Averted Eyes and Western Silence
Our previous post addressed the horrendous practice of female genital mutilation ("FMG"). We wish to follow this theme a bit further. The practice is occurring in the West; however, it is largely ignored in the time honoured Nelsonian fashion of lifting a telescope to the blind eye.
Why is the West failing miserably to confront, interdict, and punish this terrible practice? May we suggest a number of likely reasons. The first is the West will struggle to oppose this practice because to do so would be deeply hypocritical. The West has championed the spurious "right" that of woman to her own body in the dishonest attempt to justify wholesale, industrial abortion. If a woman has a right to kill her own unborn child because of a higher right to her body as her own selfish possession, then she must have a lesser right to submit to FMG. It would, therefore, be entirely inappropriate to criminalise the choice of a woman to do so. Does she not have a right over her own body to do with it as she will? Behold the cacophonous silence of Western feminists in contending against the horrific abuse of FMG.
Of course there is the issue of consent. Do young women really get to choose freely to genital mutilation, or is it forced upon them by their families? But this is splitting hairs.
The West does not know, nor does it care. It is completely dismissive over what pressures might be brought to bear upon a pregnant woman to abort her child. With respect to abortion, the presumption is that because the state sanctions abortion as a human right, all abortions are the willing choice of the mother. Doubtless the same rationale is implicitly projected upon FMG. If a young girl submits to FMG, it is presumed she wants to, and her volitional consent means that in the West she will be lauded as exercising her right over her own body. The only "contribution" the West is likely to make is to subsidize the practice and ensure it is done by qualified surgeons, and, oh, if you insist, with a duly notarised consent form.
Secondly, the West has a deep loathing of its own cultural traditions, which means it is necessary to spend a great deal of energy affirming and respecting non-Western cultures. Marxist and neo-Marxist propaganda has been spectacularly successful at making the West feel guilty about economic prosperity and wealth. Generally the West holds to the view that it has raped and pillaged the rest of the world in order to raise its own standards of living. Since, therefore, our own culture is seen as comprehensively putrid, we struggle to criticise the cultural traditions and practices of others. Our hypocrisy, we deem, will only extend so far. We are so burdened with false guilt over the imaginary log in our own eyes that we dare not criticise or condemn other cultures. "They have done FMG for centuries. It's their choice. It's important and symbolic and deeply meaningful to them. Who are we to say they are wrong?"
This leads to a third reason by the West turns a blind eye to FMG. Multi-culturalism is an ideology which claims validity for each and every culture. Each culture must be celebrated and respected. Cultural practices which stretch back centuries, in particular, must be honoured and acknowledged. Multi-culturalism, in turn, is the spawn of two influential Western twentieth century intellectual traditions. The first is post-modernism which makes each and every human perspective (and, therefore, tradition) equally authentic and valid within its own frame of reference. The second is existentialism which would "frame" FMG as neither right not wrong, but a legitimate existential choice, if freely chosen or submitted to.
A fourth reason why the West is failing to confront FMG and rigorously outlaw the practice is the influence of its prevailing, established religion of materialism (along with its various denominations of empiricism, scientism, atheism, and evolutionism). None of these establishment "churches" have any foundation for ethics or morals beyond what exists. Since we are all evolutionists now, how can genital mutilation be condemned? By what standard? It has worked for other cultures. It has survived. And that, dear friends, is that. Nothing more is permitted to be thought or said.
For these reasons the West has failed miserably to this point to harry the practice of FMG out of the land. It will only succeed in doing so if it turns its back on its secular cathedrals and materialist liturgies. But in failing to cut FMG out of existence, the West is eloquently testifying to its vacuous character. It is not just a patch over the eye that makes it purblind. Rather, the West long ago tore out the only eyes it ever had, leaving behind useless empty sockets. Meanwhile, women are being mercilessly cut, their subsequent lives mutilated, whilst "into the room the [Western] women come and go talking of Michaelangelo".
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