We're All Multiculturalists Now observed Nathan Glazer, a former
critic of pluralism, in the title of a book. And indeed we are. The celebration
of difference, respect for pluralism, avowal of identity politics - these
have come to be regarded as the hallmarks of a progressive, antiracist outlook
and as the foundation of modern liberal democracies. Nations such as Australia,
Canada and South Africa have created legal frameworks to institutionalise
their existence as multicultural societies. Others such as Britain have no
formal recognition of their multicultural status but have nevertheless pursued
pluralist policies in a pragmatic fashion. Even France, whose Republican tradition
might seem to be the nemesis of multiculturalism, has flirted with pluralist
policies. In 1986 the College de France presented the President with a report
entitled 'Proposals for the Education of the Future'. The first of ten principles
to which modern schools should subscribe was 'The unity of science and the
plurality of cultures': 'A carefully fabricated system of education must be
able to integrate the universalism inherent in scientific thought with the
relativism of the social sciences, that is with disciplines attentive to the
significance of cultural differences among people and to the ways people live,
think and feel.'
Ironically, the idea of cultural diversity has captured the political imagination
just as anthropologists themselves have started worrying about the concept.
They have come to realise not just that the notion of cultural diversity is
not self-evidently good but also that the concept of culture is not self-evident.
After all, what exactly is a culture? What marks its boundaries? Is it possible
to accord rights to cultures without treating such cultures as having fixed
boundaries? Why should cultural differences be viewed as more salient than,
say, class or age differences? In what way is a 16-year old British born boy
of Pakistani origin living in Bradford of the same culture as a 50-year old
man living in Lahore? Does a 16-year white boy from Bradford have more in
common culturally with his 50-year-old father than with that 16-year old 'Asian'?
Such questions have led most anthropologists today to reject the idea of cultures
as fixed, bounded entities. Some have come to question the very concept of
culture. 'Since the concept of culture has become so multifarious as to obscure
rather than clarify understandings of the social world', Thomas Hyland Eriksen
believes, 'it may now perhaps be allowed to return to the cultural pages of
the broadsheets, to the world of Bildung.' For Adam Kuper, 'Religious
beliefs, rituals, knowledge, moral values, the arts, rhetorical genres, and
so on, should be separated out from each other rather than bound together
into a single bundle labelled culture'. 'To understand culture', he concludes,
'we must first deconstruct it'.
Whatever the doubts of anthropologists, politicians and political philosophers
press on regardless. The idea multiculturalism has proved politically too
seductive. In lieu of proper definitions either of culture or of cultural
diversity, the term 'multicultural' has come to define a society that is particularly
diverse, usually as a result of immigration. It has also come to define the
policies necessary to manage such diversity. The concept of multiculturalism,
in other words, has come to embody both a description of a society and a prescription
for controlling that society. Multiculturalism is both the problem and the
answer. This conflation of description and prescription adds to the confusion
about the meaning cultural diversity at policy level while, at the same time,
entrenching the idea of multiculturalism as a self-evident good.
I want to argue in this paper that the multiculturalist description of society
is a highly distorted one, while the multiculturalist prescription creates
the very problems it is meant to solve. Western societies in particular are
not as diverse as multiculturalists would appear to believe, while multicultural
policies often create divisions and resurrect ways of thinking about difference
that are rooted in racial theory. To put these arguments in context I will
begin with a brief discussion of the historical and philosophical roots of
multiculturalism.
Contemporary multiculturalism is a marriage between the Romantic idea of culture
and an equally Romantic idea of identity. Romanticism is one of those concepts
that cultural historians find invaluable but which is almost impossible to
define. It took many political forms it lies at the root both of modern
conservatism and many strands of radicalism and appeared in different national
versions. Romanticism was not a specific political or cultural view but rather
described a cluster of attitudes and preferences: for the concrete over the
abstract; the unique over the universal; nature over culture; the organic
over the mechanical; emotion over reason; intuition over intellect; particular
communities over abstract humanity.
These attitudes came to the fore towards the end of the eighteenth century
largely in reaction to the predominant views of the Enlightenment. Much has
been written about the varieties of beliefs and arguments within the eighteenth
century and it is no longer fashionable to talk about the Enlightenment. Nevertheless,
beneath the differences there were a number of beliefs that most of the philosophes
held in common and which distinguished Enlightenment thinkers from those of
both the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. There was a broad consensus
that humans possessed a common nature; that the same institutions and forms
of governance would promote human flourishing in all societies; that reason
allowed humans to discover these institutions; and that through the development
of such institutions social inequalities and hierarchies could be minimised
and even erased.
