WHAT DOES MULTICULTURALISM HAVE TO DO WITH CULTURE?
Andrej Keba
I.
This paper will be concerned with locating the place for culture in the multiculturalist argument, and examining the viability of the employed concept of culture both from a conceptual and from a practical standpoint. It will consist of two parts: the first discussing the worth of culture in defences of cultural recognition, and the second dealing with two critiques levelled at culture-centred policies, the anti-essentialist and the anti-paternalist one. These threads will converge on the point that we should look into ways of moving away from culture in multiculturalism, due to the lack of a self-contained argument for upholding it and its undesirable practical implications.
II.
There are, broadly speaking, two distinct moves common to all types of multiculturalist argument. The first one consists in claiming that cultural attachments deserve public attention, for reasons which have to do either with their moral worth or their contribution to the well-being of individuals who maintain them. The second points to inequalities in access to cultural resources, which legitimate policies of cultural expression and preservation. In locating the place for culture we are interested in the former line or argument.
A full-fledged defence of multiculturalism must incorporate a convincing and workable definition of culture. It is worth mentioning, however, that when trying to define ‘culture’, how it influences the lives of individuals, how it builds systems of meaning and underlies most social institutions, we are moving away from the proper domain of moral philosophy and normative political theory. Anthropology, to some extent social psychology and even sociology, usually, and rightfully so, lay claim to explaining best the empirically observable relations of meaning and attachment contained in the concept of ‘culture’. Differences between the political theorist’s and social scientist’s approach – to cultural and other matters – do not stop at methodology and richness of account; the latter’s qualifications are intended to filter out any judgements about the goodness or badness of what is explored, contrary to the instincts of a normative theorist. Hence the descriptive, value-free anthropological definitions of culture. Interestingly given their pretensions to prescribe the morally desirable policies, almost all multiculturalist theorists accept similarly descriptive definitions of culture which do not incorporate claims about the latter's moral status. Bhikhu Parekh writes:
Culture is a historically created system of meaning and significance or, what comes to the same thing, a system of beliefs and practices in terms of which a group of human beings understand, regulate and structure their individual and collective lives. It is a way of both understanding and organizing human life.[1]
For Will Kymlicka, culture “provides its members with meaningful ways of life across the full range of human activities, including social, educational, religious, recreational, and economic life, encompassing both public and private spheres. These cultures tend to be territorially concentrated, and based on a shared language.”[2]
Kymlicka, Parekh and other normative theorists almost without exception treat the fact of culture as a brute fact, not in itself a morally relevant fact. This is an important feature of their approaches, one precluding them to take the most direct route from ‘culture’ to multiculturalist practices, which is to argue that cultural ties have some sort of independent moral standing calling for public protection. This would be to say that there is something intrinsically good, or desirable, or rightful, or commendable about the way in which we feel close to other members of our cultural community, or about the existence of cultural communities in the first place. However, the fact that these views are at odds with the widely accepted principles of individualism and ethical universalism renders them unattractive for most political theorists, at least for those of liberal convictions. The idea of non-derivative moral worth of cultures or cultural communities can, moreover, be harshly criticized on the grounds of its questionable coherence, which is why even authors from non-liberal ranks rarely unambiguously defend arguments of this sort. In light of the multiculturalists’ hesitation to counter liberal neutrality with more radical ethical arguments, Brian Barry is right to maintain that the statement ‘It’s a part of my culture’ cannot serve as an independent justification of an action if we mean to engage in moral discourse[3].
From what has been said it follows that proponents of multiculturalism must rely in grounding their moral case on linking culture to bearers of intrinsic moral worth – moral persons, commonly thought to be individuals. The ethical principle which can yield such a moral argument is that of respect for persons. If we naturally generalize the special value we attribute to ourselves because of the unique capacities and achievements which separate us from mere passive objects, we arrive at the principle that this kind of esteem is owed to all persons. This groundwork postulate of Kantian ethics is nowadays almost unequivocally accepted, with a number of differing specifications of what this respect entails. One of the most influential interpretations is John Rawls’ argument that respect for personhood and justice implicates an obligation on the part of the society to provide individuals with social bases for self-respect[4]. From here multiculturalists go on to single out two ways in which cultural membership connects to individuals’ self-respect: first, cultural attachments are an important constituent of their identities, and second, cultural embededness contributes to their well-being. The argument we are concerned with, hence, states that if we have reasons to respect personhood, or value self-respect, then we must also promote those identifications which equip individuals for pursuing their conceptions of the good life and shape them as the persons that they are. But let us now look into the said justifications of cultural practices from the perspective of self-respect, for it is on this point that the whole argument stands or falls[5].
