Not As Good As You Thought It Was

There is a new book out by Goran Adamson entitled The Trojan Horse: A Leftist Critique of Multiculturalism in the West and it provides a lot that will make you comfortable in feeling that all these mew-fangled ideas of multicilturalism and moral relativsm and such are not really that good.

Excerpt from one review:

reason, freedom and individuality – the cornerstones of democracy and civil rights – are being undermined by the ideology of multiculturalism and its elevation of particular identities and rights over universal political freedom.

the methods and theories of multiculturalists are similar to those of right-wing extremists: both want to force reality to conform to their worldview, rather than respond to it as it really is.

parallels between multiculturalism and old-fashioned racial thinking. For instance, as Adamson points out, multicultural ideology makes a fetish, like the racial theories of yore, of ethnic diversity. What matters is not, as Martin Luther King believed, the content of one’s character, but the colour of one’s skin. Common human traits, such as the capacity for abstract thinking, creativity and self-consciousness, are effaced in the name of what divides us. In this sense, multiculturalism is just as fixated on race as the racist thought of the past.

treat[ing] them as individuals who have a basic human need for self-determination; rather, ‘the immigrant’ is an abstract type, a species, a race. Thus the racist implications of multiculturalism loom large despite its ostensible anti-racism. The ‘other’ is presented as either inherently fascinating or as a fragile victim. They are not like us. And in this separation of us from them, racism festers,

universalism and inclusivity of the civil-rights movement appears to the ardent multiculturalist as an embarrassing form of ‘cultural imperialism’.

European liberalism unique, and different to its pre-Enlightenment rivals, Adamson suggests, is that it explicitly attempts to remove questions of moral value from the political sphere

in their eagerness to avoid accusations of racism, left-leaning liberals have abandoned traditionally progressive liberal principles. And, in doing so, they have unwittingly embraced a form of multiculturalism that is deeply ideological and illiberal in its current form.

And from another:

multiculturalism contains numerous intolerant qualities bordering on racism; such as the exotification of the ethnic group, and the thin veil between ethnicity and nationalism. Multiculturalism replaces racism towards other cultures with a fascination and an obsession with the other.

assumption that diversity is anti-racism and that multiculturalism rests on a progressive, tolerant, and egalitarian foundation and finds it deeply troubling that views that contest such thinking are denigrated. On the contrary Adamson asserts that a scientific discussion should allow for the opposite point of view where diversity and racism are two branches of early 19th century political romanticism. By not so doing, Swedish universities have failed in their intellectual mission – the only mission that matters – and descended into ‘mindless trumpeting of Social Democratic pseudo-radicalism’. He concludes that ideas embedded in multiculturalism under whose umbrella diversity falls, have failed concerning the independence of universities in regard to ideological debate and critical thinking. This has undermined the autonomy of lecturers and researchers and ‘infiltrated panels, projects, institutes, faculties, offices, courses and curricula’. The final damning charge is that it has let students down: ‘instead of showing them how to think, it has told them what to think’.

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