The main force in the shift from a racial to a cultural view of human differences
was the science of anthropology. Anthropology had always been the most particularist
of the human sciences. In the context of Victorian positivism and social evolutionism,
this manifested itself through physical anthropology and theories of biological
differences. As the positivist outlook disintegrated along with the long nineteenth
century, so anthropological particularism re-expressed itself in cultural
terms.
The central figure in the story of the remaking of anthropology was the German
American Franz Boas. It would be difficult to overestimate the impact of Boas,
not simply on anthropology, but on our everyday perceptions of race, culture
and difference. Contemporary ideas of pluralism and multiculturalism, of respect
for other cultures, and of the importance of tradition and history are all
significant themes in Boas' work. His legacy, however, like that of pluralism
itself, remains an ambiguous one. Boas, and his students such as Melville
Herskovitz, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, played a prominent part in the
replacement of racial theories of human differences with cultural theories,
and in so doing helped undermine the power of scientific racism. Yet the concept
of culture Boas helped develop to a large extent rearticulated the themes
of racial theory in a different guise. Influenced both by the German Romantic
tradition and by a liberal egalitarian view, the problem facing Boas, as the
historian George Stocking observes, was how to define the Romantic notion
of 'the genius of the people' in terms other than racial heredity.9
His answer, ultimately, was the anthropological concept of culture.
Boas' philosophical egalitarianism and cultural relativism arose from his
disillusionment with 'Western' values. He related in a letter the impact of
meeting the Inuit on a field trip to the Arctic:
I often ask myself what advantages our 'good society' possesses over that of the 'savages'. The more I see of their customs the more I realise we have no right to look down on them... As a thinking person, for me the most important result of this trip lies in the strengthening of my point of view that the idea of a 'cultured' person is merely relative.10
Boas' disillusionment was at the root of the ambiguity in his treatment of
the idea of equality. The revolutionary egalitarianism that arose out of the
Enlightenment was positive and forward-looking. From Condorcet to Marx, such
egalitarians held that social progress could overcome artificial divisions
and differences and reveal our essential commonality. Boas' egalitarianism
arose, on the contrary, from the belief that such progress was not possible.
Humanity was equal, not because differences could be overcome, but because
every difference was equally valid. But this approach elided 'differences'
and 'inequalities'. What were considered differences between individuals and
peoples were in reality the product of social inequalities. For Boas 'equality'
meant the acceptance of the actual inequalities of society but the regarding
of these inequalities as different manifestations of a common humanity.
We can see the way in which the new anthropology reframed the meaning of inequality
by looking at the development of pluralism in the colonial context. The concept
of a plural society first emerged 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'.11
This concept of a plural society proved attractive to both colonial administrators,
grappling with the problem of imposing law and order on the territories, and
to Western liberals keen to protect colonial subjects from the ravages of
imperialism. Pluralism quickly moved from being a description of colonial
society to an explanation for it. The inequalities of colonial society were
rationalised 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, but of cultural differences.
Pluralism effectively turned on its side the evolutionary ladder of Victorian
racial theory: pluralists conceived of humanity as horizontally, rather than
vertically, segmented. Humanity was not arranged at different points along
an ever-rising vertical axis, as the social evolutionists had believed, but
at different points along a stationary horizontal axis. Humanity was composed
of a multitude of peoples each inhabiting their own symbolic and cultural
worlds. But whether differences were seen as biological or cultural, whether
they were seen in terms of inferiority and superiority or not, racial theory
and cultural pluralism were characterised by a common hostility to universalism,
a disdain for humanism and a philosophical, and occasionally epistemological,
relativism.
The consequence of all this can be seen in the debate about race and difference
in the postwar world. Following the experience of Nazism, the Holocaust and
the Final Solution, biological theories of human differences became discredited.
But if racial science was buried in the postwar world, racial thinking was
not. While the biological arguments for racial superiority were thrown into
disrepute and overt expressions of racism were discredited, many of the assumptions
of racial thinking were maintained intact - in particular the belief that
humanity can be divided into discrete groups, that each groups should be considered
in its own terms, and that differences, not commonalities, shaped human interaction.
These assumption, however, were cast not in biological terms but in the language
of cultural pluralism. 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.
We have seen how the concept of a plural society developed in the prewar years
out of anthropological studies of colonial society. In the postwar world it
became refashioned in response to the impact of mass immigration into Western
societies. 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 nineteenth century,
the persistence of inequalities had led to the emergence of the discourse
of race, in which economic, social and technological differences between groups
were attributed to natural distinctions. In the postwar years the persistence
of inequalities in the context of mass immigration led to the development
of a pluralist outlook, in which differences were welcomed as expressions
of cultural diversity.
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'.12
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.'13
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'.14
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.'15
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, 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 pluralist might reply that the principle of 'difference' implies a truly
radical egalitarianism, because it recognises no standard by which one individual
or group can be judged as better than another. But the point is that this
principle of difference cannot provide any standards which oblige us to respect
the 'difference' of others. At best, it invites our indifference to the fate
of the Other. At worst, it licenses us to hate and abuse those who are different.
Why, after all, should we not abuse and hate them? On what basis can they
demand our respect or we demand theirs? It is very difficult to support respect
for difference without appealing to some universalistic principles of equality
or social justice. And it is the possibility of establishing just such universalistic
principle that has been undermined by the embrace of a pluralistic outlook.
The dangers of a pluralist outlook are much more acute today. Through much
of the postwar period, the pernicious impact of pluralism upon the struggle
for equality was kept in check. From liberation struggles in the third world
to the civil rights movement in the USA, there were vigorous social struggles
for equality. The demise of such struggles over the past decade, however,
has sapped the morale of antiracists. Campaigning for equality means challenging
accepted practices, being willing to march against the grain, to believe in
the possibility of social transformation. Conversely, celebrating differences
between peoples allows us to accept society as it is - it says little more
than 'We live in a diverse world, enjoy it'.
The social changes that have swept the world over the past decade have intensified
this sense of pessimism. The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the left,
the fragmentation of the postwar order, the defeat of most liberation movements
in the third world and the demise of social movements in the West, have all
transformed political consciousness. In particular, they have thrown into
question the possibility of social transformation. In this context the quest
for equality has increasingly been abandoned in favour of the claim to a diverse
society. I suggested previously that the narrative of race was also the narrative
of the containment of movements for social emancipation. Much the same may
be said about pluralism. The celebration of difference is an intellectual
outlook that has been forged out of the seeming impossibility of transforming
social relations. It is the product of political defeat, and in particular
the product of the defeat of movements for social equality. But the very pursuit
of pluralism has itself helped constrain the possibilities of social change,
for, in the absence of a universalistic outlook, and in an increasingly fragmented
world, the promise of any form of collective action becomes increasingly chimerical.
Unless we challenge the blind pursuit of difference, our capacity for meaningful
social change will continue to become ever more diminished.