Seyed Ali Reza Hosseini Beheshti*
Since the last two decades of the last century, the American society has witnessed a social movement called multiculturalism. In Terence Turner’s words,
[t]he term has come to be used primarily in connection with demands on behalf of black and other minority groups for separate and equal representation in college curricula and extra-academic cultural programs and events. It also has assumed more general connotations as an ideological stance towards participation by such minorities in national cultures and societies and the changing nature of national and transnational cultures themselves. As a code of word for minority demands for separate recognition in academic and other cultural institutions, multiculturalism tends to become a form of identity politics in which the concept of culture becomes a merged with that of ethnic identity. (Turner, 1994, pp. 407-408)
To view the American society as culturally diverse, however, is in sharp contrast with the dominant image which characterizes the United States as a ‘melting pot’, in which all cultural differences shade away in favor of a homogeneous and uniformed one, often referred to as the American culture.
The first section will deal with exploring the main features of the debate further, bringing their main claims and challenges to sight in details. Next, I shall try to explore the philosophical assumptions behind each view. The third section will offer a better understanding of the issues at hands in the debate, in which my argument shall mainly rely on Alasdair MacIntyre’s conception of traditions of moral enquiry. The last section will draw some concluding pints to this paper.
1. Cultural Homogeneity vs. Cultural Diversity
We may begin by discussing what exactly is at stake when arguments over cultural diversity and the recognition of cultural identity are concerned. It is worth noticing from the outset that the existence of cultural diversity and different cultural communities should not be viewed as recent phenomena; the problem is probably as old as human social life itself. The history of cultural differences can be traced back to the first stages of the written history. In the ancient Greece and Rome, for instance, in order to be recognized as citizens, strangers were required to participate in religious rituals of the main society. (De Coulange, 1980, pp.193-195) What can be distinguished as quite recent, however, are the demands for the recognition of such differences.
The aim of arguments by the proponents of multiculturalism, however, is not the mere recognition of cultural plurality as an inevitable feature of modern societies, but to underline the significance of cultures in constituting identities and shaping social, cultural and political institutions of the society. It means that culturally different groups, which have been marginalized by the mainstream dominant culture, would make broader claims for equality and power. However, as will be discussed below, demands of multiculturalism have gone far beyond claims of equality of rights to questions concerning how different cultural minorities, which are among the most salient and vexing on the political agenda of many democratic societies (including the United States) are to be recognized. They run against the dominant image of culture as a homogenous entity, on the basis of which claims of equal right of citizenship are often made. This concerns differences which constitute the very identities of citizens. It suggests that a democracy is letting citizens down when major institutions fail to take account of their diverse and particular identities.
Tracing back for the origins of the movement, as Turner points out, the debate over multiculturalism emerged as the consequence of “the revolt against the canon in English and American literary and the Eurocentric in history (manifested, for example, by the influence of subaltern studies and the concern with colonial and postcolonial resistance to capitalist exploitation and the Western hegemony). The development of cultural studies, strongly influenced by the work of the Center for Cultural Studies in the United Kingdom, also formed part of this intellectual landscape and directly influenced the rise of multiculturalism.” (Turner, 1994, p.416) With the opening of higher education to women and members of cultural minorities, issues of race, sex and class have taken on a new urgency both as academic issues and in the day-to-day life of the university. John Arthur and Amy Shapiro have classified the responses to these demands into four main groups. First, demands for more women and minority professors, ethnic and gender studies departments, and a curriculum that includes voices not traditionally included. Second, demands for codes of conduct which ban sexual harassment and date rape. Third, arguments for abandoning the insistence on free speech and enacting codes of punishing racist, sexist and harassing speech. Fourth, demands for taking affirmative action policies that give preference in hiring and admissions to women and persons of colour. (Arthur and Shapiro, 1995, pp 1-2)
The dispute has gone far from questions concerning what is taught and by whom, to the very nature of knowledge and the possibility of objectivity. As a consequence of the multiculturalist movement and widespread demands for the recognition of differences, therefore, a large literature on criticism of the nature of knowledge, philosophical articulation and scientific research methods has emerged. The idea of decolonising methodologies, for instance, urges the awareness of researchers of the force of cultural imperialism supported by institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imaginary and doctrines (see on this Smith 1999).
