The questions suggested by the term "multiculturalism" range far and wide,
embracing questions of inclusion: Who and what is to be taught?—questions of
criteria: On what grounds, if any, can "we" make appraisals of "other
cultures"?—questions of self-identity: When I say "we," who am I
including in such august company?—questions of the meaning of multiculturalism: What
is it? What is its purpose?
I aim to provide a framework (i) that allows us to begin a discussion that might answer
such questions, (ii) that illuminates why it is that such a modest aim is the most we can
hope for at this time, and (iii) that provides an understanding of what we can do in a
multicultural world in order to illuminate what we should do. This framework will prove to
parallel a classic Hobbesianism, a universally undesirable result that will,
paradoxically, provide further direction and reason for hope.
1. One immediate response by many in the USA to such questions is an appeal to the
ideal of tolerance—an ideal that Sir Isaiah Berlin, perhaps more than any thinker in
our time, has defended.
Berlin's central argument for toleration is that belief in the one true view has
repeatedly led to disaster: "One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the
slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals... This is the
belief that somewhere, in the past or in the future, in divine revelation or the mind of
the individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science, or in the simple
heart of an uncorrupted good man, there is a final solution."(1)
A second argument that Berlin offers for toleration is that we have no right to insist
that all be educated in our way, unless we know that we are pure and good—precisely
what we do not and cannot know. As Tolstoy argued, the history of education is a history
of tyranny, where each new school "struck off one yoke only to put another in its
place."(2) "But about one thing they were all
agreed: that one must liberate the young from the blind despotism of the old; and each
immediately substituted its own fanatical, enslaving dogma in its place" (48).
Further, Tolstoy sees no way out of this tyranny. For "who, he reasonably asks, will
educate the educators?" (50) For us to be educated, we need to recognize the pure
among us as our teachers. But to recognize the pure among us is already to be pure. So to
become pure and educated we need already to be pure and educated—an impossibility.
"Yet he believed that a final solution to the problem of how to apply the principles
of Jesus must exist" (50)—a belief that Berlin was not able to accept. In fact,
to insist that all conform to such a faith is precisely what we must avoid, insofar as
such a belief leads to none other than Dostoevski's Grand Inquisitor, the one who
crucifies Christ in the name of Christ. So, Berlin, unlike Tolstoy, pessimistically
concludes: "The world that we encounter in ordinary experience is one in which we are
faced with choices between ends equally ultimate and claims equally absolute, the
realization of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others."(3)
This pessimism results in Berlin's third argument for toleration: it is precisely because
of the lack of any universally held overarching view that we "place such immense
value upon the freedom to choose" (168), for we are willing to let no one else decide
for us how we are to choose among the competing views.
Berlin, thus, presents a muscular pluralism of tolerance. But the muscles Berlin flexes
in the name of tolerance cannot avoid Tolstoy's hard critique, that Berlin's espousal of
choice becomes just one other oppressive ideal among others. For starters, consider
toleration's paradox of condescension. The ideal of toleration requires us only to
"put up with" those who would deign to differ with us. But such an attitude
allows us to ridicule and disdain those others. Berlin was willing to accept this result.
Others are not.
2. To avoid what Kant warned of as "the arrogant title of tolerance,"(4)
others argue that multiculturalism should go beyond toleration(5)
and advocate, say, a respect for other views and cultures—or even a celebration of
other views and cultures. These views I will speak of as maximal
multiculturalism—that multiculturalism is a good and not a mere necessary evil.
Such a perspective is found in John Milton's "Areopagitica" (1644). Milton
argued that to be good one had to be good knowingly, and aware of the amazing convolutions
of human life. First, one had to be good knowingly: A "heretic in the truth,"
says Milton, includes one "who believes things only because his pastor says so, or
the Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason." Second, to know one must
know the amazing convolutions of human life. Truth itself is not to be simply had just
because truth is not simple. As Osiris was cut up into a thousand pieces, so Truth has
been "scattered... to the four winds." The truth is that Truth "may have
more shapes than one" and thus "there of necessity will be much arguing... many
opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making." As a result, those
who prevent others from speaking "are the troublers, they are the dividers of
unity," who "permit not others to unite those dissevered pieces which are yet
wanting to the body of Truth." For "Truth is strong, next to the Almighty,"
and will emerge victorious.
3. However, any ideal justifying multiculturalism carries the heavy baggage of three
hard intertwined paradoxes.
