In defence of Etzioni’s ‘radical multiculturalist’
In defence of Etzioni’s ‘radical multiculturalist’
Michael Hand
Institute of Education, University of London
In his ‘Minorities and the National Ethos’ (Etzioni, 2009), Amitai Etzioni introduces us to a character called the ‘radical multiculturalist’ and proceeds to give her a rather hard time. On the basis that an urge to champion the underdog is a particularistic British trait marginally less lamentable than most, I shall here try to defend the radical multiculturalist against Etzioni’s criticisms.
Etzioni characterises the radical multiculturalist as someone who advocates ‘abolishing the particularistic values of nations, that is, those values which differentiate the one national community from another’ (p.101). She is someone who holds that ‘the state should strive for normative neutrality centred around the protection of rights that all share, and should not foster a distinct conception of the common good and the particularistic commitments it entails’ (p.101). She believes that ‘the government should avoid promoting any set notion of national identity and culture’ (p.102) and should pursue policies that ‘seek to erase the national ethos’ (p.104).
Before attending to Etzioni’s critique of radical multiculturalism, I should like to make two points about his characterisation of the position.
First, he unhelpfully ascribes to the radical multiculturalist two incompatible views. These are (i) that the state should pursue policies designed to abolish or erase the particularistic values of nations, and (ii) that the state should adopt a stance of normative neutrality towards such values, refraining from any attempt to foster or promote them. It is clear that states cannot consistently seek both to be neutral on particularistic national values and to abolish them.
I am inclined to think that Etzioni’s talk of radical multiculturalists favouring the abolition or erasure of national values is a rhetorical indulgence. Since the whole point of the position is that states should maximise the degree to which individuals and communities can pursue their particularistic values and chosen conceptions of the good without interference from others, it would be paradoxical, to say the least, for radical multiculturalists to advocate state suppression of national values. In what follows, then, I shall take it that the correct account of the radical multiculturalist position is that states should refrain from promoting or fostering particularistic national values.
Second, Etzioni is quite clear that, on the radical multiculturalist view, the normative neutrality states should strive for is not absolute. The idea is emphatically not that the state should refrain from promoting any values: on the contrary, there is a wide range of procedural and substantive values the state is expected to endorse and, in some cases, enforce. What the radical multiculturalist insists upon is a basic distinction between universal values (i.e. those grounded in necessary features of the human condition) and particularistic values (i.e. those grounded in contingent attachments and affiliations). Only values of the former kind, she thinks, can be legitimately promoted by the state. Etzioni counts ‘tolerance, diversity, rights and due process’ (p.101) among the values radical multiculturalists recognise as universal, and elsewhere talks of the ‘thin conception of unity’ that consists in ‘commitment to a bill of rights, the democratic way of life, respect for basic laws, and mutual tolerance’ (Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies, 2001, pp.9-10). A fuller list is supplied by Bikhu Parekh in The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (Parekh, 2000), a text identified by Etzioni as an exemplar of radical multiculturalism. Parekh describes ‘two sets of values that all people in Britain can be expected to share’ (p.53):
- Procedural values e.g. ‘people’s willingness to give reasons for their views, readiness to be influenced by better arguments than their own, tolerance, mutual respect, aspiration to peaceful resolution of differences, and willingness to abide by collectively binding decisions that have been reached by agreed procedures’ (Parekh, 2000, p.53);
- Substantive values e.g. ‘people’s freedom to plan their own lives, the equal moral worth of all human beings, and equal opportunities to lead fulfilling lives and contribute to collective wellbeing’ (Parekh, 2000, pp.53-4).
So the radical multiculturalist state is by no means value-free. Its normative neutrality relates specifically to particularistic values, and to universal values whose validity is in doubt.
With these points of clarification in mind, let us consider Etzioni’s four arguments against the radical multiculturalist position.
Argument 1: Promotion of particularistic values is unavoidable
Nations, claims Etzioni, ‘cannot avoid institutionalising one set of particularistic values or another’ (Etzioni, 2009, p.102). So, for example, most countries of Christian heritage continue to give implicit support to Christian religious practice through national policies on Sunday closing and public holidays at Christmas and Easter. It is, Etzioni suggests, ‘difficult to imagine’ what religiously neutral policies on days of rest and public holidays might look like.
I do not find such policies especially difficult to imagine. It would be quite possible to redesign national calendars so that days of rest and public holidays were scheduled for days of the week and times of year with no religious significance. And if national policies on Christmas, Easter and Sunday closing were widely perceived to represent state support for Christian religious practice, redesigning national calendars in this way would be worth seriously considering. If, on the other hand, it is generally recognised that weekly days of rest and annual public holidays are readily justifiable in universal, secular terms, that their Christian trappings are a matter of historical accident, and that the survival of those trappings does not imply state endorsement of Christianity, the task of secularising national calendars will have rather low priority.
The next example Etzioni gives of the unavoidability of particularistic values is still less persuasive. ‘Whether a state bans or permits gay marriage’, he says, ‘it is far from neutral’ (p.103). But this is to forget the point that radical multiculturalists openly advocate the promotion of such universal values as ‘tolerance, diversity, rights and due process’. Since the permissibility of gay marriage is clearly implied by a commitment to rights, tolerance and diversity, states that sanction it can hardly be accused of promoting particularistic values.
Notwithstanding these misgivings about Etzioni’s examples, it may well be that occasional lapses in neutrality are unavoidable for radical multiculturalist states; but it hardly follows that the pursuit of neutrality is wrongheaded. The claim that it is impossible for states to be fully neutral is analogous to the claim that it is impossible for social scientists to describe social phenomena with complete objectivity, or for religious educators to be wholly impartial in their presentation of different religions. These claims may be true, but their importance lies in reminding us that we must be ever vigilant for bias and distortion, not in showing us that our attempts are pointless. Fully achievable or not, states (on the radical multiculturalist model) have an obligation to strive for neutrality, just as social scientists have an obligation to strive for objectivity and religious educators for impartiality.