Just as the proponents of multiculturalism vary in their claims, the opponents too differ in their criticism which is directed against it. The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom has been recognized as an outstanding conservative example in this respect. Bloom recognizes multiculturalism as the fruit of moral and epistemological relativism most fashionable within contemporary American universities:
Openness_ and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth various ways of life and kinds of human beings_ is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that the entire world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all. (Bloom, 1995, p.9)
Against this, Bloom asserts the need for the West for justification of its ways or values, discovery of nature, philosophy and science which he holds its ‘cultural imperative’ and believes the deprivation of which would result in its collapse. (Ibid, p.17) Bloom observes such indifference towards the western heritage as the consequence of the bad education students nowadays receive:
Young Americans have less and less knowledge of and interest in foreign places. In the past, there were many students who actually knew something about and love England, France, Germany, or Italy, for they dreamed of living there or thought their lives would be made more interesting by assimilating their languages and literatures. Such students have almost disappeared, replaced at most by students who are interested in the political problems of the Third World countries and in helping them to modernize, with due respect to their old cultures, of course. (Ibid, p.14)
What is lost, therefore, is a kind of education which would learn from classical texts the better ways of life:
Gone is the real historical sense of a Machiavelli who wrested a few hours from each busy day in which “to don regal and courtly garments, enter the courts of the ancients and speak with them. (Ibid, p.14)
The liberal attitude towards cultural diversity, however, has taken a distinguishably different track. Although liberals have usually been thought to be hostile to cultural difference, as Will Kymlicka indicates in his interesting study of the history of liberal views on national minority, such hostility is rather a recent phenomenon within the tradition. He shows that in nineteenth-century England, for example, there were two liberal views on minority rights: On the one hand, there were liberals like J.S. Mill who called for a common national identity which was deeply tied to an ethnocentric disintegration of smaller national groups. On the other hand, however, there were many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century liberals (e.g. Lord Acton and Alfred Zimmern) who defended minority rights on the grounds of the belief that individual freedom is tied in some important way to membership in ones national group; and that group-specific rights can promote equality between the minority and majority. (Kymlicka, 1995, p.57) But as a result of the fall of the British Empire, the rise of Cold War conflict, and the prominence of American theorists within post-war liberalism, the heated pre-war debate about national minorities amongst liberals has given way to a virtual silence. (Ibid, p.56) Kymlicka then points out the three features of the post-war world which have converted this silence into antagonism towards the recognition of national rights by contemporary liberals: disillusionment with the minority rights scheme of the League of Nations; the American racial desegregation movement; and the ethnic revival amongst immigrant groups in the United States during the 60s and 70s. Contemporary liberal theorists, consequently, neglect arguments of minority rights on the ground that such rights are inconsistent with political unity. Moreover, Kymlicka argues that many contemporary liberals have acquired the belief that minority rights are inherently in conflict with liberal principles. Consequently, liberals today insist that the liberal commitment to individual liberty precludes the acceptance of collective rights, and that the liberal commitment to universal (color-blind) rights precludes the acceptance of group-specific rights. (Ibid, p.68) Kymlicka claims, however, that these bald statements are no part of the liberal tradition: “Few if any liberals, until very recently, supposed that liberal principles allowed Universal individual rights. What contemporary liberals take to be well-established liberal principles are in fact novel additions to the liberal cannon.”(Ibid, p.68)
As will be seen in the next section, it is his goal to work out a defensible liberal account in respect to cultural diversity. We may turn now to a more philosophical analysis of the debate, which will attract our attentions in the next section.
2. Universalism vs. Particularism
The conservative and liberal positions towards multiculturalism should be clear by now through the statements cited above. It is now time to further the discussion through a closer examination of their claims.
The Conservative Perspective
We saw that conservatives like Bloom claim the multiculturalist movement responsible for the kind of decline they observe in the Western culture. Bloom argues that the present situation has emerged as the nature of the fragile balance between majority and minorities in the Constitution. He points out that the Founders had no hope of suppressing factions and educating a united or homogeneous citizenry. Instead, “they constructed an elaborate machinery to contain factions in such a way that they would cancel one another and allow for the pursuit of the common good.” (Bloom, 1995, p.12) While it was hoped that through achieving a national majority which respects fundamental rights and refrain from using its power to overturn those rights the balance between majority and minority would sustain, by the disappearance of the common good, the delicate balance has faded away. (Ibid, p.12)
Therefore, Bloom calls for a return to reason. Alongside with Plato, he argues, “[n]ature should be the standard by which we judge our lives and the lives of people. That is why philosophy, not history or anthropology, is the most important human science.” (Ibid, pp. 16-17) What has happened in contemporary American academy, however, is that “the need to know nature in order to have a standard is comfortably buried beneath our human science.” (Ibid, p.16) He concludes:
The United States is one of the highest and most extreme achievements of rational quest for the good life according to nature. What makes its political structure possible is the use of the rational principles of natural right to found a people, thus uniting the good with one’s own. Or, to put it otherwise, the regime established here promised untrammeled freedom to reason_ not to everything indiscriminately, but to reason, the essential freedom that justifies the other freedoms, and on the basis of which, much deviance is also tolerated. An openness that denies the special claim of reason bursts the mainspring keeping the mechanism of this regime in motion. (Ibid, p.17)
It is not hard to see that the rational life as conceived by conservative thinkers enjoy superiority over other ways of life. The conservative account of rationality is inherited from the Enlightenment: divorced from context and indifferent towards cultural particularities, in sum, a view from nowhere. For the appeal which the Western way of life makes to such rationality, conservatives believe, it enjoys superiority over other (irrational) cultures.
The Liberal Perspective
With respect to the existing diversity among liberal theorists over the precise definition and contents of liberalism, it would be little exaggeration to say that the study of the history of the tradition reveals as many accounts of liberalism as liberal theorists themselves. It is not to say, however, that these different accounts of liberalism have nothing in common. There are some features of liberalism, which can be recognised as shared among these accounts. I believe that most liberal thinkers would readily view liberalism as an individualist, egalitarian and universalist tradition. These shared concepts are significantly related to my concern here. We need to say a little more about these concepts here.
Individualism can be viewed as one of the most characteristic concepts of liberalism. Just as those engaged in the Enlightenment project were confident that man is fully capable of deducing the worlds regularities and fundamental principles and thus able to predict its future in the manner of scientific discovery, and like the empiricist mode in natural science fashionable at the time, liberals have been concerned, though to different extents, with principles which explain the relation of man and society, on the basis of which rules and restraints that must be capable of being justified to the people who are to live under them can be offered. As Waldron puts it, [l]ike his empiricist counterparts in science, the liberal insists that intelligible justifications in social and political life must be available in principle for everyone, for society is to be understood by the individual mind, not by the tradition or sense of community. (Waldron, 1993, p.126) For liberals, therefore, a social and political order is illegitimate unless it is rooted in the consent of all those who have to live under it; the consent or agreement of these people is a condition of its being morally permissible to enforce that order against them. (Ibid, p.140) As a result, liberalism stresses the primacy of individual persons against any form of collectivity.