It is sometimes said that cultural belonging has functional value. Will Kymlicka’s attempt to show that cultural ties should be preserved because they provide persons with the indispensable context for autonomous choices[6] has been much-criticized because of its obvious bias towards a particular, liberal understanding of the good life. Theorists as diverse as Chandran Kukathas and Bhikhu Parekh have pointed out that there is nothing intrinsically valuable about autonomy unless one is a liberal, and that, in fact, a significant – if not the greater – portion of the world’s population adheres to non-liberal values and should not be deplored for doing so. Furthermore, minority groups seeking recognition most often do not even appeal to the value of autonomy to ground their claims. Margalit and Raz stress the gains from cultural membership which are not autonomy-enabling:
[M]embership of such groups is of great importance to individual well-being, for it greatly affects one’s opportunities, one’s ability to engage in the relationships and pursuits marked by the culture. Secondly, it means that the prosperity of the culture is important to the well-being of its members. If the culture is decaying, or if it is persecuted or discriminated against, the options and opportunities open to its members will shrink, become less attractive and their pursuit less likely to be successful.[7]
However, even this move is unsuccessful because it does not legitimate holding on to one’s own culture but to any culture, since all are in principle capable of contributing to persons’ well-being. The implication that it might be legitimate to ask of a minority community to wholly assimilate into the way of life of the majority culture because of the anticipated benefits must seem quite unacceptable to the multiculturalist.
Most multiculturalist authors think that there is more to cultural belonging than functional benefits. In a representative passage Parekh writes: “Human beings are born with a cluster of species-derived capacities and tendencies and are gradually transformed by their culture into rational and moral persons. Culture catches them at a highly impressionable and pliant stage and structures their personality.”[8] In his words, individual’s personality is given content, or identity, by cultural forces[9]. It is questionable whether culture actually determines our most basic evaluations and attitudes in such a strong way, but it can be said that it influences individual identity in at least two ways. Firstly, one’s central personal traits necessarily bear the cultural mark because they are formed in a particular medium of meaning and significance. And secondly, when an individual takes on the difficult task of articulating what matters to her the most, which aspects of her identity are too well-entrenched to be given up, it is not a view from nowhere but from some cultural standpoint. To sum up, one normally adopts certain culture-specific traits because of cultural exposure in the formative period of one’s life, which are only reinforced by interpretation conducted in the linguistic and ethical code of that same culture. This point seems plausible enough to convince us of the ethical status of culture, for the degree of social esteem and recognition accorded to identity-shaping culture has a direct bearing on one’s sense of self-respect. Having reached this point, it is a good time to make a conclusion about the place of culture in the multiculturalist argument. Its moral worth is not intrinsic but related to that of the individual, who is entitled to social bases of self-respect. We properly connect self-respect with culture not because the latter contributes to individuals’ well-being but because it shapes their central identity-traits. What admits culture into the ethical picture is, hence, its role in identity-formation.
III.
The concept of culture has been harshly criticized from the feminist and deconstructionist camps for its essentialist tendencies. ‘Essentialism’ is a term that is very frequently found in writings by authors of these orientations; so frequently, in fact, that it seems that the mere mention of essentialism next to the name of a theory or a policy is sufficient to discredit the latter entirely. Despite some notable exceptions[10], deconstructionists and feminists alike equate ‘essentialism’ in any form with ‘oppression’ and denial of diversity, and this line of criticism seems very applicable to the prevalent accounts of culture.
Diana Fuss defines essentialism, the philosophical position which has pervaded metaphysical thinking since Aristotle, as ‘a belief in true essence – that which is most irreducible, unchanging, and therefore constitutive of a given person or thing’[11]. On the one hand this belief manifests itself in holding, to put matters quite simply, that a person or thing cannot be what, or who, it is if there is not something that makes it what it is[12]. For Locke, thus, the essence of a triangle is that it has three sides – a shape is a triangle and not, say, a circle if and because it has the essential characteristic of three-sidedness. If a geometrical shape lacks the essential defining property of three-sidedness it cannot be deemed a triangle; by extension, a shape that has no essential characteristics whatsoever does not exist as a shape at all. A thing can be individuated and identified as a separate, existing entity only on the basis of its possession of some property or properties that necessarily and exclusively belong to this thing or its class of things, as opposed to the essential properties of other things. Therefore, it seems that our thinking of something presupposes that this something has an essence – what it is to be that thing and not something else or nothing at all – that provides the basis for its individuation.
