Robert Sharp

This week, there has been a short online discussion about blogging on the (virtual pages) of The Guardian. Michael Billington asserted the need for professional, paper based reviewers, but I think some of his comments betray a patronising tone. He is simply wrong when he claims that

The critic, unlike the blogger, also has a duty to set any play or performance in its historical context.

… since blogs have the same responsibility if they want to be considered relevant (or simply, ‘good’). Billington is taken to task for this misunderstanding in the comments, and also for a misplaced nostalgia when he says:

The blog seems to me have supplanted the kind of prolonged argument about the arts that once took place in the correspondence columns of newspapers. Example: years ago, when I rashly suggested that Shaw was the best dramatist after Shakespeare, a considered, if heated, debate went on for weeks in the paper itself. Now such a suggestion would be a 48-hour wonder on the blog.

But that’s the point, says Ian Shuttleworth in the comments:

Blogs in this respect are filling a gap that has for some time and increasingly been left by editorial neglect in print publications.

Meanwhile, Lyn Gardner is a good deal more positive about the medium of blogging. It was her contribution which drew me to the debate, because last year I remember she used The Guardian’s theatre blog to publish a dissenting review of Katie Mitchell’s Waves, which had been panned by… none other than Michael Billington. Sadly, an online argument about Mitchell’s (admittedly divisve) work never materialised. This was a shame, since this sort of debate, between critics who care, is a feature which Billington himself misses. Blogs can complement theatre criticism, not challenge and marginalise it in the way that TV and film reviews have done.

Other writers also lament the absence of such robust industry. I am reminded of Michael Coveney’s essay in Prospect (November 2005). Here is a telling paragraph:

But the truth is that newspapers increasingly devote largely uncritical coverage to the latest product of the publicity machine … Previews and interviews now take precedence over critical responsibility. But the idea that they do so in order to meet a public demand is, I believe, false. Anyone under the age of 30 who wants to read about pop music, new film and reality television knows where to go. That place is not the broadsheets, but magazines and the internet. So the liberal, professional intelligentsia who read the broadsheets are confronted with coverage they don’t want and comment on “high culture” by people who often know less about it than they do.

The Guardian’s consideration of blogging is welcome, but ultimately, I cannot help but think that these critics are arriving late onto the scene, when they should have been in the vanguard. When Natasha Tripney writes

Bloggers are not constricted by word count or deadlines, and have free reign to write about what they want, when they want

or when Michael Billington types

critics are much more accountable for their opinions… the blog also gives a voice to the hitherto voiceless

we are reading insightless cliché - Many of us have been identifying these features for yonks! To paraphrase Michael Coveney, bloggers are being presented by comment on “blog culture” by people who often know less about it than they do.

Dave Gorman’s depressing post Twisted (via Post of the Week) prompts a pause for thought. He was harrassed by a couple of police-people for taking photographs at a fair-ground. Although he was not taking images of children at all, he was apparently making security guards nervous. In the comments, Matthew makes a related point:

One of my requests for the recent events was to take photographs for the PTA/school website. Nope no go due to child protection laws.

We often read such laments about how society is changing, and parents are becoming more risk averse. However, it always seems to be ‘other people’ who are the problem. I’ve never read an article or blog from a parent endorsing the stigmatisation of photography in public places or in schools. Anecdotal evidence would suggest that such litigious parents are in the minority. Yet schools and councils and the police have to err on the side of caution, and then bear the brunt of the criticism when taking measures to avoid trouble.

I wonder if the web has a part to play in emboldening a more permissive society that (it seems) most people want? Perhaps a website with a similar set-up to Creative Commons could provide a set of guidelines and a handy logo, which any event organiser could attach to their flyers and advertisement:

“Heatherside Junior School’s Nativity Play is operating under the Creative Commons Family Photography Guidelines (UK) Level 2 (Close-up Photography Allowed; Scenes of a Mild Christian Nature).”

Risk averse parents would then have plenty of time to withdraw their children from events they disapproved of, just as some kids do not participate in school prayers. This approach would still be highly problematic, however, since it still an imposition of values, only in reverse.

Either option flies in the face of such concepts as “parental choice”. This is an idea that seems to have much currency in education debates at present, but it looks to me like a red herring. In some areas of communal life, it is possible to partition time and resources so that people who make different choices can access the resources (think of women only swimming sessions). In other areas, such as a school play or an annual fair, such allocations are impossible. Someone has to impose their values onto the event, and no “choice” is possible.

