Author: Ophelia Benson

How did everything get turned around?

Today, to criticise multiculturalism, one is invariably derided as ‘right wing’ or ‘reactionary’. Conversely, to champion multiculturalism, one is invariably perceived as ‘progressive’ or ‘of the left’. But it should be, and historically it has been, the other way around. Multiculturalism represents the antithesis of the Enlightenment principle of colour-blindness and the notion of the universality of humankind – while the fetishisation of ethnic particularism is a quintessentially Tory ideal. The liberal-left’s love affair with multiculturalism today is a betrayal of what it used to stand for.

That’s for sure. That realization is starting to trickle through, but dang it’s taking a long time. Hurry up, folks! Get a clue. The fetishization of ethnic or religious or cultural particularism is an idea whose time has gone. Kiss it good bye. Get with the program.

Salman Rushdie says it.

In Europe, integration has been held up as a bad word by multiculturalists, but I don’t see any necessary conflict. After all, we don’t want to create countries of little apartheids. No enlightenment will come from multicultural appeasement.

Maryam Namazie says it.

Though political religion is facing a revival, it is the political Islamic movement which is spearheading this. And this rise is taking place within a new world order in which universal norms and values taken for granted only decades ago can no longer be taken so. In this climate of cultural relativism, Islamists and their apologists have perfected the use of rights language to dupe and silence any opposition.

Simon Blackburn says it.

And as far as
toasting some particular subset of humanity goes, I also wish people were not keen on
separating themselves from others, keen on difference and symbols of tribalism. I don’t
warm to badges of allegiance, flags, ostentatious signs of apartness, because I do not
think they are good for the world. I am glad that the word “race” has lost most of its
reputation recently, and I would rather like the word “culture”, as it occurs in phrases like
“cultural diversity,” to follow it. More moderately, we might keep it, but also keep a
beady eye on it. When people do things differently, sometimes it is fine, but sometimes it
is not.

And Patrick West discusses it in detail in the Spiked piece.

Multiculturalism in subsequent years has acted only to divide the population into groupsicles of competing ethnicities who feel they have nothing in common with each other…In an article in the liberal monthly, Prospect, in December 2000, Alan Wolfe and Jytte Klausen argued: ‘Solidarity and diversity are both desirable objectives. Unfortunately, they can also conflict…But it is easier to feel solidarity with those who broadly share your values and way of life. Modern progressives committed to diversity often fail to acknowledge this.’ Diversity and solidarity, both sound bites of the Left, can be mutually antagonistic.

As can democracy and freedom, or democracy and rights, and for much the same reasons. It’s as well to keep that strongly in mind – to keep ‘a beady eye on it’ – when flinging around the usual rhetoric about democracyandhumanrights or democracyandfreedom, which tend to sound as if they are inextricably linked and that the one entails the other, when in reality they can fight each other, and one of them can lose the fight.

It is peculiar that many who are the inheritors of the secular, rational Enlightenment tradition, and who call themselves progressives, are not only apologists for ethnic separateness, but – under the ostensible banner of respecting diversity – defend organised religion and irrationalism. When Luton schoolgirl Shabina Begum lost her High Court battle to wear strict Islamic dress to school in June 2004, some left-leaning commentators decried this as racist and oppressive.

Peculiar indeed. I remember some left-leaning commentators who resorted to patronizing sexist rhetoric about me when I had the gall to keep pointing out that a lot of French Muslim and Muslim-background women were in favour of the hijab ban in schools. The things that come oozing out of the woodwork can be very surprising – as Nick Cohen notes in the New Statesman.

Her cheery note ended with a warning: “You’re not going to believe the anti-Semitism that is about to hit you.” “Don’t be silly, Ann,” I replied. “There’s no racism on the left.” I worked my way through the rest of the e-mails. I couldn’t believe the anti-Semitism that hit me. I learned it was one thing being called “Cohen” if you went along with liberal orthodoxy, quite another when you pointed out liberal betrayals. Your argument could not be debated on its merits. There had to be a malign motive. You had to support Ariel Sharon.

So it goes. Anti-Semitism, sexist epithets, patronizing anti-intellectual speculation about boredom or money-love – whatever tool comes to hand.

As Stephen Eric Bronner laments in Reclaiming the Enlightenment (2004), this is the symptom of a deeper corruption of the Left. Under the spell of relativist postmodernist theory, and despairing of the failure of the Socialist experiments of the twentieth century, erstwhile progressives have sought intellectual refuge in identity politics. They have come to resemble the conservatives of old. Todd Gitlin notes this in The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars.

Yes he does. I’ve recommended that book to quite a few inquiring minds.

In academia, there are relatively few voices of the Left still championing reason, such as Noam Chomsky; Brian Barry, author of Culture and Equality (2001); Stephen Eric Bronner; Richard Wolin, author of The Seduction of Unreason (2004); and the late Susan Moller Okin, whose Is Multiculturalism Bad For Women? (1999), gave the answer ‘yes’ to its title. When Okin concluded that gender equality was impossible to achieve among societies that practice polygamy, forced marriage or female genital mutilation, she faced the accusation of being dogmatically attached to Western liberalism.