The Romantic counter-Enlightenment challenged all these beliefs. Whereas Enlightenment
philosophes saw progress as civilisation overcoming the resistance of traditional
cultures with their peculiar superstitions, irrational prejudices and outmoded
institutions, for the Romantics the steamroller of progress and modernity
was precisely what they feared. Enlightenment philosophes tended to see civilisation
in the singular. Romantics understood culture in the plural. Distinct cultures
were not aberrant forms to be destroyed but a precious inheritance to be cherished
and protected.
The philosopher who perhaps best articulated the Romantic notion of culture
was the German Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803). Herder rejected the Enlightenment
idea that reality was ordered in terms of universal, timeless, objective,
unalterable laws that rational investigation could discover. He maintained,
rather, that every activity, situation, historical period or civilisation
possessed a unique character of its own. David Hume had suggested that 'Mankind
are so much the same at all times and in all places that history informs us
of nothing new or strange'. Herder, on the contrary, insisted that history
(and anthropology) reveals many things new and strange. Mankind was not the
same at all times and in all places. What made each people or nation or
volk - unique was its Kultur: its particular language, literature, history
and modes of living. The unique nature of each volk was expressed through
its volksgeist the unchanging spirit of a people refined through history.
Every culture was authentic in its own terms, each adapted to its local environment.
The 'grand law of nature', he proclaimed was 'let man be man. Let him mould
his condition according to what he himself shall view as best.'
Herder occupies an ambiguous role in modern political thought. In the eighteenth
century, Herder saw himself as part of the Enlightenment tradition, but also
as someone forced to challenge some of the basic precepts of the philosophes
such as their stress on universal law and on the universal validity of reason
in order to defend the cherished ideals of equality. In the nineteenth century,
Herder's concept of the volksgeist encouraged, albeit unwittingly, the development
of racial science. Volksgeist became transformed into racial make-up, an unchanging
substance, the foundation of all physical appearance and mental potential
and the basis for division and difference within humankind. By the late nineteenth
century, Herder's cultural pluralism came, paradoxically, also to give succour
to the new anthropological notion of culture championed by critics of racial
science. Franz Boas, the German American who played a key role in the development
of cultural anthropology, sought, in the words of historian George Stocking,
to define the Romantic notion of 'the genius of the people' in terms other
than those of racial heredity. His answer ultimately was the anthropological
notion of culture. And in the twentieth century, Herder's relativism and particularism
came to shape much of antiracist thinking. The roots of barbarism, many came
to believe, lay in Western arrogance and the roots of Western arrogance lay
in an unquestioning belief in the superiority of Enlightenment rationalism
and universalism. The ambiguity of Herder's legacy still shapes contemporary
multiculturalism. The Herderian idea of group differences gave rise to both
racial and pluralist views and there remain, as we shall, common bonds between
racial and multicultural notions of human difference.
The second theme in Romantic thinking important to modern multiculturalism
is the idea of identity. 'There is a certain way of being human that is my
way', wrote Charles Taylor in his much discussed essay on 'The Politics of
Recognition'. 'I am called upon to live my life in this way… Being true to
myself means being true to my own originality'. This sense of being 'true
to myself' Taylor calls ‘the ideal of "authenticity"'. The ideal
of the authentic self finds its origins in the Romantic notion of the ‘inner
voice’ that spoke uniquely to every individual, guided their moral actions
and expressed a person’s true nature. The concept was developed in the 1950s
by psychologists such as Erik Erikson and sociologists like Alvin Gouldner
who pointed out that identity is not just a private matter but emerges in
dialogue with others. Increasingly identity came to be seen not as something
the self creates but as something through which the self is created. Identity
is, in Stuart Hall's words, 'formed and transformed continuously in relation
to the ways in which we are represented or addressed in the cultural systems
which surround us.' The inner self, in other words, finds its home in the
outer world by participating in a collective. But not just any collective.
The world is comprised of countless groups philosophers, truck drivers,
football supporters, drinkers, train spotters, conservatives, communists and
so on. But in contemporary debates about identity, each person's sense of
who they truly are is seen as intimately linked to only a few special categories
collectives defined by people’s gender, sexuality, religion, race and, in
particular, culture. These comprise, of course, very different kinds of groups
and the members of each are bound together by very different characteristics.
