My Take | An inconvenient truth for holier-than-thou Western moralists

I must admit I had never heard of The 1975 until last week. The British rock band caused quite a stir in Malaysia and across Southeast Asia for having their male band members kissing on stage. It was apparently a protest gesture for LGBTQ rights. I suppose there is no bad publicity in show business. The whole furore is reminiscent of a similar protest campaign by several football teams representing Western countries at the World Cup in Qatar last year. Both controversies raise fundamental questions about Western arrogance and ignorance – or Eastern bigotry, depending on where you stand on such issues. In Malaysia, the music festival organisers and government officials didn’t take kindly to the act, and shut down the whole event early. Even many within the local gay community are angry at what they see as a pointless gesture that needlessly provoked in a conservative Muslim-majority country. LGBTQ Malaysians slam UK band’s onstage kiss as ‘performance activism’ Predictably, though, the band’s fans and LGBTQ activists in the West have praised them for daring to challenge Malaysia’s sexually repressive society. “I do not see the point of inviting The 1975 to a country and then telling us who we can have sex with,” said lead singer Matty Healy, who carried a bottle of whisky onto the stage. No, Matty, Malaysia didn’t tell you who you can have sex with; no one cares. If you didn’t perform your stunt, no one would be any the wiser. It’s you who are oversharing. But if you feel so strongly, maybe you and your bandmates shouldn’t have accepted the invite in the first place. The problem with Westerners going to conservative and religious countries and lecturing them about what’s right and what’s wrong is that such claims usually conflict with the deeply held religious beliefs and societal norms of the locals. While many Westerners may think their rights are universal, or ought to be, they are not. Rather, they are also the beliefs and norms that emerge out of the particular circumstances of their own society and history. It’s clear that LGBTQ rights are the logical – and inevitable – extension of individual rights, freedom of choice and secularism. In the European Enlightenment tradition, it’s sometimes called “the sovereignty of the individual”. China’s LGBT community doesn’t need Western ‘gay pride’ Such rights, though still highly contested, didn’t come from nowhere. They emerge from the particular historical circumstances of Western society. Such Westerners believe they must submit, or ought to submit, to no one but only exercise their own sovereign rights and freedoms as individuals. Even biology is no determinant of their gender, which ought to be of their own choosing. You can now legally choose one of any number of genders with legal documents in Canada. And why not? Personally, despite or because of the awesomeness of such demands with their heavy responsibility, I think very few individuals can honestly live up to them, unless you are someone like Nietsche’s “superman” or “superperson”. Now what does Islam mean? I was told it means submission or surrender to God’s will. Sovereignty doesn’t lie in you, but in God. You don’t choose; it’s already chosen for you. That’s where true freedom lies. While I certainly don’t want to be a slave, there are many overburdening responsibilities – and freedoms – in contemporary life that I can definitely do without. For example, the freedom of choice, I believe, is overrated in Western society and is often exploited by big corporations to sell you things you don’t need, while destroying the environment. (I think one of the worst books ever written by supposedly seminal thinkers is Free to Choose: A Personal Statement by Milton Friedman. But that’s another story.) Security threats in Muslim-majority Indonesia force LGBTQ event to be moved Societies and individuals are locked into whole ways of life that are not easily taken apart without causing the whole edifice to collapse. A common resentment in non-Western countries is that Western modernity came with a wholesale imperialism that mercilessly, even cruelly, tore apart their society and tradition. Contemporary Western interference, however much driven by goodwill, inevitably comes with that modernist-imperialist burden. While I am not saying it’s wrong to fight for LGBTQ rights, you must be prepared to go all the way, and to challenge your opponents’ way of life and religious beliefs as well. If you want Muslims to accept LGBTQ rights, you’d better be prepared to challenge their Islamic beliefs, too. You don’t want to do that, do you? That would be imposing your values on someone else. But aren’t you already doing that in the most ineffective, virtue-signalling way, say, kissing on stage before your music fans? You can’t just pick and choose for other people when it’s their whole way of life you are talking about. Either seriously challenge them and tell them their God is false – or shut up and put up. You can’t pick and choose this and that bit of belief or morality for other people and societies. You can’t say, “That’s none of my business, but this is”. That’s just too convenient.

.css-1m2rp1p{color:#34b8b5;}My Take | An inconvenient truth for holier-than-thou Western moralists

.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;}The 1975 caused an almighty furore in Malaysia when two male members of the British rock band kissed on stage but their antic was an affront to a society they do not understand

My Take | An inconvenient truth for holier-than-thou Western moralists

The 1975 caused an almighty furore in Malaysia when two male members of the British rock band kissed on stage but their antic was an affront to a society they do not understand