This one aspect of essentialism does not seem all that objectionable. Critics of essentialism must acknowledge that it would be absurd to push their points to the point where all generalizations are impossible and our concepts disintegrate[13]. There must be something about the Western culture of advanced capitalism that makes it distinguishable from all other cultures, just as there must be something specific to the oppression of women that allows us to differentiate it from non-oppression. Controversy comes into the picture with the remaining essentialist ingredient. This is the ambition to determine the conditions that a property must satisfy in order to be considered essential, which is the same as wondering whether the essences of all objects and phenomena are in some respect alike and, if so, what is “essential to essences”. We shall see that the central question here is whether knowledge of “essences” is, so to speak, merely analytic – in itself uninformative – or progressive and synthetic.
The statement ‘The essence of a triangle is that it has three sides’ is uninformative because three-sidedness is already contained in the concept of a triangle. This type of statement does not advance our knowledge because what it actually says is ‘The essence of a triangle is that it has the property of “triangleness”’, where the latter can only be defined in reference to “the triangle”. Essentialist statements of this ‘geometric’ sort fall into the first category from our question above, being unavoidable but wholly uninformative. Due to their analytical nature, they possess two main features: firstly, they hold necessarily because they are derived from the idea of the object under scrutiny. To deny that a triangle has three sides would be to negate the very existence of triangles. Secondly and consequently, essences of this kind do not vary over time or space: triangles are the same wherever and whenever we may find them. Now, the problem that feminist and post-colonial thinkers have with “essentialism” is not really about all generalizations, but about the common tendency to treat all essences as essentially the same, i.e. to extend the said two features of geometrical concepts to cover social facts. They object not to essences in the social realm but to the view that the essential characteristics of social categories are necessary and immutable.
Some authors have suggested that the sin of essentialism is in making illegitimate or over-generalizations, or false universalizations[14]. It is possible to be more specific and say that these universalizations about social facts are illegitimate because they treat the latter as ‘natural’, self-explanatory facts that present themselves immediately to the mind, analogously to the way circles and triangles do. Anti-essentialist theorists offer a very different, constructionist picture of social reality. This is a reality of social categories constructed through social discourse and implicit understandings rather than given by nature, a reality in which meanings determine facts, not vice versa. There is no objectively existing ‘Western culture’, only a gamut of interpretations and explanations of what this term should be taken to stand for, some of which gain social prestige over time and crystallize as relatively fixed social definitions. The meaning of the term ‘Western culture’ is, constructionist critics insist, not self-evident but socially produced.
In light of the said remarks, our previous observation that the fundamental bone of contention between essentialists and anti-essentialists is whether knowledge of essences is analytic or synthetic becomes more transparent. Whereas statements about the essence of geometric shapes are in this sense analytic, claims about the nature of social categories add something substantive to our understanding of social reality, and radically so because they actively constitute the text of reality. Clearly, the latter position immediately leads to the insight that interpretations achieve primacy in a certain constellation of social power, that the socially preferred understandings are the understandings of the dominant social group. The emancipatory aspect of the anti-essentialist critique consists, therefore, in detecting the ways in which the interpretations of the socially privileged are imposed on the disempowered, determining their social status and prospects[15].
IV.
We have examined in some detail the constructionist critique of ‘culture’ which focuses on the illegitimacy of treating cultural groups as if they possessed some essential characteristics that are inalienable and immutable. The anti-essentialist critique works best, however, when tempered with the insight that some generalizations about cultures have to be tolerated if the category of ‘culture’ is to be preserved. Anti-essentialism ‘does not deny the existence of “cultural differences” per se’[16] but it does insist that these differences should be explained in a historical perspective, and with special attention to the societal distribution of power.
Let us now move to the second type of criticism of “culture”, which focuses on the inadequacy of this concept for capturing the totality of commitments and attachments that matter to individuals. It can be argued that culture is immensely important to people but so are other things, which is why we ought to be sceptical towards giving wholehearted support to cultural claims in politics. If culture is not everything we care for, then there is no reason to accord it any special political status, for this may violate people’s other commitments and attachments. To put it differently, the interest persons have in partaking in the way of life of their cultural community is only one among many of their interests, and for many people not even the highest. Persons’ values and strivings are multifaceted and to pick out as exclusively important to them those that are strictly determined by the practices of their culture, or those aimed at preserving them, is illegitimate. No-one is just British, or just Muslim, or just Chinese. Our identifications are unavoidably diverse so that we will normally hear people saying that they are an elderly British Black woman, or a middle-class homosexual Muslim man, or a Chinese intellectual with a passion for art.