Nevertheless, what collectives such as gender, sexuality, religion, race and
culture all have in common is that each is defined by a set of attributes
that, whether rooted in biology, faith or history, is fixed in a certain sense
and compels people to act in particular ways. Identity is that which is given,
whether by nature, God or one's ancestors. 'I am called upon to live my life
in this way', as Charles Taylor has put it. Unlike, say, politically defined
collectives, these collectives are, in philosopher John Gray's words, 'ascriptive,
not elective… a matter of fate, not choice'. The collectives that are important
to the contemporary notion of identity are , in other words, the modern equivalents
of what Herder defined as volks. For individual identity to be authentic,
so too must collective identity. 'Just like individuals', Charles Taylor writes,
'a Volk should be true to itself, that is, its own culture.' To be
true to itself, a culture must faithfully pursue the traditions that mark
out that culture as unique and rebuff as far as is possible the advances of
modernity and of other cultures.
This view of culture and identity has transformed the way that many people
understand the relationship between equality and difference. For much of the
past two centuries important strands of both liberal and radical thought drew
upon Enlightenment insights to view equality as requiring the state to treat
all citizens in the same fashion without regard to their race, religion or
culture. Most contemporary multiculturalists, on the other hand, argue that
people should be treated not equally despite their differences, but differently
because of them. There is, of course, a considerable diversity of views among
multiculturalists. Whatever the differences, however, there are a number of
common themes that underlie the arguments of mainstream multiculturalists
such as Charles Taylor, Will Kymlicka, Bhikhu Parekh and Tariq Modood.
For most multiculturalists the heterogeneity and diversity that defines contemporary
societies, especially in the West, makes old-style equality, rooted in Enlightenment
notions of universalism inadequate, even dangerous. The Enlightenment idea
that all people flourish best under the same kinds of social institutions
and forms of governance are a fantasy because the world is too complex and
too varied to be subsumed under a single totalising theory. Universalism is
a 'Eurocentric' viewpoint, a means of imposing Euro-American ideas of rationality
and objectivity on other peoples. In the place of universal rights come differential
rights. 'Justice between groups', as the political philosopher Will Kymlicka
has put it, 'requires that members of different groups are accorded different
rights'.
An individual's cultural background frames their identity and helps define
who they are. If we want to treat individuals with dignity and respect we
must also treat with dignity and respect the groups that furnish them with
their sense of personal being. ‘The liberal is in theory committed to equal
respect for persons', Bhikhu Parekh argues. 'Since human beings are culturally
embedded, respect for them entails respect for their cultures and ways of
life.' Tariq Madood takes this line of argument to make a distinction between
what he calls the 'equality of individualism' and 'equality encompassing public
ethnicity: equality as not having to hide or apologise for one's origins,
family or community, but requiring others to show respect for them, and adapt
public attitudes and arrangements so that the heritage they represent is encouraged
rather than contemptuously expect them to wither away.' We cannot, in other
words, treat individuals equally unless groups also treated equally. And since,
in the words of Iris Young, 'groups cannot be socially equal unless their
specific, experience, culture and social contributions are publicly affirmed
and recognised', so society must protect and nurture cultures, ensure their
flourishing and indeed their survival. Some go further, requiring the state
to ensure the survival of cultures not just in the present but in perpetuity.
Charles Taylor, for instance, suggests that the Canadian and Quebec governments
should take steps to ensure the survival of the French language in Quebec
'through indefinite future generations'.
Most multiculturalists and certainly the likes of Will Kymlicka and Charles
Taylor would probably consider themselves as standing in the liberal Enlightenment
tradition. But the rootedness of their argument in the Romantic counter-Enlightenment
often gives a distinctly illiberal sheen to the policies they advocate. Take
Tariq Modood's demand that people be required to give respect to various cultures
and that public arrangements be adapted to accommodate them. Does this mean
that schools should be forced to teach Creationism because it is part of Christian
fundamentalist culture? Or should public arrangements be adapted to reflect
the belief of many cultures that homosexuality is a sin? These are not simply
abstract questions. In 2002, in Australia's Northern Territory, Jackie Pascoe
Jamilmira, a 50 year-old Aboriginal man was given a 24-hour prison sentence
for assaulting and raping a 15-year-old girl. He had apparently been plying
the girl's family with gifts since her birth so that she would become his
wife upon coming of age. According to the judge because the girl was an Aborigine,
she 'didn't need protection. She knew what was expected of her. It's very
surprising to me he was charged at all.' In California, a young Laotian-American
woman was abducted from her work at Fresno State University and raped. Her
assailant, a Hmong immigrant (one of the boat people who had fled Cambodia
and Laos in the final stages of the Vietnam war) explained to the court that
this was a customary way of choosing a bride among his tribe. The court agreed
that he had to be judged largely by his own cultural standards and sentenced
him to just 120 days in jail.