When the news came that Cannabis was to be reclassified as a class B drug, I had expected there to be something of a reaction from the British Blogosphere, which has a healthy Libertarian bias. Back in the office after a week without proper internet, I found precious little online writing on the subject. I reasoned that this might have had something to do with the Lancet Report (and podcast) into the effects of cannabis use, and the associated risk of psychosis.

However, I had reckoned without Tim Worstal and his excellent statistics.

So, does 0.2% of users being harmed pass our test? 0.05%? 0.01%? Even at that higher number it’s still vastly lower as a percentage than the numbers harmed by either tobacco or alcohol: and yet they are both legal. I’d wager very long odds that it’s lower than the STD infection rate on one night stands: which are also legal. I’d even take an evens bet on whether it’s less dangerous than playing golf in a thunderstorm which while stupid is also legal.
…
Just another example of bansturbation I’m afraid, this time it’s the social authoritarians in the Tory Party getting their rocks off over the matter. Heaven forfend that the citizenry should actually be free to go to hell in their own preferred manner.

I think the comparison with alchohol is important here, because it highlights an essential contradiction at the heart of the debate. Both alcohol and smoking are legal, despite being harmful. Why not cannabis too?

Throughout, it has been noted that the skunk on the streets is far more powerful and harmful than the milder forms that our cabinet smoked as students. Aside from looking like a convenient get-out clause for those who have admitted to a toke or two twenty years ago, it also ignores the fact that there are many different types of cannabis in circulation.

In any case, is the undoubted potency of modern skunk an argument for legalisation and regulation, or further crimminalisation and marginalisation? The recent orthodoxy claims the latter, and says that because cannabis is so harmful, it should be banned. But that is analagous to saying that alcohol should be banned because Moonshine is so toxic! Just as there is a world of difference between the causual, weekend wine-drinker, and the serious alcoholic with his Vodka or (worse) bottle of Meths… so there is a difference between a weekend spliff in the garden, and a heavy skunk-user putting himself at risk of psychosis. It would be nice if someone stated that either drug, in moderation, does make the parties and the conversations a little more interesting (to the partakers, at least)… but that consumption to excess can lead to a lack of productivity, and then serious damage to one’s health. The absolutist, binary debate on this issue is unhelpful and unlikely to wash with the young people who need to be so well informed.

I think a more compelling argument against casual drug use, is that it provides financial support to gangsters. The usual mitigation for cannabis use is that it is a victimless crime. At present, however, there is no way of knowing if this is actually true. Illegal drugs do not come with a ‘Fair Trade’ certificate to reassure you that no human-traffickers, Russian Mafioso or Jamaican Yardies have profited (or indeed, been murdered) during its production and bagging. When politicians admit to trying cannabis at university, they are always asked whether they ‘inhaled’, but never if they knew where the drugs came from. This latter question would, I believe, be more pertinent. That few politicians would be able to answer it is probably the main reason why this particular argument is sidelined in the debate.

Surely a more sensible approach to the issue would be to legalise cannabis, and then regulate it and tax it in the same manner as alchohol and tobacco. This is the only sure way to reduce the potency of the drugs being consumed. Better information about the strength and origin of their cannabis will help people to make a more informed choice about how much to consume, and lead to a reduction in associated health problems.

I’ve been re-reading a little bit of Andrew Sullivan’s book The Conservative Soul, in which he attempts to wrestle back conservatism from the theocons. By his analysis, Conservatism is the Politics of Doubt (and thus incompatible with fundamentalism, be it Christian or otherwise). This is outlined in chapters Five and Six. The pace of change for a conservative is necessarily slow, argues Sullivan, because conservatives are naturally skeptical of any change, and will endorse such a change only when his questions have been exhausted.

The conservative, unlike the fundamentalist or Marxist or any other adherent of a direction for a time, simply observes that this is the way the world is. He will confront the fundamentalist with a puzzled look, and ask him how he knows for sure that something beyond contingency and choice is at work in human history, that some other force is directing human action and ends. … He will enjoy pointing out the collapse of this great history or that one. And in the meantime, he will simply make the choices he wants to make and live.

