Robert Sharp

Pupil Barrister

Tag: Debate (Page 15 of 27)

Is multiculturalism conservative?

18 July 2007 / / 4 Comments

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.

Religious Belief and the Age of Consent

30 June 2007 / / 8 Comments

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. ‘Consent’ 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.

First Hand

26 June 2007 / / 1 Comment

“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’.

Identity Politics and Multiculturalism

15 June 2007 / / 4 Comments

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.

Affirmative Aliyah

25 May 2007 / / 31 Comments

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?

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