thecritic.co.uk/the-anthropolo…
One of anthropology’s great cautionary tales involves the American anthropologist Margaret Mead. Mead travelled to Samoa in the 1920s and described in her book Coming of Age in Samoa a society totally free of the Western world’s sexual taboos, to its great benefit. The book captivated Western audiences and seemed to suggest a happy alternative to our damaging complexes and hangups, a world of joyful love and sex without guilt and shame — until it was revealed, decades later, by Derek Freeman, that Mead’s informants had been systematically lying to her about their sexual lives because she was an outsider and a woman. The whole thing was a dream. Mead’s Samoa didn’t exist and never had.
Critics of liberalism and multiculturalism, especially critics of the postmodern variety, see them both as a kind of Western imperialism, whilst denying that they are such. These people are right. Presented as neutral political and interpretive frames that allow the world’s great multitude of peoples to live happily side by side and “be who they really are” in peace and harmony, liberalism and multiculturalism are nothing of the sort. They smuggle in values, not least of all a commitment to moral universalism, to individual over group, to law over custom, that are utterly partial in their origin and force, and to which the vast majority of people throughout history have not subscribed and probably couldn’t even if they wanted to.
The multicultural experiment forced on Britain and other Western nations by their ruling classes is not a genuine encounter with the Other. It’s a dangerous fantasy, a delusion of shared humanity that ends in disaster. We’ve been told these people are just like us, though they may wear a different skin colour and worship a different god — but they’re not. Just how different they are is a lesson our rulers still have yet to learn, if they even care to learn it at all, but one tens of thousands of young white girls will never be able to forget.
Rose
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