Mick Hartley

There’s an important article on multiculturalism by Amartya Sen in the latest New Republic, which looks in particular at the British experience. He’s fairly complimentary about the advances we’ve made over the last 50 years or so:

Britain, to which I first came as a student in 1953, has been particularly impressive in making room for different cultures. The distance traveled has been in many ways quite extraordinary. I recollect (with some fondness, I must admit) how worried my first landlady in Cambridge was about the possibility that my skin color might come off in the bath (I had to assure her that my hue was agreeably sturdy and durable), and also the care with which she explained to me that writing was a special invention of Western civilization (“The Bible did it”). For someone who has lived–intermittently but for long periods–through the powerful evolution of British cultural diversity, the contrast between Britain today and Britain half a century ago is just amazing.

But there’s no doubt about where he sees the danger:

[M]ust a person’s relation to Britain be mediated through the culture of the family in which he or she was born? A person may decide to seek closeness with more than one of these pre-defined cultures or, just as plausibly, with none. Also, a person may well decide that her ethnic or cultural identity is less important to her than, say, her political convictions, or her professional commitments, or her literary persuasions. It is a choice for her to make, no matter what her place is in the strangely imagined “federation of cultures.”

There would be serious problems with the moral and social claims of multiculturalism if it were taken to insist that a person’s identity must be defined by his or her community or religion, overlooking all the other affiliations a person has, and giving automatic priority to inherited religion or tradition over reflection and choice. And yet that approach to multiculturalism has assumed a pre-eminent role in some of the official British policies in recent years.

The state policy of actively promoting new “faith schools,” freshly devised for Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh children (in addition to pre-existing Christian schools), illustrates this approach, and not only is it educationally problematic, it also encourages a fragmentary perception of the demands of living in a desegregated Britain. Many of these new educational institutions are coming up precisely at a time when religious prioritization has been a major source of violence in the world (adding to the history of such violence in Britain itself, including Catholic-Protestant divisions in Northern Ireland–themselves not unconnected with segmented schooling). Prime Minister Tony Blair is certainly right to note that “there is a very strong sense of ethos and values in those schools.” But education is not just about getting children, even very young ones, immersed in an old inherited ethos. It is also about helping children to develop the ability to reason about new decisions any grown-up person will have to take. The important goal is not some formulaic parity in relation to old Brits with their old-faith schools, but what would best enhance the capability of the children to live “examined lives” as they grow up in an integrated country.

Having done so well, comparatively speaking, we’re in danger now of making some serious misjudgements.