Secondly, and relatedly, liberalism can also be characterised as egalitarian. This should be understood in connection with its commitment to individualism: all men possess the same moral status as members of the political society. The notion of equality is so central to liberalism that liberal thinkers like Ronald Dworkin suggest that all basic liberties (like freedoms of speech, association, conscience) are derived from the fundamental liberal commitment to the equality of concern and respect. (Dworkin, 1985, p.192)
The third fundamental element of liberalism, which at the same time is connected to the first two, is that it is universalist. As Gray puts it, the liberal conception of man and society should be understood in terms of affirming the moral unity of the human species and according a secondary importance to specific historic associations and cultural forms. (Gray, 1986, p.x) Consequently, until very recently, all liberal theories were meant to provide rational frameworks applicable not to certain societies in the West but to the human society as such.
All these common features are explicitly or implicitly related to the problem of cultural diversity. As will be observed, for autonomy-based liberalism like that of Raz or Kymlicka, for example, the freedom of individuals enjoys such a priority over other values that all other goods come secondary to it. So far as universality of the liberal politics is concerned, the criticism levelled at the flaws which are associated with the liberal conception of the individual, has forced thinkers like John Rawls (1991) to revise their works in order to work out their conception of the person as a free and equal citizen, which forms the public culture of democratic societies. This has led to a change in methodology: liberal political theory is now concerned with what is viewed as a common political ground that can alone satisfy the demands of the public reason of democratic societies in the West (on this see Mulhall and Swift, 1996, Ch 6).
Despite the principles which constitute such an assumed common culture are conceived by liberal theorists as neutral towards different conceptions of the good and, therefore, as universally adopted by all American citizens, as will be discussed below, a significant number of such principles are based on concepts which are culturally specific. The distinction that liberalism draws between the political and non-political, for instance, is itself concerned with a particular notion of privacy. Larry Peterman (1993) offers a clear discussion about the idea of privacy and its root in the history of the West. He rightly mentions that the subject has rarely been paid the attention it deserves: a fact, which indicates that the high valuation of privacy is usually taken for granted. Privacy has been considered as a sphere which should be protected from unwanted interference by others, including political authorities. Through a critical analysis of works of authors like Hannah Arendt, Peterman shows that the source of conceptions of the private versus the public is neither the ancient Greek nor the Roman cultures. Rather, Christianity has brought about the changes in Western thought on this subject. The contemporary understanding of privacy originates from the New Testament and early Christianity since charity, which is characteristically distinguishable from private love, became the critical virtue in the Christian order. It was from then, Peterman argues, that these arose the notion of a private life lived apart from political life, as a consequence of the loving spirit and of virtues which are not subject to the public law. (Peterman, 1993, p.112) Liberalism has inherited this notion of privacy which is central to the value, which it attributes to the individual, and its high valuation of individual’s domain.
There are two other conceptions at the heart of liberalism: the way religion is perceived, and partly as a consequence of this, the conception of the political which is viewed as secular. It is about the former which I would like to explain a little more here, though very briefly. When reading about religion and religious doctrine in works of liberal theorists, it is important to bear in mind that the conception of religion to which references are made is not religion qua religion, but a particular conception which is based firmly on Christianity as experienced in the West. It is important because while religion is addressed in general, the characteristics which are offered and the historical evidence which is employed match Christianity and not any other known religion. Cultural communities which are based on religions other than Christianity may not, therefore, agree on arguments related to this matter proposed by liberals. Although it has been mentioned before, it would be helpful to point out in what way the Christian connection of liberalism makes its political ideas connected to a particular culture. An interesting article by Larry Siedentop shows how and in what sense liberalism has inherited its fundamental conceptions from Christianity. He argues that when Western scholars describe contemporary Western societies as secular and materialistic, they miss the fact that Western distinctions between the state and civil society, and between the public and private spheres, are themselves derived from Christian assumptions: That is, they rest on a framework of assumptions and valuations which can be described broadly as individualist and which historically conform in crucial respects to the framework of Christian theology. (Siedentop, 1989, p.308) While religion is no longer paramount in the West, and philosophy and moral doctrines have occupied most of its place, for other cultures religion may still provide the core of belief and provides the constituents of personal identity, the crucial source of social integration, and the key to the nature of things. (Ibid, p.308) By contrast, the predominant view is that the political and social vocabulary of the West apparently makes it possible to devalue beliefs as the source of social order by way of its distinctions between the public and private spheres, the state and civil society, ritual and truly moral action. (Ibid, p.308) However, Siedentop remarks, this interpretation fail to see how deeply such distinctions are related with Christian assumptions. It fails to realise, for instance, that the birth of the individual in the West was a Christian achievement. He concludes that Christian ontology is the foundation of what are usually described as liberal values in the West. (Ibid, p.308)
Having discussed the common features of liberalism, we may now turn to the exploration and evaluation of its position towards cultural diversity. For the purpose of my argument, I have chosen Joseph Raz’s and Will Kymlicka’s discussions as they both have had attempted to accommodate cultural diversity within their liberal theories.
In an interesting article, Raz (1994) has offered a liberal perspective on multiculturalism. Since multiculturalism is a problem today and is likely to be so for the foreseeable future, for politics and the ethics of politics. He intends to explore the implications of the liberal political philosophy in which he believes. The contextuality of political theory, he argues, presupposes value pluralism and in this respect, contemporary liberalism differs from its classical ancestor. As a result, unlike the classical theories of Locke and Kant, contemporary liberal theory acknowledges the importance of community for individual well-being. In this respect, liberal nondiscriminatory theories of rights and discussions which concern the minority rights against majority rule fall too short in capturing the central claims of multiculturalism. Raz believes that:
[M]ulticulturalism emphasizes the importance to political action of two evaluative judgments. First, the belief that individual freedom and prosperity depend on full and unimpeded membership in a respected and flourishing cultural group. Second, a belief in value pluralism, and in particular in the validity of the diverse values embodied in the practices of different societies.(Raz, 1994, 69)
This, of course, is a liberal perspective, a perspective which emphasises the value of freedom to the individual in his being in charge of his life. For Raz, this freedom depends on options. By culture he means shared meanings and common practices. (Ibid, p.70) Cultural membership, therefore, is viewed as vitally importance to individuals in three ways: First, [o]nly through being socialized in a culture can one tap the options that give life a meaning. (Ibid, p.71) Second, is the fact that a common culture facilitates relations and is a condition of rich and comprehensive personal relationship. (Ibid, p.71) Finally, cultural membership affects individual well-being. Raz concludes that it is only by referring to such an individualistic account of cultural membership that liberals can support multiculturalism:
Cultural, and other, groups have a life of their own. But their moral claim to respect and to prosperity rests entirely on their importance to the prosperity of individual human beings. This case is a liberal case for it emphasizes culture as a factor that gives shape and content to individual freedom. (Ibid, p.72)
He emphasizes here that liberal multiculturalism is characteristically non-utopian and that it rejects any commitment to perfectionism and conservatism. It rather sees the conflict between and within cultures as endemic.
