Victimology and Multiculturalism in the United Kingdom
7th June 2015
Victimologists are busy expanding the catalogue of officially certified categories of victims; multiculturalists are people who never disliked a culture, however bizarre. Yet policies inspired by these ideologies are frequently initiated by morally admirable individuals. What decent person could possibly object to a law against sex trafficking, or to educational programs that protect the rights of religious minorities? Well, sometimes things get a bit more complicated. A sociologist may remember Max Weber’s concept of unanticipated consequences; the Irish sage who formulated “Murphy’s Law” had the same idea in mind (“What can go wrong, will go wrong”). But there is a more ancient wisdom that can serve as a lesson here: Confucius’ “Doctrine of the Mean”—the middle way that avoids all excessive zeal, in private as well as public life. Murphy might have said: “Virtue carried to excess leads to vice”. This is what Anglicans have called their “via media”, a calm attitude in the face of both Catholic and Protestant zeal. The comparison with Confucians may indicate a deep affinity. The Mandarins of imperial China shared with the elite of the British Empire the conviction that they were morally superior to anyone else on earth; that conviction was instilled by an education that involved the acquisition of perfectly useless achievements, such as calligraphy or cricket. But I must not digress….
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Sweden was, perhaps still is, in the vanguard of progressive causes. When I first visited there around 1970, a group of feminists seriously proposed that public urinals should be prohibited, because they were discriminatory—the men should be forced to sit down. I don’t know what happened to this project.