After decades during which the flood tide of multiculturalism has swept all before it, destroying so much that is good and true, the values of our great civilization may be about to reassert themselves. Not a moment too soon, there are welcome signs we have reached an indispensable inflection point.
That this is so was detectable in an interview last weekend conducted by the BBC with Kemi Badenoch, member of Parliament, daughter of Nigerian immigrants to the United Kingdom, who is now running for the leadership of the Conservative Party after the departure of former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
The BBC asked Badenoch about her view, expressed in an article she wrote in the past week, that not all cultures are as “valid” as others.
Some of us have been making this point for years, indeed decades, but because such a thought contradicts the relativist central assumption of multiculturalism, it has been treated as either outright false or as an unspeakable truth. Uttering it has had the power instantly to end a political career.
Journalists, most of whom lean left, smell blood in any hint from a public figure that one culture is superior to another. The BBC interviewer, setting her trap, asked Badenoch, “Which cultures, in your view, are less valid than others?”
Her reply was refreshingly unembarrassed and unequivocal: “Oh, lots. Cultures that believe in child marriage, for instance, or that women don’t have equal rights.”
The MP then, even more impressively, turned the tables on the interviewer, adding, “I actually think it is extraordinary that people think that’s an unusual or controversial thing to say. Of course not all cultures are equally valid. I don’t believe in cultural relativism. I believe in Western values, the principles which have made this country great. And I think that we need to make sure that we continue to abide by those principles to keep the society that we have now.”
In fact, almost everyone believes some cultures are better than others, though many vociferously deny such a thing. The higher merit of one culture over another is the only justification for proposed measures of reform. If we do not accept that one culture is preferable to another, how can it be argued, for example, that our society was improved by the abolition of slavery or by the ending of laws and customs that made a woman’s property her husband’s as soon as they married?
The Left’s doctrinaire adherence to relativism is a logical contradiction of the label “progressive” that they give themselves. If one culture is just as good as any other, what does progress mean?
The strength of Badenoch’s answer was not simply contained in its clear statement of a cultural hierarchy and its delineation of customs that should be rejected as inferior and unwanted. It was also inherent in her use of the phrase “of course.” It implied not simply that the question was stupid and disingenuous, as obviously it was, but also that it is now manifestly out of date. It deftly identified the BBC as clinging to a tired and false narrative, which the broadcaster wished to use to ask a question that sensible people recognize as ridiculous and obsolete.
Badenoch went yet further, calling out the reporter for the disingenuousness of her attempted gotcha. “I know what you are trying to do,” the plain-spoken MP said. “You want me to say Muslims. But it isn’t all Muslims.” (It should be noted that the unenlightened customs that the MP mentioned, and others, are more prevalent and forcefully practiced in Muslim societies and communities than in most others, but they are not exclusively the unpleasant preserve of Islam.)
The BBC hoped to lure a leading conservative into an incautiously blunt statement that could be clipped into a viral video and used to discredit her. The rationale of this shallow and creaking old media tactic is that it allows tendentious news media to depict advocacy of enlightened Western values as nothing more than the expression of bigoted insults.
The Left and its media handmaidens in America, as well as in other developed Western democracies, respect all cultures except their own. Their multiculturalism pretends to be tolerant but is the opposite, repudiating the only civilization in which it could have germinated and thrived.
Perhaps the strongest defense of our Western culture was contained in the famously unequivocal warning by Gen. Sir Charles Napier to Britain’s 19th-century colonial subjects in India, who intended to burn a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre.
They told him their customs should be respected, to which he replied, “Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation also has a custom. When men burn women alive, we hang them and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to our national customs.”
We have a long way to go before our statesmen defend Western culture quite so robustly, but like a rising tide that begins to be subjected to forces that will eventually turn it from flood to ebb, so there is a growing realization about the horrors and hypocrisies of multiculturalism. They have been becoming more and more apparent to ordinary tolerant people for several years, even as the leftist tide continued to rise.
This realization has accelerated in the 12 months since Oct. 7, 2023, because of violent and unabashed displays of support for terrorism and the murder of Jews. In city streets and on campuses, Americans have witnessed a display of values so depraved that they are impossible to set lightly aside and ignore. Similar displays elsewhere have opened the eyes of the public all across the Western world.
This growing understanding and frank public repugnance for what is taking place in its midst makes it possible for politicians to speak simple, obvious, declarative truths that were recently beyond the pale of polite or acceptable conversation.
It is 37 years since the Rev. Jesse Jackson, running for president in 1987, marched into Stanford University with 500 students, chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.’ Their demand was for the elimination of a specific academic course at the university, but it was also a wider rejection of our civilization — of its tolerance, its coherence, and its success — and that rejection gathered pace ever since, bringing us to the pass at which we now stand.
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Badenoch is a black woman born in London, the capital of a country that is as great a fountainhead of our great civilization as any other. Like her, politicians must seize this moment unembarrassedly to represent the great mass of people who understand that some cultures are less equal than others, and ours is eminently worth preserving.
The chant of this new cultural self-confidence should reverse the one that heralded its long retreat nearly two generations ago; “Ho, ho, hey, hey, Western Civ has got to stay.”