Multiculturalism is dead

[al Roumi]

Really? Is it only a personal opinion - like a preference of sweets over cauliflower - whether or not six million Jews should be exterminated?

How else would you explain Hitler and a good part of the Nazi party holding such views? Surely they formed their opinions that this was a “good” thing to do in the same way as you and I have arrived at the contrary position –through experience and reflection based on a framework of values.

Do you accept any morality at all?
If you happen upon a fourteen year old girl, who fell of her bicycle, is there moral equivalence between the man who calls an ambulance then lends her his cellphone to call her parents, and the man who drags her into nearby bushes, abuses her, then murders her to destroy the evidence of his act?

Even if current post-modern philosophy can pinpoint neither absolute truths nor morals, absolute moral relativism is a practical dead end. Resentment of absolutes, of people and ideologies claiming absolute truths should not mean one should fall for the trap of going the other extreme, to deny any morality or truth at all.

Of course I personally "accept morality" and naturally concur with the intended sense of your exposes. However, I recognise that to those with opinions as strongly held as my own, the truth of their derived beliefs is as great to them as mine is to me.

Yet, I also recognise that in practice, society must work out a way to accommodate these differing views for the greater good. I kept banging on about mutual understanding etc because that is the only thing that allows two conflicting views to begin to be peaceably reconciled; and tolerance because where possible, its easier just to live and let live.

I concede that by such reasoning, even such issues as equality of race, sex etc are questioned –but so they are throughout the world today, and so they have been throughout history. For example, it is fruitless and almost meaningless for people to state things like “human rights are universal” when they quite patently are not universally considered to be so in significant proportions of the world.