Raz tries next to provide an argument to answer why cultures should be respected. He first notices that the liberal justification of multiculturalism is humanistic, not theological. Secondly, the liberal support for non-liberal cultures is conditional: it does so while imposing liberal protections for individual freedom on those cultures. (Ibid, p.74) Therefore, liberal multiculturalism recognizes and respects those cultures only to the extent that they serve true values. (Ibid, p.74) A third point is that ones devotion to and love of ones culture in no way depends on believing it to be better than others. It is rational and valid whether or not it is better than others’; so long as one loves ones own culture for what is truly good in it (Ibid, p.75).
I begin my criticism from the three points just mentioned and then I shall argue why I think his liberal multiculturalism is actually far from being compatible with the main claims of the recognition of cultural diversity. It should be pointed out at the outset that his claim that the liberal justification of multiculturalism is humanistic rather than theological cannot imply any rational superiority of the former over the latter, if it is meant to. As will be discussed in section 3, different traditions of moral enquiry presuppose different rationality and, considering the fact of untranslatability and incommensurability of cultures, at least sometimes it is impossible to claim one as rationally superior.
Secondly, he gives liberalism the power to decide whether a culture can be allowed to be respected in the multicultural society and the power to impose a particular conception of individual freedom on other cultures. This, as argued above, conflicts with the main claim of multiculturalism, namely, the equal recognition of diverse cultures. Since the true values, which Raz mentioned in this respect, turn out to be liberal, his multiculturalism turns out to be too narrow to embrace many non-liberal cultures.
Thirdly, his remark on the relation between ones affection for his culture seems to be unrealistic: how am I to love my culture while I do not regard it as better than others? And on what basis should I make up my mind to choose a culture (as the consequence of the freedom of choice that Raz’s liberal multiculturalism provides me) when my choice is not (at least in my eyes) the better?
But apart from these points, his liberal formulation suffers from a deeper problem. Raz’s reason for the compatibility of liberalism and multiculturalism is that autonomy (in terms of liberty of individual choice), which should be considered as the most fundamental value of liberalism, calls for the toleration of different cultures with the exception of those in which internal oppression is observed. Such a group is excluded from the suggested mutual toleration since the autonomy of its members is undermined. Oppression, however, can be defined differently from the viewpoints of different cultures and the cultural dependence of this factor undermines the very possibility of the application of Raz’s solution. Here, the Satanic Verses affair in Britain provides a good example in this respect. On the one hand, the British Muslim community demanded that the book be banned, since in accordance with the Islamic law it was considered as blasphemous. On the other hand, liberals considered the ban as unacceptable since it would undermine freedom of speech. Raz’s formulation, I suppose, would vote for ignoring the Muslims demand on the ground that it would undermine the principle of autonomy (as interpreted by the liberal culture).
Andrew Mason has discussed this matter as follows: Raz believes that the thesis of his radical individualism is true in relation to an autonomy-supporting culture. But “[i]t is not clear whether this idea could justify giving priority to autonomy whenever it conflicts with community” (Mason, 1993, p.236) since the state of affairs which would then make the thesis of radical individualism true would be one in which priority has already been given to autonomy and the autonomous life by providing an environment that uniformly supports autonomous life-styles and discourages non-autonomous ones. (Ibid, pp.236-237) Moreover, [w]ithin a society that provides an autonomy supporting environment, there may be groups which have traditions and customs that suppress autonomy. These groups may place their own meanings on the options that are provided by the dominant culture. (Ibid, p.237) Mason concludes that the truth involved in radical individualism is insufficient to justify giving priority to autonomy whenever it conflicts with community. A person, therefore, can lead a life that is autonomous to a large extent, even when some options are ruled out for him because allowing individuals to choose them would threaten to undermine communal relations. Someone who is prevented from ridiculing a religion that other members of the same community practice need not be prevented from leading a life that is autonomous in its broad outlines. Thus, even if radical individualism is true, it does not provide sufficient reason always to trade off threats to community in favor of protecting and promoting the exercise of autonomy. (Ibid, pp.238-239)
Therefore, when it comes to non-liberal cultures, the liberal multiculturalism of Raz would tend to use assimilatory means rather than recognizing the existing cultural diversity. Two conclusions can be drawn from this argument. The first is that Raz’s liberal approach is incompatible with multiculturalism. The second is that, considering the untranslatability and incommensurability of cultures, there cannot be any universally acceptable approach at all.
As mentioned above, Kymlicka too attempts to provide an account of liberalism as a political philosophy which can accommodate cultural diversity. Such a discussion should answer questions concerning the idea of cultural membership and its nature, the meaning and extent of individual’s cultural identity, and the legitimacy of ensuring the continuation of cultures.