First, there is the paradox of commitment. Are we to tolerate, respect or celebrate all
cultures, all ways of life?—say , the intolerant, the disrespectful and the
non-celebrators of other views? And if not, then are we not simply espousing our own views
of what should and should not be accepted and thus adopting a non-multicultural stance?
Second, there is the paradox of justification. Whether and of what we should be
tolerant, respectful, or celebratory are not self-evident and so must be justified. But
any justification will be in terms of certain ideals. Consequently, will it not be the
case that the ideal appealed to will be dogmatic insofar as it insists that its brand of
multiculturalism be adopted?
Finally, there is the paradox of teaching. We in our wisdom aim to teach students, say,
to tolerate, respect, or celebrate those who differ from us. But most cultures and
sub-cultures do not accept these practices as an ideal. So are teachers to insist that
their students conform to their ideal when their students have another ideal? Is such an
insistence multicultural?
4. What implicitly follows from such paradoxes is that no matter what we say, we will
do so from the perspective of the one true view. All of us, inescapably, as a matter both
of logic and of daily living, have the one true view. For instance, to insist on our
fallibilism is to betray how our fallibilism is the view in terms of which we evaluate all
other views. While we may look at our fallibilism critically, we do so not by asking how
to radically reconstruct it but by asking how to improve it—a question not foreign to
any fundamentalism. Hence our fallibilism is practically speaking infallibilistic, the one
true view, just because we cannot radically question it.
Thus, it turns out, we look into the mirror and behold: They are us. We, all of us, are
fundamentalists.
5. So what next? I believe that we can return to my initial points—that it is a
given that we live in a multicultural world, that we find ourselves addressing people of
other cultures and vastly different perspectives, that we lack a consensus on how to
address this world, and, then add: that the "we" I refer to here are those who
grant these givens. Not to grant them is to be deservedly dismissed from the discussion.
And an agreement on them is what I will speak of as minimal multiculturalism —what we
can legitimately expect and thus demand from any other.
"But that says very little!" And indeed it does—although it took a while
to see why we must say so little, why we cannot initially presume to say more. Minimal
multiculturalism is the hard recognition of our small but disagreeable world. To expect
more is to overlook that there is no world culture that we can appeal to in order to argue
for some more embracive form of multiculturalism.
Hence, if we are to say more and go beyond minimal multiculturalism, we must assume a
more specific context than "the contemporary world." So let us narrow the
context by considering what it means to live in a society like that of the USA, as found
in a public college.
6. For starters, as a public place in the USA, the college is composed of many many
sorts of people—people who do not look alike, think alike, dress alike, eat alike....
More, as a public college, it is engaged in a type of inquiry, which itself sets up
standards of evidence, standards which require the recognition that we do not always agree
on what inquiry is about or how it is to be conducted. Paradoxically, we cannot expect us
to be a we. Rather, we are an uneasy we. We are not the world: we do live in one society
or nation state, a place with a heritage of rights and "way of doing business."
But we rest uneasily in this, in that we do not agree, and never have agreed, on what
"all of this" means.
This lack of agreement on what the we means paradoxically leads to an agreement that
goes beyond minimal multiculturalism, what I will speak of as mitigated multiculturalism.
The uneasy we in the USA can expect that (i) we cannot publicly assume a maximal
multiculturalism; (ii) no view will be publicly regarded as sacred or closed to radical
challenge, (iii) all views will be publicly challenged, and (iv) critics and defenders of
the various views do no violence to each other—they in some way or another put up
with or tolerate each other.
Why we can expect (i)-(iii) of mitigated multiculturalism to be a given follows from
the observation of the vast variety of people and perspectives in the USA. But why we can
expect the tolerance of (iv) takes a longer story.
7. Crucially, we cannot justify such tolerance by any specific appeal to some
ideal—a vision of how human life should be. For all ideals are in question.
Nor can we justify tolerance in terms of a heritage like the Bill of Rights,
emphasizing freedom of speech, religion, and inquiry. To do so is only to beg the
question. For this heritage was sharply challenged when it was first instituted, both as
to what it meant and covered and also as to whether it was a good idea at all, and it is
sharply challenged today. And add to this story all of the other stories that inform the
USA, and what results is both a reaffirmation of mitigated multiculturalism's (i)-(iii)
and also a heightened requestioning of the tolerance of (iv).
