Author: Ophelia Benson

More on Sen on multiculturalism. It’s a terrific article; don’t miss it.

Being born in a particular social background is not in itself an exercise of cultural liberty, since it is not an act of choice. In contrast, the decision to stay firmly within the traditional mode would be an exercise of freedom, if the choice were made after considering other altenatives. In the same way, a decision to move away – by a little or a lot – from the standard behavior pattern, arrived at after reflection and reasoning, would also qualify as such an exercise. Indeed, cultural freedom can frequently clash with cultural conservatism, and if multiculturalism is defended in the name of cultural freedom, then it can hardly be seen as demanding unwavering and unqualified support for staying steadfastly within one’s inherited cultural tradition.

No, it can’t – but in practice multiculturalism is defended sometimes in the name of cultural freedom, but other times in the name of other things – anti-racism, or identity, or authenticity, or (undefined) diversity, or all those patched together as needed. So these terrible stultifying confining effects are overlooked, as so often happens when definitions change at convenience. That’s the work definition-changing does – it promotes confusion in the service of obscuring important problems.

there is another momentous issue here, which concerns the role of religion in categorizing people, rather than other bases of classification. People’s priorities and actions are influenced by all of their affiliations and associations, not merely by religion. The separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan was based on reasons of language and literature, along with political priorities, and not on religion, which both wings of undivided Pakistan shared. To ignore everything other than faith is to obliterate the reality of concerns that have moved people to assert identities that go well beyond religion.

Exactly. That is exactly why all this ‘the Muslim community’ crap drives me straight up the wall – it simply assumes that all Muslims (and even ex-Muslims) are Muslims before they are anything else, and that’s an absurd thing to assume. It’s not respectful or sensitive, it’s confining and coercive – it seals off all the exits.

The people of the world cannot be seen merely in terms of their religious affiliations – as a global federation of religions. For much the same reasons, a multi-ethnic Britain can hardly be seen as a collection of ethnic communities. Yet the “federational” view has gained much support in contemporary Britain. Indeed, despite the tyrannical implications of putting persons into rigid boxes of given “communities,” that view is frequently interpreted, rather bafflingly, as an ally of individual freedom.

Guardian please note; Madeleine Bunting please note; BBC producers who keep booking Iqbal Sacranie to speak for ‘the Muslim community’ please note.

But must a person’s relation to Britain be mediated through the culture of the family in which he or she was born? A person may decide to seek closeness with more than one of these pre-defined cultures or, just as plausibly, with none. Also, a person may well decide that her ethnic or cultural identity is less important to her than, say, her political convictions, or her professional commitments, or her literary persuasions. It is a choice for her to make, no matter what her place is in the strangely imagined “federation of cultures.” There would be serious problems with the moral and social claims of multiculturalism if it were taken to insist that a person’s identity must be defined by his or her community or religion, overlooking all the other affiliations a person has, and giving automatic priority to inherited religion or tradition over reflection and choice. And yet that approach to multiculturalism has assumed a pre-eminent role in some of the official British policies in recent years.

Home Office please note; student unions please note; everyone everywhere please note.

Amartya Sen on multiculturalism. Right at the beginning – in the second paragraph – he asks the questions that seem so obviously necessary to ask, but that seem completely ignored in the way that people generally talk (or prate, or babble, or rave) about multiculturalism. As Sen remarks, ‘There is no way of escaping these rather foundational questions if multiculturalism is to be fairly assessed.’ Just so, which is why it so seldom is fairly assessed, why it is instead simply assumed to be a good even without precise specification of what it means.

One of the central issues concerns how human beings are seen. Should they be categorized in terms of inherited traditions, particularly the inherited religion, of the community in which they happen to have been born, taking that unchosen identity to have automatic priority over other affiliations involving politics, profession, class, gender, language, literature, social involvements, and many other connections? Or should they be understood as persons with many affiliations and associations, whose relative priorities they must themselves choose (taking the responsibility that comes with reasoned choice)?

See – that is so basic, and so important, and yet it is so widely ignored or obscured, with the result that people (certain people, and not others) are incessantly pressured to put their unchosen identity first and put the chosen ones way, way behind the first. And this is taken to be, assumed to be, kind and caring and progressive, when in most ways, frankly, it is the opposite.

Why isn’t this more widely appreciated? I always wonder. I can see why multicultural identity politics seem at first blush like a good way to resist racism, but I have trouble seeing why the terrible coercion and confinement of them don’t become apparent with a little further thought. You wouldn’t think it would need much further thought. We know it of ourselves, I think – that we don’t want to be permanently stuck doing whatever it is that our ancestors had always done, that we don’t want to be obsessed with our religious backgrounds, that we do want to be able to choose and decide for ourselves what interests us most, what is salient to us, what keeps us energized and motivated. If we do know that of ourselves, why do we not know it of other people?

I will argue that the real issue is not whether “multiculturalism has gone too far”…but what particular form multiculturalism should take. Is multiculturalism nothing other than tolerance of the diversity of cultures? Does it make a difference who chooses the cultural practices – whether they are imposed on young children in the name of “the culture of the community” or whether they are freely chosen by persons with adequate opportunity to learn and to reason about alternatives?

Yes. It makes a huge difference. Huge. We know that for ourselves, don’t we? Practices that are imposed are imposed, and we want the freedom to reject them if we think good. If we want that freedom for ourselves, are we really sure we have good reasons for not wanting it for other people? Can we articulate them? What – immigrants, because they are subject to racism and hostility, shouldn’t be free to reject cultural practices that were imposed on them in childhood? That seems like a harsh remedy, and also one that’s not likely to work all that well.

