Redefining 'diversity'

Of all the factors that might combine produce in a young mind the desire to kill and maim hundreds of innocent people, multiculturalism would seem one of the least likely suspects. Multiculturalism may be guilty of many things, but it would be a stretch to connect it with fomenting terrorism.

That, nonetheless, was the heroic aim of several writers in this series. If, as George Jonas wrote, “multiculturalism hasn’t been the sole cause of the spate of suicide bombings and assassinations since the 21st century began ... it’s proving to be a potent ingredient in causation’s baneful brew.” But there haven’t been any suicide bombings or assassinations in Canada, and while there have been in other countries -- Britain, for instance -- it is unclear what this has to do with multiculturalism in Canada.

It’s a slippery word, with multiple meanings. Is it, as it is sometimes used, merely a synonym for the observed fact of ethnic and cultural diversity? Is it the ideology that all cultural norms are of equal moral value, the dreaded cultural relativism? Or is it the policy of official multiculturalism, complete with grants for folk-dancing and heritage language training?

If the latter, we can stop right here: it’s a silly policy, which has had very little impact for good or ill. To be sure, it has fed the careers of a few professional ethnics and their political patrons. But for the vast majority of immigrants, it is an irrelevance. Certainly, if the charge against official multiculturalism is that it encourages immigrants to live apart from the rest of society, the facts would seem to dispute it: ethnic minorities are measurably less ghettoized in Canada than in other countries -- again, Britain is an example.

The more troublesome definition of multiculturalism is that suggesting a broader cultural confusion, an inability to sort out which values ought to be shared and upheld by society at large, and which left to personal or community choice. But this kind of multiculturalism I think should be seen not as a cause, but a consequence: part of a broader malaise that leaves us unable to tell right from wrong, or to defend basic precepts of civilized life against either the sophistries of tenured radicals or the cruder assaults of their revolutionary cousins.

It is not immigrants who are barricading highways and vandalizing hydro towers to press their demands. It is not immigrants who have spent the last forty years threatening to detach a part of Canada from the rest. And while the publication of the Danish cartoons caused enormous offence to many Muslims, in Canada as elsewhere, it was difficult to explain to them why their hurt feelings should defer to the higher principle of free speech when we are so busy prosecuting free speech on similar grounds in other cases.

The problem is not that immigrants are not absorbing Canadian values. The problem is that we have provided them with so few Canadian values to absorb. We are the country of the notwithstanding clause, the country that exalts the virtues of pragmatism and compromise before all. We do not take a stand, we split the difference. Indeed, we cannot even bring ourselves to take a stand against our own destruction: it is “for Quebecers to decide.”

The roots of this anomie, oddly, lie in the ideology of Canadian nationalism. Where other nations defined themselves by what they were, we defined ourselves by what we were not, viz. Americans. Where other nations aspired to the universal, we retreated into the particular, obsessed with what made us different, unique, special. Canadian nationalism invented itself as just another species of identity politics, with no higher claim than “we are not you.” Should we have been surprised to discover other identity groups within our midst, with the same claims?

The answer to multiculturalism is not, however, monoculturalism. It is not, as the British writer Melanie Phillips suggested in her contribution to this series, to preserve traditional Canadian values from the insidious “doctrine of universalism,” or to exalt the majority’s culture over that of minorities. Precisely the contrary. It is to uphold universal human values -- starting with the idea that there are such values. And amongst those values is pluralism, the principle that every human being is entitled to pursue his own vision of the good life -- so far as this is compatible with the vision of others, on their own such quest.

This is not just different from cultural relativism -- it’s the opposite of it. Relativism says: there is no truth, but what the group says it is. Pluralism says: there is such thing as truth, but no one is in absolute possession of it. So we have common laws to govern us, and we insist that all must obey the law. But we restrict those laws to the minimum necessary to allow pluralism to flourish, to make the liberties of each compatible with all.

What has this to do with culture? Not a thing. Let us insist on the separation of culture and state, neither promoting one culture nor many. Let our policy be neither assimilation nor segregation, but integration. We do not need to “ban the burka.” But neither should we be erecting separate sharia courts.

Let us say no to group rights, special status, and the endless exemptions of particularism. And let us say yes to a society whose solidarity is built on the sturdy foundation of the individual -- the individual, not as the alienated atom of caricature, but as the unique point of intersection of all those multiple group identities of which each of us is composed.

The folly of multiculturalism is not its insistence on “diversity,” but rather its peculiarly narrow definition of diversity. Identity politics is not really about differences between groups, but rather enforcing sameness within the group. That’s as true of young Muslims, under pressure from fundamentalists to conform to their definition of a “good Muslim,” as it is of Quebec nationalists -- or Canadian nationalists.

A deeper commitment to diversity would respect the uniqueness of each individual. And it is our common experience of that uniqueness, of what it means to be human, that ultimately unites us.