Multiculturalism has become a catchword in societies which seek ways to ease tensions which are caused by racism and xenophobia. Very little thought, however, has been given to problems connected with the concept. Often the arguments used in multiculturalist discourse come disturbingly close to racist ideas. Kenan Malik has argued that multiculturalism has become a language through which ideas of race and racial difference are being recycled. Here he analyses problems connected with pluralism and multiculturalism. He based the article on a recent lecture.
There are few beliefs more entrenched in the modern liberal imagination than
that of the virtues of pluralism and a multicultural society. Belief in
multiculturalism is so much woven into the fabric of our lives that we rarely
stand back to question some of its assumptions. Pluralism and multiculturalism
are seen as self-evidently good. The celebration of difference, the promotion
of a pluralist society, tolerance for a variety of cultural identities —
these are seen as the hallmarks of a decent, liberal, democratic, non-racist
society.
I want to question that assumption and to challenge the idea that multiculturalism
is self-evidently good. I want to show that the notion of pluralism is
a deeply ambiguous one. I want to show too that much of our discussion
about multiculturalism is result of the failure of equality. Moreover I want
show that much of contemporary multicultural and antiracist theory is rooted
in the same philosophies that gave rise to racial theory in the first place.
Even a superficial look at the idea of cultural difference reveals how ambiguous
a notion it is. Consider the following quote: "Every society, every
nation is unique. It has its own past, its own story, its own memories, its
own ways, its own languages and ways of speaking, its own culture."
It could have been a quote from any number of multicultural texts. In fact it
comes from the pen of Enoch Powell, one of the most notoriously racist postwar
British politicians.
The late Isaiah Berlin is widely regarded as one of foremost philosophers of
modern liberalism and pluralism. His key idea was that of 'value pluralism'. Different
peoples and cultures, Berlin believed, had different values, beliefs and truths,
each of which may be regarded as valid as any other. "Life may be seen
through many windows", he wrote, "none of them necessarily clear or
opaque, less or more distorting than any of the others."
Shortly before he died, he was interviewed for Prospect magazine by the
political philosopher Steven Lukes. Lukes asked whether it was ever possible
for peoples of different cultures — such as Arabs and Jews — to live
together. "When you have two peoples of different origins and cultures",
Berlin replied, "it is difficult for them to live together in peace." He
added that "it is quite natural that each side should think that they cannot
lead free lives in an integrated society if the others are there in quantity."
Such a view, claimed Berlin, "is not sheer bigotry". It is a view,
however, not too different from that of many politicians who most would accept
are bigots.
"It is because we respect ourselves and others", Pierre Pascal, a
leading rightwing thinker in France contends, "that we refuse to see our
country transformed into a multiracial society in which each group loses their
specificity." For two decades now, the French far right has astutely exploited
the right to maintain cultural differences by asserting the right of the French
to maintain their cultural identity. Muslims, they maintain, belong to a different
culture and tradition, and hence do not belong in France. "I love North
Africans', Jean-Marie Le Pen has declared, "but their place is in the Maghreb."
Berlin abhorred the claims of the far right. Yet it is difficult to deny that
the logic of his claim that two peoples of different origins cannot live together
in peace, and that it is not bigotry to believe this, leads inexorably to the
arguments of Powell, Pascal and Le Pen.
Indeed, Berlin himself, in his Prospect interview, observed that "the
ferment of the French Canadians, the Flemings in Belgium, Basques in Spain,
Corsicans, Bretons, Tamils, Irishmen, Jews and Arabs, Georgians, Armenians,
Indians and Pakistanis" had made him question the "nineteenth century
[idea] that multicultural societies were desirable". Moreover, he questioned
whether black immigrants to the Western nations were "ready for assimilation".
Black immigration was "a problem" he said, because "Cultures
which have grown up with no contact with one another have now collided."
These views are not an unfortunate aberration, the illiberal thoughts of a man with otherwise impeccably liberal credentials. They are the inevitable consequence of Berlin's pluralist outlook. The idea that human beings divide into incommensurate cultural groups has always been at the heart, not of the antiracist, but of the racist agenda. Nineteenth century racial thinkers despised what they regarded as the abstract universalism of Enlightenment philosophers which they believed denied, and even undermined, the concrete reality of human differences. Dismissing claims of a universal humanity, they advocated instead the notion that human groups are in profound ways distinct and should be treated accordingly.