Most multiculturalists would undoubtedly abhor such cases, and argue that
they have little to do with real multicultural policies. Yet it is not difficult
to see how the demand that everyone’s heritage should be respected and that
public arrangements be adapted to preserve each distinct heritage would inevitably
create situations such as these. Cases such as Jamilmira's are not unusual
in Australia. The courts increasingly accept that Aborigines should have the
right to be treated according to their own customs rather than be judged by
'whitefella law'. According to Colin McDonald, a Darwin barrister and expert
in customary law 'Human rights are essentially a creation of the last hundred
years. These people have been carrying out their law for thousands of years.'
This is a central theme to many kinds of multicultural policies - that to
preserve cultural authenticity, we must respect the right of certain people
to do X because their ancestors also did X. Or, in Charles Taylor's version,
that my descendants, through 'indefinite future generations', must do Y because
I am doing Y. The demand that because a cultural practice has existed for
a long time, so it should be preserved, is a modern version of the naturalistic
fallacy - the belief that ought derives from is. For nineteenth century social
Darwinists, morality - how we ought to behave - derived from the facts of
nature - how humans are. This became an argument to justify capitalist exploitation,
colonial oppression, racial savagery and even genocide. Today, virtually everyone
recognises the falsity of this argument. Yet, when talking of culture rather
than of nature, many multiculturalists continue to insist that 'is' defines
'ought'.
In any case, there is something deeply inauthentic about the demand for authenticity.
The kinds of cultures that most multiculturalists wish to recognise, affirm
and preserve are largely 'traditional' cultures, particularly those that they
believe to be under threat from the steamroller of modernity and globalisation.
They are however different in a significant respect from truly traditional
cultures that existed in the premodern world. There was, in the premodern
world, no sense of cultural integrity or authenticity. There were no alternatives
to the ways of life that people followed. Cultures were traditional but in
an unselfconscious fashion. Those who lived in such cultures were not aware
that they should value their difference or claim it as a right. A French peasant
attended church, an American Indian warrior painted his face not because they
thought 'This is my culture, I must preserve it' but for pragmatic reasons.
In the absence of some compelling reason for doing things differently, people
went on doing them in the same way as they had in the past. Cultural inertia,
in other words, preserved traditional ways because it was the easiest way
to organise collective life.
Multiculturalists, on the other hand, exhibit a self-conscious desire to preserve
cultures. Such 'self-conscious traditionalism', as Brian Barry calls it ,
is a peculiarly modern, post-Enlightenment, phenomenon. In the modern view,
traditions are to be preserved not for pragmatic reasons but because such
preservation is a social, political and moral good. Maintaining the integrity
of a culture binds societies together, lessens social dislocation and allows
the individuals who belong to that culture to flourish. Such individuals can
thrive only if they stay true to their culture - in other words, only if both
the individual and the culture remain authentic.
Modern multiculturalism seeks self-consciously to yoke people to their identity
for their own good, the good of that culture and the good of society. A clear
example is the attempt by the Quebecois authorities to protect French culture.
The Quebec government has legislated to forbid French speakers and immigrants
from sending their children to English-language schools; to compel businesses
with more than fifty employees to be run in French; and to ban English commercial
signs. So, if your ancestors were French you, too, must by government fiat
speak French whatever your personal wishes may be. Charles Taylor regards
this as acceptable because the flourishing and survival of French culture
is a good. 'It is not just a matter of having the French language available
for those who might choose it', he argues. Quebec is 'making sure that there
is a community of people here in the future that will want to avail itself
of the opportunity to use the French language.' Its policies 'actively seek
to create members of the community… assuring that future generations continue
to identify as French-speakers.'
An identity here has become a bit like a private club. Once you join up, you
have to abide by the rules. But unlike the Groucho or the Garrick it's a private
club you must join. Being black or gay, Kwame Anthony Appiah suggests, requires
one to follow certain 'life-scripts' because 'Demanding respect for people
as blacks and gays can go along with notably rigid strictures as to how one
is to be an African American or a person with same-sex desires.' There will
be 'proper modes of being black and gay: there will be demands that are made;
expectations to be met; battle lines to be drawn.' It is at this point, Appiah
suggests, that 'someone who takes autonomy seriously may worry whether we
have replaced one kind of tyranny with another.' An identity is supposed to
be an expression of an individual’s authentic self. But it can too often seem
like the denial of individual agency in the name of cultural authenticity.
