Bass culture: "In the comments section to yesterday's entry I quote an article in Monday's Guardian in which Julian Baggini and other philosophers examine imaginary scenarios designed to present typical modern problems and paradoxes. I particularly liked the first example, in which a 'cosmopolitan' called Saskia is annoyed that a white waiter brings her poppadoms in an Indian restaurant, because she wants to be multicultural herself but prefers the wait staff in the 'exotic' restaurants she visits to remain monocultural. 'Saskia highlights one of the great inconsistencies of contemporary western liberalism,' comments David Goodhart. 'The Canadian scholar Eric Kaufmann calls it asymmetrical multiculturalism, meaning that minority groups should express their ethnicity while dominant ones should transcend theirs.'

I usually refer to 'asymmetrical multiculturalism' as the strange collusion between liberal internationalists and conservative nationalists. Marxy put it rather more bitchily in a debate we were having yesterday about the meaning of a swastika he saw on a Harakjuku fashion-punk: 'I'm against right-wing politics, Momus is for, as long as they aren't Western peoples.' (My counter-argument was that there's nothing inherently right wing about preserving national cultural differences: artists, museum curators and restauranteurs do it as well as right wing bigots. What's more, the punk in question was decontextualizing a foreign symbol; he was more like the non-Christian Japanese women who wear crosses around their necks than a rabid nationalist.)

(Via Click opera.)