These notions became an important part of the nineteenth century Romantic movement.
Romantics reacted the universalist ideas of the Enlightenment and championed
instead particularist accounts of human difference. They considered every people
to be unique, and that such uniqueness was expressed through its volksgeist,
the unchanging spirit of a people refined through history. The idea of volksgeist
became transformed through the nineteenth century into the concept of racial
make-up, an unchanging substance, the foundation of all physical appearance
and mental potential and the basis for division and difference within humankind.
Romantic notions of cultural uniqueness, and the idea of racial difference,
became central to Western thought as a result of a fundamental contradiction
of post-Enlightenment societies: the contradiction between a deep-seated
belief in, and respect for, equality and the reality of societies that
remained stubbornly unequal. Racial theory attempted to explain this contradiction
by suggesting that inequality itself was naturally given. Society was
unequal because the destiny of every social group was in some way linked to
intrinsic qualities that each possessed. For racial theorists, as for Romantics,
the nature of a society was explained by the differences it embodied. Today's
pluralists are intensely hostile to racial ideology. Yet, like nineteenth century
racial theorists, contemporary pluralists are animated by an abhorrence of Enlightenment
universalism and by a Romantic vision of human differences. It is no coincidence
that Isaiah Berlin's most profound intellectual debt lay with German Romantics
such as Herder and Hamman. It is the mutual origins of racism and pluralism
in Romanticism that underlies the ambiguities of the pluralist outlook.
In the nineteenth century, group differences were seen largely as biological
in nature — as in the ideology of scientific racism. Today, those differences
are more often than not seen as cultural. The horrors of Nazism and the
Holocaust helped discredit racial science and biological theories of human differences.
But if, in the postwar world, racial science was buried, racial thinking was
not. The biological arguments for racial superiority were thrown into disrepute
and overt expressions of racism were discredited. All the assumptions of racial
thinking, however, were maintained intact — in particular the belief that
humanity can be divided into discrete groups; that each group should be considered
in its own terms; that each is in some way incommensurate with the others; and
that the important relationships in society arise not out of commonalties but
out of the differences between groups. The form of racial thinking, however,
changed. It was cast not in biological terms but in the language of cultural
pluralism.
The concept of a 'plural society' first emerged, in fact, prior to the War
through anthropological analyses of colonial societies in the first decades
of this century. In a study of Indonesia and Burma, the anthropologist
JS Furnivall 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, Furnivall wrote, "mix but do not combine".
Each group "holds by its own religion, its own culture and language, its
ideas and ways". The result was a "plural society, with different
sections of the society living side by side but separately within the same political
unit."
Pluralism quickly moved from being a description of colonial society to an explanation
for it. Drawing on Romantic ideas of group differences, anthropologists rationalised
the inequalities of colonial society as products of the different cultural outlooks
and lifestyles of the various groups that constituted that society. Through
this process inequality became reframed as difference. Like racial theory, plural
theory provided an apology for social inequalities, portraying them as the inevitable
result, not of natural variations as in racial theory, but of cultural differences.
In the postwar world, pluralism provided a vocabulary with which to articulate
social differences without having to refer to the discredited discourse of race.
It provided both a sense of continuity with prewar racial discourse and a means
of asserting the aversion to racism that exemplified the postwar years.
It was the impact of mass immigration into Western societies that helped shape
the nature of postwar pluralism. Eleven million workers came to Europe in the
fifties and sixties, encouraged by an economic boom. In the USA a different
kind of mass migration took place — the huge movement of African Americans
to the Northern cities in the fifties and sixties. In both cases the newcomers
found themselves on the margins of society, subject to racism and discrimination,
and unable to gain access to levers of power. The ideology of pluralism developed
as an accommodation to the persistence of inequalities despite the rhetoric
of integration, assimilation and equality. As immigrant and black communities
remained ghettoised, excluded from mainstream society, subject to discrimination
and clinging to old habits and lifestyles as a familiar anchor in a hostile
world, so such differences became rationalised not as the negative product of
racism or discrimination but as the positive result of a plural society.
In the America of the sixties, for instance, most commentators, both black and
white, hoped and expected that African-American migrants to the North would
eventually integrate into US society, as fully as had European immigrants. The
title of a 1966 article by Irving Kristol in the New York Times
captured that hope - 'The Negro Today is like the Immigrant Yesterday'.