The vocal defense of multiculturalism that we frequently hear these days is very often nothing more than a plea for plural monoculturalism. If a young girl in a conservative immigrant family wants to go out on a date with an English boy, that would certainly be a multicultural initiative. In contrast, the attempt by her guardians to stop her from doing this (a common enough occurrence) is hardly a multicultural move, since it seeks to keep the cultures separate. And yet it is the parents’ prohibition, which contributes to plural monoculturalism, that seems to garner the loudest and most vocal defense from alleged multiculturalists, on the ground of the importance of honoring traditional cultures – as if the cultural freedom of the young woman were of no relevance whatever, and as if the distinct cultures must somehow remain in secluded boxes.

Exactly. Those secluded boxes. We don’t want to live in secluded boxes ourselves, do we – so we should think long and hard, and then think some more, before shoving other people into them.

This is a surprising news item.

Michael Ruse and Daniel Dennett are two of the most prominent philosophers writing about issues related to evolution. It seems they have been engaging in a bit of e-mail correspondence on the side. How do I know this? Because Ruse inexplicably sent the entire correspondence to William Dembski. I say this is inexplicable because there is no indication that Dennett consented to have his private e-mails made public. For Ruse to make public e-mails that were intended as part of a private correpsondence is an incredible breach of professional ethics.

Especially since, as you discover if you look at the correspondence, it was Ruse who initiated it. So – he asked Dennett a leading question, got an expected answer, retorted unpleasantly, got a brief polite ‘think again’ reply – and sent the whole thing off to Dembski?! That sounds almost like a set-up. How very strange – especially since it’s so public.

Close (not to say fanatical) readers of B&W may remember that I’ve done quite a few N&Cs disagreeing with things Ruse has said in interviews and articles – ten of them, in fact, along with one by Jeremy, so many that I did an In Focus to put them all in one place along with those articles and interviews. The first N&C is more than two years old – Ruse has been saying odd things for quite awhile.

I feel somewhat vindicated in all this disagreeing now. (Besides, there was that time my disagreements with Ruse and with Dylan Evans seemed to have inspired Salman Rushdie to talk about them in an article in the Star, which was interesting.) It’s not just my imagination that Ruse has taken an odd path. Dennett says as much in his letter to the Times.

The suggestion by Michael Ruse that this activity of extending the reach of science is tantamount to turning science into a religion is a transparent example of a well-known cheap trick: when you don’t like the implications of some science, and can’t think of any proper scientific refutation, call it ideology – then you don’t have to take it seriously!

It is a very, very, very familiar, stale trick – a variant of the ‘atheism is religion’ trick. And at least in the articles and interviews I’ve seen, Ruse doesn’t back it up convincingly. So now he resorts to sending his correspondence with other people to William Dembski – not a terribly impressive move.

Ah. Someone finally points it out.

The notion of free speech, at its best, speaks to freedom of conscience – the idea that there’s no opinion or worldview whose expression should be proscribed. But it is ever more subject to be hijacked by the muddy notion that it protects all statements aspiring to the status of fact – be they truthfully believed or cynically falsified. Should we, necessarily, protect the statement “nobody died at Belsen”, any more than we regard as free speech a false claim in an advertisement for a vitamin supplement? I’m not sure.

Precisely. Neither am I. Furthermore, I am pretty sure that it’s not helpful to ignore that aspect of the issue when discussing the free speech problem. Irving doesn’t just have an opinion or a belief about the Holocaust, he also falsified the evidence. Should falsification of evidence be protected free speech? In certain situations it emphatically isn’t; in others it’s not approved but it’s also not subject to imprisonment. But either way it’s more than mere opinion. (Truth matters.)

Here it is again.

A virulently anti-Semitic film about the Iraq war has provoked a storm of protest in Germany after it sold out to cheering audiences from the country’s 2.5 million-strong Turkish community.

The Turkish community – as if they all live together in a rather large and crowded village somewhere. How much does this insistence on ‘the ___ community’ foster audiences that cheer anti-Semitic movies, one wonders. Talk of ‘the community’ and celebration of Hate Week are cheek by jowl.

At a packed cinema in a largely Turkish immigrant district of Berlin last week, Valley of the Wolves was being watched almost exclusively by young Turkish men.

So – yet again, as with the riots in the banlieues, as with 7/7, as with so many things, we’re not actually talking about ‘the community’ at all, we’re talking about a very specific fraction of it, which cannot be taken to represent the rest of it – which is more likely to bully and oppress at least half of the rest of it than it is to represent it. Young men represent young men, especially when they have grown up in religions that teach and mandate the inferiority and subordination of women. So blithering about ‘the community’ is doubly inaccurate, and also damaging. (If the audiences consisted almost exclusively of Turkish women, would they be referred to as ‘from the country’s 2.5 million-strong Turkish community’? I can’t be sure, but I have a feeling they wouldn’t – I have a feeling they’d be seen as a special case. But if they are, men are. It is not true that men can speak for everyone while women can speak only for women – but too many people still seem to think it is true.)

Kenan Kolat, the head of Germany’s Turkish community, insisted that a ban on the film would make matters worse.

The head of Germany’s Turkish community? It has a head? Is he elected? What is his title? Is everyone able to vote for him? Or is he ‘the head’ in the same way that Iqbal Sacranie is ‘the head’ of the UK’s ‘Muslim community’ – to wit, no way at all except anointment by mass media.

And of course there’s the obligatory confusion to sum up.

Alin Sahin, the film’s distributor in Germany, argued: “When a cartoonist insults two billion Muslims it is considered freedom of opinion, but when an action film takes on the Americans it is considered demagoguery. Something is wrong.”

Yes, something is wrong; the comparison of unlike things is wrong. Mocking a belief is not the same thing as insulting the people (two billion now?) who hold the belief. Demanding that everyone accept that it is will be the death of thought – and in no long time, too.