Kymlicka begins his discussion by underlining the importance of our essential interest in leading a good life. He then argues that there are two preconditions for the fulfilment of such an interest: that we lead our lives from within; and that we should be free to question and revise our beliefs about what gives value to life. Together, they represent the basis of liberal political theory. Each theory, therefore, must give an account of what peoples interests are, most comprehensively conceived, and an account of what follows from supposing that these interests matter equally:
According to liberalism, since our most essential interest is getting these beliefs right and acting on them, government treats people as equals, with equal concern and respect, by providing for each individual the liberties and resources needed to examine and act on these beliefs. This requirement forms the basis of contemporary liberal theories of justice. (Kymlicka, 1989, p.13)
This freedom to examine our ends from inside is only valuable if we can pursue them, but it is not equivalent to the freedom to lead our lives from the inside. (Ibid, p.19) It is this moral capacity for revising our ends which is the cornerstone of Kymlicka’s liberalism and on which he builds his strategy of defending contemporary liberal theory. In fact, as we will see later, Kymlicka aims to show us that this power of revisability is unique to liberalism or at least that liberal theories have a stronger position on this matter than their communitarian rivals.
Yet he does not agree with Raz that appealing to perfectionist ideals is unavoidable. Kymlicka argues that while Raz claims that the necessity of public support for the cultural structure requires some controversial public ranking of the intrinsic merits of competing conceptions of the good; his argument relies on the non-controversial value of a secure cultural pluralism for people in developing their varying conceptions of the good. Therefore, there is no reason to suppose that governments couldn’t develop a decision procedure for public support of the culture of freedom that respected the principle of neutral concern. (Ibid, p.181)
What kind of neutrality and perfectionism, then, does he suggest? Kymlicka’s commitment to state neutrality leads him to adopt an indirect perfectionism which argues that although the state should be neutral towards different conceptions of the good, it should ensure the sort of freedom which is needed in choosing ones conception of life and revising that conception at any time. Interestingly, Ronald Dworkin has made the same suggestion in his paper, “Can a Liberal State Support Art?”. (Dworkin, 1989, p.11) While in his other works he has argued that the liberal state should be neutral in operation as between its citizens views about what kinds of life are valuable for themselves, when he is dealing with the issue whether the state can support the arts, his argument seems to violate such a neutrality of operation since here, Dworkin argues that the state is responsible for the culture within which people make their choices. (Dworkin, 1990, p.308) For him, culture has two distinguishable consequences for citizens. First, it provides the particular cultural products; and second, it provides what he calls the structural aspect of the general culture, i.e. the frame that makes aesthetic values of that sort possible. (Ibid, p.229) The protection of cultural structures, however, is not involved in forcing anyone to make particular choices within it. As Mulhall and Swift point out, however, it is far from clear that the value-neutral interpretation of cultural richness is what Dworkin has in mind, since his formulation of the argument explicitly suggests that the background culture should contain those opportunities and examples that have been thought to be part of living well by reflective people in the past and this implies that he cannot define what he means by a rich and diverse culture without invoking past judgment about the worth of specific cultural products. If so, then he cannot even specify his avowed aim without implicitly endorsing evaluations of a kind concerning which he appears to claim neutrality. (Mulhall and Swift, 1996, p.303) It should be pointed out that Kymlicka’s argument for the neutrality of the liberal state is open to the same criticism since, as will be observed later, in his early works his approach to accommodating cultural diversity within liberalism appeals to this Dworkinian argument about cultural structure, though he ceases to employ it in his later writings as he realizes the difficulties it faces.
Secondly, his indirect perfectionism seems to be inconsistent with his idea of revisablity. As will be shown shortly, he argues that the value of revising ones beliefs about the good is instrumental, deriving from its role in helping one live a life that is on other grounds good. As Thomas Hurka points out, revision has this value only when it will have this particular effect. If I have false or inadequate beliefs about the good, and revision would lead me to replace them with true beliefs, I have an interest in revision. It may switch me from less good activities to ones that are better. But if my current beliefs about the good are true, and revision would replace them with false beliefs, revision would do me harm. Thus, “[i]f in these circumstances the state discourages me from revising my beliefs, either coercively or non-coercively, it does me good.” (Hurka, 1995, p.52) However, since Kellick does not endorse state perfectionism but defends state neutrality, his abstraction from particular claims about value leads him to suggest that revision in general is good, rather than only revision towards, and not away from, true beliefs. And it invites the simple worry that a state may have false beliefs. (Ibid)
Thirdly, the kind of neutrality that Kymlicka suggests seems to be similar to what has been called by B. Parekh (1994) cultural laissez-faire which extends the liberal principle of choice and competition to the realm of culture since he has argued that,
Liberal neutrality … allow[s] each group to pursue and advertise its way of life, and those ways of life that are unworthy will have difficulty attracting adherents. Since individuals are free to choose between competing visions of the good life, liberal neutrality creates a marketplace of ideas, as it were, and how well a way of life does in this market depends on the kinds of goods it can offer to prospective adherents. (Kymlicka, 1991, p.219)
Simon Caney has pointed out, however, that [t]he chief problem with this argument lies in the assumption that valuable forms when confronted with worthless forms will prevail while we have no reason to think that the most valuable ideals always triumph, and that truth defeats falsity. (Caney, 1991, p.460)
However, Kymlicka is aware of some difficulties which the cultural marketplace argument for neutrality may produce. Such worries are explicitly shown where he points out that [m]inority cultures are often vulnerable to economic, cultural, and political pressure from the larger society, (Kymlicka, 1994, p.24) which indicates that some groups may be unfairly disadvantaged in the cultural marketplace.
