Theories of Multiculturalism

An Introduction

George Crowder

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745673622
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Multiculturalism is one of the most controversial ideas in contemporary politics. In this new book George Crowder examines some of the leading responses to multiculturalism, both supportive and critical, found in the work of recent political theorists. The book provides a clear and accessible introduction to a diverse array of thinkers who have engaged with multiculturalism. These include Will Kymlicka, whose account of cultural rights is seminal, liberal critics of multiculturalism such as Brian Barry and Susan Okin, and multiculturalist critics of liberalism including Charles Taylor, Iris Marion Young, James Tully, and Bhikhu Parekh. In addition the discussion covers a wide range of other perspectives on multiculturalism - libertarian, feminist, democratic, nationalist, cosmopolitan - and rival accounts of Islamic and Confucian political culture. While offering a balanced assessment of these theories, Crowder also argues the case for a distinctive liberal-pluralist approach to multiculturalism, combining a liberal framework that emphasises the importance of personal autonomy with the value pluralism of thinkers such as Isaiah Berlin. This clear and comprehensive account will be an indispensable textbook for students in politics, sociology and political and social theory.

1

Universalism, Relativism and Culture

‘Multicultural thinking’, writes Paul Scheffer, ‘represents a continuation of cultural relativism by other means’ (Scheffer 2011: 197). It is easy to see why someone might believe this. Cultural relativism is the idea that truth or morality is relative to culture, that each culture has its own unique standards of truth or moral rightness, and that consequently all cultures are equal in moral and intellectual status. If that is so then it seems to follow that all cultures should be accorded equal respect. Where multiple cultures are present in the same society none is more authoritative than any other and all should be recognized equally.

However, Scheffer's comment is seriously misleading. It is true that some forms of multiculturalism rest on something like the reasoning just sketched out. This applies to what may be called the ‘strong’ or perhaps ‘popular’ multiculturalism of the kind found in the curriculum wars in American schools and universities in the 1980s and 1990s. But a great deal of multiculturalist thought does not take this form. Indeed, not one of the leading multiculturalist thinkers I shall discuss is an outright relativist, although some flirt with relativism from time to time. That is because cultural relativism suffers from a number of difficulties that make it problematic in general and that undermine it as a basis for multiculturalism in particular.

These difficulties are well known. Nevertheless, the popular understanding of multiculturalism is so influential, among both supporters and detractors, that it is important to begin this inquiry by examining the notion of cultural relativism. I hope thereby to challenge immediately certain assumptions that some readers may bring to this investigation. The first step is to consider what relativists react against, namely ethical universalism, before looking in more detail at relativism: its core claims, varieties (including postmodernism) and problems. In the final section I set out a view that could be said to occupy a middle ground between traditional universalism and relativism – namely, the theory of human capabilities advanced by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen. The critical discussion of capabilities theory will briefly introduce the idea of value pluralism that I shall return to in Chapter 7.

Universalism

Ethical universalism is the view that there are certain moral rules that are binding on all human beings in all places at all times. Such universal rules override the norms of particular cultures, which can be judged as more or less acceptable by the criterion of universal morality. Universal accounts of morality have been dominant in Western thought, at least until recently. They have, by and large, been dominant in other world philosophies too, but I shall be focusing on Western thought, since this is, perhaps ironically, the context for explicit theories of multiculturalism. I say ‘ironically’ because multiculturalist theories so often condemn Western thought for its ‘ethnocentrism’. This condemnation is itself a distinctive expression of certain strands of Western thought. Throughout the history of Western philosophy, ethical universalism has frequently been challenged, these challenges amounting to a sceptical and relativist counterpoint that is as old as universalism itself. But it is universalism that has struck the dominant chord.

The most prominent contemporary expression of ethical universalism is the concept of human rights, the idea that all persons have fundamental entitlements simply by virtue of their humanity.¹ This notion can be traced to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century idea of natural rights advocated by thinkers such as John Locke, Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson. The idea of natural rights, in turn, has its origin in the concept of natural law, developed most systematically by St Thomas Aquinas from roots in the ancient Greek philosophers. The basic notion of natural law is that universal rules of conduct can be identified by studying human nature (d’Entrèves 1951). Thus, Aquinas argues that we can deduce universal rules of conduct by using our reason to identify the natural ‘inclinations’ of human beings and to decide how those inclinations should be facilitated and regulated (Aquinas 1959: 123).

