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I often find that I get a confused response when I tell people that I’m opposed to multiculturalism. There’s a common view that the only people who don’t accept multiculturalism are the racist BNP and the right-wing of the Conservatives. So when someone so stereotypically left-wing as myself argues that multiculturalism is a bad thing, a certain degree of incomprehension is rather inevitable. Part of the problem is that there’s a profound ambiguity about the meaning of the term. In every day conversation, the term multiculturalism is often taken to refer to the simple fact of the presence of multiple cultures within one nation. This cultural diversity is so self-evidently enriching that it seems fair to assume that only xenophobia and racism would lead one to oppose it. However in political life the term multiculturalism often has a very different meaning, frequently occluded by people failing to distinguish between the two uses of the term. In this sense multiculturalism refers to a set of political arguments concerning the role different cultures should be granted in society. Multiculturalists argue that that different cultures deserve public recognition. There are many cases where the laws of a country conflict with beliefs which are deemed to be central to a culture. For instance in the United Kingdom Sikhs are exempt from laws mandating that people wear protective headgear while riding motorbikes, or while working on construct sites. Likewise, Jews and Muslims may slaughter animals in abattoirs by bleeding them to death while conscious rather than stunning them prior to killing them, which is otherwise mandated by law. These exemptions, argue multiculturalists, are necessary to preserve minority cultures. Where a law conflicts with a ‘traditional’ practice, fairness is seen to dictate that an exemption be allowed from the law.
In these isolated cases multiculturalism can seem fair and perhaps even insignificant. After all, as Dr Rowan Williams so famously asked recently, why should the religious be forced to choose between loyalty to their church and loyalty to the law? The problem is that as soon as you pose the question in these terms you implicitly abandon the ideal that people should be equal before the law. Why should anyone be forced to make a choice between their beliefs and the law? Leaving aside the complex issue of anarchism, we can see that the legitimacy of the state rapidly breaks down if we pursue this line of argument. Thus it’s necessary for multiculturalism to draw a hard distinction between what an individual may happen to believe and what minority cultures demands of people or what religious traditions demand of their adherents. In essence multiculturalism is arguing for the privileged status of religious tradition and minority culture: religious beliefs are intrinsically more worthy of respect than non-religious beliefs. In practice this entails that those groups who are sufficiently politically organized and able to lobby get their special treatment. The United States has seen multiple failures of certain Native American groups and Rastafarians to gain exemption from drug laws for their use of peyote and cannabis. The point is not that these uses of drugs are necessarily illegitimate and deserving of criminalization but rather that if there’s no good grounds to criminalize a Rastafarian for smoking cannabis, there’s no good grounds to criminalize cannabis at all. Yet multiculturalism rejects this notion of equal treatment before the law and takes an entirely opposed view. Its response to the failure of Rastafarians to gain legal exemption is not to take a libertarian stance against the criminalization of cannabis in itself but rather to council Rastafarians to organize politically as a group so they might force government to “recognize” their culture and thus gain their desired legal exemption. Multiculturalism encourages the politicization of cultural identities. It’s in the interests of the self-appointed “community leaders” to work to construct a sense of a distinct and self-contained community, sometimes by whipping up conflict with other such groups, so as to be able to lobby government effectively for special treatment. This suppresses dissent within groups, as we can see from the 60%+ of Muslims who polling shows have no interest in Sharia law, who are increasingly ignored by the state as self-appointed insider lobbying groups tell government what Muslims want. Minorities are increasingly dealt with solely as groups, rather than as individuals, while largely unelected and unaccountable individuals are granted the power to articulate and shape the agenda of these groups on a national level. The well meaning liberals who support multiculturalism in the name of “tolerance” end up progressively abandoning the individuals within these groups to the authority of religious and cultural leaders. We ought to remember that liberalism once fiercely fought for the freedom of the individual against the oppressiveness of traditional organized religion and yet now, in many quarters, it’s reduced to fuzzy-minded multiculturalist dogma and the flabby cultural relativism it so often entails.
Multiculturalism leads to social fragmentation. Rather than being united as citizens in a political community, we are isolated and exhaustively defined by our ethnic, religious and cultural groupings. Any sense of common cause and social solidarity is progressively eroded. To use the analogy of the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, multiculturalism treats a nation like a hotel: as long as the guests in each room abide by some basic ‘house rules’, there’s no need for any further integration. Thankfully this wrong-headed notion is starting to fall out of favor in government but it has, unfortunately, been replaced by something worse. For all it’s flaws, multiculturalism at least sought to cultivate a respect for cultural difference, something that’s sorely missing from Gordon Brown’s sudden discovery of ‘Britishness’ and consequent demands that ‘they’ must integrate themselves to ‘our’ way of life. We shouldn’t demand that newcomers to this country substitute ‘our’ values for their own but rather that through integration they develop their own culturally-specific interpretations of British values and citizenship. This would enrich us all.
