Rhetoric Race and Religion
by Benjamin Myers
ABC Religion
Contemporary western societies have witnessed the emergence of a new tribalism, fuelled by the logic of capitalism with its proliferation of niche identities and by the politics of multiculturalism with its advocacy of mere “difference,” while lacking the language to articulate any vision of a common good.
Such multicultural pluralism is a mirror image of the postmodern ethics of difference, where each person is assumed to be absolutely “other.”
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams argues that, once this doctrine of otherness has taken hold of political imagination, we are left with the depressing prospect of “a world in which there aren’t and couldn’t be any real discussion of the goals and destiny of human beings as such.”
The resulting social order starts to look like a Hobbesian war of all against all, a chaotic rivalry between segregated interest groups, each ruthlessly brandishing its own rights and freedoms while the State is reduced to the role of suppressing open conflict by policing the borders of “difference.”
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