From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Thu Aug 18 2005 - 18:50:39 BST
Hi Ham,
>> I'm pleased to know that you're not really Bob Pirsig playing devil's
> advocate and that you're here to stay. I can't imagine why there is such
> animosity to your postings, except that a majority of the MD are obviously
> left-wingers who want to replace individualism and national pride with an
> elitist social order.
Yes. That's certainly one reason.
> Personally, I've seen nothing unreasonable in your responses which are
> invariably well articulated and appropriately referenced. Your responses
> to the most innane accusations are always graceful and congenial, and you
> have somehow managed to humor your accusers far beyond my capacity to do
> so.
I appreciate the compliment. As for humoring my accusers, I just keep try
to keep in mind that both they and I could be wrong.
> In my research for an op-ed introduction to multiculturalism, I ran across
> this article by Robert Locke which I thought might be of particular
> interest you. I'm quoting several paragraphs here, but the entire text (in
> pdf format) is accessible at
> http://www.suomensisu.fi/kukkiakriittisille/realproblem.html under the
> title "The Realm Problem with Multicultualism". To me, it demonstrates
> that esthetic values when conceived multicultually (i.e., in the collective
> sense) deprive us of the individual freedom that makes art and beauty
> "appreciable" in the first place. I see this as an alternative perspective
> on Quality that inverts Pirsig's Fourth Level concept. What do you think?
>
> "First used in its present sense by philosopher Immanuel Kant, *Kultur* in
> the German is ultimately derived from the same root as the English
> agriculture. In its original meaning, it meant what we would now call
> self-cultivation, i.e. the cultivation of the individual consciousness
> through exposure to the arts. It presumes the idea that the consciousness
> is just as worthy of cultivation and perfection as the body. This is why we
> insist on a hierarchy of culture, as higher forms of art impart a greater
> refinement to the consciousness and give it objects of higher quality on
> which to form itself. "Shaping taste" is an extremely superficial way of
> describing it, but not misguided. The concept of taste is the tip of a far
> more important iceberg, the question what objects this consciousness has
> formed itself on and come to be moved by. What attracts it? Garbage, or
> things of real quality? This is all motivated, ultimately, by a sense that
> what a man's consciousness amounts to is an essential component of what he
> amounts to as a human being, what he is worth.
>
> "That this cultivation requires culture, i.e. the property of a community
> and not just an individual, is caused by the fact that individuals on their
> own cannot sustain culture, one of whose essential attributes is
> communication. Therefore culture tends to be the property of groups of
> people who communicate with each other, i.e. societies. Nietzsche said a
> culture was a group of people who understand each other. Because it takes
> time to build up a culture, cultures tend to be the property of groups of
> people who have done this for some time, i.e. nations grounded in history.
> Because it takes time to learn and requires real, not virtual,
> circumstances, individuals tend to belong to only one culture. Because the
> upper rungs are hard to reach without the lower, this is especially true in
> the case of high culture. The objective of culture is the cultivated
> person, what the Germans used to call the gebildete Mensch, the first word
> having a root related to "build," also to the German word for education.
>
> "Multiculturalism makes a mockery of this. It asks people who haven't even
> learned their own culture yet to learn another. How are students supposed
> to learn someone else's culture when they don't yet know what it is to
> learn a culture or even to have a culture? It is hard enough to learn one's
> own, and probably harder today than it used to be, now that high culture
> lacks the authority it once commanded and low culture has exploded in
> technical sophistication and ubiquity. More likely, they will learn
> neither, and their culture will in fact be the same child-centered
> commercial pop culture they came to college with-which is to say, they will
> have learned nothing, and probably wasted their only serious chance of a
> lifetime to do so. Multiculturalism therefore produces what we can call the
> default to the lowest common denominator. It is not a philosophy of freedom
> of choice; it is a philosophy that imposes the lowest common denominator on
> people who have no choice in the matter.
>
> "Multiculturalism also favors the lowest common denominator because it
> throws together people who have no culture or any quality in common. If
> everyone is encouraged to embrace wildly different cultures, the common
> conversation of culture, that conversation in which people experience the
> highest elements of their common humanity through their common experience
> of the highest products of human creativity, is broken. People share
> nothing but pop-cultural junk. There can be no community of experience, no
> shared critical standards, no common memory, no common aspiration. There
> are just dozens, if not hundreds, of ghettoes, and it makes no difference
> if some of them are gilded."
Thanks for the effort of quoting this. It is, as the Brit's say, "spot
on." The whole multicultural gig has seen it's last days. With the
terrorist killing in London, former multicultural champion Tony Blair woke
up, saying "It is important, however, that the terrorists realize our
determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than
their determinism to cause the death and destruction of innocent people
and impose their extremism on the world."
It's about time Europeans got the message.
Best regards,
Platt
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