Reading these chapters, it occurs to me that multiculturalism could be considered conservative in its temperament. By this analysis, multiculturalism is the realistic approach. It acknowledges that when humans move and mix, they are unlikely (and maybe unable) to change their culture overnight. It is surely unreasonable for a migrant to announce Year Zero on their arrival, and simply abandon their old culture in favour of the new one. Change will come, cultures will evolve, but slowly. To demand that new additions to our society simply equalise their values to our own is illiberal, unworkable, ignorant of human nature, and ultimately counter-productive.

The first critique of this idea is that some of the cultures we are asked to mix with are fundamentalist in nature. They may not change at all, and are the polar opposite of any Politics of Doubt. This may be true for a few people (and it is relatively few), and to give them the bulk of the attention is to willfully ignore the wider truth. As we see in the UK, the reality for most people is that the cultures do change, and the change is slow - often spanning generations. They achieve this precisely because, however annoyingly insular they appear to be, they are not fundamentalists. Liberal democracy is as much a part of their culture as it is of ours. In such cases I see no problem in respecting and actively celebrating their culture, its history, and its traditions. When this is done by the British it is often labelled ‘conservative’ or ‘Conservative’. It seems logical to give the same label to the act of celebrating other cultures too.

You may recall a case from a few weeks ago, in which a girl named Lydia Playfoot took her school to the High Court. The school had not allowed her to wear a chastity ring, which she argued was a representation of her religion. Over at the Ministry of Truth, the prolific Unity has pointed out that the girl’s father, and the people who assisted in her Human Rights claim, also run the UK franchise of the Silver Ring Thing (via DK). The court case doubles as a fantastic publicity campaign for the chastity course, which makes money selling the rings and merchandise to those who take the pledge.

This revelation chimes in with the unease many people felt over the Playfoot case, as with the Shabina Begum case two years ago. The idea persists that Lydia was “put up to it” by her father, just as the influence of the hard-line Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir was cited in the Begum case. Personally, I don’t think such “influence” captures the full story in either case - both Lydia Playfoot and Shabina Begum clearly hold strong beliefs and do not seem to be anyone’s puppet.

Nevertheless, I think both cases grate on the consciousness for the same reason, which is that the symbols (ring and Jilbab) evoke a religious imposition of chastity. This in turn is linked to ideas of male ownership of women, and the use of religion to impose control over women. As Mark Morford writes in his discussion of ‘Purity Balls’, this is a distasteful concept in itself, but also one that leads to a “wanton sexual stupidity” that is dangerous and miserable (via Tygerland).

This concern was not the basis on which both Playfoot and Begum eventually lost their cases. Instead, the cases centred around how the expression of their faith impacted on other people. The rights and wrongs of their personal convictions were not questioned, nor was the sincerity of their convictions. Perhaps they should…

Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Dish has been running a discussion on the genital mutilation of children for religious reasons. While FGM is obviously much worse, Sullivan points out that MGM is still a ’scarring’ to which the child cannot possibly consent. ‘Constent’ is an interesting word here, since it unites sex and religion once more.

Many countries around the world, including the UK, have an Age of Consent law. By stipulating the age at which one can legally be said to have given consent to sexual relations, it effectively says that children under that age are not capable of making such an important decision for themselves. However, I do not believe such laws exist for the adoption of a religion. This is in many ways odd. Choosing a faith (or none) is arguably a more important decision for a person, than whether to have sex or not. Most religious people cite their faith as the most important thing about them. They would surely be the first to agree that it outweighs the very human choice over whether to indulge in intercourse or not on any given evening.

Its a conundrum for the religionists, who are happy to use the language of choice, responsibility and rights when it comes to promoting their faith, yet deny similar choices can exist for sex and sexuality. I say that if a fourteen year old is old enough to make a decision about their God, then they are also ready to make a decision about sex! Alternatively, if a fourteen year old cannot make a responsible decision about sex, then they cannot possibly make a responsible decision about God. Note how children like Lydia Playfoot are only deemed capbable of making a responsible choice when they choose chastity. In that case, is it any kind of choice at all? Should it be respected in human rights law?

My suggestion is to broaden the definition of the ‘Age of Consent’ to include a consent to religion too. By this rationale, children could still, of course, wear religious symbols in school… but below the age of consent, they would not be deemed, in a legal context, to have chosen to wear those things for themselves. Rather, they have been dressed by their parents. If religionists wish to assimilate young members into their Church, and use their ‘choices’ as the basis of a campaign… then they have to allow those young members the choice to have sex too. Alternatively, if they cannot stomach such a permissive idea, then the religious choices of school-children can no longer be the basis of a Rights campaign in the courts.

