When Multiculturalists Get Bitten By Multiculturalism

Eight years ago, Kenan Malik wrote an important and remarkably prescient essay on multiculturalism called Against Multiculturalism:

Proponents of multiculturalism usually put forward two kinds of arguments in its favour. First, they claim that multiculturalism is the only means of ensuring a tolerant and democratic polity in a world in which there are deep-seated conflicts between cultures embodying different values. This argument is often linked to the claim that the attempt to establish universal norms inevitably leads to racism and tyranny. Second, they suggest that human beings have a basic, almost biological, need for cultural attachments. This need can only be satisfied, they argue, by publicly validating and protecting different cultures. Both arguments are, I believe, deeply flawed.

By that definition, Sunny Hundal is a textbook proponent of multiculturalism. A few months ago he wrote a piece on his blog, Pickled Politics, and called it Minorities and power, in liberal democracies. Not only was it is a clear-cut example of Kenan’s definition of multiculturalism, Hundal provides a complete proof-positive validation of Kenan’s thesis with this astonishing disclosure:

After a while the race and the religion doesn’t even matter: it comes down to numbers. If your numbers or clout is large enough then the establishment will pay lip service. Perhaps the mistake Latinos in the US made was to tilt too far towards the Democrats… removing the Republican incentive to avoid pissing them off. Although it looks like Republicans are paying the price already.

Perhaps what I’m trying to say is that the only way a minority can get over the bigotry is either by expanding in large numbers, or getting very close to the establishment.

That’s what current affairs tell us, right?

[caveat: I'm not saying all minorities should vote along ethnic lines, I'm merely pointing out that in extreme circumstances (draconian immigration laws for example, they have an incentive to]

What Hundal is advocating here, and what multiculturalists in general want, is surmised in the second of Malik’s two-point exposition. Multiculturalists want people to organise themselves along the lines of some or other ethnic or religious descriptor, say as “brown people” or as “Muslims” or as “Sikhs” etc, in order to oppose or protect themselves from some or other putative draconian or adverse law.

Now the diametrically opposite position to this would be if “white people” were to bind together politically in order to oppose this or that piece of legislation, corporate marketing or even other “brown people”.

But if “white people” were to organise themselves to ‘publicly validate and protect their culture’, as Kenan Malik would describe it, would multiculturalists like Sunny Hundal find it acceptable or even desirable? Surely that is the nature of the dynamics of a multicultural system, and surely that would include sub-cultures of “white people”?

Fat chance. As Sunny demonstrates, “brown” multiculturalists don’t like it when “white multiculturalists” assert themselves along the lines of a multicultural grouping.

In the case of a football t-shirt campaign for example, Hundal contradicts everything he has previously advocated for “brown minorities” and goes into hypocricy overdrive to deny this cherished multicultural privilege to that sub-culture known as “England supporters”. He then produces not one but two blog articles in a fit of apoplectic rage. And don’t be surprised if more still are on the way in the Pickled Pipeline.

It is inevitable that exponents of multiculturalism will tie themselves into intellectual and ethical knots, in the same way Sunny Hundal continues to do. We will leave it to him and his admirers to help him out of that predicament. It’s going to be long haul by the looks of things, but it is very entertaining to point and laugh.

I suggest the rest of us glean as much as possible from Kenan Malik’s article and ponder what a truly plural society, not just a multicultural society, would entail.

The irony of multiculturalism is that, as a political process, it undermines what is valuable about cultural diversity. Diversity is important, not in and of itself, but because it allows us to expand our horizons, to compare and contrast different values, beliefs and lifestyles, and make judgements upon them. In other words, because it allows us to engage in political dialogue and debate that can help create more universal values and beliefs, and a collective language of citizenship. But it is precisely such dialogue and debate, and the making of such judgements, that contemporary multiculturalism attempts to suppress in the name of ‘tolerance’ and ‘respect’.

A truly plural society would be one in which citizens have full freedom to pursue their different values or practices in private, while in the public sphere all citizens would be treated as political equals whatever the differences in their private lives. Today, however, pluralism has come to mean the very opposite. The right to practice a particular religion, speak a particular language, follow a particular cultural practice is seen as a public good rather than a private freedom. Different interest groups demand to have their ‘differences’ institutionalised in the public sphere. And to enforce such a vision we have to call in the Thought Police.

Multiculturalism is an authoritarian, anti-human outlook. True political progress requires not recognition but action, not respect but questioning, not the invocation of the Thought Police but the forging of common bonds and collective struggles.