Sir Isaiah Berlin, who died last November, has been hailed by many as the
pre-eminent philosopher of modern liberalism. 'Thanks in part to Sir Isaiah',
his biographer Michael Ignatieff reflected after his death 'liberalism came
out of the Cold War as the only doctrine with any legs left'.
Berlin's key idea was that of 'value pluralism'. 'Life may be seen through
many windows', he wrote, 'none of them necessarily clear or opaque, less or
more distorting than any of the others.' For Berlin, there was no such thing
as a universal truth, only a variety of conflicting truths. Different peoples
and cultures had different values, beliefs and truths, each of which may be
regarded as valid. Many of these values and truths were incommensurate, by
which Berlin meant that not only are they incompatible, but they were incomparable,
because there was no common language we could use to compare the one with
the other. Hence, argued Berlin, we have to accept that society is irredeemably
plural.
Berlin linked his belief in pluralism to another of his key beliefs: his commitment
to freedom and liberty. Freedom, for Berlin, lay in the acceptance of the
plurality of society and of the incommensurability of cultural values. Pluralism,
he argued, was the best defence against tyranny and against ideologies, such
as racism, which treated some human beings as less equal than others.
This link between freedom and pluralism has become the cornerstone of modern
liberal philosophy. The celebration of difference, respect for pluralism,
avowal of identity politics - these are regarded as the hallmarks of a progressive,
antiracist outlook. As the American academic, and former critic of pluralism,
Nathan Glazer puts it in the title of a recent book, We're All Multiculturalists
Now.
I want in this essay to show this to be a naive and dangerous view. I want
to argue, rather, that the notion of pluralism is a deeply ambiguous one.
Far from being a bulwark against racism and tyranny, a plural outlook appropriates
many of the themes of racial ideology and reproduces the very assumptions
upon which racism has historically been based. Most critically, the embrace
of 'difference' as a political goal has undermined our capacity to defend
equality.
The dangers of pluralism can be seen in Berlin's own work. Shortly before
he died, he was interviewed for Prospect magazine by the political
philosopher Steven Lukes. Lukes asked whether it was ever possible for peoples
of different cultures - such as Arabs and Jews - to live together. 'When you
have two peoples of different origins and cultures', Berlin replied, 'it is
difficult for them to live together in peace'. He added that 'it is quite
natural that each side should think that they cannot lead free lives in an
integrated society if the others are there in quantity'. Such a view, claimed
Berlin, 'is not sheer bigotry'. It is a view, however, not too different from
that of many politicians whom most would accept are bigots.
'Every society, every nation is unique', claims Enoch Powell, the most vocal
opponent of black immigration in postwar Britain. 'It has its own past, its
own story, its own memories, its own languages or ways of speaking, its own
- dare I use the word - culture.' This is why, he argues, immigrants, who
belong to different cultures and different traditions, could never be fully
British.
'It is because we respect ourselves and others', Pierre Pascal, a leading
rightwing thinker in France contends, 'that we refuse to see our country transformed
into a multiracial society in which each group loses their specificity.' For
two decades now, the French far right has astutely exploited the right to
maintain cultural differences by asserting the right of the French to maintain
their cultural identity. Muslims, they maintain, belong to a different culture
and tradition, and hence do not belong in France. 'I love North Africans',
Jean-Marie Le Pen has declared, 'but their place is in the Mahgreb'.
Berlin abhorred the claims of the far right. Yet it is difficult to deny that
the logic of his claim that two peoples of different origins cannot live together
in peace, and that it is not bigotry to believe this, leads inexorably to
the arguments of Powell, Pascal and Le Pen.
Indeed, Berlin himself, in his Prospect interview, observed that 'the
ferment of the French Canadians, the Flemings in Belgium, Basques in Spain,
Corsicans, Bretons, Tamils, Irishmen, Jews and Arabs, Georgians, Armenians,
Indians and Pakistanis' had made him question the 'nineteenth century [idea]
that multicultural societies were desirable'. Moreover, he questioned whether
black immigrants to the Western nations were 'ready for assimilation'. Black
immigration was 'a problem' he said, because 'Cultures which have grown up
with no contact with one another have now collided.'
