Posted: Jan 21, 2022 12:04 pm
Spearthrower wrote:To exemplify that... go back to an earlier cited example:
bailey: white nations are being subjected to genocide by immigration
challenge delusional racism
motte: why is it racist to want to preserve our history and culture?
My response would be that the motte in this case is both a strawman caricature of properly understood anti-racism and a false equivalence. Because it is both perfectly possible, and perfectly proper, to preseve one's history and culture without being racist. It's possible, for example, for a UK citizen such as myself, to appreciate the musical output of Elgar, without simultaneously entertaining the "get rid of the bleeding darkies™ " mindset that is sadly still too prevalent here. Indeed, I'm minded to note at this juncture, that some of Elgar's lesser known works are actually far more compelling to listen to, than the far more popular works that have, over time, acquired nationalistic baggage that is overdue to be jettisoned. But I digress.
Of course, the fun part about this particular motte, is that the pedlars thereof are either unaware, or choose duplicitously to forget for their apologetic convenience, that UK history is liberally leavened with well-documented instances where we changed our culture in order to address and eradicate various iniquities. No serious student of history would pretend otherwise. Unfortunately, history has a habit of being abused by the usual suspects, to try and deflect from this documented historical reality.
Indeed, one of the other documented historical realities, is that culture is not a static entity. Culture changes in response both to external influences (advent of new technologies, the output of philosophers, etc) and internal influences (such as whether or not the populace considers a tradition worth maintaining). The irony applicable to the motte in this question, is that cultures that do become static and fossilised quickly become dead cultures. Cultures exhibit at least some of the features of populations of living organisms, and while that analogy can of course only be taken to a certain extent, it's still a useful analogy provided the bounds of applicability are respected.
Indeed, I'm minded to note at this juncture, that the white supremacist/racial purity brigade are not only wrong from an ethical standpoint, but also from a biological standpoint, and that any serious student of evolutionary biology quickly learns that genetic diversity is a virtue within a population, for several very important reasons. I have, of course, not only written in scathing tones in the past here about the fatuous "monoculture" view of the typical racist, but about the lies being peddled on this matter by the usual suspects from the creationist camp, but again, I digress (and widely here in this instance).
In short, if the motte consists of a prescriptive suggestion, one elegant means of destroying it, consists of demonstrating that it's perfectly possible to implement that suggestion, whist at the same time rejecting the farce in the bailey.