Tory Party leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch has received a lot of flak in the past week after making a modern-day heresy. She said that not all cultures are equal.
In an op-ed in The Telegraph, Badenoch swore in the church of multiculturalism.
“Culture is more than food and clothing. There are also customs that may be at odds with British values.
We cannot be naive and assume that immigrants will automatically abandon the ethnic hostility of their ancestors at the border, or that all cultures are equally valid. They are not.”
On the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Badenoch was asked which cultures she thought were more valuable.
“Many. Cultures that believe in child marriage or don’t give women equal rights … I don’t think a culture where gay people can be stoned is as valid as ours.”
Badenoch emphasised that she has no problem with a multi-ethnic society; after all, she is dark-skinned herself. It’s the multiculture that she dislikes.
For many, it’s liberating to hear a politician say something so self-evidently true. But challenging an accepted axiom in this way naturally brought the liberal left to its knees, writes Patrick West in Spiked.
Among the most outraged was radio personality James O’Brien. Considering his intolerant and crass way of presenting himself, and the fact that his second book is titled How to Be Right, it really seems that O’Brien believes that his own worldview is more valuable than anyone else’s, says West.
Historically, it has been a matter of course to understand that there are different cultures, and you were born into a culture that you were taught to perceive as the best. Herodotus wrote about this. He is considered to be the first real historian, over 400 years BC.
This was true until Romanticism, when the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, among others, promoted the idea that all cultures are equal. He concluded that there was no universal standard for judging human morality. But this was only a thought experiment for a tiny intellectual elite.
This was the beginning of what we now call cultural relativism, and was further developed by Friedrich Nietzsche before reaching its absolute nadir with the monster Michel Foucault.
Foucault had a huge impact on how Western universities developed, and then the madness spread across society via the media, literature and politics. Politicians now believe that there is such a thing as universal human rights, which Herder rejected.
Civil rights have largely been abolished, we’ve lost both property rights and freedom of expression, democracy is just an empty shell.
This belief that all cultures are equally valid is therefore a specifically Western concept. Chinese and Muslims are convinced that they are superior to all other cultures. More and more people in the West seem to recognise the vilification of our own culture.
It is only in the West that we have developed and cultivated cultural relativism, this deviant way of thinking, this deep scepticism that often turns into self-loathing.
However, this Eurocentric arrogance shows in a strange way that our culture is different from all other cultures. We are blessed with both the best and the worst culture.
Moreover: If all cultures are equal, why is diversity, equity and inclusion so important? At the same time, there are clearly some cultural differences that are almost religious, manifesting themselves in expressions such as toxic masculinity and critical race theory.
We have confused young people who are fooled into believing that gender identity is a free choice. Trans women are the real women of today, while real women are assigned the insulting term cis women. As if they are inferior.
We have weak men who declare themselves feminists. We have would-be rape victims standing in the streets cheering and waving Refugees Welcome flags. We have Queers for Palestine (now there’s a gang).
Today, one year after the 7 October massacre, universities in the West are overflowing with Hamas supporters singing about exterminating Israel, from the river to the sea.
We have politicians who started harping about a ceasefire and a two-state solution even before Israel had buried its dead, while over 200 hostages were in the Gaza Strip. Hamas culture is clearly perceived better than Jewish culture.
We have Just Stop Oil, which thinks it can save the world by attacking old, valuable paintings. There’s a “queer” person in every TV show, usually in a heroic role. Those who protest the madness are cancelled, like J.K. Rowling.
We also live in a generally more censored and cautious time, which is why commissioners are afraid to touch anything that might get them into trouble.
As recently as the 1990s, social transgressions only led to embarrassment. Now they lead to lives being ruined. They’re no longer a laughing matter.
This is reinforced by the retroactive nature of woke ideology, which leads to books written long ago being corrected, like when Pippi Longstocking’s father suddenly could no longer be a negro king.
To paraphrase Charles Dickens:
It is the best of times, it is the worst of times, it is the age of wisdom, it is the age of foolishness, it is the epoch of belief, it is the epoch of incredulity, it is the season of light, it is the season of darkness, it is the spring of hope, it is the winter of despair.
This is how you could have opened the novel about the times we are living in.
