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post-modernism, cultural relativity and identity politics - attitudes of progressives

phildwyer said:
I've lived in the UK, just not for more than a couple of months at a time. It seems to me that Islam has never been stronger or more influential in Britain than it is today--surely the recent success of Respect is a testimony to that?
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Galloway's tactics in Bradford were very different from TH. I'd say it was an anti-communalist vote from what I've read.
 
Das Uberdog said:
there was one 'humerous' (??) incident where the Preston SWP branch started holding their meetings in a Shisha bar on Manchester Road in a bid to find a venue more attractive to Muslims - where the proprietors would regularly rip them off with overpriced falafel and soft-drinks (which they brought to the table without asking). the staff in the place pretty much solely consisted of haggard-looking Eastern European women in their early 20s, most of whom couldn't speak particularly good English. strangely, the regular Muslim contingent from their meetings started to drop off and they weren't getting any new Muslims around the table (they'd completely written off getting anyone from any other demographic, and the venue was deliberately chosen because of its proximity to Avenham with a large Pakistani community).

after several months one of the locals sheepishly informed the confused group that the restaurant was a well-known brothel and the waitresses were all prostitutes - few of the men from the community wanted to be openly seen in there at 7pm in summer. the meetings were duly relocated but it didn't stop the group using the Restaurant as a venue for several bloody good knees-up over the course of the following few years.

ETA sorry this should read 'StW' group rather than SWP group. same difference...
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fucking classic, you should have sent that to Private Eye!
 
Jeff Robinson said:
I think historically that may have been true, but nowadays it seems to me that cultural relativism is almost always an explicitly moral doctrine: 'you should not judge the conduct taking place in that culture on the basis of the norms of any other culture'.
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I think you are right, in that that is what cultural relativism is considered to be. In my view though it's a mistake, and absolutely worth keeping the distinction between cultural relativism and moral relativism. I would personally consider myself a cultural relativist, but I'm not a moral relativist.
 
OK, I said I'd get back to Jeff on Cultural Essentisalism and Multiculturalism.

It's ironic that at the moment that anthropology rejected the idea of a culture as a fixed, bounded entity, that antiracists alighted upon it as a replacement for "race". It is true that all humans are social animals and therefore culture-bearers. As Kwame Anthony Appiuah put it in the Ethics of Identity, "It's not easy to imagine a person, or people, bereft of culture. The problem with grand claims for the necessity of culture is that we can't readily imagine an alternative. It's like form: you can't not have it". (p126). The problem is that identity politics has taken ought from is, and extrapolated the cultures one should have. Recommended modes of being black or being gay. Or whatever. What Anthony Appiah refers to as "life scripts".

Social beings are transformative beings. Cultures don't stand still. And even if they did, what would it mean to say that a 16-year-old British "Asian" girl with Bangladeshi ancestry shared the same culture as a 50-year-old man in Dhaka? It makes no sense to say that there is an authentic culture that those two people share. To demand that every individual is integrated into a particular cultural group is to fail to grasp that. Just because I have Irish ancestry, does that mean I cannot truly be myself unless I speak Irish Gaelic and set up road-side shrines to Mary?

Then comes the demand that cultures be protected and preserved. People like Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor claim that the survival of particular cultures are essential to people's lives. This reminds us of the kind of nonsense contested in Quebec whereby children who had French ancestry had to go to French medium schools. There was no personal choice permitted. This was only overturned in 2009. Cultures change. We don't speak Shakespearian English, and Shakespeare didn't speak like Chaucer. The search for an authentic cultural identity is so obviously anti progressive, you wonder why it needs to be said. But it does.
 
Some Lefties celebrating Jamaican culture.



Multiculturalism is the reason we have no significant far-right movement in this country.

Love music, hate racism. :)
 
critics should refer to "state-sponsored multiculturalism, or "top-down..." - if you don't want to sound like racist nutjobs
 
phildwyer said:
The biologization of race isn't the only problem. I'd argue that all human culture is increasingly being interpreted through the lens of biology, most notably in pseudo-sciences like sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.

I agree that it's very dangerous. It reduces human beings to the status of animals.
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:eek:




:confused:



:facepalm:



:(


...uh... we are animals.
 
Das Uberdog said:
there was one 'humerous' (??) incident where the Preston SWP branch started holding their meetings in a Shisha bar on Manchester Road in a bid to find a venue more attractive to Muslims - where the proprietors would regularly rip them off with overpriced falafel and soft-drinks (which they brought to the table without asking). the staff in the place pretty much solely consisted of haggard-looking Eastern European women in their early 20s, most of whom couldn't speak particularly good English. strangely, the regular Muslim contingent from their meetings started to drop off and they weren't getting any new Muslims around the table (they'd completely written off getting anyone from any other demographic, and the venue was deliberately chosen because of its proximity to Avenham with a large Pakistani community).

after several months one of the locals sheepishly informed the confused group that the restaurant was a well-known brothel and the waitresses were all prostitutes - few of the men from the community wanted to be openly seen in there at 7pm in summer. the meetings were duly relocated but it didn't stop the group using the Restaurant as a venue for several bloody good knees-up over the course of the following few years.

ETA sorry this should read 'StW' group rather than SWP group. same difference...
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shit, we used to eat there all the time. :facepalm:

food was pretty good tbf.
 
Johnny Canuck3 said:
<snip>...uh... we are animals.
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Only up to a point.

Although the more which becomes known about the other primates (not to mention the sea-dwelling mammals), the clearer it becomes that humans are probably less of an advanced species than some of us would like to think.
 
Greebo said:
Only up to a point.

Although the more which becomes known about the other primates (not to mention the sea-dwelling mammals), the clearer it becomes that humans are probably less of an advanced species than some of us would like to think.
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I think our abilities, when compared to those of animals, are a difference of degree, not of kind.
 
articul8 said:
critics should refer to "state-sponsored multiculturalism, or "top-down..." - if you don't want to sound like racist nutjobs
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Excellent example of what people have been talking about. Never mind the context you're a racist if you criticise MC.
But then what else should we expect from a man who's a member of a party which has repeatedly used MC to attack the working class.
 
redsquirrel said:
Excellent example of what people have been talking about. Never mind the context you're a racist if you criticise MC.
But then what else should we expect from a man who's a member of a party which has repeatedly used MC to attack the working class.
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Do you think that even after reading what's actually been said we still sound like "racist nutjobs"? Bearing in mind that the substitution of 'culture' for 'race' is one of the things being critiqued?
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:facepalm: I didn't say I thought you were racist nutjobs - I was saying that the term "multiculturalism" is generally understood in a much less specific way than the specific political approach you are criticising. You'd be better off recognising this, and stop your internal shorthand of "MC" for something more descriptive - state-sponsored liberal politics of cultural identity or something. Doesn't trip off the tongue but people wouldn't misundestand as readily.
 
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