At the start of the 2005 electoral campaign, the Electoral Commission and Hansard commissioned MORI to do a poll on political apathy. It found that 77% of respondents were interested in “national issues”. However only 27% feel that they “actually have a say in how the country is run”. On a similar note, a poll on the Guardian student website found that 77% of first-year university students are not interested in taking part in political protests, while 67% of freshers believe that “student protest isn’t effective and doesn’t make any difference”. Now I really wish they’d asked (1) how interested students would be in protest action (as opposed to protest as an abstract category) that could be effective and could make a difference (2) whether their interest could be maintained by the kind of strategic and focused single-issue campaigning that can be effective and make a difference. If not there’s a perhaps insurmountable double-bind here.
An Inquiry into the Moral Psychology of Modern Life
Background:
The process of individualization, as described by theorists such as Giddens and Beck, foregrounds the massive expansion of choices available to the individual. The decline of traditional moral orders and the unprecedented growth of consumer choice free the individual from the ascribed and inherited determination of his or her social characteristics while placing an ever-growing stress on the necessity of constructing their own social identity. Identity is no longer a given and the individual is charged with constructing their own identity as an open-ended project. However this new found freedom, with all the possibility to experimentation it affords the individual qua consumer, carries with it the unprecedented task of coping with the consequences.
Modern liberal democracies grant individuals unparalleled liberty to think and act of their own volition. However the processes that bring about this freedom also profoundly reshape prevalent cultural understandings concerning the philosophical significance of the choices people make with these freedoms. Individual autonomy within liberal societies is defended on the grounds of the individual’s right to act as they choose providing their actions do not cause harm to others. Yet this defence subjectivizes the reasons for action: with the freedom it brings comes a loss of a sense of our choices as grounded in anything outside our own volitions. Likewise the freedom of the individual to hold their own beliefs is defended on the grounds of individual conscience. Again, we’re free to believe what we want but those beliefs are treated as a matter of individual preference. Liberal individualism understands community as an arena in which individuals pursue their own self-chosen conception of the good life, while political institutions exist to provide the social order which renders such self-determined activity possible. For all the freedom liberal individualism brings, it progressively erodes the moral significance of the choices we make when we utilise this freedom. The defence of the individual’s right to their own self-chosen conception of the good life has, at its flip-side, the understanding that this choice is ultimately private and arbitrary. Questions of substantive morality are increasingly removed from public life to be replaced by procedural questions of how we might live together in ways that respect the autonomous subjectivity of others.
This proceduralisation extends beyond the public sphere. The process Porpora describes as the “proceduralisation of ethics” increasingly surrenders questions of the kind of person one should be to the aesthetic sphere. Much as in the public sphere, morality is hollowed out to become a series of procedural rules, so to in the private sphere, as morality is increasingly seen to be exhausted by deontology. Procedural ethics is about means, the ends are left to the free, though entirely subjective, choice of the individual. Consequently, substantive forms of moral reasoning become increasingly difficult to sustain; moral reasoning is fundamentally dialogical and deeply difficult when any appeal to non-subjectivist criteria is met by the refrain “that’s just your opinion”, a cultural tendency evaluated by Charles Taylor in his Ethics of Authenticity. Likewise while placing ever greater stress on the individual to work at sustaining the coherence of their identity, processes of individualization within liberal societies fatally undermine the possibility of shared moral horizons.
The advent of the postmodern (or liquid modern) culture described by theorists such as Zygmunt Bauman, celebrates fragmentation and discontinuities. Likewise the economic changes, described most lucidly in the later work of Richard Sennett, renders any notion of a “job for life” self-evidently anachronistic. The free self-narrativizing individual is thrown into a working life increasingly defined by its discontinuities, as individuals are forced to adapt to the ‘flexible’ forms of industrial and commercial organisation that characterise what Sennet calls “the new capitalism”. The culture of consumer capitalism, with its inculcations towards ever increasing personal consumption, leaves it ever more difficult to sustain qualitative distinctions between our ends. It is such distinctions, argue Porpora and Taylor, that define the “moral space” within which we orientate ourselves. It is through our movements in this space that the possibility of investing our lives with meaning and purpose is actualised. Yet the same processes that turn identity from a ‘given’ into a ‘task’, leaving the individual free to choose his own ends, progressively collapse the moral space within which that the meaning of that identity might be grounded and the significance of those choices ensured. Likewise the cultural and institutional changes described work to collapse the social space which provides the individual with the biographical markers (e.g. the old bureaucracies, unified career paths, mass political parties) they might use to ensure continuity and stability of identity over time.
