About four years ago, I posted a little piece here at The Hesperado in which I adumbrated the Ten Commandments of Politically Correct Multiculturalism (PC MC).
More thoughts about that came to mind later:
1) First of all, the set of Ten Commandments of the PC MC paradigm is not a general set of axioms about Politically Correct issues as a whole, nor do those Ten Commandments exhaust all the issues of Multiculturalism which itself is a subtopic under Political Correctness: The Ten Commandments of the PC MC paradigm, on the contrary, refer specifically to the Problem of Islam. They represent the axioms which are dominant and mainstream throughout the West, axioms by which the Problem of Islam is not really a Problem of Islam at all, but a constellation of Problems About Other Things (Mostly Caused by the West). And that leads to our second point.
2) Secondly, the First Commandment—Thou Shalt Never Criticize Islam Itself—is the crux of the entire set of Commandments. All subsequent Commandments on the list depend upon the First Commandment. Indeed, all the subsequent Commandments are really just a logical extrapolation of the First Commandment, and they may be put thusly: “Whatever you have to do to uphold the First Commandment, do it.”
3) The third point that requires clarification is that, while all ten of the Commandments interlock in logical interdependence, not all of them are actively and consciously supported by the millions of Westerners whose minds are, nevertheless, infected by PC MC. Particularly those Commandments that extrapolate a rather radical anti-Western bias (see Commandments 5, 6, 7 and 10) are the ones that tend to decide the division into Left and Right: Most people on the Right would not endorse the anti-Western Commandments with as much enthusiasm as would people on the Left. Many people on the Right might even refuse to endorse those Commandments at all.
However, the PC MC people on the Right who would therefore reject those anti-Western Commandments are being essentially illogical (with the solitary exception of Commandment 7 which is the most virulently anti-Western), for there is no other way to make sense of the remaining Commandments (1, 2, 3, 4, 8, and 9) than to blame the West in one way or another. The problem with rejecting Commandment 7 exclusively, however, is that it reflects a logical unfolding of the other anti-Western Commandments—and that is the logical predicament of all those millions of Right and Center people who nevertheless sign on to the general PC MC paradigm: they are essentially floating on a tissue of incoherent assumptions and avoiding the coherent resolution that bifurcates only two ways:
Either:
a) Admit proudly that the West is globally superior to all other cultures and civilization, that many other cultures (particularly Islam) are sufficiently inferior such that they will never become Westernized -- and thus acknowledge Western Imperialism as the beneficent and necessary precursor to the global superiority and dominance of the West today.
Or:
b) Reject the West in favor of
i) Equivalencist Relativism (which simply perpetuates the untenable incoherency);
ii) Some form of anti-Western system that should replace the West.
Now, one way that PC MC people on the Right might try to wiggle out of the logic that holds the entire Ten Commandments together is to locate the blame for the Problem of Islam in some conspiratorial cabal of dastardly elites—perhaps “Gramscian” elites, or more broadly (and ironically) Leftists in general. This attempt to wiggle out of the logic has problems we have analyzed elsewhere (here and here).
Furthermore, I would wager to say that most PC MC people on the Right would not reject outright the anti-Western Commandments (again, with the exception of Commandment 7): although they might feel mighty uncomfortable with the presence of those anti-Western Commandments on the general platform of the Ten Commandments as a whole, they are not averse to blaming the West in a milder way, in effect agreeing with their Leftist Co-Commandment Supporters but simply toning down the anti-Western rhetoric. The end result, however, remains: Islam and Muslims following Islam are let off the hook for all the problems radiating out of Islam, while the West, in one way or another, is left to shoulder the responsibility and burden of all those problems.
4) And finally, the Ten Commandments directly concerns only the problem of Islam: the problem of Muslims -- who, qua Muslims, put the inert, theoretical ideology of Islam into dangerous, evil, unjust and bloody action in various regions of the world – remains directly unaddressed and only logically implicit. It is, nevertheless, a crucial ingredient to the list. PC MC is adamant about protecting the vast majority of Muslims from any critical scrutiny; and that attitude builds directly (albeit incompletely) from the Ten Commandments.
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