Three decades later it has become obvious how misplaced were such claims.
Virtually every social statistic — from housing segregation to rates of
intermarriage, from infant mortality rates to language use — shows that
African Americans live very different lives to the rest of America. The experience
even of Hispanic Americans is far closer to that of American whites than
it is to that of African Americans.
As the possibilities of equality seemed more and more constrained, so there
was an increasing tendency to celebrate 'difference'. The black American
critic bell hooks observes that "civil rights reform reinforced the idea
that black liberation should be defined by the degree to which black people
gained equal access to material opportunities and privileges to whites —
jobs, housing, schooling etc." This strategy could never bring about liberation,
argues hooks, because such "ideas of 'freedom' were informed by efforts
to imitate the behaviour, lifestyles and most importantly the values and consciousness
of white colonisers." The failure of equality has led radical critics like
hooks to declare that equality itself is problematic because African Americans
are 'different' from whites.
Politicians and policy-makers have responded to such arguments by reinventing
America as a 'plural' or 'multicultural' nation. Pluralism is premised on the
idea that America is a nation composed of many different cultural groups and
peoples. But in reality it is the product of the continued exclusion of one
group: African Americans. The promotion of pluralism is a tacit admission
that the barriers that separate blacks and whites cannot be breached and that
equality has been abandoned as a social policy goal. "Multiculturalism",
Nathan Glazer has written, "is the price America is paying for the inability
or unwillingness to incorporate into its society African Americans, in the same
way and to the same degree it has incorporated so many other groups." The
real price, however, is being paid by African Americans themselves. For in truth
America is not plural or multicultural; it is simply unequal. And the promotion
of pluralism is an acknowledgement of the inevitability of that inequality.
Indeed, in his own way, Glazer himself recognises this. "We must pass through
a period in which
we recognise difference, we celebrate difference", he writes, because of
"our failure to integrate blacks."
The 'apartness' of black and immigrant communities in Western Europe is probably
not so great as that of African Americas in the USA. Nevertheless, here too
pluralism has become a means to avoid debate about the failure of equality.
Many young people in Marseilles or East London call themselves Muslim, for instance, less
because of religious faith or cultural habits, than because in the face of a
hostile, anti-Muslim society, calling oneself Muslim is a way of defending the
dignity of one's community. Young Muslims are often not religious; they have
mores and outlooks and habits little different from that of their white peers.
But racism imposes difference upon them and forces them to adopt difference
themselves. Their Islam is not the free celebration of an identity, but an attempt
to negotiate a difficult relationship with a hostile society as best they can.
In celebrating such cultural differences, we are danger of celebrating the differences
imposed by a racist society, not identities freely chosen by those communities.
I am not, of course, objecting to pluralism in the sense of a society
in which there exists the right to free and open political, cultural and religious
expression. Rather, what I fear is the one-sided embrace of 'difference' and
denigration of universalistic concepts. The irony is that the blind pursuit
of pluralism undermines our capacity to defend those very rights of free expression.
Such rights can only be defended through a defence of equality. In an equal
society, our universal capacity to act as political subjects can take a myriad
of forms, and hence can become the basis of true difference. Indeed, only in
an equal society, can difference have any meaning, because it is only here that
difference can be freely chosen. In an unequal society, however, such as the
ones in which we live, the pursuit of difference all too often means the entrenching
of inequalities. Inequalities simply become reframed through the discourse of
difference. In such circumstances, there is little possibility of true freedom
to express one's political, cultural or religious identities.
A truly plural society would be one in which citizens have full freedom to pursue
their different values or practices in private, while in the public sphere all
citizens would be treated as political equals whatever their private beliefs.
Today, however, pluralism has come to mean the very opposite. The right to practice
a particular religion, speak a particular language, follow a particular cultural
practice is seen as a public good rather than a private freedom. Different
interest groups demand to have their 'differences' institutionalised in the
public sphere. This has led not to greater equality, but to a rationalisation
of inequality. The question we have to ask ourselves, therefore, is: do we want
an equal society or a plural society? We cannot have both.
Kenan Malik is a writer and lecturer. He is the author of Man, Beast and Zombie : What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us about Human Nature (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2000) and The Meaning of Race : Race, History and Culture in Western Society (Macmillan 1996).