Multiculturalism and Reality
by Byron Matthews

Today's multiculturalism is of little use for either analysis or action, because it is based in what George Santayana termed "mystical neutrality": the myth that despite their surface differences all cultures are fundamentally similar. If cultures are really not very multi, then virtually everything about cultural differences becomes unproblematic. Essential commonalities of perspective and longer-term interest must mean that cultural conflicts will always yield to sufficiently skilled negotiation.

But cultures define themselves by what is specifically not negotiable, and only by confronting that reality does any view of cultural differences earn the right to be taken seriously. Under a naive theory of the benignity of cultural differences, manifest outrages can evoke only excuses or reflexive denial. Thus, the brutal subjugation of women by some Muslim societies is met mostly with silence from women's organizations; a Dutch film director is murdered by an Islamist assassin, and our arts and entertainment elites stand mute. Yet, multiculturalists are quick to condemn outside demands for reform as exercises in cultural imperialism. That we are no better than they, whoever they are, is, after all, a straightforward corollary of the myth of cultural similarity.

When it comes to practices sanctioned by a foreign value system, multiculturalists find no permissible basis for making, let alone for enforcing, judgments of unacceptability. Unacceptable according to whose values? And what gives those values the standing to decide, for example, how women should be treated? Questions like those threaten to leave us stuck on Square One, where it's all a matter of different strokes. Are we finally doomed to an endless regress of question-begging when it comes to values?

No, we aren't, because one species of value system has, so far at least, demonstrated its competitive superiority in practice. Setting the inconclusive meanderings of ethical theory aside, defensible judgments about values must be based on the outcomes of the pragmatic tests that occur when value systems face off in the real world. Those results argue for the superior fitness of the sorts of value systems that have characterized liberal democratic societies. Liberal democracies have demonstrated, overall, a singular ability to survive, and even to prosper, in military and economic competition with societies representing every extreme of political and economic theory. Some of those competitors looked good on paper, and some had briefly successful runs; but in the end, they all flunked the final   exam.

Many factors contribute to the staying power of liberal democracies. But important among them are value systems that sustain internal diversity of all kinds, making those societies more adaptable to unexpected challenges. Parallel to the role of variation in natural selection, internal diversity provides a greater range of alternatives to draw upon when change is required. Tolerance for diversity lets liberal democracies keep more kinds of arrows in their quivers.

In contrast, the high value placed on social and ideological uniformity leads illiberal societies always to suppress diversity, and always to their longer term detriment. The Nazis could not countenance Jewish mathematicians and scientists in their universities and research programs; liberal democracies welcomed them, and the Allied war effort benefitted accordingly. Moscow could not countenance dissent from Lysenko's pseudo-scientific orthodoxy, and for two decades Soviet agriculture descended further into ruin. Mao talked about letting a hundred flowers bloom, but only liberal   democracies walk that walk. That difference in values is eventually   decisive, because diversity is the only reliable hedge against the demands of an unpredictable future.

When cultural differences come up for discussion, self-identified multiculturalists are typically loudest in extolling their value and desirability. But, ironically, the radically nonjudgmental view of diversity they offer is based in a denial of fundamental cultural differences and the differences they make. A vacuously celebratory theory of diversity that refuses to make contact with the reality of its own subject matter is no theory at all, finally having nothing to offer but empty moralizing.

Internal diversity is always problematic, a constant source of conflict.

But, within limits, it has instrumental value in its consequences for longer-term societal survival. That's what makes diversity worth the trouble it causes. The competitive advantages of liberal democracies are due partly to value systems that tolerate and promote internal diversity; a claim for the superiority of those values is therefore more than a mere assertion of parochial cultural preference. It is around issues like these that serious discussions about multiculturalism and cultural differences should be taking place.

Byron Matthews is a sociologist retired from the University of Maryland; he lives near Santa Fe, NM.