Proposed Methodology:
The starting point for understanding moral experience has to be the actual form that experience takes. Therefore I want to supplement my theoretical inquiry with a series of in-depth semi-structured interviews with young people. For young people the changes I describe in the background, as well as the existential challenges they pose, represent the horizon of possible experience. I want to explore the presence of moral purpose in their lives, as well as the form it takes. Likewise, where it is absent, I want to explore the psychological, emotional and behavioural consequences of this absence. I’m interested in the different strategies young people adopt to invest their lives with sense and meaning, as well as the relationship these strategies have to the changing contexts within which they attempt to do this. I also want to inquire as to what sense they make of questions about the kind of person they should be. What moral and/or aesthetic concerns, if any, govern the way they approach these questions? Though there are a variety of theoretical concepts I intend to explore, I also wish to remain open to themes that emerge through the interviews.
There are two distinct sampling strategies I shall adopt. To achieve as broad a cross-section of young people as possible (in terms of socio-economic class, ethnicity, education etc) will ensure a wide insight into the moral experience of young people. However I’m also interested in the way in which youth counter-cultures can serve to invest their participant’s lives with meaning and purpose. Examples of sub-cultures I’m interested include the green movement, far-left politics, neo-paganism and various sub-cultures centred around live music. In these cases snowballing sampling will be appropriate, given that people I gain access to will be able to introduce me to other involves in the subculture who may be willing to be interviewed. In the case of interviewees actively participating in subcultures, I shall also adopt a different interviewing approach. In these cases I’ll be interested to inquire into the interviewee’s life-history and biography, particularly in terms of their initial acquaintance with and growing involvement in their respective subcultures.
Relevant Literature:
Archer, M. (2000), Being Human (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Archer, M. (2007), Making Our Way through the World (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press)
Bauman, Z. (1997), Postmodernity and its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity
Press)
Bauman, Z. (2001), The Individualized Society (Cambridge: Polity Press)
Bauman, Z. (2007), Consuming Life (Cambridge: Polity Press)
Baumeister, R. (1991), Meanings of Life (New York: Guilford Press)
Beck, U. (2000), The Brave New World of Work (Cambridge: Polity Press)
Bellah, R. (1970), Beyond Belief (London: Harper & Row)
Bellah, R. (1985), Habits of the Heart (London: University of California Press)
Boltanski, L. (2005), The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso)
Castells, M. (1997), The Power of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell)
Gergen, K. (1991), The Saturated Self (New York: Basic Books)
Giddens, A. (1990), The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press)
Giddens, A. (1991), Modernity and Self-Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press)
Giddens, A. (1992), The Transformation of Intimacy (Cambridge: Polity Press)
Harvey, D. (1990), The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell)
Hochschild, A. (1983), The Managed Heart (London: University of California
Press)
Hochschild, A. (2003), The commercialisation of intimate life (Berkeley: University
of California Press)
Kennedy, A. (1974), The Protean Self (London: Macmillan)
Lasch, C. (1985), The Minimal Self (London: Pan)
Lasch, C. (1991), The Culture of Narcissism (London: W.W. Norton)
Macintyre, A. (1984), After Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press)
Macintyre, A. (1988), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London: Duckworth)
Porpora, D. (2001), Landscapes of the Soul (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Sayer, A. (2005), The Moral Significance of Class (New York: Cambridge University
Press)
Sennett, R. (1998), The Corrosion of Character (New York: W. W. Norton)
Sennett, R. (2006), The Culture of the New Capitalism (Yale University Press)
Slater, D. (1997), Consumer Culture and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press)
Taylor, C. (1985), Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press)
Taylor, C. (1985), Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press)
Taylor, C. (1989), Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press)
Taylor, C. (1991), The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press)
Taylor, C. (2007), A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press)
Last week I filled in a form on the website of my student union which asked me to ’self-define’. I’ve been thinking quite a lot about this notion since then. I think many of the people I know through political campaigning would argue quite strongly that we have an ethical obligation to respect people’s self-definitions. In many case this seems utterly plausible: minority groups should be allowed to define their own identity rather than having it ascribed to them by an external power structure. Even if many of the advocates of such a view would not be aware of them, or at least articulate them in the terminology I’m using, I’d argue that there’s a deeply postmodern set of assumptions underlying this. There is an ethical concern to attend to human difference, to not subsume people’s lived experience of their identity under a unitary system of categorisation that purports to be ‘objective’. It also assumes an epistemological claim, that the purported objectivity of schemes of social categorisation are not in fact objective but are merely a screen for the exercise of power of those doing the categorising. It’s particularly striking in the context of racial difference how overt this imposition of social power seems when examined from the ‘outside’. Indeed we have good grounds to say a priori that categorisation is an irreducibly social process given that these categories, with the varying social significances assigned to them, do not emerge fully formed from nature.
