The Multicultural Mystique: The Liberal Case Against Diversity - Hardcover

H. E. Baber

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1591025532 ISBN 13: 9781591025535

Publisher: Prometheus, 2008

Synopsis

Most literature on multiculturalism assumes, without argument or compelling empirical evidence, that immigrants and members of ethnic minorities prefer to identify with their ancestral cultures. According to the received view, multiculturalism benefits ethnic minorities, who want to maintain distinct cultures and keep to themselves. And it protects them from the pressure to assimilate to the majority culture. Philosopher H. E. Baber scrutinizes these assumptions in this critique of the notion of multiculturalism. Baber asks whether it could be that many, or even most, members of ethnic minorities want to shed their ethnic identities and assimilate to the dominant culture. She suggests that multiculturalism imposes ethnic scripts on minorities and thus locks them out of the opportunity to assimilate. In effect, it becomes a form of ethnic stereotyping and discrimination. Multiculturalism, when transformed into an ideology as it often is, benefits cultural preservationists at the expense of members of ethnic minorities who wish to assimilate-arguably the majority. Perversely, it then labels those who would resist such stereotyping as atypical, inauthentic, or even self-hating. Baber argues that liberals, or anyone who favors the expansion of individual liberty, should reject a multiculturalism that restricts personal freedom by classifying and identifying people on the basis of unchosen characteristics such as ancestry and appearance. Like all Americans, ethnic minorities should be encouraged to "invent themselves," to affiliate with groups of their own choosing and be identified as they wish.

About this title

About the Author

H. E. Baber (San Diego, CA) is a professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego and the author of many scholarly articles.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The MULTICULTURAL MYSTIQUE

The Liberal Case against DIVERSITYBy H. E. BABER

Prometheus Books

Copyright © 2008 H. E. Baber
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59102-553-5

Contents

Introduction. Is Multiculturalism Good for Anyone?....................................7Chapter 1. Do People Like Their Cultures?............................................17Chapter 2. A Philosophical Prelude: What Is Multiculturalism?........................35Chapter 3. The Costs of Multiculturalism.............................................55Chapter 4. The Diversity Trap: Why Everybody Wants to Be an X........................73Chapter 5. White Privilege and the Asymmetry of Choice...............................95Chapter 6. Communities: Respecting the Establishment of Religion.....................115Chapter 7. Multiculturalism and the Good Life........................................137Chapter 8. The Cult of Cultural Self-Affirmation.....................................157Chapter 9. Identity-Making...........................................................181Chapter 10. Identity Politics: The Making of a Mystique...............................205Chapter 11. Policy....................................................................227Index.................................................................................247

Chapter One

DO PEOPLE LIKE THEIR CULTURES?

Par ma foi, il y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose, sans que j'en susse rien. -Molire, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme

Does multiculturalism make us more free or less free? The answer seems obvious at first: multiculturalism, which supports the coexistence and equal dignity of diverse cultures, expands the range of cultural options and therefore enhances human freedom.

But there's a logical trick here, a fallacy. Even if there is a wide range of cultural options available within a multicultural society, it does not follow that there is a wide range of cultural options open to any given individual within that society. Indeed, multiculturalism restricts freedom by locking individuals into unchosen identities, affiliations, and social arrangements, some of which are themselves highly restrictive.

Liberals value individual freedom. Multiculturalism restricts individual freedom. That is the liberal case against multiculturalism.

CHOICES

Like M. Jourdain-Molire's bourgeois gentleman who didn't realize he'd been speaking prose all his life-most people don't know that they live in "cultures." They view local social arrangements as unalterable facts of life, like death and taxes, rush hour traffic or the irritating minutiae of office politics chronicled in Dilbert.

Do people like their cultures? That is like asking whether people like their phone numbers. I don't know how my phone number was assigned and I do not think that there is any way I could get it changed. I had no choice about it, in any case. I might idly wish that my phone number were more memorable or that I could get an arrangement of alphanumeric characters that expressed something about my personal history or preoccupations-like a vanity license place. But that is not the way things work: you take what you get. This is the way most people understand their cultures, which are for them no more a matter of choice than phone numbers or, for that matter, the laws of nature, and certainly not something that they think about. People are stuck with their cultures, and, on the face of it at least, there is no reason to think that they like them.

Nevertheless, on the world stage, people strive for ethnic "self-determination." Michael Lind, speculating on "the world after Bush" in the Prospect notes:

The fact is that most of the people engaged in political violence today-from the Basque country to the Philippines-are not fighting for individual rights, nor for that matter are they fighting to establish an Islamist caliphate. Most are fighting for a national homeland for the ethnic nation to which they belong. For most human beings other than deracinated north Atlantic elites, the question of the unit of government is more important than the form of government, which can be settled later, after a stateless nation has obtained its own state.

Political revolutionaries do indeed fight to establish ethnically defined national homelands. We should ask, however, why. Arguably, it is because in most circumstances capturing tribal turf is the only way to secure individual rights. Multiethnic states in which the individual rights of all citizens are equally protected regardless of their ethnic origin or tribal affiliation are anomalous, and, in most cases, even where the official regulations guarantee equal rights to all citizens, these regulations are not taken seriously. Tribes take care of their own, and interethnic peace is always fragile: in most multiethnic nations, if you are a member of a minority tribe you are living on sufferance. "Tribal clashes" and ethnic cleansing are always a real and present danger.

