Cultural Assessment

Fire of Liberty

Irshad Manji, author of "The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith," has written a wonderful Op/Ed piece in The New York Times examining the policies and values of our culture that we as a society are willing to defend. In a big way, Western societies have wrapped themselves up in a fish-net known as "tolerance," which basically applies a hands-free policy on the everyday activities of its citizens because they are too scared to offend various groups. I think Manji sums up the major problems facing Western society in the following paragraphs:

As Westerners bow down before multiculturalism, we anesthetize ourselves into believing that anything goes. We see our readiness to accommodate as a strength - even a form of cultural superiority (though few will admit that). Radical Muslims, on the other hand, see our inclusive instincts as a form of corruption that makes us soft and rudderless. They believe the weak deserve to be vanquished.

Paradoxically, then, the more we accommodate to placate, the more their contempt for our "weakness" grows. And the ultimate paradox may be that in order to defend our diversity, we'll need to be less tolerant. Or, at the very least, more vigilant. And this vigilance demands more than new antiterror laws. It requires asking: What guiding values can most of us live with? Given the panoply of ideologies and faiths out there, what filter will distill almost everybody's right to free expression?

Neither the watery word "tolerance" nor the slippery phrase "mutual respect" will cut it as a guiding value. Why tolerate violent bigotry? Where's the "mutual" in that version of mutual respect? Amin Maalouf, a French-Arab novelist, nailed this point when he wrote that "traditions deserve respect only insofar as they are respectable - that is, exactly insofar as they themselves respect the fundamental rights of men and women."

It's about time we start shouting "Enough is enough," and find a way to thwart the decay of Western society before we lose it once and for all to the barbarians at the gates.