January 5, 2000

“It’s not better or worse, it’s just different.”

As if such an appraisal were ever yet possible. This plea to respect the other has a false premise, namely that it wishes one to treat the other, not with the respect with which one treats oneself, but rather with indifference, directly giving the lie to the operative term of the slogan. “Why is this false, exactly?” “Only in the accomplished synthesis, in the union of contradictory moments, will their difference be manifested. Without the step that [A] is the same as [B], each of them would -- to use one of Hegel's favorite terms -- be ‘indifferent’ to the other; only when they are to be the same do they become contradictory.” So goes multiculturalism/diversity/cultural relativism. We are unable, even in the midst of this most-miserably-failed experiment in democracy, to recognize the contradictions between cultures (and they are quickly becoming the same, the better to fall in line with the centuries-old theory of social totality, the fully-expected result of global capitalism; more and more like ours, if the hype is to be believed, the thinnest of multicultural veneers allowing for surface diversity) which always entail geography, religious beliefs, rationality, and irrationality, and even the basic and everyday contradictions in the universal use of the word “I,” or whatever corresponds to it, to describe subjects which have no chance of becoming equal. As proximate urban anonymity stands in for Gemeinwesen, indifference stands in for égalité.
April 9, 1998

Postscript

Until they begin to talk of economic equality—i.e., the supersession of economics&mdash, the people who, because they are equal opportunity bigots, generally meanspirited, etc., plead for respect because “at least I’m honest,” should shut the fuck up.
January 5, 2000

difference relativism equality