Yet when we pursue this line of thought, what happens to the notion of objectivity? Imagine a man who self-defined as heterosexual and yet exclusively has sex with other men over a period of decades. Most would instinctively reject his self-definition; particularly outside the context of an abstract discussion of these issues. Yet were the reverse case postulated, the rejection seems obvious and less clear cut. For me this illustrates the ineradicable ethical core of all debates on these issues. We can’t strip the philosophical/conceptual issue from its ethical/political motivations, concerns and assumptions. There is no ethically significant issue of power if we’re talking about rejecting the self-definition of majority groups because, simply speaking, they already have it.
However just because the philosophical issue can’t be stripped from the ethical issue doesn’t mean the former can be reduced to the latter. I can presume we’re not ready to abandon the concept of objectivity and so collapse rational discourse into a war of all against all as each participant attempts to coerce the others beyond the smoke screen of ‘objectivity’: thus leaving the postmodern theorist struggling to explain how they and they alone are able to rise above this fray and so impartially diagnose what’s going on and, likewise, why we should accept their diagnosis when it must surely just be one more play for power amongst others. So the question is how do we reserve the concern for otherness, the respect for difference and the desire to protect people’s lived experience while rejecting the intellectual detritus that this position brings with it?
Can we recognise difference without placing an a priori value on it? The attraction of multiculturalism to self-consciously ‘progressive’ types comes, I suspect, from its (correct) accusation that liberal universalism subsumed cultural difference under a unitary category of citizenship. The poverty of multiculturalism comes from it’s subsequent inference that cultural difference has value in-and-of-itself. Yet there are no clearly bounded, self-contained and homogenous cultures. It’s a mistake to read back a common culture from seeming participation in a shared set of practices. The political act of attempting to ‘recognise’ culture, the legislative necessity of working with classifications, reifies live social forms and (should but amongst multiculturalists doesn’t) raise again all the ethical concerns that kicked off the multiculturalist endeavour. Difference can only be valued and cultivated in an abstract setting. In political life the valorisation of difference inevitably turns into the institutionalisation of a small range of particular differences in a way vapidly unrepresentative of the make up of the ‘valued’ group. Can we however recognise the ineradicability of human difference, the ever-presence of otherness, with all the ethical issues this brings with it, while also still recognising that social solidarity requires that we stress commonality over difference? The issue is the political process by which that sense of commonality is reached: is it fair, just and respectful of otherness? What we can’t do, unless we want to give up on the idea of social solidarity all together, is to give difference an ethical trump card such that must always be respected.
I just looked on the large facebook event for the next anti-war protest and was rather shocked to see a thread about David Ike which was almost all complementary. For the first time it really hit home what those people who talk about us entering the “new dark ages” are scared of. Does picking a side of reason/unreason take precedence over other more overtly political issues? My instinct is that I don’t want to be anywhere near these fucking idiots.
Or to put what I said earlier in a slightly more obvious form: meaningful moral discourse requires that it be about something. If it takes place within a political culture that conceives of moral values as private and arbitrary then moral discourse becomes no more meaningful than an argument about whether Guinness or Murphey’s is a better stout. Though clearly Guinness is.
I guess the empirical question I’m interested in is the extent to which moral values actually are understood to be private and arbitrary in Britain. I broadly accept Michael Sandel’s case about procedural liberalism being the dominant public philosophy in American political life. Yet in Britain, as we can see particularly with the moralistic communitarianism of New Labour, the situation is more complicated. I guess the moral subjectivism of the political culture remains an open question for now (largely because unlike America that political culture is far more pluralist in its intellectual and social influences) but I think there’s a decent case to be made that the sort of subjectivism prominent particularly amongst young people today (a function of what Taylor calls the ethics of authenticity) has a similar effect on the possibility of meaningful moral discourse. After all if we are in a situation where “that’s just your point of view” is seen by many to be a perfectly reasonable response within a moral argument – as opposed to the conversation-killing vacuous truism that it is – then can we really say we live in an age of healthy moral discourse?