Either way, The ‘Age of Consent’ will remain a law designed to protect youngsters from the predatory influence of adults.

“I have witnessed first-hand” has unfortunately become a terrible political cliche recently, much overused in the leadership campaigns we have seen in the past couple of years. Its a rhetorical device the speaker uses to imply that he knows the mind of whatever group of people he is talking to, or about, and therefore they are important to him.

Its an odd turn of phrase, because most acts of governing deal in things that cannot be witnessed first hand. The skill is not to sympathise with some terrible event that you have seen personally (that’s easy), but to use your imagination to put yourself inside the head of someone you have not met. Otherwise, it becomes an exercise in crass popularism, with policy being formed and resources allocated to whichever story of difficulty happens to reach the politician first.

I actually get very annoyed with people who dismiss an argument with “you don’t know what its like.” Being in the majority (politically speaking) of pretty much every group you care to think of, I’m an easy target and the ad hominem rolls off the tongue. It is an annoying verbal trick, because its actually not true. When we use the word like, we are talking about similies. Arguably, the whole point of language is to use similies to try and convey what is going on in our own heads, by likening the feelings we experience to something more universal. So I while I don’t know what it is to be black, or disabled, or gay, or a woman (say), I can at least know what its like… because people can describe it to me. Within a society that has a shared language and experiences, this should be fairly easy. It is a little more difficult when you cross societal or language barriers, but there are always people who bridge the divide, who can articulate what it is like to be them. So not being of a particular group should not necessarily be a barrier to engaging with that group.

What this is not, however, is an argument for maintaining the status quo in our representative bodies, where women and ethnic minorities are woefully under-represented. When seeking to understand how someone different from you actually thinks, the key task is to listen, which politicians don’t. Further, they tend to have their own agendas. In such situations, only diversity in our representation can lead to a diversity of views.

Update

On a not-quite-related point, the International Herald Tribune has an interesting article on the new uses of the word ‘like’.

Over at Pickled Politics, Sunny Hundal presents his essay on how the War On Terror has fractured the British Asian community along religious lines.

… a change has been taking place within minority communities in the way they interact with each other, identify themselves and become politically engaged… The atmosphere of distrust following 9/11 and 7/7 made it easier for Muslim, Sikh and Hindu religious extremists to openly express distaste towards other religious minorities.

For me, the a key feature of the post-9/11 politics, which includes the enigma that is ‘Britishness’ and the hammering of ‘multiculturalism’, has been a focus on differences between groups: How does the white majority interact with the minorities; how do the values of different groups differ, and can they be reconciled; what concessions does the State make to these groups, and does it ask for any change in return?

As we debate ad nauseum the conflicting identities within the State, it often seems as if other aspects of multiculturalism are neglected. Specifically, the different and conflicting identities that exist within the individual. This is a particular issue for British-Asians (Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims all) as well many people with dual nationality, and many people of mixed race (an exponentially expanding group). For these people, to suggest that notions of multiculturalism should be abandoned is nonsensical. For while a compromise with (or even a capitulation to) the behemoth that is ‘mainstream culture’ might be theoretically possible on a group level, this is not true on the level of the individual.

That is not to say that people, on an individual level, cannot resolve what conflicts they are presented with. Indeed, they seem to succeed much more often than they fail. At places like Pickled Politics I think the contributors manage to elucidate very well how they reconcile such differences, and what immediately becomes clear is that their solutions do not lie in their granting total supremacy of one culture over the other. That they can do this proves for me the value of multiculturalism. The most sensible commentators seem to be those who can say, for example, “I am 100% Hindu and 100% Asian and 100% British”.

And yet much of the political debate (from both the, erm, generic white majority, and also within the various interest groups Sunny highlights) refuses to accept that this kind of reconciliation is possible. Because these critics cannot make that reconciliation themselves, they smear those who can as either delusional or fake. In this dismissal, they fail to accept the idea that one may be changed by other ideas, fail to understand the value of multiculturalism, and therefore become a kind of fundamentalist. Its a shame that the post 9/11 political climate has exacerbated this problem too.