Argument 2: Attacks on national values drive people to extremism
Etzioni’s second argument is that moves in the radical multiculturalist direction ‘seem to be one major reason a growing number of members of the majority in many countries in Europe are supporting conservative, or right-wing, or even nationalistic political parties and movements which promise to restore the traditional values and which have strong anti-minority (and/or anti-immigrant) positions’ (p.104).
But this is no more than the commonplace observation that progressive policies tend to provoke a conservative backlash. That may be a good reason for implementing state neutrality cautiously and incrementally, but it should hardly dissuade us from our commitment to it.
Argument 3: People need communities
The third argument is that ‘if significantly eroded, the nation, as a community invested in a state, will lose its capacity to provide nurturing and to contribute to human flourishing’ (p.104). Etzioni develops this argument by making a series of assertions about the important role played by communities in people’s lives. Without strong communities, ‘people suffer physically and psychologically’ and come to feel ‘detached, alienated and powerless’ (p.104). Communities improve ‘our capacity to act as reasoned people’, ‘help curb strife and gridlock’ and ‘strengthen adherence to social norms’ (p.105).
In syllogistic form, the argument therefore runs as follows:
Nations are communities.
People need communities.
Therefore, people need nations.
It is fairly obvious, I think, that the conclusion is not entailed by the premises (technically, the argument falls foul of the fallacy of the undistributed middle). From the fact that people need communities in general it does not follow that they need national communities in particular. It is quite possible, and indeed quite plausible, that the communities best able to meet the physical, psychological and social needs Etzioni identifies are families, friendship circles, neighbourhoods, workplace groups and religious fellowships, and that national communities barely register on the scale of nurturing communities integral to human flourishing.
Moreover, as noted above, the radical multiculturalist state has no desire to erode or erase the nation. It is more than happy for citizens to count the national community among their sources of identity and moral motivation if they so choose. But it refrains from actively promoting the particularistic values of this community, just as it refrains from promoting the particularistic values of any other community to which its citizens may belong.
Argument 4: A weak national community impedes state-wide policy formation
Etzioni’s fourth argument is that failure to foster national values can ‘lead to difficulties in forming state-wide policies, which require shared core values and a commitment to the common good to justify inevitable sacrifices’ (p.105). Here, again, Etzioni seems conveniently to forget the point that the radical multiculturalist state endorses and enforces a significant set of procedural and substantive values to which it can appeal in forming and securing acceptance of state-wide policies. If Etzioni holds these ‘shared core values’ to be insufficient for the functioning and flourishing of states, he needs to do rather more to explain why.
None of Etzioni’s objections, then, shows the radical multiculturalist’s position to be an untenable one. If, as Etzioni concludes, radical multiculturalism has now ‘practically died out’ (p.109), the cause of death does not appear to be injury sustained in rational argument.
What are particularistic British values?
Etzioni’s article, and my response thus far, are pitched at a high level of generality. Perhaps, by way of conclusion, it is worth focusing in on the UK and asking what the particularistic values of the British national community might be. Here we can enlist the help of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain. Parekh offers the following ‘roll-call of traditional British virtues’: ‘tolerance, moderation, readiness to compromise, fair play, individualism, love of freedom, eccentricity, ironic detachment, emotional reticence’ (Parekh, 2000, p.23).
Half of these virtues – tolerance, readiness to compromise, fairness, freedom – can be promoted by the British state without opposition from the radical multiculturalist, though she will wish them to be presented as universal virtues rather than peculiarly British ones. The other half – moderation, eccentricity, ironic detachment, emotional reticence – are unlikely to receive the radical multiculturalist’s endorsement. Their classification as virtues seems to depend on a particularistic attachment: one values these traits, if one values them at all, because they are constitutive of a national character one loves.
Is it traits of this kind that Etzioni would like to see the British state nurturing in its citizens? What sort of policies, one wonders, might be conducive to the development of an eccentric, ironic, emotionally reticent citizenry? And how exactly would Britain – or the rest of the world – benefit from the achievement of this goal?
Parekh goes on to identify two further particularistic British values: whiteness and politeness.
Britishness, as much as Englishness, has systematic, largely unspoken, racial connotations. Whiteness nowhere features as an explicit condition of being British, but it is widely understood that Englishness, and therefore by extension Britishness, is racially coded. ‘There ain’t no black in the Union Jack’, it has been said. Race is deeply entwined with political culture and with the idea of nation, and underpinned by a distinctively British kind of reticence – to take race and racism seriously, or even to talk about them at all, is bad form, something not done in polite company. This disavowal, combined with ‘an iron-jawed disinclination to recognise the equal human worth and dignity of people who are not white’, has proved a lethal combination. (Parekh, 2000, p.38)
I do not doubt that Etzioni would be the first to oppose the perpetuation of this ‘lethal combination’; but the recognition that whiteness is a particularistic British value raises two pressing issues. First, what is the criterion by which Etzioni would have us select aspects of Britishness for promotion by the state? And second, what confidence can we have in the ability of the state to pull apart the ‘deeply entwined’ strands of British national identity, in order to promote the benign without also cultivating the malign?
References
Etzioni, A. (2009) ‘Minorities and the National Ethos’, in Politics 29 (2), pp.100-110.
Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies (2001) ‘The Diversity Within Unity Platform’, available at http://www.gwu.edu/~ccps/dwu_positionpaper.html.
Parekh, B. (2000) The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: Report of the Commission on the
Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, London: Profile Books.