According to Locke's late seventeenth-century interpretation, the natural law generates a doctrine of natural rights. Under the natural law, fundamental obligations, such as the duty to preserve human life, imply fundamental rights, notably individuals’ rights to their ‘life, health, liberty, or possessions’ (Locke 1689 [1970]: section 6). These are basic entitlements that trump public opinion, the policies of particular governments and the local norms of particular cultures. Lockean rights became the basis for justifying the great political revolutions of the modern era, beginning with the Glorious Revolution (1688) that established the supremacy of Parliament over the Crown in England. They reappeared among the ‘self-evident truths’ of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (1776), and were restated by Paine and the French revolutionaries as ‘the rights of Man’ – the ancestors of the ‘human rights’ listed in the United Nations Declaration of 1948.

The idea of a universal morality implicit in human nature is thus one of the most powerful streams in Western thought, and foundational for modern politics, especially liberal democracy. Locke's assertion of respect for natural rights as the test of legitimate government marks something like the birth of the liberal tradition that I shall have more to say about in the next chapter.

From the beginning, however, ethical universalism provoked the obvious question, what exactly are the rules that are said to be universal? Moreover, in the case of the central natural-law tradition, what exactly are the features of human nature that imply the universal rules, and how do they do so? Over the centuries these questions have received many conflicting answers. For example, Aristotle's view that slavery was ethically permissible, indeed justified by natural differences among human beings, was flatly contradicted by the moral egalitarianism of Christian readings of the natural law, culminating in the natural rights advocated by Locke and his successors. Again, Locke's interpretation of human nature is distinctly more optimistic, and consequently the task of government in his view is distinctly more limited, than that of Thomas Hobbes, who pictures human nature as fundamentally selfish, aggressive and in need of strict political control in order to avoid continual conflict.

Such disagreements have been endemic in the history of ethical universalism. Moreover, they have been exacerbated by a series of developments in the history of modern Western ideas that have tended to undermine confidence in a single moral truth and to promote various kinds of moral scepticism and relativism. These developments began with the Reformation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which saw the break-up of Western Christianity into rival Roman Catholic and Protestant factions, each asserting and attempting to enforce equally dogmatic claims to the possession of God's truth. The whole notion of divine authority was in turn eroded by the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with its secular explanations of the natural world, and subsequently by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, some streams of which attempted to apply modern scientific method to the explanation and improvement of the social world. The gradual disappointment of Enlightenment hopes for a natural science of morality only added to doubts about the possibility of identifying a single, coherent body of moral knowledge to rival the achievements of the natural sciences, despite efforts to model such a science on disciplines such as mathematics and evolutionary biology.²

Marxism, too, was in part a sceptical or relativizing influence, to the extent that it regarded morality as a secondary, ‘superstructural’ phenomenon, determined by the more fundamental processes of the economic ‘base’ (Cohen 1978; Lukes 1985). On a Marxist view, Locke's natural rights merely express the ‘bourgeois’ morality of capitalist society; non-capitalist societies generate quite different moralities. This is not to say that Marxism departs entirely from mainstream Western universalism. At a deeper level Marx's account of historical progress is underwritten by a vision of human nature as fundamentally distinguished by a capacity for spontaneous and collective creative activity, partly developed by capitalism, partly obstructed by it, and destined to be fully realized only in a post-capitalist future. Still, Marxism remains a key source for recent ‘poststructuralist’ and ‘postmodernist’ understandings of morality as relative to interests or power.³

In these various ways, then, modernity has been characterized by a retreat from the moral certainties of the premodern world. This is not to deny that there was moral scepticism in ancient and medieval times, still less that ethical universalism has been wholly abandoned – indeed, the modern concept of human rights probably commands a more widespread international consensus than any previous form of universalism. But the sceptical and relativist counterpoint is also more insistent now, and certainly more reputable in the academic world, than ever before. The Reformation, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment and Marxism have all had a hand in this development. But perhaps the most important factor of all has been the increased proximity and interaction, in modern times, of different cultures, and the subsequent emergence of the idea of cultural relativism.

Relativism

At its broadest, relativism is the idea that judgements of value or truth are not universal or objective, but valid only from some particular perspective (Wong 1993). For a relativist, ‘X is morally right’ or ‘X is true’ means X is right or true only from some particular point of view. That point of view is neither more nor less fundamental or authoritative than others, and so the judgement that X is right (or true) is necessarily correct if it sincerely and accurately expresses the perspective in question. Such perspectives vary, and all are equally valid. Relativism, therefore, especially in its stronger forms, is opposed to universalism. Strong forms of relativism deny that any moral judgements are universally valid, or even that any truth-claims are universally valid.

