Making the Case for Multiculturalism

Posted by Keith Tidman

Multiculturalism and ‘identity politics’ have both overlapping and discrete characteristics. Identity politics, for example, widens out to race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, national origin, language, religion, disability, and so forth. Humanity’s mosaic. It’s where, in a shift toward pluralism, barriers dissolve — where sidelined minority groups become increasingly mainstreamed, self-determination acquires steam, and both individual and group rights equally pertain to the ideal.

This situation is historically marked by differences between those people who, on one hand, emphasise individual rights, goods, intrinsic value, liberties, and well-being, where each person’s independence stands highest and apart from cultural belonging. And, on the other hand, the communitarians, who emphasise a group perspective. Communitarians regard the individual as ‘irreducibly social’, to borrow Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s shorthand.

The group perspective subordinately depends on society. This group perspective needs affirmation, addressing status inequality, with remedies concentrated in political change, redistributive economics, valuing cultural self-worth, and other factors. Communitarians assign primacy to collective rights, socialising goods, intrinsic value, liberties, and well-being. In other words, civic virtue — with individuals freely opting in and opting out of the group. Communitarians and individualists offer opposed views of how our identities are formed. 

But the presumed distinctions between the individual and community may go too far. Rather, reality arguably comprises a coexistent folding together of both liberal individualism and communitarianism in terms of multiculturalism and identity. To this point, people are capable of learning from each other’s ideas, customs, and social behaviour, moving toward an increasingly hybrid, cosmopolitan philosophy based on a new communal lexicon, fostering human advancement.

The English writer (and enthusiastic contributor to Pi’s sister publication, The Philosopher) G. K. Chesterton always emphasised the integrity of this learning process, cautioning:

‘We have never even begun to understand a people until we have found something that we do not understand. So long as we find the character easy to read, we are reading into it our own character’.

Other thinkers point out that cultures have rarely been easily cordoned off or culturally pristine. They contend that groups have always been influenced by others through diverse means, both malign and benign: invasion, colonialism, slavery, commerce, migration, flow of ideas, ideologies, religions, popular culture, and other factors. The cross-pollination has often been reciprocal — affecting the cultural flashpoints, social norms, and future trajectories of both groups.

Globalisation only continues to hasten this process. As the New Zealand philosopher of law Jeremy Waldron puts it, commenting on the phenomenom of cultural overlap:

‘We live in a world formed by technology and trade; by economic, religious, and political imperialism and their offspring; by mass migration and the dispersion of cultural influences’.

How groups reckon with these historical influences, as groups become more pluralistic, deserves attention, so that change can happen more by design than chance.

After all, it’s a high bar to surmount the historic balkanisation of minority cultures and to push back against the negativism of those who trumpet (far too prematurely) multiculturalism’s failure. The political reality is that societies continue to reveal dynamically moving parts. Real-world multiculturalism is, all the time, coalescing into new shapes and continuing to enrich societies.

Multiculturalism in political philosophy involves acknowledging and understanding the fact of diverse cultural moorings in society and the challenges they pose in terms of status, equality, and power — along with remedies. Yet, in this context, the question recurs time and again: has the case really been made for multiculturalism?

The American philosopher John Searle, in the context of education, questions the importance of ‘Western rationalistic tradition’ — where what we know is ‘a mind-independent reality . . . subject to constraints of rationality and logic’. Adding: ‘You do not understand your own tradition if you do not see it in relation to others’.

Charles Taylor, however, sees multiculturalism differently, as an offshoot of liberal political theory, unhampered by heavily forward-leaning ideology. This aligns with postmodernist thinking, distrusting rationalism as to truth and reality. The merits of scepticism, criticism, subjectivism, contextualism, and relativism are endorsed, along with the distinctiveness of individuals and minority groups within society.

Advocates of multiculturalism warn against attempts to shoehorn minority groups into the prevailing culture, or worse. Where today we see rampant nationalism in many corners of the world — suppressing, tyrannizing, and even attempting to stamp out minority communities — eighty years ago Mahatma Gandhi warned of such attempts:

‘No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive’.