These views are not an unfortunate aberration, the illiberal thoughts of a
man with otherwise impeccably liberal credentials . They are the inevitable
consequence of Berlin's pluralist outlook. The idea of that human beings divide
into incommensurate cultural groups has always been at the heart, not of the
antiracist, but of the racist agenda. Nineteenth century racial thinkers despised
what they regarded as the abstract universalism of Enlightenment philosophers
which they believed denied, and even undermined, the concrete reality of human
differences. Dismissing claims of a universal humanity, they advocated instead
the notion that human groups are in profound ways distinct and should be treated
accordingly.
These notions became an important part of the nineteenth century Romantic
movement. Romantics reacted the universalist ideas of the Enlightenment and
championed instead particularist accounts of human difference. They considered
every people to be unique, and that such uniqueness was expressed through
its volksgeist, the unchanging spirit of a people refined through history.
The idea of volksgeist became transformed through the nineteenth century into
the concept of racial make-up, an unchanging substance, the foundation of
all physical appearance and mental potential and the basis for division and
difference within humankind.
Romantic notions of cultural uniqueness, and the idea of racial difference,
became central to Western thought as a result of a fundamental contradiction
of post-Enlightenment societies: the contradiction between a deep-seated belief
in, and respect for, equality and the reality of societies that remained stubbornly
unequal. Racial theory attempted to explain this contradiction by suggesting
that inequality itself was naturally given. Society was unequal because the
destiny of every social group was in some way linked to intrinsic qualities
that each possessed. For racial theorists, as for Romantics, the nature of
a society was explained by the differences it embodied. Today's pluralists
are intensely hostile to racial ideology. Yet, like nineteenth century racial
theorists, contemporary pluralists are animated by an abhorrence of Enlightenment
universalism and by a Romantic vision of human differences. It is no coincidence
that Isaiah Berlin's most profound intellectual debt lay with German Romantics
such as Herder and Hamman. It is the mutual origins of racism and pluralism
in Romanticism that underlies the ambiguities of the pluralist outlook.
In the nineteenth century, group differences were seen largely as biological
in nature - as in the ideology of scientific racism. Today, those differences
are more often than not seen as cultural. The horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust
helped discredit racial science and biological theories of human differences.
But if, in the postwar world, racial science was buried, racial thinking was
not. The biological arguments for racial superiority were thrown into disrepute
and overt expressions of racism were discredited. All the assumptions of racial
thinking, however, were maintained intact - in particular the belief that
humanity can be divided into discrete groups; that each group should be considered
in its own terms; that each is in some way incommensurate with the others;
and that the important relationships in society arise not out of commonalties
but out of the differences between groups. The form of racial thinking, however,
changed. It was cast not in biological terms but in the language of cultural
pluralism.
The concept of a 'plural society' first emerged, in fact, prior to the War
through anthropological analyses of colonial societies in the first decades
of this century. In a study of Indonesia and Burma, the anthropologist JS
Furnival wrote that 'the first thing that strikes the visitor is the medley
of peoples - European, Chinese, Indian and native' that constitute the society.
The different groups, Furnival wrote, 'mix but do not combine'. Each group
'holds by its own religion, its own culture and language, its ideas and ways'.
The result was a 'plural society, with different sections of the society living
side by side but separately within the same political unit'.
Pluralism quickly moved from being a description of colonial society to an
explanation for it. Drawing on Romantic ideas of group differences, anthropologists
rationalised the inequalities of colonial society as products of the different
cultural outlooks and lifestyles of the various groups that constituted that
society. Through this process inequality became reframed as difference. Like
racial theory, plural theory provided an apology for social inequalities,
portraying them as the inevitable result, not of natural variations as in
racial theory, but of cultural differences. In the postwar world, pluralism
provided a vocabulary with which to articulate social differences without
having to refer to the discredited discourse of race. It provided both a sense
of continuity with prewar racial discourse and a means of asserting the aversion
to racism that exemplified the postwar years.
It was the impact of mass immigration into Western societies that helped shape
the nature of postwar pluralism. Eleven million workers came to Europe in
the fifties and sixties, encouraged by an economic boom. In the USA a different
kind of mass migration took place - the huge movement of African Americans
to the Northern cities in the fifties and sixties. In both cases the newcomers
found themselves on the margins of society, subject to racism and discrimination,
and unable to gain access to levers of power. The ideology of pluralism developed
as an accommodation to the persistence of inequalities despite the rhetoric
of integration, assimilation and equality. As immigrant and black communities
remained ghettoised, excluded from mainstream society, subject to discrimination
and clinging to old habits and lifestyles as a familiar anchor in a hostile
world, so such differences became rationalised not as the negative product
of racism or discrimination but as the positive result of a plural society.