I think that the most important problem of Kymlicka’s argument for the state neutrality lies somewhere else. When discussing cultural differences he is only concerned with cultural minorities. Although he insists that [m]embership in a culture is qualitatively different from membership in other associations, since our language and culture provide the context within which we make our choices and that [l]oss of cultural membership… is a profound harm that reduces ones very ability to make meaningful choices, (Ibid, p. 25) he fails to see that there are a significant number of cultural communities which cannot be considered as minorities. For instance, it is hard to see how his approach can possibly deal with the cultural differences which have been emphasized by feminists.
A possible response can be that Kymlicka’s approach is at least applicable to minorities. But for at least one reason, his approach faces difficulty even when concerned with cultural minorities, that is, what Kymlicka fails to see is that the very nature of cultural identity makes the accommodation of cultural diversity as a certain kind of minority rights very difficult, if not impossible. The reason lies in the extent to which such differences may touch our understanding of politics itself. There are cultural communities (minority or not), for instance, which do not agree with the public-private distinction as liberals view it. For this very reason, his neutrality of concern which he views as the most likely political principle to secure public assent in societies like ours (Kymlicka, 1989, p.95), turns to be not as neutral as it seems at first, because the criterion by which the state policies would be judged as neutral or otherwise is grounded on an account of autonomy-based freedom of choice for citizens which is by its very nature liberal. Such a liberal account may come into conflict with other accounts of individual freedom and autonomy held by other cultures which live within western democracies and, therefore, he needs to show the liberal account as superior, a task which itself can lead to further difficulties.
3. Different Cultures, Different Rationality
As mentioned in the introduction, I believe that from a philosophical point of view, the nature of differences of cultures is understood more adequately if they are seen as traditions of moral enquiry. Alasdair MacIntyre has introduced this perspective, and the discussion of this section will be mainly concerned with exploring its contents.
Although it is initially in his After Virtue that MacIntyre has argued for the conception of a tradition, it is in his Whose Justice? Which Rationally? which this conception is discussed at greater length. However, our study of this concept will begin from the former book and then will be extended into its fuller version in the latter.
It is important not to confuse from the outset the conception of tradition as argued by MacIntyre with the notion of tradition as understood by conservative political theorists. At least as understood by E. Burke, the latter characteristically contrasts with reason and is used to prevent any conflict and sustain stability. Against such a view (and this itself makes clear the sense in which he uses the term) MacIntyre argues that all reasoning takes place within the context of some traditional mode of thought and when a tradition is in a good order it is always constituted by a conception of the good:
A living tradition then is a historically extended, socially embodied argument and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute the tradition. Within a tradition the pursuit of goods extends through generations, sometimes through many generations. (MacIntyre, 1985, p.272)
In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? MacIntyre’s approach to the conception of a tradition aims to answer an important question one confronts at the end of After Virtue: “How ought we to decide among the claims of rival and incompatible accounts of justice competing for our moral, social, and political allegiance?”(MacIntyre, 1988, p.2) Although to a limited extent, After Virtue makes it clear that instead of the view which dominated philosophical discourse at the time, there is not one line of moral enquiry which has derived and changed throughout the history of philosophy, but rival traditions, each consisting of a conception of the good for the pursuit of which that particular tradition is constituted. An immediate question, therefore, concerns the judgment we have to make in order to choose one rather than another. Here, MacIntyre introduces a more comprehensive version of the concept. He argues that traditions of thought differ from each other not only in the conceptions of the good which they hold, but in their account of what rationality is. Such a claim about rival accounts of rationality undermines fundamentally a possible answer to the above question according to which judgments among rival traditions should be made by appealing to the laws of logic. Accordingly, one tradition may be found logically superior to others. But as MacIntyre notices, observance of the law of logic is only a necessary and not a sufficient condition for theoretical or practical rationality: “It is on what has to be added to observance of the laws of logic to justify ascriptions of rationality- whether to oneself or to others, whether to modes of enquiry or to justifications of belief, or to courses of action and their justification- that disagreement arises concerning the fundamental nature of rationality and extends into disagreement over how it is rationally appropriate to proceed in the face of these disagreements.(Ibid, p.2) The conception of tradition, therefore, is now to be understood in a wider sense.
In order to understand what a tradition of moral enquiry is, it is helpful to study the relationship within traditions. As will be argued, MacIntyre’s account of epistemological crisis plays a key part in this respect. Some of his studies in the history of moral thought will follow this discussion in order to illuminate the argument, though as briefly as necessary. This can be better understood through understanding what MacIntyre calls Epistemological Crisis. To share a culture is to share schemata which are at one and the same time constitutive and normative for intelligible action by one and are also means for his or her interpretations of other actions. Consider now that someone who has been away from his home for a long time returns and finds that his people have changed in his absence. There will arise problems, in that the narrative of his family and of the society he lives in, through which he had identified his own place in society and his relationship to others, has been disrupted by radical interpretative doubts. He finds himself, therefore, in an epistemological crisis. An epistemological crisis, thus, is always a crisis in human relationships. Similarly, [w]hen an epistemological crisis is resolved, it is by the construction of a new narrative which enables the agents to understand both how he or she could intelligibly have held his or her original beliefs and how he or she could have been drastically misled by them. (MacIntyre, 1977, p.455) The agent, however, has to accept two points: first, that these new forms of understanding may themselves in turn come to be put in question; and secondly, that since in such crisis the criticism of truth, intelligibility and rationality may be put in question, “we are never in the position to claim that now we possess the truth or now we are fully rational. (Ibid, p.455)
