The Diversity Illusion by West Ed

Author:West, Ed [West, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Immigration
Publisher: Gibson Square
Published: 2013-03-11T13:00:00+00:00

8

Multiculturalism

The liberal response to diversity

Just as Rushdie said, the new empire was built, with the British state adapting to its new colonial population just as it did the old one.

For the problems raised by importing new subject peoples, a solution came in the form of multiculturalism, a policy that can be traced back to Home Secretary Roy Jenkins’s hailing, in 1966, of a new era of ‘cultural diversity, coupled with equal opportunity in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance’.

Few political ideas of recent years have enjoyed such a meteoritic rise and fall as multiculturalism, so that today many liberals argue that it has been a failure, although what they mean by this term is not always clear. While ‘soft multiculturalism’ refers simply to cultural interaction, which most of us agree is generally a positive thing, multiculturalism can also refer to the idea that a society filled with diverse cultural, ethnic and racial groups is in itself a good, so that multicultural becomes just another word for multiracial. Most commonly, however, it is used to describe ‘hard multiculturalism’, the specific government policy that each culture should be valued equally, and that ‘white’ British culture should not be supreme. Multiculturalism as a policy was, in effect, the application of anti-racist doctrine to run a multi-ethnic society.

On a practical level the policy of dealing with minorities through unelected appointees within that community followed the system employed in previous diverse societies, such as the Ottoman Empire, and in the British Raj in India. But the philosophical idea behind it, that each culture must be equally valuable, was novel, and heavily influenced by the cultural relativism of the early 20th century, pioneered by the likes of German-American anthropologist Franz Boas. It was on a trip to the Arctic to study the Inuit that Boas concluded with these influential words: ‘I often ask myself what advantages our “good society” possesses over that of the “savages”. The more I see of their customs the more I realise we have no right to look down on them… As a thinking person, for me the most important result of this trip lies in the strengthening of my point of view that the idea of a ‘cultured’ person is merely relative.’ That the Inuit strangled their elderly did not strike this thinking person as being less cultured, presumably.

The common view among European progressives had been that progress was attainable for all, and that there was such a thing as progress. Eighteenth-century French philosopher Denis Diderot suggested that people were less developed because of the climate and environment, and that habits ‘are not African or Asiatic or European. They are good or bad.’ He believed that ‘everywhere a people should be educated, free and virtuous’. Diderot drew a distinction between people and culture – people were potentially equal but cultural forms were not. This made him one of the forefathers of liberalism, yet today many would see that statement as offensively racist, because it accepts that European norms are superior. Boas, in

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