To remain philosophically consistent liberalism must treat all the moral claims of individuals as if they were of the same ultimately arbitrary and irreducibly private status. Leaving aside the complex empirical question of the extent to which this form of procedural liberalism exists within modern liberal democracies, is this plausible as an explanation of why it’s increasingly difficult to sustain meaningful forms of moral discourse within liberal society? Meaningful discourse is dialogical and reciprocal. In a political culture which subsumes all moral claims under a unitary category of arbitrary private moral preference, these necessary conditions become extremely difficult to mantain simply because there’s a prevailing meta-ethic (which due to the fundamental meta-ethical incoherence of liberal thought doesn’t understand itself as such) which excludes the understanding necessary to engage with morality dialogically. Or to use Porpora’s terminology, the meta-ethics of liberalism collapses the critical space within which such engagement would take place.
In an interview with BBC correspondent Christopher Landau, Dr Williams said Muslims should not have to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty”.
Leaving aside some of the wider issues surrounding Williams’ comments on Sharia law, this in itself is a fascinating point which risks being obscured by a hysterical debate about what precisely he said and whether he meant it. The collective element of religious worship is intrinsically subversive. A group of people bound by shared conceptions of a higher good, indeed the highest good, necessarily relativises the importance of those lower goods around which liberal society attempts to unify itself. Indeed the influence of a procedural conception of liberalism, admittedly much greater in the USA but still significant here, is such that there’s a pervasive strand of public thought that sees the job of the state as being to regulate between individuals with their own private conceptions of the good i.e. there are no public goods.
Obviously this achieves its most coherent formulation in the work of political philosophers but, as many have argued, it also represents the dominant understanding within American political discourse (see for instance Michael Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent). From within this understanding, there is no problem with Williams’s claim: “loyalty to the state” should be logically independent of “loyalty to culture”. Yet even this procedural conception of liberalism is forced to argue for what are, practically speaking, goods – if it did not make a case for at least some goods, how could it even defend its own right to exist? The problem is that the goods it argues for are thin and procedural goods (one might say meta-goods) which are not understood as substantive values. Rather the advocate of such a liberalism inevitably vacillates between asserting these meta-goods as pragmatic procedures to regulate a pluralist society (when unchallenged) and asserting them as substantive values (when presented with a moral challenge).
Yet the internal unacceptability of regarding these goods as goods hugely impoverishes the moral resources available to the liberal in argument. She is left counter-posing some poorly articulated conception of what is right for the political community against what is good for a specific cultural community that is challenging the hegemony of what liberalism sees to be right. Religion poses a very specific challenge to liberal society and without an adequate conceptualisation of the status of the basic goods of such a society this challenge cannot be met. It’s in this situation that you can have otherwise well-meaning and perfectly intelligent men like Dr Williams’s coming out with tragically foolish questions like the one quoted at the start of this post. As much as I hate to approving quote the leader of the Lib Dems:
We have to accept that whatever your views, whatever your faith, whatever the great cultural diversity – which I celebrate in this country we have – there’s got to be a certain set of values that we all subscribe to, otherwise the whole thing falls apart.
He’s actually completely spot on. This is the fact that Williams seems to have failed to grasp and it’s indicative of liberalism more generally (with the leader of the Lib Dems articulating what could be considered to be a classic communitarian statement). The way liberalism fails to adequately conceptualise a notion of the ‘public good’, leaving an impoverished category of what’s ‘right’ in public affairs, can prove to be rather socially dangerous. It’s also the prime theoretical mistake underlying so much of the liberal wing of multiculturalism. Diversity is good. Freedom of speech is good. Freedom of religion is good. All these things are goods. Society needs to be unified around them as goods. Not simply procedural norms that regulate the interactions of asocial individuals (or indeed homogeneous and self-contained cultural groups as the multiculturalists would content). Certainly the interpretations of these values should not be fixed. We need Islamic interpretations of liberal values, rather than exemptions to preserve an utterly fallacious cultural homogeneity. The question of what the fundamental goods of a political society mean should be open. The question of what the fundamental goods of a political society are should not.
