One Degree wrote:Allowing local communities to indulge their prejudices. If they want prayer in their school, then they should be allowed to have it. If a different community wants to outlaw prayer, then fine. Demanding that everyone follow the same guidelines based strictly on physical harm is simply an argument to support globalization of human rights and the elimination of our cultural differences. This does tremendous emotional harm to even a greater degree than any physical harm. Destruction of our community as the source of our values is the most dangerous thing I can thing of. What good is being free of physical harm in a world where I have no emotional choices? Are you harmed by prayer in school? Are you harmed by not having prayer in school? It is obvious many of our laws need to be emotionally based.
It's hard for me to respond since I don't have an explicit sense of what ideas are evoked in reaction to this post. But the two sentiments I have is one that this notion of local autonomy has long been obsolete and as much as you might wish for local autonomy I don't see how feasiable it is considering the modern economy. That we're not longer in tribes or city states, but in nation states which even themselves are at present in tension as even the most powerful states have less autonomy than they had years back as transnational corporations have gained significant leverage over even them. And I suppose an issue is even the concept of autonomy is often thought of in a non-concrete sense where we're abstracted away from the world where we're intimately reliant on many things outside of ourselves so that even our autonomy is based on the nature of things outside us. That even the power of one's boss is reliant on the fact that they keep those beneath them subdued, autonomy being at the expense of other's having the leverage to undermine others.
But something I think that irks me with your notion beyond any point of whether it's feasible or not is that I have a vague sense of it being a multiculturalist notion of respecting culture itself rather than people. And to me I'm not sure I really have an inherent respect for culture, I always had a tension with this sense of respecting cultures and its embedded assumptions.
That I think this idea of having to respect cultures is likely detrimental and perhaps reliant on strange conceptions of culture.
I've been enjoying Kenan Malik's views of trying to retain aspects that are seen as progressive in the modernist/liberal project rather than resorting to a sort of nihilism that tries to treat all cultures as if they're on equal footing. There are many cultures I have no respect for and I actually like that they are disrupted and overcome with new standards.
Multiculturalism at its limits?
Kenan Malik: It seems to me that part of the problem is confusion over what we mean by multiculturalism. It can mean one of two things. First: diversity as lived experience. Second: multiculturalism as a political process. To talk of diversity as lived experience is to talk of the experience of living in a society that, through mass immigration, has become more open, more vibrant and more cosmopolitan. In that sense, the mass immigration of the past 50 years has been of great benefit, it seems to me. But multiculturalism as a political process has come to mean something very different, namely the process of managing that diversity by putting people into ethnic boxes. It’s a process through which cultural differences are institutionalized, publicly affirmed, recognized and institutionalized; through which political policy is predicated on the ethnic box to which one belongs. That seems to me deeply problematic.
The conflation of diversity as lived experience and multiculturalism as a political process has been highly invidious. On the one hand it has allowed many on the Right, and not just on the Right, to blame immigrants and immigration for the social problems of western nations. On the other hand, it has led many on the Left to abandon their attachment to classical notions of liberty and freedom, such as free speech and secularism. The irony about multiculturalism as a political process is that it undermines much of what is good about diversity as a lived experience.
The question that multiculturalists very rarely ask themselves is why is diversity good? Diversity isn’t good in and of itself; it’s good because it allows us to expand our horizons, to break out of the boxes — be they cultural, ethnic, or religious — in which we find ourselves. To think about other values, other beliefs, other lifestyles, to make judgements upon those values and beliefs and lifestyles. To enter, in other words, into a dialogue, a debate, through which a more universal language of citizenship can arise. It is precisely such dialogue and debate that multiculturalism as a political process undermines and erodes in the name of “respect” and “tolerance”. So the very thing that diversity is good for, the very thing we should cherish it for, is the very thing that multiculturalism as a political process undermines.
All cultures are not equalHow things have changed. ‘Permanently different’ is exactly how we tend to see different, groups, societies and cultures today. Why? Largely because contemporary society has lost faith in social transformation, in the possibility of progress, in the beliefs that animated anti-imperialists like James and Fanon.
To regard people as ‘temporarily backward’ rather than ‘permanently different’ is to accept that while people are potentially equal, cultures definitely are not; it is to accept the idea of social and moral progress; that it would be far better if everybody had the chance to live in the type of society or culture that best promoted human advancement.
But it’s just these ideas — and the very act of making judgements about beliefs, values, lifestyles, and cultures — that are now viewed as politically uncouth. In place of the progressive universalism of James and Fanon, contemporary Western societies have embraced a form of nihilistic multiculturalism. We’ve come to see the world as divided into cultures and groups defined largely by their difference with each other. And every group has come to see itself as composed not of active agents attempting to overcome disadvantages by striving for equality and progress, but of passive victims with irresolvable grievances. For if differences are permanent, how can grievances ever be resolved?
Against MulticulturalismThe idea of the equality of cultures (as opposed to the equality of human beings) denies one of the critical features of human life and human history: our capacity for social, moral and technological progress. What distinguishes humans from other creatures is capacity for innovation and transformation, for making ideas and artefacts that are not simply different but also often better, than those of a previous generation or another culture. It is no coincidence that the modern world has been shaped by the ideas and technologies that have emerged from Renaissance and Enlightenment. The scientific method, democratic politics, the concept of universal values - these are palpably better concepts than those that existed previously. Not because Europeans are a superior people, but because many of the idea and philosophies that came out of the European Renaissance and Enlightenment are superior.