Well…we’re working on that (those of us who are), and the dam is beginning to break. Witness all those citations. So just keep chipping away at the dam…

Maryam won! Maryam Namazie is Secularist of the Year. Ya-hoooooo. Sorry to be so American, but I’m really really pleased. As a matter of fact, I’m also damn smug. Here I’ve been publishing her articles like mad all this time, which I haven’t noticed the Guardian or the Independent bothering to do. Well? Well??! Wouldn’t you be smug? Wouldn’t you? Who has the better judgment? Eh? Eh? Which would you rather have published – Dilpazier Aslam, or Maryam Namazie?

Well maybe now they’ll start publishing her. Maybe this will be the push they need. Kenan Malik said, you know. Remember that? In the Guardian (she said pointedly). All the way back in January.

It also creates a climate of censorship in which any criticism of Islam can be dismissed as Islamophobic. The people who suffer most from such censorship are those struggling to defend basic rights within Muslim communities. Marayam Namazie is an Iranian refugee who has long campaigned for women’s rights and against Islamic repression. As a result she has been condemned as an Islamophobe, even by anti-racist organisations. “On the one hand,” she says, “you are threatened by the political Islamic movement with assassination or imprisonment or flogging. And on the other you have so-called progressive people who tell you that what you say in defence of humanity, in defence of equal rights for all, is racist. I think it’s nothing short of an outrage.”

I don’t see anything about the award in the papers yet (Maryam told me herself, and Azar Majedi sent a congratulatory message), so I’ll just link to this for now. It wouldn’t do for people not to know.

Some more on that terrific Simon Blackburn article ‘Religion and Respect’. So much of it is so exactly what I think myself, and have been saying here with tedious iteration – naturally I think it’s terrific. But it is, all the same.

But, I argued to myself, why should I
“respect” belief systems that I do not share? I would not be expected to respect the beliefs
of flat earthers or those of the people who believed that the Hale-Bopp comet was a recycling facility for dead Californians, and killed themselves in order to join it. Had my
host stood up and asked me to toast the Hale-Bopp hopefuls, or to break bread or some
such in token of fellowship with them, I would have been just as embarrassed and indeed
angry.

Just so. We’re expected (all but coerced, at times) to ‘respect’ some beliefs, but not others.

‘Respect’, of course is a tricky term…The word seems to span a spectrum from simply not interfering, passing by on
the other side, through admiration, right up to reverence and deference. This makes it
uniquely well-placed for ideological purposes.

Exactly. As do words like faith, and community, and spiritual – words that span a spectrum and mean different things for different purposes. It is necessary to be always, permanently, without fail, tirelessly vigilant about and attentive to words like that. They have designs on us (which is to say, people who resort to them have designs on us). It is essential to foil their knavish tricks.

People may start out by insisting on
respect in the minimal sense, and in a generally liberal world they may not find it too
difficult to obtain it. But then what we might call respect creep sets in, where the request
for minimal toleration turns into a demand for more substantial respect, such as fellowfeeling,
or esteem, and finally deference and reverence.

Bingo. Respect creep – that’s exactly it. (And come to think of it, it also makes a nice nickname for Galloway – but that’s another story.) There’s a huge difference between respect in the sense of leave me alone, and respect in the sense of see me and my beliefs as special and devout and good and superior. The first does not entail the second. Crucial point.

In postmodernist writings on religion, it is the done thing to distinguish between
theology and ‘onto-theology’, or religion and ‘onto-religion’. Onto-theology makes
existence claims. It takes religious language in the same spirit in which people calling
themselves scientific realists take science. It makes claims about what exists, and these
claims are more or less reasonable and convincing, and when they are true they point to
explanation of the way things are in one respect or another…In more sophisticated circles, onto-theology is old hat. Instead we should see
religion in the light of poetry, symbol, myth, practice, emotion and attitude, or in general
a stance towards the ordinary world, the everyday world around us…

Yes. We’ve seen that ‘sophisticated’ line more than once. I’ve been known to call it harsh names. In fact, amusingly, I made a note while reading page 11 that I would put it more strongly than SB does: I would call it a cheat. On page 15, SB does exactly that, which made me laugh a good deal. Snap!

But equally perhaps ‘God exists’ functions largely as a license to demand respect
creep. It turns up an amplifier, and what it amplifies is often the meanest and most
miserable side of human nature. I want your land, and it enables me to throw bigger and
better tantrums, ones that you just have to listen to, if I find myself saying that God wants
me to want your land. A tribe wants to enforce the chastity of its women, and the words
of the supernatural work to terrify them into compliance.

Brilliant image. Tantrum-amplifier, threat-amplifier, enforcement-amplifier.

I think
that the ontological imaginings do their work at a slightly different place. They work to
close off questions and doubts, and in effect to fend off reason. They cement a particular
way of associating ‘ought’ and ‘is’ and insulate it from criticism…By closing its eyes to this bit, expressive
theology in fact repudiates everything that makes religious language the power that it is.

Yet again – just so. But you’re going to get tired of reading me saying ‘Exactly,’ so I’ll stop. That’s only a fraction of the ‘exactly’s in the article. I give it my personal secular award for today.