"The tragedy of bad ideas"

Don't miss Andrew Klavan on The Stoning of Soraya M. Here's a peek:

The events now unfolding in Iran, some 23 years after Soraya's death, provide the answer. The movie's detailed and unflinching depiction of a world and a worldview make "The Stoning of Soraya M." a different kind of tragedy, what you might call a tragedy of culture or a tragedy of bad ideas.

The tragedy of bad ideas unfolds from a moral flaw in a worldview or philosophy as inevitably as classical tragedy unfolds from a flaw in individual character. Tragedies of bad ideas are the most common, pervasive and destructive man-made mass disasters. Yet our thinking class has become powerless to oppose them or even recognize them for what they are.

The reason is that too many of our intellectuals are themselves ensnared in a bad idea. That idea is multiculturalism -- the notion that no system or government is inherently better than any other, that the rules of morality are just a doctrine written by history's winners. Thus there are no enduring human truths, only "narratives" by which almost any beastliness can be explained away if committed by a people with a claim to having been victimized by a dominant culture.

The Stoning of Soraya M is a movie I don't necessarily want to see because of the horror of the story line, but I'm compelled to see and hope that it will be in a movie theater here in Hawaii at some point.