How multiculturalism should work.

The most important attribute of a progressive society is respect for others who have accomplished more than they themselves have, and learn from them. . . .

. . . We [Indians] continue to rationalize our failures. No other society has mastered this part as well as we have. Obviously, this is an excuse to justify our incompetence, corruption, and apathy. This attitude has to change. As Sir Josiah Stamp has said: It is easy to dodge our responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our responsibilities.^[1]

This is not to make the point that India is or is not on the same level as the United States. In fact, that is the least useful approach to cultural comparisons, if not one that is completely useless. Assessing relative overall merit is a fool's game, as though there's a need for a scoreboard to rank quality with an up and down score such as is seen in titanic Superbowl football contests.

The point is not that Mr. Murthy can identify things about Indian society that need changing. The point is that he can look at another culture and see that there are particular aspects that warrant emulation in India. And, he could do so without trashing his own society as some kind of illegitimate excrescence on the face of the earth.

It's just this freedom to cherry pick practices, attitudes, and values that makes for vibrancy in culture. A culture that can do that will be progressive in the way that involves the incorporation of "best practices."

By contrast, the multiculturalism that festers in the U.S. is precisely the position that one's own society as a whole is neither better nor worse than any other and that both the best parts of any other resident culture and its worst parts must be accepted uncritically. This would be "progressive" in the minds of leftists -- who do indeed hate their own culture and yearn to move it in the direction of some ideal and abstract Shangrila where the lion will lie down the lamb.^[2]

What Mr. Murthy says about Indians' rationalizing their own failures, a point that we are not making here, is also applicable to the world's Muslims, a point that we are making. The pretensions of Muslims are so utterly laughable in the face of their demonstrable backwardness and utter inability to adopt superior methods and attitudes. The rage of Muslim fanatics has at its heart the implicit realization of the maladaptability of Islam.

The only reason that it's not all that laughable is that Islam lends itself to fanaticism, dissembling, and terror against infidels and dissenters. The latter facet of this lovely jewel is the absolute essential attribute of Islam that guarantees such "viability" as it has. Islam must employ terror to keep its "adherents" in line for, if Muslims were progressive in the sense that Mr. Murthy is, so many good ideas would flow into Muslim society that it would cease to be Muslim in any meaningful sense. Imams would be relegated to true spiritual advisors (rather than militia army leaders) and would no longer be able to whip people in public for not dressing correctly or not going to prayers five times a day. Or force improperly dressed schoolgirls back into burning buildings.

On this particular point, what person anywhere in the world actually thinks, "Gosh. That's an amazing culture there. What we need here at home is public whipping for dress code and prayer violations"?

That's not what we're thinking we would want to adopt from Muslim society. No it's not.

In fact, . . . what would we want to adopt from the Muslim world?

(Thinking. Thinking. Thinking. Thinking . . . .)

Notes
^[1]  "What we must learn from the West." By Mr. N R Narayana Murthy. A speech at Lal of Management on the role of Western values in contemporary Indian society. C. 2001.
^[2] "Progressive" also means focusing the entire attention of society on the lowest classes, and at the same time denying the presence of underclass pathologies. Wilfred McClay, in "Twilight of Sociology," Wall Street Journal, 2/2/07, p. W13, also defines "progressivism" as "the belief that the present is always better than the past, and better off without it."