A month-old article on OpenDemocracy.net has got me thinking again about differing levels of citizenship and equality in Israel. Laurence Louër highlights the growing minority of Arab Israelis, and how an increase in their numbers means an increase in their political power. This, he says, “is a challenge to the country’s very self-definition.”

Louër cites the legal organisation Adalah (with whom I have worked), who deal with Arab minority rights in Israel. Their campaigns centre around the fact that Arab citizens of Israel, be their Muslim, Christian or Druze, are not afforded equal rights as their Jewish fellow citizens. The charge, at its most ferocious, is one of apartheid. As I have found, this is a contentious word for a contentious issue – a more benign accusation might be something like ‘discrimination on the basis of ethnicity’. Either way, the complaint is that people are not all equal in the eyes of the law or the state.

Some might say that the inequalities are surely the result of social frictions, of the kind that we see in the UK. This might have some truth. Adalah’s complaint, however, is that the state also enshrines an imbalance in law. Inequalities are therefore magnified, ethnic conflict is exacerbated, and the idea of democracy is compromised.

To my mind (and Louër’s too), the most pertinent example of this inequality is the ‘Law of Return’, whereby anyone of Jewish origin may ‘make aliyah’ and take Israeli citizenship. No similar right is granted to those who might be relatives of Arab citizens, or indeed those who did, just a generation ago, actually live within the borders of what is now Israel. The justifications for this (when they are not biblical) cite the necessity of such a law to maintain the Jewish character of the state. I have written before on why I think states should not have an official religion or ethnicity. I also acknowledge that many see Arab Israeli issues as just once facet of the wider Palestinian population (indeed, Louër reminds us that most Arab Israelis define themselves as ‘Palestinian citizens of Israel’). For now, then, one observation:

Isn’t the ‘Law of Return‘ an example of Affirmative Action? The state is, after all, performing a kind of social engineering, seeking to influence its social demography. Certain ethnic groups are awarded preferential treatment, gaining admission by jumping the queue. The justification for this policy is that past injustices have been done to that group, and the preferential treatment redresses the balance. If the ‘Law of Return’ is indeed Affirmative Action, then don’t the arguments against Affirmative Action apply to the ‘Law of Return’ too? How do those who have made aliyah feel about jumping the queue?

The common (some might say inevitable) response to my previous post is to suggest that I am mis-defining the term multiculturalism, and that it does in fact mean simply the idea that all cultures have complete parity. How else do we get the absurd defences of illiberal practices? Even if the the counter-intuitive work done in the name of multiculturalism is no such thing, why persist with a term that has been sullied by these actions. Far better, say the critics, to call the tolerance and change something like ‘melting pot’ instead.

But cling to ‘multiculturalism’ I do. First, because I question the extent to which the word has been discredited by its misuse. And secondly, because it just seems a better word, which better captures the ideas which I think are important. ‘Melting pot’ implies an all-consuming mass in which individual identity is lost. It has a whiff of homogeneity about it, and any new addition is barely perceptible. I want to emphasise the fact that change will occur within the majority population too. New additions are not just ‘spice’ but a whole extra ingredient…

Here are some areas of interest to me. First, the notion of group or cultural rights. Where they exist and are taken into account, I tend to the idea that they arise from a combination of individual rights, and tradition. Preserving (or at least respecting) a particular cultural practice will allow individuals to flourish. I suspect that this puts me at odds with what we could call fundamentalist multiculturalists, who hold that a culture is inherently valuable in itself.

Second, the extent to which multiculturalism is an off-shoot of western liberal thought. Is it simply a kind of legislated tolerance? Is it possible in other societies? Critics say that it is not, but I am less sure. India and the new South Africa are worthy of examination here. Clearly the impasse in Iraq, and between Israel and the Palestinians will only be solved when the various ethnic groups agree that there are things of value in different cultures they might encounter, and that these other cultures are not malign. Nation states with a single identifiable culture are not an option. But it is still an open question as to whether these solutions can succeed without an acceptance of basic liberal values. No wonder the theocracies of Iran and The Vatican feel threatened by multiculturalism – it is entirely incompatible with their claim to the absolute truth.

