Don’t be afraid to say it
I am not afraid to say the West’s values are better
The West should be proud of its ethical achievements
This year in Britain we have seen the creation — with government assistance — of a parallel system of banking. Never mind that sharia banking is both a recently invented tradition and a dumbly hypocritical fudge. It has set a standard. If the people of Britain are no longer equal in the eyes of the banking trade, why should they continue to be equal in the eyes of the law? There are many cultures in which they are not, and it is no coincidence that equality before the law arose out of Judaeo-Christian ethics. By contrast, sharia law recognises no such equality. Our unwillingness categorically to condemn sharia (in its formal or informal practice) at home or abroad seems to me to be an expression of defeat rather than an expression of sensitivity.
And the callow racial exclusivity of our values is already felt. Our values were never enjoyed by the dozens of immigrant women whose murders appear to have gone uninvestigated by the British police because the police thought such ‘honour’ crimes a ‘community issue’. They were never extended to the tens of thousands of UK women genitally mutilated yet still awaiting the prosecution of even one mutilator. The rights which we enjoy but hold only silently superior were not extended to Ghofrane Haddaoui, stoned to death in Marseilles in 2004. And if we can’t assert the superiority of our values at home, what hope is there that our values would ever extend to, for instance, Iran, where teenage boys are hanged for being gay, and women stoned for owning their own lives? If we in the West don’t speak up for pluralism, democracy and the rule of law, who will? And what chance do reformers have in other countries?
Decades of intense cultural relativism and designer tribalism have made us terrified of passing judgment. But it’s time we spoke up. All systems are not equal. Across the non-Western world there are millions of people who would believe in our values and who envy our rights. It is time we believed in them too. And said so.
Douglas Murray is the director of the Centre for Social Cohesion. Listen to the debate and join in the voting at spectator.co.uk. The whole debate will be broadcast live from 6.45 p.m. on Tuesday 9 October and then available to listen to in full at www.spectator.co.uk/intelligence.
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Conor Pickering
October 8th, 2007 5:50pmThank you for this voice of reason in an age and a nation that is scared of its history, politically and socially weak in its present and ill equipped to face the challenges of the future. With decency, tolerance, honesty, pluralism and ambition we can face the future with some hope of success. But to do so, we must understand who we are and be confident about the things we have got right, whilst recognising the things we have got wrong. Mr Murray is helping us do that.
Charles E Moore
October 8th, 2007 10:17pmWe offend ourselves, and the world, by cringing beneath the weight of a self-imposed "guilt," affected merely in order to "apolgize" for the fact that western civilisation, out of respect for individual rights, has created so much for so many. For all the regard we may genuinely feel for the brilliant accomplisments of other world cultures, none have deigned to grant the single human being, and how much less the single human female, the dignity of meaning that we so take for granted...and shamelessly seem almost ashamed to note.
Ian Campbell
October 9th, 2007 6:05pmIt should be remebered that historicaly, the freedoms we ascribe as western with roots in Judeo-Christian teachings have only recently become what they are in western liberal societies. Was it only in 1984 that women got the vote in Luxembourg (or was it Lichtenstein?). Our cultural values as embodied today are quite new, so we should not be surprised that other cultures are just getting exposure to them. That is not to say that their historical novelty means they should not be asserted as much better or else future developments of worldwide cultural values will not benefit from the lessons learnt along the path to the values we have today.
Brett_McS
October 10th, 2007 12:28amExcellent article. "The emperor has no clothes" - or perhaps he is a social nudist? Multiculturalism and post-modernism: How future generations will laugh at us!
Rob Spear
October 10th, 2007 3:19pmVotes'n'democracy as the sole determiner of government policy is at best a contentious issue, Mr Campbell. Since it has been introduced we have seen ever more rapacious and totalitarian states in the west. I do not know if this is inevitable, but it is possible that democracy is the enemy of freedom.