'It is in the interest of every person to be fully integrated in a cultural
group', Joseph Raz has written. But what is to be fully integrated? If a Muslim
woman rejects sharia law, is she demonstrating her lack of integration? What
about a Jew who doesn’t believe in the legitimacy of the Jewish State? Or
a French Quebecois who speaks only English? Would Galilleo have challenged
the authority of the Church if he had been ‘fully integrated’ into his culture?
Or Thomas Paine have supported the French Revolution? Or Salman Rushdie written
The Satanic Verses? Cultures only change, societies only move forwards
because many people, in Kwame Appiah's words, 'actively resist being fully
integrated into a group'. For them 'integration can sound like regulation,
even restraint'. Far from giving voice to the voiceless, in other words, the
so-called politics of difference appears to undermine individual autonomy,
reduce liberty and enforce conformity.
Part of the problem here is a constant slippage in multiculturalism talk between
the idea of humans as culture-bearing creatures and the idea that humans have
to bear a particular culture. Clearly no human can live outside of
culture. But then no human does. To say that no human can live outside of
culture, however, is not to say they have to live inside a particular
one. To view humans as culture-bearing is to view them as social beings, and
hence as transformative beings. It suggests that humans have the capacity
for change, for progress, and for the creation of universal moral and political
forms through reason and dialogue. To view humans as having to bear specific
cultures is, on the contrary, to deny such a capacity for transformation.
It suggests that every human being is so shaped by a particular culture that
to change or undermine that culture would be to undermine the very dignity
of that individual. It suggests that the biological fact of, say, Jewish or
Bangladeshi ancestry somehow make a human being incapable of living well except
as a participant of Jewish or Bangladeshi culture. This would only make sense
if Jews or Bangladeshis were biologically distinct in other words if cultural
identity was really about racial difference.
The relationship between cultural identity and racial difference becomes even
clearer if we look at the argument that cultures must be protected and preserved.
If a 'culture is decaying', Avishai Margalit and Joseph Raz argue, then 'the
options and opportunities open to its members will shrink, become less attractive,
and their pursuit less likely to be successful.' So society must step in prevent
such decay. Will Kymlicka similarly argues that since cultures are essential
to peoples' lives, so where 'the survival of a culture is not guaranteed,
and, where it is threatened with debasement or decay, we must act to protect
it.' For Charles Taylor, once 'we're concerned with identity, nothing ‘is
more legitimate than one’s aspiration that it is never lost'. Hence a culture
needs to be protected not just in the here and now but through 'indefinite
future generations'.
A century ago intellectuals worried about the degeneration of the race. Today
we fear cultural decay. Is the notion of cultural decay any more coherent
than that of racial degeneration? Cultures certainly change and develop, a
point few multiculturalists would dispute. But what does it mean for a culture
to decay? Or for an identity to be lost? Will Kymlicka draws a distinction
between the ‘existence of a culture’ and ‘its “character” at any given moment’.
The character of culture can change but such changes are only acceptable if
the existence of that culture is not threatened. But how can a culture exist
if that existence is not embodied in its character? By ‘character’ Kymlicka
seems to mean the actuality of a culture: what people do, how they live their
lives, the rules and regulations and institutions that frame their existence.
So, in making the distinction between character and existence, Kymlicka seems
to be suggesting that Jewish, Navajo or French culture is not defined by what
Jewish, Navajo or French people are actually doing. For if Jewish culture
is simply that which Jewish people do or French culture is simply that which
French people do, then cultures could never decay or perish they would always
exist in the activities of people.
So, if a culture is not defined by what its members are doing, what does define
it? The only answer can be that it is defined by what its members should
be doing. The African American writer Richard Wright described one of his
finest creations Bigger Thomas, the hero of Native Son, as a man
'bereft of a culture'. The Negro, Wright argued, 'possessed a rich and complex
culture when he was brought to these alien shores'. But that culture was 'taken
from him'. Bigger Thomas' ancestors had been enslaved. In the process of enslavement
they had been torn from their ancestral homes, and forcibly deprived of the
practices and institutions that they understood as their culture. Hence Bigger
Thomas, and every black American, behaved very differently from his ancestors.