We citizens of the global north, and we Americans in particular, imagine that multiethnic democracies where the rights of all individuals are secure "regardless of race, creed or color" are a norm or default to which all nations naturally will revert-if only they can be liberated from brutal dictators or corrupt regimes. Nationalist revolutionaries know better.

If you are tribal, you do not have the option of affiliating with other tribes or joining deracinated elites. You may not like your culture, but you are locked into it, and the only way to secure individual rights in the tribal system is by achieving ethnic "self-determination" and group rights-turf, power, and, if possible, statehood for your tribe. It is better to be a member of a tribe that has turf, power, and political independence under virtually any conditions than it is to be a member of a powerless, stateless minority on another tribe's turf. Consequently, if you, as a member of an ethnic minority, can choose between an ostensibly democratic multiethnic state and a national homeland-even a national homeland under the thumb of a dictator from your tribe-you will choose the latter in the interest of securing individual rights for you and your tribe mates.

We cannot therefore infer that, apart from we members of the deracinated North Atlantic elite, most people like their cultures and want to preserve them or they value cultural preservation and group rights rather than individual rights. People live tribally because they have no other viable options. They take care of their own because they know that only their own will take care of them. They fight for turf and prefer ethnic "self-determination" to incorporation in multiethnic states because they know that in most such systems, official commitments to liberty, equality, and fraternity are a sham. They follow the rules of their cultures and perpetuate them because they have no choice.

Do people like their cultures? Maybe some do and some don't. We cannot, however, assume that all or most people like their cultures. We cannot assume that most people, particularly members of non-Western societies, prefer to preserve their cultures or that immigrants and members of ethnic minorities in the West prefer not to assimilate, and we cannot assume that the interests of cultural preservationists should trump the interests of assimilationists.

Some individuals may like their cultures. Culture, as we are often reminded, is not merely external: individuals' beliefs, values, and aspirations are formed by their cultures. But culture also constrains, and the rational choices individuals make in response to the constraints imposed by their cultures reinforce these constraints. Even if no one likes the system, any individual who opts out unilaterally will be worse off. Working the system perpetuates it, but refusing to work the system does nothing to undermine it and only leaves refuseniks worse off. So, in developing countries riddled with corruption, paying bribes feeds the beast, but not paying bribes would starve out individuals long before it starved the beast. When I was foolish enough to send a T-shirt to my friend Lila, who was working for a Kenyan publishing firm, she had to pay twice the cost of the shirt in "fees" to extract it from the local post office. You either paid or you couldn't collect your mail. You might not like the system, but you couldn't beat it.

We, the privileged few, have a wider range of options and recognize that our cultures and the social rules that constitute them are local and revisable-that is to say, we know that we live in a culture. We have choices. We are accustomed to getting what we want and imagine that other people are, for the most part, getting what they want too-that their cultural practices and social arrangements are the way they like things. This assumption is unwarranted.

Do most people like their cultures? We can't assume that they don't, but we can't assume that they do, because most have no choice.

KENYA

I didn't understand this myself until I got to Kenya. After two years of collecting frequent flyer miles, I managed to piggyback my journey onto a trip back east to our son's graduation from Johns Hopkins, my grad school alma mater. My first stop, at Heathrow, was nothing exciting. As half of a transatlantic couple, I'd visited family in England often. Apart from that, however, I hadn't traveled much, so when I got back on the plane, I hung on the TV map on the seatback in front of me, watching the plane cross the channel and fly southeastward across continental Europe. When the Mediterranean came into view, I melted. This was the first place I'd seen, even if only from two miles in the air, that seemed truly Other. The plane-icon jerked across the screen of the TV map, which periodically displayed helpful information about the temperature and wind speed in the stratosphere, across the Mediterranean and into Africa, the most foreign of all foreign places.

After negotiating the Nairobi airport, which had the ambience of a provincial Greyhound bus station, I was collected by my friend Lila, and we drove down the airport road and through the industrial district to her house in South B, a middle-class neighborhood near downtown Nairobi. Kenya, as I first saw it, was as foreign as I could have wished. Ragged bands of pedestrians drifted down the road, which cut through a semi-arid plain that sprouted thorny acacia trees. Lila's house was in a gated community, between a burnt-out Catholic church and a bombed-out mosque. The approach was lined with small businesses operating out of "kiosks," booths tacked together out of concrete blocks, rubble, and corrugated iron. Inside the gated community, the house was itself fortified with walls and iron bars. It was maintained by a fifteen-year-old housegirl from up-country who soon after my stay got pregnant and was dismissed. The house stank of sour rags.