But how does such a progress towards a better narrative begin? According to MacIntyre, one sign that shows that a tradition is in crisis is that its accustomed ways for relating seems and is begins to break down and, consequently, the pressures of scepticism becomes more urgent and attempts to do the impossible, to refute scepticism once and for all, becomes projects of central importance to the culture and not mere private academic enterprises. (Ibid, p.459) But why has the role of narrative been ignored so widely within philosophical discourse? It is because tradition has usually been taken seriously only by conservative social theorists and such theorists have never attended to the connection between tradition and narrative. What constitutes a tradition is a conflict of interpretations of that tradition and this is in contrast to the conception of tradition as a resolution to rational conflicts for which traditions are used within conservative theories. Thus all kinds of traditions (religious, political and intellectual) involve epistemological debates as a necessary feature of their conflicts. Moreover, “it is not merely that different participants in a tradition disagree; they also disagree as to how to characterize their disagreements and as to how to resolve them. They disagree as to what constitutes appropriate reasoning, decisive evidence, and conclusive proof. (Ibid, 461) Therefore, in contrast to the Aristotelian account of justice and practical rationality according to which particularities play an important role, for instance, the central aspiration of the Enlightenment project was to provide standards and methods of rational justification for debate in the public realm by which courses of action in every sphere of life could be judged just or unjust and rational or irrational:
So, it was hoped, reason would displace authority and tradition. Rational justification was to appeal to principles undeniable by any rational person and therefore independent of all those social and cultural particularities which the Enlightenment thinkers took to be the mere accidental clothing of reason in particular times and places. (MacIntyre, 1988, p.6)
The liberal tradition which has dominated moral and political philosophy since then has taken a similar task. A discussion which had not been advanced by MacIntyre until the publication of Whose Justice? Which Rationality? is that instead of discovering an epistemological ground which is neutral in relation to all the discussions of other traditions and hence able to claim a kind of superiority over rival modes of moral enquiry, liberalism has itself been transformed into a tradition. The liberal claim (at least in its Kantian form) was initially to provide a political, legal and economic framework in which those who hold different and incompatible conceptions of the good life would be able to appeal to neutral standards so they could live altogether in peace: Every individual is to be equally free to propose and to live by whatever conception of the good he or she pleases, derived from whatever theory or tradition he or she may adhere to, unless that conception of the good involves reshaping the life of the rest of the community in accordance with it.(Ibid, p.336) In the public realm, only the expression of preference is permitted, either as an individual or a group, and it is here that the market-based idea of liberalism can be easily observed: whether a particular preference is chosen as the basis of policy-making is a matter for bargaining. It is on the basis of such an idea that central features of the liberal system of evaluation become comprehensible: the principle of neutrality requires that the liberal be committed to there being no one overriding good. What follows from this is that life is compartmentalized into different spheres and, therefore, each individual pursues his or her good within different and distinct groups. The liberal self, then, is one that moves from sphere to sphere, compartmentalising its attitudes. The claims of any one sphere to attention or to resources are once again to be determined by the summing of individual preferences and by bargaining:
So it is important for all areas of human life and not only for explicitly political and economic transactions that there should be acceptable rules of bargaining. And what each individual and each group has to hope for from these rules is that they should be such as to enable that individual or that group to be as effective as possible in implementing his, her, or their preferences. This kind of effectiveness thus becomes a central value of liberal modernity. (Ibid, 337)
The implementation of preferences and desires, however, is not peculiar to liberalism. What makes it distinguishable is that first-person expressions of desired have been transformed into statements of reason for actionon, i.e., into premises for practical reasoning. MacIntyre argues that such a transformation is brought about by a restructuring of thought and action in a way which accords with the procedures of the public realms of the market and of liberal individualist politics. (Ibid, p.339)
According to MacIntyre, the culture of liberalism transforms expressions of opinion into what its political and moral theory had already said that they were, i.e., the deference of rival moral and political standpoints is interpreted within the liberal order as the expression of preferences. Whereas liberalism initially rejected the claims of any overriding theory of the good, in fact it embodies just such a theory because [t]he starting points of liberal theorizing are never neutral as between conceptions of the human good; they are always liberal starting points. (Ibid, p.345)
These examples seem to illustrate sufficiently the conception of tradition of intellectual enquiry. As promised above, we also need to explore MacIntyre’s view of the relationship between traditions which I believe is the part of this section most relevant to our discussion.
We have seen above that in MacIntyre’s view, there are different and incompatible accounts of rationality, each of which results in a different conception of moral issues like virtues and justice. The question which arises, therefore, is whether we are able to evaluate one tradition of moral enquiry against another and if we can, on what ground we are able to do so?
Here, MacIntyre distinguishes between the kind of evaluation with which we are engaged in the comparison of rival and competing claims within one and the same tradition and that of evaluating similar claims when each has developed within two very different and competing traditions. In the first type, what is available is a set of relatively unproblematic standards to which we appeal in making such a comparison. But in the latter, there are accounts of practical reasoning which are developed within very different conceptual frameworks. Here we confront the problem of incommensurability and untranslatability which runs against the very central claim of cosmopolitan modernity which believes that all cultural phenomena must be capable of being translated into the language which the adherents of modernity speak to each other. Moreover, broadly speaking, there are no neutral tradition-independent standards of a rationally justifiable kind to which we can appeal in such evaluative comparison. That is not to say that no independent and neutral standard can be found at all. Rather, what MacIntyre points out is that any attempt to identify some ground for justice independent of the competing traditions requires some feature or features of human moral stance which hold(s) of human beings independently of and apart from those characteristics which belong to them as members of any particular society or cultural tradition. In doing so, the difficulty which arises is that those conceptions of universality and impersonality which survive this kind of abstraction from the concreteness of traditional or even nontraditional conventional modes of moral thought and action are far too thin and meager to supply what is needed. (Ibid, 334) MacIntyre’s position, therefore, is different from an absolute relativist one, since he does not reject the possibility of finding universality altogether. What he believes is that by appealing to such universality, we cannot go far enough in establishing those grounds we are searching for.
His position is also distinct from broad relativism in another way: if two rival moral traditions are able to recognize each other as advancing rival contentions on important issues, they must necessarily share at least some common features. Therefore, while it is possible that there are some incommensurable standards to which each tradition appeals, it is not the only possible kind of relationship: It will thus sometimes at least be possible for adherents of each tradition to understand and to evaluate- by their own standards- the characterizations of their positions advanced by their rivals.