Slavery was an abomination and clearly had a catastrophic impact on black
Americans. But however inhuman the treatment of slaves and however deep its
impact on black American life, why should this amount to a descendant of slaves
being 'bereft of a culture'? This can only be if we believe that Bigger Thomas
should be behaving in certain ways that he is not, the ways that his ancestors
used to behave. In other words, if we believe that what defines what you should
be doing is the fact that your ancestors were doing it. Culture here has become
defined by biological descent. And biological descent is a polite way of saying
'race'. As Walter Benn Michaels puts it, 'In order for a culture to be lost…
it must be separable from one’s actual behaviour, and in order for it to be
separable from one’s actual behaviour it must be anchorable in race.'
The logic of the preservationist arguments is that every culture has a pristine
form, its original state. It decays when it is not longer in that form. There
are echoes here of the concept of 'type' that was at the heart of nineteenth
century racial science. A racial type was a group of human beings linked by
a set of fundamental characteristics that were unique to it. Each type was
separated from others by a sharp discontinuity; there was rarely any doubt
as to which type an individual belonged. Each type remained constant through
time. There were severe limits to how much any member of a type could drift
away from the fundamental ground plan by which the type was constituted. These,
of course, are the very characteristics that constitute a culture in much
of today’s multiculturalism talk. In a recent debate, the political philosopher
Sir Bernard Crick, chair of the Crick report on British citizenship, wrote
that he 'would accept… gladly' the description of multiculturalism as a society
'composed of a small number of organic cultures dancing around each other'.
Multiculturalism, in other words, is driven by a concept of 'cultural type'.
For all the talk about culture as fluid and changing, multiculturalism invariably
leads people to think of human cultures in fixed terms. Indeed, it is difficult
to imagine how multicultural policy could conceive of cultures in any other
way. How could rights be accorded to cultures, or cultures be recognised or
preserved if they did not possess rigid boundaries?
Once membership of cultural types is defined by the possession of certain
characteristics, and rights and privileges granted by virtue of possessing
those characteristics, then it is but a short step to deny membership of a
culture to people who do not possess those characteristics and hence to deny
them certain rights and privileges. The language of diversity all too easily
slips into the idiom of exclusion. In the autumn of 1951 the philosopher Isaiah
Berlin wrote an essay in the Jewish Chronicle putting the case for
Zionism. Until the founding of Israel, he observed, no Jew had been free to
live a purely Jewish life, free from scrutiny and repression. Berlin was particularly
scathing about Gentile intellectuals, such as the poet TS Eliot, those 'souls
filled with terror', who feared that a Jewish presence undermined Christian
civilisation.
When Eliot protested that he was no anti-Semite, Berlin was sharp in his rebuke.
'Am I profoundly mistaken', he wrote to Eliot, 'that you thought it a pity
that large groups of "free thinking Jews" should complicate the
lives of otherwise fairly homogenous Anglo-Saxon Christian communities? And
that it were better otherwise? And that if this could be done by humane means
and persuasion and without coercion, it would be better for such communities
if their Jewish neighbours, or a sufficiently large proportion of them, were
put "beyond the borders of the city?".'
Forty years later Berlin was interviewed by the political philosopher Steven
Lukes. Was it possible, Lukes asked, 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... 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.'
Similarly, black immigration to Western Europe was 'a problem' because 'cultures
which have grown up with no contact with one another have now collided'. These
considerations, Berlin observed, had led him to question 'the 19th century
[idea] that multicultural societies were desirable'.
Berlin has been hailed by many as the pre-eminent philosopher of modern pluralism.
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. Yet, as his interview
with Steven Lukes reveals, Berlin's liberalism all too easily gave way to
a desire to exclude minorities. A cynic might argue that the difference between
Eliot and Berlin was less about whether minorities should be put 'beyond the
borders of the city' than about which minorities should be so excluded.
Nor is Berlin alone in making a multiculturalist case for 'keeping them out'.
Will Kymlicka would undoubtedly be critical of Berlin's views on immigration
and is anything but a xenophobe. Yet he too adopts the language of exclusion.
'It is right and proper', Kymlicka believes, 'that the character of a culture
changes as a result of the choices of its members'. But 'while it is one thing
to learn from the larger world', it is quite another 'to be swamped by it'.
What could this mean? That a culture has the right to keep out members of
another culture? That a culture has the right to prevent its members from
speaking another language, singing non-native songs or reading non-native
books?
Kymlicka's warning about 'swamping' should, as Kwame Appiah has observed,
make us sit up and take notice. It is, after all, the right that has long
exploited fears of cultural swamping. In 1979 Margaret Thatcher told television
viewers that she understood the fears of British citizens being swamped by
immigrants. It was a time of considerable racial tension when the far-right
National Front was gaining support. Thatcher's comments played an important
part in persuading potential National Front voters to switch allegiance to
the Conservatives and in helping Thatcher win her first election. Twelve years
later Charles Moore, the then editor of the rightwing Spectator magazine made
a case for what he called a 'liberal and "racist" immigration policy'.