In the America of the sixties, for instance, most commentators, both black
and white, hoped and expected that African-American migrants to the North
would eventually integrate into US society, as fully as had European immigrants.
The title of a 1966 article by Irving Kristol in the New York Times
captured that hope - 'The Negro Today is like the Immigrant Yesterday'. Three
decades later it has become obvious how misplaced were such claims. Virtually
every social statistic - from housing segregation to rates of intermarriage,
from infant mortality rates to language use - shows that African Americans
live very different lives to the rest of America. The experience even of Hispanic
Americans is far closer to that of American whites than it is to that of African
Americans.
As the possibilities of equality seemed more and more constrained, so there
was an increasing tendency to celebrate 'difference'. The black American critic
bell hooks observes that 'civil rights reform reinforced the idea that black
liberation should be defined by the degree to which black people gained equal
access to material opportunities and privileges to whites - jobs, housing,
schooling etc.' This strategy could never bring about liberation, argues hooks,
because such 'ideas of "freedom" were informed by efforts to imitate
the behaviour, lifestyles and most importantly the values and consciousness
of white colonisers.' The failure of equality has led radical critics like
hooks to declare that equality itself is problematic because African Americans
are 'different' from whites.
Politicians and policy-makers have responded to such arguments by reinventing
America as a 'plural' or 'multicultural' nation. Pluralism is premised on
the idea that America is a nation composed of many different cultural groups
and peoples. But in reality it is the product of the continued exclusion of
one group: African Americans. The promotion of pluralism is a tacit admission
that the barriers that separate blacks and whites cannot be breached and that
equality has been abandoned as a social policy goal. 'Multiculturalism', Nathan
Glazer has written, 'is the price America is paying for the inability or unwillingness
to incorporate into its society African Americans, in the same way and to
the same degree it has incorporated so many other groups.' The real price,
however, is being paid by African Americans themselves. For in truth America
is not plural or multicultural; it is simply unequal. And the promotion of
pluralism is an acknowledgement of the inevitability of that inequality. Indeed,
in his own way, Glazer himself recognises this. 'We must pass through a period
in which we recognise difference, we celebrate difference', he writes, because
of 'our failure to integrate blacks.'
The 'apartness' of black and immigrant communities in Western Europe is probably
not so great as that of African Americas in the USA. Nevertheless, here too
pluralism has become a means to avoid debate about the failure of equality.
Many young people in Marseilles or East London call themselves Muslim, for
instance, less because of religious faith or cultural habits, than because
in the face of a hostile, anti-Muslim society, calling oneself Muslim is a
way of defending the dignity of one's community. Young Muslims are often not
religious; they have mores and outlooks and habits little different from that
of their white peers. But racism imposes difference upon them and forces them
to adopt difference themselves. Their Islam is not the free celebration of
an identity, but an attempt to negotiate a difficult relationship with a hostile
society as best they can. In celebrating such cultural differences, we are
danger of celebrating the differences imposed by a racist society, not identities
freely chosen by those communities.
I am not, of course, objecting to pluralism in the sense of a society in which
there exists the right to free and open political, cultural and religious
expression. Rather, what I fear is the one-sided embrace of 'difference' and
denigration of universalistic concepts. The irony is that the blind pursuit
of pluralism undermines our capacity to defend those very rights of free expression.
Such rights can only be defended through a defence of equality. In an equal
society, our universal capacity to act as political subjects can take a myriad
of forms, and hence can become the basis of true difference. Indeed, only
in an equal society, can difference have any meaning, because it is only here
that difference can be freely chosen. In an unequal society, however, such
as the ones in which we live, the pursuit of difference all too often means
the entrenching of inequalities. Inequalities simply become reframed through
the discourse of difference. In such circumstances, there is little possibility
of true freedom to express one's political, cultural or religious identities.
A truly plural society would be one in which citizens have full freedom to
pursue their different values or practices in private, while in the public
sphere all citizens would be treated as political equals whatever their private
beliefs. Today, however, pluralism has come to mean the very opposite. The
right to practice a particular religion, speak a particular language, follow
a particular cultural practice is seen as a public good rather than a private
freedom. Different interest groups demand to have their 'differences' institutionalised
in the public sphere. This has led not to greater equality, but to a rationalisation
of inequality. The question we have to ask ourselves, therefore, is: do we
want an equal society or a plural society? We cannot have both.