Theme: Ethnoculture

via Michael Churchill Ken Wilber: Multiculturalism is highly evolved … but won’t admit it. Wilber has a fabulous breakdown of the ethical knots the left gets into by embracing multiculturalism as an end in itself. In Wilber’s model of human development, elite democrats are at a higher stage of evolution than garden-variety republicans. Generally speaking, the elite left sees that there are multiple valid perspectives, whereas the middle-brow right tends to focus on the Truth of just one perspective. The former is more evolved … BUT there is a huge caveat to this. Wilber makes his case eloquently on pages 171-173 of A Brief History of Everything: 1) ACHIEVING the multiculturalist worldview (i.e grasping the validity of diverse viewpoints and cultures) is a very rare, difficult and elite accomplishment. 2) While you yourself may have evolved from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric, and see that everyone deserves equal opportunity, few of the people you treat with your universalist consideration SHARE your universalism. They are not as evolved as you are — they are still egocentric or ethnocentric. You are extending universalist courtesy to people who absolutely won’t extend the same courtesy to you. This creates multiple contradictions for the multiculturalist: * The multiculturalist claims to be non-elite, but the mere capacity for worldcentric pluralism is a rare, elite accomplishment. (Only 10% of Americans have achieved it.) “So multiculturalism is a very elite stance that then claims it is not elitest.” * The multiculturalist confuses his highly evolved stance with the fact that getting to that high stance is a very rare and difficult accomplishment. * The multiculturalist claims we must treat all individuals and movements the same (no hierarchies) … and thus has no language to argue why some movements can or should be shunned. [In theory this leaves the multiculturalist in a position where he has to accept the KKK and Nazis as valid positions, but in reality he gets around this by claiming that only white supremacy is bad. Thus the ethnocentric movements of other races get a free pass.] At the core, the multiculturalist cannot allow for superior and inferior stances because he denies distinctions between stances altogether. Because the multiculturalist cannot defend the contradiction in this position, he is forced to become completely intolerant of anyone who disagrees. The result is censorship of dissenting opinions. “And so off we go with vicious intolerance in the name of tolerance, censorship in the name of compassion, with we-know-best thought police and mindless political correctness — with a bunch of elitists trying to outlaw everybody else’s elitisms … They have an elite stance that denies its own elitism — and they are lying about their actual identity. They have a false self system. And that is an identity crisis.” “The American universities have been hijacked by it. All that is doing is contributing to the retribalization of America.”