'You can be British without speaking English or being Christian or being white',
Moore wrote, 'but nevertheless Britain is basically English-speaking and Christian
and white and if one starts to think that it might become Urdu speaking and
Muslim and brown, one gets frightened and angry'. It is both 'natural' and
'right', Moore argued, to feel 'alarmed' at the thought that you might be
'outnumbered' by people from another culture, such as Muslims. 'You ought
to have a sense of your identity', Moore concluded, echoing Kymlicka, Taylor,
Berlin and countless pluralists, 'and part of that sense derives from your
nation and your race'.
'It's not our country any more', has become the common cry of those opposed
to immigration. 'There are now substantially growing areas in many of our
major cities which are in some important respects rather more like foreign
countries than those of the ordinary English domestic scene', argues the Oxford
demographer David Coleman, a leading figure in the British anti-immigration
think tank Migration Watch. 'They're not parts of the country where most English
people will want to go.' This has led to the 'dethronement' of what 'the ordinary
people of Britain… take to be their national identity and their history'.
Kymlicka no doubt abhors the arguments of Thatcher, Moore and Coleman. But
once it becomes a matter of political principle that cultures should not be
swamped by outsiders, then it is difficult to know how one could possibly
resist such anti-immigration arguments. Herder, Alain Finkielkraut observes,
has become the cheerleader for both sides of the political spectrum. ‘No longer
silenced by post-World War II taboos’, Finkielkraut has written, ‘he reigns
supreme inspiring at the same time… unyielding celebrations of ethnic identity
and expressions of respect for foreigners, aggressive outbursts by xenophobes
and generous pronouncements by xenophiles.’ The two sides have ‘conflicting
credos but the same vision of the world’. Both see ‘cultures as all-encompassing
entities, distinctly different, one from the other.’ Multiculturalists, like
racial theorists, fetishise difference. Both seek to ‘confine individuals
to their group of origin’. Both undermine ‘any possibility of natural or cultural
community among peoples’. We believe we have discredited the concept of race
but, Finkielkraut asks, ‘have we really made any progress?’
The irony in all this is that we’ve all become multiculturalists at the very
time the world is becoming less, not more, plural. 'When I was a child', the
Ghanaian-born American philosopher Kwame Appiah recalls, 'we lived in a household
where you could hear at least three mother tongues spoken each day. Ghana,
with a population close to that of New York State, has several dozen languages
in active use and no one language that is spoken at home or even fluently
understood by a majority of the population.' So why is it, he asks, that
in America 'which seems so much less diverse than most other societies are
we so preoccupied with diversity and inclined to conceive of it as cultural?'
The proportion of foreign born Americans is far less than it was at the beginning
of the twentieth century. Intermarriage between immigrant groups continues
to increase. More than 97 per cent of Americans speak English. Even among
Hispanics, the one ethnic group defined by language, the proportion of non-English
speakers is a quarter of what it was at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Then new immigrants did not simply speak their own language, but read their
own newspapers, ate their own food and lived their own lives. In 1923, for
instance, the Polish community alone, David Hollinger points out, published
67 weekly newspapers, 18 monthlies and 19 dailies, the largest of which had
a circulation of more than a hundred thousand.
Today, not just language, but the shopping mall, the sports field, the Hollywood
film and the TV sitcom all serve to bind differences and create a set of experiences
and cultural practices that is more common than at any time in the past. Indeed,
even before today’s immigrants set foot on US soil they are probably more
American than previous generations of Americans. Even immigrants from non-European
countries are, as Dennis wrong suggests, 'probably less unfamiliar with the
major features of the society than were, say, South Italian or Slavic peasants
in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries.'
Much the same is true of Europe. There has been considerable debate in recent
years about the impact of mass migration, and in particular of Muslims, on
social cohesion and national identity. Interestingly, both sides in this debate
about whether Europe is becoming 'too diverse', to quote the title of a much-discussed
recent essay on the relationship between diversity and solidarity , make a
link between the diversity of peoples and the diversity of values. Multiculturalists
believe that the presence in a society of diversity of peoples precludes the
possibility of common values. Nativists want to limit immigration because,
they suggest, such values are possible only within an ethnically homogenous
society. And both sides suffer from a collective memory loss. The claim that
European nations used to be homogenous but have become diverse does not stand
up. At the time of the French Revolution, for instance, less than half the
population of France spoke French and only 12 per cent spoke it 'correctly'.