There was no microwave or washing machine in Lila's house, nor the usual suite of labor-saving devices. The supply of electricity was sporadic; it was cheaper and more efficient to employ housegirls who were exchanged regularly as they inevitably got pregnant or were caught stealing. Electricity was unreliable, but labor was cheap. The pots in the kitchen had no handles: they had half-inch lips around the top edge that housegirls picked up with their bare fingers. Pots like this, Lila told me, were beaten out of hubcaps by local fundis; handles and potholders were luxuries, and there was no point in investing in them, since housegirls were accustomed to picking up pots by their lips with their bare hands. This was middle-class life in Nairobi, the life of teachers, doctors, engineers, lawyers, and businesspeople-the life of privileged Kenyans.

Downtown, there was perhaps a square mile that approximated a normal first-world city. Lila and I sat in posh downtown bars and watched American and European tourists, who would remember Kenya only as a game park with hotel facilities, as they packed into minivans to be ferried to local wildlife preserves. Beyond the square mile, an inaccessible never-never land for most Kenyans, Nairobi was a maze of impassible streets, filth, and squalor. It was the London of Gay's Beggar's Opera and Hogarth's Gin Lane, a casualty of the Industrial Revolution, replete with runaway and throwaway kids, begging and stealing. Lila warned me to keep the car windows rolled up: street urchins packing human feces extorted money from careless motorists by threatening to smear them if they didn't stand and deliver.

Lila's firm, which published books for the education market, had organized a series of seminars for primary school teachers up-country in Meru, on the east side of Mount Kenya, to promote their books, and I tagged along to help out. We drove up along the side of the mountain to primary schools "on the tarmac"-just off the main road-to conduct seminars for teachers in the area and, we hoped, to sell books. The country was sweet and lovely, with houses, schools, and churches built foursquare in stone, reminding me of the west of England. We drove past donkey carts packed with rice, one- and two-donkey carts, and occasionally donkey troikas. Trucks packed with miraa, a mild stimulant also known as khat and grown up-country, whizzed by on their way to market as we pushed northward packed into our company car with boxes of books.

The teachers, who came by foot from remote villages to the seminars, could have been teachers from Topeka or Cleveland-they were teachers like me and behaved like teachers everywhere, chatting and enjoying their day, and trying to pick up free copies of books as I did myself when I went to conferences. In the course of cheap charter flights, I'd very briefly been to Brussels and Amsterdam and later traveled to Iceland and to China. These places felt alien to me in a way that Kenya didn't. Whether it was language, religion, or some shared history, it seemed to me that they were my people, my own, locked into an intolerable situation. It was one thing to imagine exotic, primitive people in remote South Sea islands living strange lives, but it was chilling to see people who spoke English-people like me-living under these conditions. The acacia trees and free-ranging goats in the city streets may have been exotic, as they seemed to me when I landed, but the people I met were not. They were my people, caught in an evil net and unable to extricate themselves.

Lunchtime came and went, but the caterer who had been hired to bring hot meals from the nearest town was nowhere in sight. The teachers chatted and entertained themselves; we apologized and did what we could to kill time. No one was happy about the delay, but no one was surprised. Kenya, Lila explained, operated on "African time." When lunch finally came, almost two hours late, the caterer explained that her van had been stuck behind an overturned truck that blocked the road. Whether or not this was true-and we didn't bother investigating-it was plausible. Roads were quite often impassible for one reason or another and it could be hours before traffic accidents were cleared up.

No one particularly liked African Time (those teachers were hungry), but it was a fact of life and there was no way to avoid it. You couldn't count on the roads being clear or the electricity being turned on or the phones working or any of the other prerequisites for carrying through plans, keeping to schedules, or operating efficiently. Blackouts and other cock-ups that occasionally stopped business in the United States were a daily occurrence in Kenya. That, I discovered, was the most intractable deficit in the "developing" world-not individual poverty, which could have been addressed, but the absence of reliable public goods and services. Resistance was futile. You could no more escape African Time than you could opt out of the patronage system or avoid interminable waits on line to negotiate with innumerable functionaries to pay "fees." If everyone behaved differently, things might have been better, but any individual who tried to beat the system was doomed to failure and frustration. The only rational response was to work the system-and so to perpetuate it.

To say the system was corrupt, however, would be misleading, since corruption assumes a prior uncorrupt state, a time in which there was an efficient, transparent, fair system in place that had decayed. There never was such a time, even if during colonial days the British had tried to impose one for limited purposes. Kenyans operated according to a tribal patronage scheme, which was until recently in human history universal. From top to bottom, people took care of their own-their families and tribe mates, cronies and clients. President Moi, then in his last days in power, extracted tribute and bankrolled his retainers; he promoted the flower industry, operated by his Kalinjin tribe mates at the expense of Kikuyu coffee growers. Jobs in the bureaucracy and police force were concessions: functionaries worked for the state with the understanding that their positions entitled them to extract additional fees to supplement their income, like waiters working salary plus tips or the universally hated tax collectors in the Gospels who took a cut as a matter of course. When Barack Obama visited his father's ancestral village in Kenya, an elderly lady interviewed on the evening news exulted that with Obama as a big man in the United States, the village was now sure to get an airport, which would put it on the map. That was the way the system worked.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Prometheus
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1591025532
• ISBN 13: 9781591025535
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 260