Belief
in pluralism and the multicultural society is so much woven into the fabric of
our lives that we rarely stand back to question some of its assumptions. As the
American academic, and former critic of pluralism, Nathan Glazer puts it in the
title of a recent book, We are All Multiculturalists Now.
Proponents
of multiculturalism usually put forward two kinds of arguments in its favour.
First, they claim that multiculturalism is the only means of ensuring a
tolerant and democratic polity in a world in which there are deep-seated
conflicts between cultures embodying different values. This argument is often
linked to the claim that the attempt to establish universal norms inevitably
leads to racism and tyranny. Second, they suggest that human beings have a
basic, almost biological, need for cultural attachments. This need can only be
satisfied, they argue, by publicly validating and protecting different
cultures. Both arguments are, I believe, deeply flawed.
This
argument for pluralism is, as many have pointed out, logically flawed. If it is
true that 'any standpoint we adopt is that of a particular form of life and the
historic practices that constitute it', then this must apply to pluralism too.
A pluralist, in other words, can never claim that plural society is better,
since, according his own argument, 'There is no impartial or universal
viewpoint from which the claims of all particular cultures can be rationally
assessed'. Once you dispense with the idea of universal norms, then no argument
can possess anything more than, at best, local validity.
Many
multiculturalists argue not simply that cultural values are incommensurate, but
that also that different cultures should be treated equal respect. The American
scholar Iris Young, for instance, writes that 'groups cannot be socially equal
unless their specific, experience, culture and social contributions are
publicly affirmed and recognised.'
The
demand for equal recognition is, however, at odds with the claim that cultures
are incommensurate. To treat different cultures with equal respect (indeed to
treat them with any kind of respect at all) we have to be able to compare one
with the other. If values are incommensurate, such comparisons are simply not
possible. The principle of difference cannot provide any standards that 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.
Equality arises from fact that humans
are political creatures and possess a capacity for culture. But the fact that
all humans possess a capacity for culture does not mean that all cultures are
equal. 'We know one of the realest experiences in cultural life', the art
critic Robert Hughes has observed, 'is that of inequalities between books and
musical performances and paintings and other works of art'. Much the same could
be said about all cultural and political forms. Some ideas, some technologies,
some political systems are better than others. And some societies and some
cultures are better than others: more just, more free, more enlightened, and more
conducive to human progress. Indeed the very idea of equality is historically
specific: the product of the Enlightenment and the political and intellectual
revolutions that it unleashe
Multiculturalists
have turned their back on universalist conceptions not because such conceptions
are racist but because they have given up on the possibility of economic and
social change. We live in an age in which there is considerable disillusionment
with politics as an agency of change, and in which possibilities of social
transformation seem to have receded. What is important about human beings, many
have come to believe, is not their political capacity but their cultural
attachments. Such pessimism has led to multiculturalists to conflate the idea
of humans as culture-bearing creatures with the idea that humans have to bear a
particular culture.
Clearly
no human can live outside of culture. But to say this 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, Bangladeshi ancestry somehow make a human being
incapable of living well except as a participant of Bangladeshi culture. The
idea of culture once connoted all that freed humans from the blind weight of
tradition, has now, in the hands of multiculturalists, become identified with
that very burden.
Multiculturalism
is an authoritarian, anti-human outlook. True political progress requires not
recognition but action, not respect but questioning, not the invocation of the
Thought Police but the forging of common bonds and collective struggles.
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