The historian Eugene Weber has shown the extraordinary modernising effort
that was required in the nineteenth century to unify France and her rural
populations, and the traumatic and lengthy process of cultural, educational,
political and economic 'self-colonisation' that this entailed. These developments
created the modern French nation and allowed for notions of French (and European)
superiority over non-European cultures. But it also reinforced a sense of
how socially and anthropologically alien was the mass of the rural, and indeed
urban, population. In an address to the Medico-Psychological Society of Paris
in 1857, the Christian socialist Phillipe Buchez considered the meaning of
social differentiation within France:
Consider a population like ours, placed in the most favourable circumstances; possessed of a powerful civilisation; amongst the highest ranking nations in science, the arts and industry. Our task now, I maintain, is to find out how it can happen that within a population such as ours, races may form not merely one but several races so miserable, inferior and bastardised that they may be classes below the most inferior savage races, for their inferiority is sometimes beyond cure.
Victorian England, too, viewed the urban working class and the rural poor as the racial Other. A vignette of working class life in the Saturday Review, a well-read liberal magazine of the era, is typical of English middle class attitudes of this era:
The Bethnal Green poor… are a caste apart, a race of whom we know nothing, whose lives are of quite different complexion from ours, persons with whom we have no point of contact. And although there is not yet quite the same separation of classes or castes in the country, yet the great mass of the agricultural poor are divided from the educated and the comfortable, from squires and parsons and tradesmen, by a barrier which custom has forged through long centuries, and which only very exceptional circumstances ever beat down, and then only for an instant. The slaves are separated from the whites by more glaring… marks of distinction; but still distinctions and separations, like those of English classes which always endure, which last from the cradle to the grave, which prevent anything like association or companionship, produce a general effect on the life of the extreme poor, and subject them to isolation, which offer a very fair parallel to the separation of the slaves from the whites.
Of course the descendants of the Bethnal Green poor that the Victorian middle
class viewed as a 'race apart' are now seen as part of indigenous British
(or perhaps English) culture while a new generation of Bethnal Green poor,
who only arrived there after the Second World War, are now regarded as not
just a race apart but a culture apart too. Yet, the social and cultural differences
between a Victorian gentleman and a farmhand or a machinist were probably
greater than those between a native white Briton and a second generation British
Asian or Afro-Caribbean today. Indeed a 60-something white Briton would probably
find a 20-something white Briton more culturally alien than either would an
Asian or an Afro-Caribbean of their own generation.
So, why is it that on both sides of the Atlantic we’ve become obsessed by
cultural differences at the very time that real cultural differences have
less and less meaning in our lives? Much of the answer lies in the narrowing
of the political sphere. 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 over the past two decades. By the last
decade of twentieth century, the broad ideological divides that had characterised
politics in the previous two hundred years had been all but erased. For the
first time since the French Revolution, politics became less about competing
visions of the kinds of society people wanted - most had come to accept with
Margaret Thatcher that 'There is no alternative' to liberal capitalism - than
a debate about how best to run the existing political system.
As the meaning of politics has narrowed, so people have begun to view themselves
and their social affiliations in a different way. Social solidarity has become
increasingly defined not in political terms - as collective action in pursuit
of certain political ideals but in terms of ethnicity or culture. The question
people ask themselves are not so much 'What kind of society do I want to live
in?' as 'Who are we?'. The first question looks forward for answers and defines
them in terms of the commonality of values necessary for establishing the
good life. The second generally looks back and seeks answers and defines
identity in terms of history and heritage. The politics of ideology has
given way to the politics of identity. Stripped of a radical idiom, Russell
Jacoby observes, robbed of a utopian hope, radicals retreated 'to celebrate
diversity'. Multiculturalism, Jacoby concludes 'has become… the ideology of
an era without ideology'.
The irony of multiculturalism is that, as a political process, it undermines
what is valuable about cultural diversity. Diversity is important, not in
and of itself, but because it allows us to expand our horizons, to compare
and contrast different values, beliefs and lifestyles, and make judgements
upon them. In other words, because it allows us to engage in political dialogue
and debate that can help create more universal values and beliefs, and a collective
language of citizenship. The narrowing of the political sphere makes such
a process much more difficult to pursue. As a result diversity has come to
be seen as a good in itself. Multiculturalism is not a response to a diverse
society. Rather, the pursuit of multicultural policies has led us to imagine
that we are far more diverse than we are.