8. The justification rests on the given that no group of the uneasy us can expect any
other group to respect or welcome its Primary Truths or to remain silent about their
Primary Truths. The uneasy we cannot expect a Bob Jones University or, following Pope John
Paul II and the USA philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre,(6) a
Roman Catholic university, to tolerate, let alone welcome, all views. But the uneasy we
can expect that in the public arena we put up with each other in order to give each other
a vent and thereby avoid universal war. Come what may, we, whoever we are, will make
ourselves heard. If we are prevented from making ourselves heard, at least in the public
arena, what will result is a kind of war, a willingness to do each other harm—which
the uneasy we agrees must be avoided. Thus we all must be persuaded that at least this is
available to each and every one of us, that we can act and speak out in public
arenas—provided that our acting and speaking are not violent. Such toleration is the
minimum that we can expect and the maximum that we can demand in a public arena in the
USA.
9. Mitigated multiculturalism thus distinguishes two types of toleration—positive
and negative. On the one hand, positive toleration, found in Berlin, is built on some
ideal or vision—Berlin's centrality of individual choice. On the other hand, negative
toleration is built on no such affirmation but on the fear of others if they are denied
their say.
Negative toleration is hardly a positive ideal but is unwelcome in at least four ways.
First, it is justified by fear of others and what bad things they will do to us if they
are prevented from expressing themselves. Second, it has force only when the other has
power and is willing to use it. It thus requires us all to be on our guard against those
who would deny it to us and warns that we must rely on ourselves to protect our core
ideals. Third, it represents a failure—either our failure to make the other see our
One Truth, or, more likely to be said, the other's failure to accept our One Truth. And
finally, it is not an end in itself, some ideal or vision to embrace, but a mere means to
an end. It allows us to live, not together as one, but side by side yet apart, as we carry
on war by other means.
10. Negative toleration avoids the four paradoxes that plagued positive toleration. It
avoids them by not allowing them to arise, and it does this by not viewing itself as
something good in itself.
It sidesteps the paradox of condescension by not deigning to tolerate the other out of
any ideal but by being forced to tolerate the other out of fear—a kind of respect. It
dodges the paradox of commitment by understanding toleration not as an ideal but as a
means to one's safety. It avoids the paradox of justification by rejecting the presumption
that toleration must be justified by ideals—ideals which it inflicts on others. Fear
of the other is no ideal to be attained but is hard reality to be addressed. And finally,
it finesses the paradox of teaching by claiming that negative toleration is no superior
view to be taught but rather an inferior position to be endured.
11. Nonetheless, from these considerations follows mitigated multiculturalism's own
paradox: it is what we can all agree on and what no one wants. No one wants it not only
because it is multiply unwelcome, but also because of its resemblance to that stark
Hobbesian understanding of human motivation and of government—where all of us seek to
advance our own self-interest merely because it is our own self-interest. Hence, if we
have the might we have the right, the reason of self-interest, to do whatever we
will—whether cheating or brutalizing others—to advance our interests.
Consequently, almost all of us take great pains to persuade others that we are not working
out of self-interest alone, but rather have other reasons to restrain us.
But what these other reasons are, why we are not to run rampant over the interests of
others when it is in our self-interest to do so, remains much in question. And because
each competing reason stating why Hobbes is to be rejected carries profound social
consequences, we need a Hobbesian grounding to society with respect to human expression to
protect our view from those who would surpass Hobbes. Such a grounding satisfies no one.
12. But if we are not satisfied with this grounding but are committed to the idea that
Hobbesian negative tolerance must be surpassed, then the uneasy we must engage in the hard
discussion of how to surpass Hobbes. This results in turn in a more complete definition of
mitigated multiculturalism—to (i)-(iv) add: (v) negative toleration is unwelcome to
all and so we all seek ways of surpassing it—say, by imagining notions of power that
go beyond Hobbesian brute power.
Such a multiculturalism, mitigated as it is, may allow us the intellectual framework to
build the new world the uneasy we say we seek. But it will have to be built context by
context, country by country. For I suspect that French Egalitarianism, German Volk and
Blut, English nobility and commoner, Indian secularism and sects,... will all bear
strikingly different slants than the stories of multiculturalism made in the USA.
Moreover, if and when the world gets smaller and it becomes clearer that we live in the
world as we live in our country, then minimal multiculturalism might be reconceived as
mitigated. But how to get us, all of us, to live in the world as we live in our country is
currently beyond our reach. For while we all may agree that toleration out of fear is not
enough, we do not agree that the world is our country. Perhaps as the world becomes
increasingly polluted and the resources of the world increasingly depleted, so that the
powerful of the world can no longer escape the hardships that most face on a day to day
basis,.... But all of this of course is speculative.
In any case, ideally the public university and college uniquely stand as crucibles
where such discussion may take place without doctrinaire restraint.
|