A third point about the multicultural debate is the extent to which it is dominated by religion, and religious obsession with sex and the sexes. Culture is of course more than that. It extends into those areas of life that are less contentious, where people might be more willing to engage in a dialogue, more willing to change. Cultural practices concerning not only food, but hospitality, leisure and ritual are all fair game for this kind of discussion. And how we evolve in these areas is as much a concern of multiculturalism, as the the ‘flash-point’ issues which periodically sweep through our periodicals like wildfire. It is perfectly possible to sit in a souq smoking a shisha pipe, without endorsing any of the pillars of Islam. Likewise, it is perfectly possible to visit the mosque in the morning and the football in the afternoon. Finsbury Park Mosque is a short walk from the Emirates Stadium at Ashburton Grove. When people talk of London and New York as the two truly multicultural ‘world cities,’ it is surely this kind of diversity that they are referring to.

Johann Hari’s lazy column in yesterday’s Independent prompts me to pick up my old, familiar drum. Multiculturalism, he says, provokes domestic abuse, on the basis that some German authorities have allowed men to get away with violence against women, by claiming that it is ‘their culture’.

It is a wilfully petulant view of multiculturalism that allows Hari to draw this conclusion, in part because it is a similar warped view of multiculturalism which causes the ridiculous judgements that he cites. In the cases Hari mentions, and by his own analysis, the concept is defined to mean that all cultures in their entirety are of equal value. If he wishes to argue against this version of multiculturalism, he is welcome to it. Attempting to define something so nebulous as a culture in its entirety is an impossible task. Occasionally, we find jobsworths and fools (usually on the far left, it must be noted) who subscribe to this definition, and they leave themselves open to ridicule and condemnation.

But Johann Hari should know that this analysis has never been what most defenders of the concept, including myself, have been arguing for. To us, multiculturalism is the idea that change is inevitable and should be embraced. To us, it is the idea that one may be changed by other ideas. To us, it is a rejection of the view that the dominant majority culture is complete and perfect, and that it cannot be changed for the better by outside influences. Many people see these ideas as a threat to their entrenched status quo, and so they attack the entire philosophy by citing only its deformation. Hari is clearly pandering to this view.

The column noticeably focuses on problems within Muslim households, as if this is all that ‘multiculturalism’ concerns itself with. Hari forgets that a broader multicultural philosophy also encompasses positive cultural changes such as (say) homosexual rights. We acknowledge these rights precisely because we accept that not all alternative lifestyles and cultures are bad. If it turns out that a given cultural practice is damaging, this does not damn other cultural practices that originate in the same group. Nor does it prove that encouraging other cultures to flourish is an a priori Bad Thing. By railing against multiculturalism in general, Hari endorses both these logical fallacies.

He pin-points the abominable practice of domestic abuse, forgetting that such a practice occurs in our own culture (and endorsed by the Old Testament too, if anyone cared to ask).  More important in this context, he forgets it is multiculturalism – in its proper form – that is stamping out this practice.

One real-life example: An Indian friend of mine recently had to confess to her Pakistani boyfriend that she had been previously married. She had refrained from telling him about her past because, well, he is from a very traditional Muslim background. She feared a judgemental, angry reaction… but in the event, his response surprised her. Although he found her revelationd difficult at first, he made the effort to listen, and to understand… something that (he says) would be beyond the strict values of his parents.

This change of outlook is, I suggest, an inevitable product of his time in the UK. When we were interviewing young people for the documentary Sex Lies and Culture last year, we unearthed countless examples of formerly socially conservative parents changing their attitudes (much to the surprise of their children). The change had been brought about by their immersion in a different culture. Multiculturalism is a two-way process. It is not about the introduction of Sharia Law into the UK, as Johann Hari might claim, but in fact the slow yet inevitable undermining of Sharia Law by presenting alternatives (this is why Islamists are threatened by multiculturalism too). In a post-colonial and globalised world, multiculturalism is actually the means by which we export our values to new places and peoples. But unlike in colonial times, the values cannot be delivered to others via the tip of a bayonet, or indeed imposed via legislation. Nor are all guaranteed to survive. Instead, our values must compete and win out in the marketplace of ideas. They are doing so, and the unfortunate incidents Johann Hari cites are noteworthy because they are incongrous, not because they are the sign of things to come.

It is right to be vigilant, and it is right to argue against these mad German judgements. But its a mistake to attribute these tragedies to a failure of ‘multiculturalism’ And it is most certainly a mistake to think that a more insular approach would be a better response to something so fluid as ‘culture’. These debates will define the coming century, and we need to understand the complexity and subtlety of the ideas we are describing.