What such a conception of tradition of moral enquiry and such a description of the relationship within and between traditions can offer for a politics of cultural diversity, however, can be worked out only after exploring MacIntyre’s conception of culture.
We observed what a conception of tradition for MacIntyre is, and we saw how traditions of moral enquiry are related to each other. In this section I am going to explore the notion of culture in MacIntyre’s thought. In particular I am interested in the relationship between cultures and traditions. My thesis is that the problem of the politics of cultural diversity is best formulated if cultures, or, to be more precise, those features of cultures which are of political significance in respect to the problem of cultural diversity, can be conceived as traditions of moral enquiry. That is to say, as far as the political decision-making process is concerned, the differences between cultural communities are not to be understood as difference between cultures as such, but between cultures as the contexts and resources of traditions of moral enquiry.
We need first to explain the concept of culture as perceived by MacIntyre. In order to do so, we may use his discussion on the five characteristics of the conception of morality in the culture of the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannia, of which Adam Gilford was a prominent member. The first is that in that culture, morality was a distinct and relatively autonomous area of beliefs ordered with a scheme of rigid compartmentalisation of life. The moral, therefore, was sharply distinct from the economic, the religious, the legal, and the like. Secondly, morality was primarily a matter of rule-following and ritualised responses to breaches of rules. Thirdly, these rules were chiefly negative prohibitions. Fourthly, it was a culture in which strong notions of impropriety attached to violations of the compartmentalizing boundaries of social life. To know what conversation, what manners, what clothing was appropriate and proper to whom, where, and when was indispensable social and moral knowledge.(MacIntyre, 1990, p.26) Fifthly, social agreement, especially in practice and on what morality was and what it consists of, coexisted with intellectual disagreements on the nature of its rational justifications. MacIntyre concludes that moral philosophies always articulate the morality of some particular social and cultural standpoints.
This dependence of morality and moral philosophy is in important parts derived from the role of characters. For MacIntyre, characters are a very special type of social role which places a certain kind of moral constraint on the personality of those who inhabit them in a way in which many other social roles do not because [t]hey furnish recognizable characters and the ability to recognize them is socially crucial because a knowledge of the character provides an interpretation of the actions of those individuals who have assumed the character. (MacIntyre, 1986, p.27) A character is an object of regard by the members of the culture generally or by some significant segment of them. (Ibid, p.28) Characters, therefore, are certain kinds of social role specific to particular cultures. Thus:
One of the key differences between cultures is the extent to which roles are characters; but what is specific to each culture is in large and central part what is specific to its stock of characters. So the culture of Victorian England was partially defined by the characters of the Public School Headmaster, the Explorer and the Engineer; and that of Wilhelmine Germany was similarly defined by such characters as those of the Prussian Officer, the Professor and the Social Democrat. (Ibid, p.28)
In MacIntyre’s view, modern moral philosophy (and liberalism as its political ideology) fails to understand the relation between the self and the community. We have seen also that his virtue-based critique of liberal individualism argues that the liberal tradition falls short in providing our lives with an essential structure, continuity and moral coherence. In order to remedy such failures, MacIntyre appeals to an essentially Aristotelian theory and elucidates a unitary core of the virtues through his accounts of practices, the narrative order of a human life and traditions of moral enquiry.
It is on the basis of such an understanding that he criticises the form of existing universities and suggests that universities should be places where conceptions of and standards of rational justification are elaborated, put to work in the detailed practices of enquiry, and themselves rationally evaluated, so that only from the university can the wider society learn how to conduct its own debates, practical or theoretical, in a rationally defensible way. (MacIntyre, 1990, p.222) This, of course, requires fundamental changes in universities because “that claim itself can be plausibly and justifiably advanced only when and insofar as the university is a place where rival and antagonistic views of rational justification, such as those of genealogists and Thomists, are afforded the opportunity both to develop their own enquiries, in practice and in the articulation of the theory of that practice, and to conduct their intellectual and moral warfare.(Ibid, p.222)
Different cultures, therefore, pursue the realization of different traditions of moral enquiries which in turn rely on different rationalities. The important point to be drawn here is that viewed as such, no culture can claim superiority over others as being, for instance, more rational. There are significant implications of this point that lead us to a critical re-evaluation of the concept of the modern state, its nature and its functions. I shall discuss this implication below, though very briefly.
4. Conclusions
So far I have tried to provide an outline of multiculturalism, a social and intellectual movement which has been developed within the American society during the last two decades or so. Critical arguments raised by multiculturalists, as shown above, are mainly concerned with commitments to cultural diversity; the significance of cultural identity; the Euro- and Ethno- centrism of the academia, curricula, and knowledge in general, especially in Humanities, Social Sciences and the Arts; and the discriminatory nature of the male-oriented white middle class culture which has dominated and shaped cultural, social and political institutions in the United States for a long time.
We have also examined the conservative and liberal perspectives on the matter. As mentioned above, in their criticism on multiculturalism, both traditions appeal to a kind of rationality which is conceived as enjoying superiority and universality over other traditions and cultures.
In order to provide a better understanding of the existing differences between cultures, I employed MacIntyre’s the account of traditions of moral enquiry. Accordingly, when confronting different cultures, the question is not whether our own culture is more rational and the other’s less rational or irrational. Rather, we are confronted with different traditions of moral enquiry, each provided by a particular account of rationality.
This account, as noted in passing, has important implications which may challenge our understanding of the modern state and invites for serious re-evaluation of its functions. For sure, the appeal to a monoculturalist concept in policy-making processes and an illusionary dichotomy between rational vs. irrational ways of life is no longer plausible.
* Senior Lecturer, Department of Political Science, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran
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