Are Some Cultures Superior? By David Goldman.
“I don’t shrink from the word ‘superior’” with regard to Anglo-Protestant cultural norms, [University of Pennsylvania Professor Amy Wax] told a student newspaper. “Everyone wants to come to the countries that exemplify” these values. “Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.”
Western governments have undoubtedly committed crimes, she said, but it would be a mistake to reject what is good in those countries because of their historical flaws. “Bourgeois values aren’t just for white people,” she had said. “The irony is: Bourgeois values can help minorities get ahead.”
Predictably, various student moblets denounced Prof. Wax for promulgating white supremacy, e.g., the Penn graduate students’ organization GET-UP, which detected “presence of toxic racist, sexist, homophobic attitudes on campus.” The “superiority of one race over others is not an academic debate we have in the 21st century,” GET-UP wrote. “It is racism masquerading as science.”
Of course, Prof. Wax said nothing of the kind. No matter: When they burn witches, they don’t parse paragraphs. …
Protestant culture is not the only successful culture. The rise of Asia is the great economic phenomenon of our times, and in no way can we attribute that to Western bourgeois values. Rather, the Chinese culture sphere has melded its own strengths with an adaptability to some aspects of Western culture. …
Other cultures are less successful. We sacrificed thousands of lives and disrupted a million more, at the cost of nearly $5 trillion, in a misguided effort to change the political culture of the Arab world, and the Arab world puked us out….
Muslims are in general incurious about Western culture. … The total number of Western books translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years is less than the number of books translated into Spanish in one year. …
We should ask the Intersectionalist mob: Are you living, or dying? Do you have much of a future as matters stand? With a 73% illegitimacy rate, and a rate of incarceration and early demise so high that only 81 black men are available for every 100 black women of marrying age, black America will die. That is the tragic truth. Are you asking for treatment, or for palliative care? Do you want us to treat you the way the medical profession used to treat terminally ill patients, who were kept in ignorance of their impending death? Is your “safe space” a hole to crawl into, a comfortable place to curl up and die?