There are different kinds of relativism corresponding to how one answers the question: relative to what? Some relativists believe that value and truth judgements are relative to the person making them. This is ‘subjectivism’: a moral claim merely expresses the beliefs or feelings of the individual who makes the claim (e.g. Ayer 1936: ch. 6). More important to multiculturalism is a second kind of relativism, ‘cultural relativism’, in which the validity of claims depends on the beliefs and values not of individuals but of whole cultures or ways of life. According to cultural relativism, ‘X is morally right’ means X is right from the perspective of a particular culture. It is the cultural kind of relativism that I shall be concerned with in the remainder of this section.

Within cultural relativism another important distinction needs to be drawn – that is, between its ‘ethical’ and ‘cognitive’ branches (Lukes 2008: ch. 1). The ethical dimension of cultural relativism asserts that there are no universally valid moral rules, only the codes and practices of particular cultures. On this view moral judgements are always made from the perspective of some cultural code or other. Therefore, there is no culturally neutral or objective standpoint from which to compare and judge the divergent practices of different cultures, and so no way of legitimately criticizing a culture's morality from any perspective other than its own. We are often tempted to judge other ways of life on the basis of our own cultural values. But this is ‘ethnocentrism’, the illegitimate judging of one culture according to standards imported from another. A cultural relativist can consistently criticize a culture's practices, but only on the ground of that culture's own norms – for example, where the culture's basic values are not adequately expressed or respected by its actual practices or institutions. This is called ‘immanent critique’ or criticism ‘from within’, because it appeals to standards immanent in the culture itself rather than external to it (Held 1980: 183–7; Walzer 1988: 26).

But even if different cultures do, as a matter of fact, have different moral codes, might some of these be more rational or reasonable than others? This is where ‘cognitive’ relativism comes in. Some philosophers argue that not only morality but also rationality, reasonableness and truth are culturally relative too. According to the cognitive relativist, different cultures have such divergent ways of seeing things that they inhabit different conceptual worlds. None of these is objectively more authoritative than any other. One archaeologist, for example, argues that the findings of modern science are no more valid than the creation narratives of the Zuni Indians, who believe that their ancestors emerged from inside the earth into a world created by supernatural beings. The Zuni beliefs are ‘just as valid as the archaeological viewpoint of what prehistory is about’ (quoted by Boghossian 2006: 2).

If we accept the cognitive relativist view, we must again recognize strong limits on the extent to which we are entitled to criticize other cultures. On this view, when we judge other cultures’ practices to be irrational according to standards other than those of the cultures concerned, we are again being ethnocentric, projecting our own standards onto others.

The idea of cultural relativism, like that of universalism, can be traced back to the ancient world. Among the Greeks, the dominant universalism of Plato and Aristotle was opposed by sceptical thinkers like Protagoras, for whom ‘man is the measure of all things’ (Guthrie 1960: 68–9). Similarly, Herodotus, in the Histories, recounts an anecdote in which the Persian king Darius questions the Greeks and the Callatiae about their funeral practices. The former prefer to cremate their dead, the latter to eat them, and each is revolted by the other. ‘One can see by this what custom can do,’ writes Herodotus, ‘and Pindar, in my opinion, was right when he called it “king of all” ’ (Herodotus n.d. [1972]: 220).

By and large, however, these relativist sallies were for centuries submerged in the development of Western thought by several pro-universalist factors, including the prestige of Plato and Aristotle, the emergence of Christianity and the development of natural-law thinking. The centuries-long dominance of natural law in European thought is nowhere more evident than in attitudes to alien cultures. When Europeans were confronted by unfamiliar ways of life, the basic ethical question was always: how far do these cultures conform to the natural law?

Sometimes the answer was quite complimentary to the culture in question, which was judged to be superior, at least in certain respects, to its European rivals – more rational, or more ‘natural’. Montesquieu's Persian Letters (1721 [1973]), for example, adopts the perspective of a sensible Persian visit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1: Universalism, Relativism and Culture
• 2: Liberal Rights to Culture: Kymlicka's Theory
• 3: Liberal Critics of Cultural Rights
• 4: Nationalists and Cosmopolitans
• 5: Beyond Liberalism?
• 6: Democrats
• 7: Value Pluralists
• 8: Global Cultures
• 9: A Liberal–Pluralist Approach
• References
• Index