Thursday, February 01, 2007

Now More Than Ever...

If you espouse Enlightenment ideas of free will and intellectual self-determination, the fundamentalists will call you an "Enlightenment Fundamentalist" and the totalitarians will call you an "Enlightenment totalitarian"; 'twas always thus. But how to explain the perverse nature of those otherwise intelligent people who will claim that those children of the Enlightenment who call on people to stop burning their wives, for example, are somehow as cruel and brutal as the people who are actually burning their wives? Pascal Bruckner takes on the so-called "multiculturalism" that encourages polite silence in the face of oppression and finds it to be as flimsy and quiescent as it seems. Alas, consumer culture sees everything in terms of equally therapeutic and meaningless choices.

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