The difficulty faced by a Western intellectual who is sympathetic to Islam yet dedicated to liberalism–one who thinks of himself as auxiliary to the politician rather than to the priest–is to avoid hinting that his sort of multiculturalism is based on the equal dignity of cultures which could not be evaluated merely on the basis of our criteria.
For this talk of multiculturalism, to paraphrase French philosopher Pascal Bruckner, is a “,” bringing back just the idea our sort of liberal intellectual wants to get rid of, recognition of the group, oppression of the individual: “This is the paradox of multiculturalism: it accords the same treatment to all communities, but not to the people who form them, denying them the freedom to liberate themselves from their own traditions.”
Conforming to Brukner’s precept, there is an interesting interview with Bernard Lewis conducted by The Jerusalem Post , in which Lewis correctly claims that “multiculturalism is a superiority complex.” He adds, “Multiculturalists never express this openly, but their attitude is that Arabs are a bunch of hopeless barbarians anyway, so Western moral standards cannot be applied to them.”
To say that we should drop the discourse of multiculturalism, a discourse which has caused more trouble than it has been worth, is not to say that the we have discovered that, out there, there is a “universal truth,” and Western civilization has a grasp of it. No. It is to say that our chances at living a decent life, self-improvement, peace, and wealth are more guaranteed by modern liberal societies than any other societies hitherto known to us.
More importantly, I think Richard Rorty is certainly right by arguing that contemporary liberal society already contains the institution for its own improvement: “My hunch is that Western social and political thought may have had the last conceptual revolution it needs. J. S. Mill’s suggestion that governments devote themselves to optimizing the balance between leaving people’s private lives alone and preventing suffering seems to me pretty much the last word, (Northcliffe Lectures).”
