The practice of applying 21st Century Egalitarian criteria, criteria which are eminently disputable, to the beliefs and achievements of individuals who lived hundreds of years ago, is devoid of both moral and intellectual integrity, yet pursued with reckless abandon by our academics and “intellectuals” as well as those mindless mobs intent on eliminating every trace of the icons of Western Civilization from contemporary culture.
John A. McDonald was in the habit of referring to the Indigenous of the Americas as “savages” in his various parliamentary speeches. One need hardly list the achievements of Western Civilization which led him to that seemingly rational conclusion. Of course he was not apprised of the notion of Cultural Relativism, the pseudo-intellectual argument endorsed today by those intent on finding the ideas and values of all peoples indistinguishable, the notion that in fact no one way of approaching the world is superior to any other. No doubt had such a Relativist approached him 150 years ago with that argument, Sir John would have deemed him insane!
The charge of Cultural Genocide emerges quite naturally from the notion of Cultural Relativism. While McDonald thought Science and Reason might inestimably help the Indigenous, he was apparently merely trying to destroy their culture. But how hypocritical is this charge given that “progressives” never stop celebrating their devotion to Reason and Science in denouncing those Christian fundamentalists who they claim still believe the Earth is flat [or some variation of such nonsense]? The fact is they support Reason and Science when they validate their agenda but ignore them when they do not. In appraising the relative merits of Indigenous and post-Enlightenment European Cultures, then, they disingenuously dismiss the Rational/Scientific orientation of the latter as a mere Western eccentricity, thereby making McDonald and his Civilization both arrogant and racist. Such contradictions are legion in the sanctimonious rants of the Left.
At this point, of course, one must pause and respond to the inevitable volley of cliched objections. Yes, Western colonialists were frequently treacherous in their dealings with the Indigenous. And yes, given that they were no less prone to evil than any other sector of the species, they often used their sense of cultural superiority to justify their actions. But this does not alter the fact that their Culture was inestimably superior to anything they found in the Americas, that its quest from its inception in Ancient Greece to define those ideas, values and political forms most conducive to human well-being utterly transcended the cultural dynamic of Civilizations that were still sacrificing innocent children to their gods as recently as 500 years ago.
This is not spoken in hatred. This is not White Supremacism. It is a simple historical fact. Inasmuch as each person is unique, it is a Fact which entitles no one to stereotype anyone of Indigenous or any other background. Surely we are capable of simultaneously respecting both the facts of History as well as the integrity of the Individual. For “progressives,” apparently, this is not possible, respect for the Individual automatically entailing the need to denigrate the vast disparities in cultural achievement evident throughout our species’ past.
Relativism, as I have already pointed out, is one of the ways they do so. Determinism is the other, the idea peddled by Jared Diamond that it was weather and geography rather than the intelligence and character of America’s Indigenous that determined their beliefs and values. Were Diamond to have presented his hypothesis to our first Prime Minister, the latter would no doubt have found him insane as well.
McDonald justifiably saw Residential Schools as a valid means of enabling the Indigenous to share in what he hoped would be Canada’s future prosperity. His assumption that their previous orientation was not conducive to such was perfectly rational. And while the abuses ultimately exposed in those schools were perhaps somewhat racially motivated, they were just as likely the result of the sad, simple fact of human evil. It has recently come to light that nursing homes here in Canada have been equally rife with unconscionable levels of abuse and incompetence. Unfortunately and to the dismay of those who see the State as the solution to all our problems, such corruption would seem to be far more prevalent in the closed circuits of our tax funded government institutions than in those private services where the public has a choice [i.e., the free market] in the various options at its disposal.
McDonald was a true progressive in his day, arguing for the enfranchisement of Women at a time when many world leaders were unwilling to do so. Yet he, along with a myriad of other Western Cultural icons, including such formerly revered figures as Jefferson and Lincoln in the States, are now the objects of nothing but scorn among those mobs which have recently hijacked the Western World, mobs which, with the complicity of our institutions of “higher learning,” seem to know nothing of human history, nothing of the dysfunction and savagery evident in much of the rest of the world, indeed nothing of the highly questionable constructs of Relativism and Determinism which the Left uses to pursue its demonstrably superficial definition of Social Justice.