This is a resonse to an earlier post that has been archived. I apologize for its lateness.

Multiculturalism?

Dear Roger,

I begin where you began. “…”Multiculturalism,” that university-nurtured version of cultural relativism”….

Well, that’s all I need to get off.

First, I guess, I must ask if you believe that we do not live in a pluralist world, a world within and across cultures and nations wherein people subscribe to different worldviews and practice different ways of life? This is Connolly’s point: we are no longer just Americans but African-American, no longer Jews by Jewish-Americans, no longer, like me, Germans but German-Americans. In a different context we would call this Clintonian identity politics. It is no university-natured version of anything but just what happens when you walk down a South Philly (my home town) street and encounter Arabic, Oriental, Greek, Jewish, Italian and Irish Americans all interacting, sort of. Call it what you may, it is an experience of “difference”—the ineluctable élan of our “late modern” existence: it is multiculturalism or pluralism at work, a Leviathan that knows no bounds.

In short, unless one wants to erase the Lacanian Real, so to speak, pluralism as difference is multiculturalism—how could it not be? …different worldviews, ways of life. I cannot conceive how anyone can deny this “social fact”, and I assume you do not nor cannot. So the issue is not multiculturalism per se but your appraisal of it.

Let’s say that you agree with my assessment of multiculturalism, how then should I, as an flatulent liberal, fetid even, deal with your antimony of liberalism: that liberalism’s openness becomes illiberal when it asserts the integrity of its viewpoint, such that, as you describe, liberalism’s liberalism can erase itself when faced by an insurmountable and hostile difference.

Well, here I resort to Gadamer and Cecilia Bok. Gadamer, though excoriated by Habermas and other “quasi-metaphysicals” for his historically determined consciousness and assorted other sins, notes the impenetrable weight of “tradition”, as he calls it, or as I would say, the unbearable heaviness of being of the social as in Bourdieu, This weight as Rawls says in Political Liberalism is that no point of view can become synoptic: it cannot include the point of views of all points of view because it is, after all, just a point of view. Accordingly, it cannot become the worldview that absorbs difference as it if were some sort of amoebic goo that is assimilates whatever it touches.

Cecilia Bok argues that when we are faced with “incommensurate” difference, intractably opposed worldviews, we cannot (or is it should not?) just erase our way of life in a gesture of accommodation to radical difference. Rather, a liberal or conservative response should be “Here I stand. I may be right or wrong, but it is my belief” It is, pace
Augustine, a faith not so much seeking understanding, but a faith defining understanding. Now, whether these frames of reference are incommensurate or not is not, in my view, the practical issue at hand—they may be in theoretical pursuits–a difficult issue that dates most recently to Wittengenstein and descends to Quine, Davidson, and Rorty through Kuhn.

Let’s say the liberal viewpoint and its discontents are incommensurate in a practical sense. One cannot be a liberal and look away when clitoroctomys are commonplace, when the abridgment of freedom of thought, expression, and religious conviction are determined by an official dogma. That is, liberalism is a point of view that is incommensurate with certain constraints on thought and action. One could even hold that illiberal liberalism is illiberal. That is, liberal tolerance cannot, without self-destruction, become intolerant in its tolerance. A delightful aporia if there ever was one that may support de Man’s views that the principled and epistemological niceties that ground our petty human systems are nothing but infinitely oscillating polysemic anthropomorphisms.

It is here, in my demented universe, that I see a convergence of Gadamer and Bok: one cannot just forswear one’s tradition, it defines who we are: tradition is our warp and woof —we, by definition, cannot declare a viewpoint that negates our “liberalism” unless we are prepared to abandon our liberalism –be it Lockean, Burkean, or Keynesian. We reside in a world in which liberalism and many other points of view contest for the throne of the world. Given the indifference to the claims of difference, that is, that I am right and your are wrong, Bok suggests that at most we can hope for is some sort of modus vivendi—and in no way on a Habermasian consenus based on ideal speech acts, where we agree to agree or disagree without killing each other. In this world there are no overlapping consenses (Rawls), just livable (hopefully) disagreements.

While not a Gadamerian “fusion of horizons” (to amend: the fusion takes place between me and a text; but between thee and me it is more like a confrontation of horizons, one true (mine) and false (yours)), it is a recognition that one’s way of life is no mere garment to be discarded at a moment’s notice of discontent. It, rather, is a world in which we make worlds of self-identity, thus no mere skin that we can shed at whim.

From this vantage point, then, one’s way of life is a zygote, impenetrable to most spermatic intruders…a confrontation of horizons of intractable multicultural or pluralist difference that bespeak a strategy of compromise, if feasible, but not capitulation.*