If so, maybe he could visit some clothing factories there and let us know his findings. Perhaps he would prefer to identify with the country of his birth, Bangladesh. When did Dr Tanveer Ahmed’s culture ban slavery? Well, if he identifies with the Islamic world, not until the 20th century. The first time in history it was banned was 1833. Slavery has been the default condition in every human culture forever. It’s not clear whether Dr Tanveer Ahmed thinks this was an intervention too far. Fortunately, those nasty colonial British were culturally insensitive enough to ban it.
We’re doing it to ourselves.Ĭultural relativism doesn’t stand up to historic or logical scrutiny.įor example, murdering wives on their husband’s funeral pyre is not just an aspect of culture, it’s immoral. Those who would do us harm have noticed this and, like Dr Tanveer Ahmed, they are keen to exploit our insecurities.Īlso, as Douglas Murray points out in The War on the West, many of those who would do us harm are us. We’ve lost our cultural self-confidence and now our guilt over the past is preventing us from progressing in the future. A thousand years ago, we had this pathetic notion of paying off the Vikings to leave us alone, the Danegeld.īut, as Rudyard Kipling wrote, “… once you have paid him the Danegeld, You never get rid of the Dane.“ Perhaps we are in the suddenly stage of our cultural decline.īritain has been here before, of course. Gradually, then suddenly”, is how a Hemingway character describes his process to bankruptcy. It’s worse than that though, as the title of this article infers “ Two ways. In the UK, we talk of a managed decline since the days of empire, a melancholy acceptance of a slow fall down the world rankings since the war. Even if the Kiwis woke up to the problem today, it’s a multi-generational effort to reverse the decline. The statistics comparing it to Singapore are damning. Here’s another article to consider, bemoaning the decline of New Zealand, particularly in the quality of its education. Would China allow it? Nigeria? Qatar? Argentina? Singapore? I don’t think so. Moral colonialism indeed.ĭr Tanveer Ahmed goes on to equate dressing as a crusader with wearing Nazi uniforms.Ĭan you name another culture in the world that would invite immigrants to their country and then provide column inches for such self-loathing in their national newspaper? That second sentence smuggles the concepts of killing migrant workers through negligence and jailing gays in the conversation under the cover of our differences over alcohol. Western sensitivities around banning alcohol, homosexuality and demands around worker’s rights have a ring of moral colonialism. There is an undercurrent of racism about the negative coverage of Qatar during the World Cup, the first to be held in a Muslim nation. On a personal level, the inability to fit into a favourite pair of trousers is a harsh and obvious indicator of change.Īt a national level, articles such as this are a sign we’ve lost our confidence and have done a deal with those who wish us harm. It also appeases a deep and integral need in our humanity, to ‘know and feel’ that we are connected in an emotional way to the universe, not just in the physical stardust that makes up our bodies but in everything we see and touch.Eventually, our decline becomes difficult to wilfully ignore. The science of plotting the exact position and interactions of the planets at the moment of one’s birth and then interpreting that event, if nothing else, is a beautifully romantic notion, and an interesting exercise to boot. At every turn it seems a beautifully symmetrical and harmonic system. If life is all one big cosmic dance then the study of Astrology and your birth chart are a fascinating alternative take on how you view yourself by looking at how Astrology and the planets view you. The Pythagorans say ‘Look at the sky at Dawn’ – to remind ourselves of the constancy of those heavenly bodies, their perpetual round of their own duty, their order, their purity, and their nakedness. I haven’t even thought about the predictive side of Astrology, preferring to stick to Birth Chart interpretation as a kind of profiling. As a method or metaphor for understanding and typifying the human psyche it appears to hold up very well for me under close inspection. Its origins can be traced back 5000 years. Astrology is rightly called the oldest science.
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