The perils of designer tribalism.(evaluation of certain modern views of culture)

A generalized tolerance will be best achieved if we leave undisturbed whatever it is which constitutes the special character of particular individuals and peoples, whilst at the same time we retain the conviction that the distinctive worth of anything with true merit lies in its belonging to all humanity.

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

[A] life without piety, including piety to the past, courts grief and does damage to the life of the living individual.

--Edward Shils

They are very gentle, and know nothing of evil.

-- Christopher Columbus

In 1983, the French writer Pascal Bruckner published Le sanglot de l'homme blanc, an astringent, intelligently disabused attack on recent European efforts to sentimentalize the Third World. Duly translated into English a few years later as The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt (Free Press, 1986), the book excited a brief spark of interest among conservatives and then sank without trace into the tenebrous limbo of the out-of-print.