To argue this today is, of course, to invite the charge of 'Eurocentrism', or even racism. This simply demonstrates the irrationality of contemporary notions of 'racism' and 'antiracism'. Those who actually fought Western imperialism over the past two centuries recognised that their struggles were rooted in the Enlightenment tradition. 'I denounce European colonialist scholarship', wrote CLR James, the West Indian writer and political revolutionary. 'But I respect the learning and the profound discoveries of Western civilisation.'
Frantz Fanon, one of the great voices of postwar third world nationalism, similarly argued that the problem was not Enlightenment philosophy but the failure of Europeans to follow through its emancipatory logic. 'All the elements of a solution to the great problems of humanity have, at different times, existed in European thought', he argued. 'But Europeans have not carried out in practice the mission that fell to them.'
Western liberals were often shocked by the extent to which anti-colonial movement adopted what they considered to be tainted ideas. The concepts of universalism and unilinear evolutionism, the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss observed, found 'unexpected support from peoples who desire nothing more than to share in the benefits of industrialisation; peoples who prefer to look upon themselves as temporarily backward than permanently different'. Elsewhere he noted ruefully that the doctrine of cultural relativism 'was challenged by the very people for whose moral benefit the anthropologists had established it in the first place'.
Multiculturalists have turned their back on universalist conceptions not because such conceptions are racist but because they have given up on the possibility of economic and social change. We live in an age in which there is considerable disillusionment with politics as an agency of change, and in which possibilities of social transformation seem to have receded. What is important about human beings, many have come to believe, is not their political capacity but their cultural attachments. Such pessimism has led to multiculturalists to conflate the idea of humans as culture-bearing creatures with the idea that humans have to bear a particular culture.
Clearly no human can live outside of culture. But to say this is not to say they have to live inside a particular one. To view humans as culture-bearing is to view them as social beings, and hence as transformative beings. It suggests that humans have the capacity for change, for progress, and for the creation of universal moral and political forms through reason and dialogue.
To view humans as having to bear specific cultures is, on the contrary, to deny such a capacity for transformation. It suggests that every human being is so shaped by a particular culture that to change or undermine that culture would be to undermine the very dignity of that individual. It suggests that the biological fact of, say, Bangladeshi ancestry somehow make a human being incapable of living well except as a participant of Bangladeshi culture. The idea of culture once connoted all that freed humans from the blind weight of tradition, has now, in the hands of multiculturalists, become identified with that very burden.
Multiculturalism is the product of political defeat. The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the left, the defeat of most liberation movements in the third world and the demise of social movements in the West, have all transformed political consciousness. The quest for equality has increasingly been abandoned in favour of the claim to a diverse society. Campaigning for equality means challenging accepted practices, being willing to march against the grain, to believe in the possibility of social transformation. Conversely, celebrating differences between peoples allows us to accept society as it is - it says little more than 'We live in a diverse world, enjoy it'. As the American writer Nancy Fraser has put it, 'The remedy required to redress injustice will be cultural recognition, as opposed to political-economic redistribution.' Indeed so deeply attached are multiculturalists to the idea of cultural, as opposed to economic or political justice, that David Bromwich is led to wonder whether intellectuals today would oppose economic slavery if it lacked any racial or cultural dimension.
That the totalitarianism of views and values you don't like being imposed on you is something that is inevitable with power where those who are powerful inevitably dominate others. It's just in regard to gay marriage it seems you're on the shit end of the stick where previously you weren't, norms of those in power have shifted.
From this I'm just trying to bring up the state of how things are regardless of gay marriage being right or wrong. Which I think you don't actually argue directly against but are now on a distant point primarily about local autonomy and dislike of the reality in which local is subjugated by the larger community of the nation state. And I don't know how to argue about whether it's right or wrong because I feel like in just trying to consider what I think the reality of our circumstances is, no matter whether it's right or wrong, the power of the local simply isn't that significant and likely won't be unless we destroy our economies and revert back to tribalism or city states.
I don't know how to say it other than I think you're upset just as I or anyone else is when our views and values are realized through the state. But you kind of have to live with it unless you're prepared to go through the means of organizing the sorts of power required to undermine it. That there is always a struggle and for many, they're too impotent to resist the power of others and they are compelled to comply. This is a an inevitable function of any social organization no matter it's size. And in the case of the US, your community standards lose out. Just like how a member of your local community loses out when they disagree with the standards of the community. This is because there can't be a plurality of individual likes, there has to be a dominant standard because as you noted we're socially implicated and in this case your local standard loses out to the larger community standard. It's just a case of shit out of luck, in the same way women who don't want to be mistreated through state policy are fucked over. But wishing it were different doesn't mean much in terms of reasoning that it's right or wrong or whether it's feasible. And I think this might be something I personally see in this situation, we're discussing something that seems purely in the realm of wishing it were true without relation to it's feasibility base don the world as it exists today and moved away from even debating why anyone cares to oppose or support gay marriage.
It seems all very hard to engage with I think and I find this thread all very confusing and muddled because of these points I believe.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics