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One of the strange psychological effects of multiculturalism as a doctrine or ideology is that it renders people peculiarly uninterested in or insensitive to the ideas or feelings of people or cultures other than their own.
Anyone who has tried to understand another culture or even just master literature in a foreign language knows that it requires great effort and determination and not just the occasional tasting of a different cuisine. It is most unlikely that anyone could master both Pali Buddhist scriptures and the ninth-century Arabic of Moslem philosophers. An abstract commitment to respect other cultures is not the same as the effort to understand just one of them.
There is a connection between multiculturalism as a doctrine or received wisdom and the behavior of numbers of young Western tourists in far-off lands in Asia. There is a fashion among them of photographing themselves naked or near-naked there at temples or other sites of cultural or religious significance.
According to a report in the French newspaper, Le Monde [1], it is a kind of epidemic. It reports the case of 12 young tourists who posted photographs of themselves on Facebook, nude or nearly nude, on the summit of Mount Kinabalu in Borneo, against the advice of their guides, who told them that to take such photographs would be offensive to the local people.
It so happened that five days after they took the photos there was an earthquake in which 18 tourists, including seven Singaporean schoolchildren, were killed. The local people, who have a religious reverence for the mountain, attributed the earthquake to the previous desecration. The Chief Minister of the Malaysian state of Sabah said, "Whether or not others believe it, we, here, believe it."
Four of the young desecrators were arrested by the Malaysian police and then sentenced to three days in prison and a fine of a little more than $1,000 each. The young man presumed to be the instigator of the prank, a Canadian called Emil Kaminski, escaped arrest and then posted the following comment on the internet: "How can you be a minister and not know about plate tectonics?" Another of his comments (here I translate from the French, which is itself a translation from the English): "He’s a real cocksucker."
Nowadays, of course, not many people in the West would concur with the local people that the earthquake was caused by the desecration. But here it should be noted that it is not an eternity ago that many people in Europe, and not just the uneducated, believed that natural disasters were the consequence of, and punishment for, man’s wicked conduct.
After the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, in which much of the city was destroyed and 30,000 people were killed, a considerable body of literature was written, not just in Portugal, claiming that it was God’s vengeance on the unregenerate people, and as a warning to others. It would probably be true to say that more people throughout history have believed this kind of thing than not believed it; and while I am personally glad that we have escaped it, I cannot simply look down on more than half of humanity, because I happen to have been born in the time and place that I was.
Second, the local people were not trying to impose their beliefs on others as indisputable truth. They were not evangelizing for their beliefs; on the contrary, they were welcoming strangers to come to the place that they regarded, superstitious as we may think it, with reverence and awe. Surely common courtesy should have been enough to suggest to these young people that they should not act in this fashion?
How much does one need to know to act inoffensively in a foreign land? One can sometimes make mistakes through ignorance of subtleties, but this behavior was gross in its offensiveness. Moreover, it was far from an isolated case. On the contrary, it was only the most publicized. Such conduct, or a lesser form of it, is far from uncommon. The conduct abroad of tourists from my own country is notoriously disgusting and disrespectful of local mores. Why?
Multiculturalism means that all cultures are to be respected—with the logical corollary that so is one’s own. If we must respect others, others must respect us. And if our "culture" happens to include taking and publishing nude photographs of ourselves in temples and elsewhere, others must just grin and bear it; otherwise, they are being retrograde, primitive, and (worst of all) intolerant. We must be tolerant of them, we agree, but that means they must be tolerant of us. And, as it happens, they also need our tourist dollars, so they should just shut up. Who is the boss around here?
[1] Le Monde, 2 July, 2015
