Abstract
Celebrations of diversity are the public face of multiculturalism in Canada, but there is more to it than simply overcoming fears of “difference” and developing a welcoming attitude towards new musical, culinary, and romantic experiences. Its broader meaning will be seen more clearly only after seeing through or around its simplest self-presentations, and this requires a careful, detached, “positive” examination of the multicultural values that define it as a political project, namely, diversity, tolerance, equality, freedom, recognition, authenticity, and openness. The meaning of these terms can be best understood, this introductory chapter suggests, by considering what has to be done in practice to increase the values in question.
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- 1.
Cf. Will Kymlicka, Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ethnocultural Relations in Canada (Oxford University Press, 1998), 16: “Diversity is valuable, but only if it operates within the context of certain common norms and institutions…. Similarly, tolerance is a virtue, but only within certain boundaries.” How is one to make sense of these sensible remarks? No one should be surprised that a country practising a particular (racial, religious, sexual, etc.) form of toleration will be intolerant in principle of those individuals or groups whose actions or expressions violate (or even just tend to undermine) its established norms of toleration, regardless of whether the deviations in question are found, so to speak, on the left or on the right and are blamed for being either too progressive or too conservative. “Toleration” here simply means an established pattern of inclusions and exclusions, support for which is commonly thought to show tolerance as well as good sense and civic responsibility. The interesting difficulties arise when one tries to “theorize” a particular practice (in order to resolve its practical indeterminacies) by defining tolerance more abstractly as an overarching ideal, value, or norm in the light of which particular practices of toleration could be judged to be tolerant or intolerant, because tolerance so defined seems to require acceptance of what one rejects in principle. “We need to tolerate other people and their ways of life only in situations that make it very difficult to do so. Toleration, we may say, is required only for the intolerable. That is its basic problem…. All toleration involves difficulties, but it is the virtue that especially threatens to involve conceptual impossibility.” Bernard Williams, “Toleration: An Impossible Virtue?” in Toleration: An Elusive Virtue, ed. David Heyd (Princeton University Press, 1996), 18 (emphasis added). Thus an individual committed to tolerance as a value may reasonably wonder whether there is any better way of showing a firm commitment to the value than by refusing to tolerate the intolerant (those who offend conventional norms of toleration), even if they realize that by doing so they are themselves being intolerant and thus, if they were to be perfectly consistent, would have to be intolerant of themselves. This is one way of stating the much-discussed “paradox of toleration.” Evidently, the boundaries of acceptable toleration need to be set by values (or considerations) of a broader or more general character than “tolerance” alone suggests, and it is these broader considerations that need clarification. The discussion needs to be carried to a higher level.
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Cf. Jeremy Webber, Reimagining Canada: Language, Culture, Community, and the Canadian Constitution (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 15, 17, 22–26. Writing more than 25 years ago, in the wake of the defeat of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords, when there seemed to be a “void at the centre of Canadian life,” with “no compelling vision of the whole” and “no agreement on what our country might mean,” Webber, a young law professor at McGill, set out to show how “Canada makes sense as a country.” The problem he emphasized was the lack of a “vocabulary” to grasp and develop the “complex idea of Canadian identity” that Canadians had actually been living, within the existing constitutional structures and political practices. Like Webber, I shall try “to find the words to express it,” by clarifying the meaning of some common political words. But in the 25 years since 1994, the “it” to be grasped has acquired a clearer form, and while relations between Quebec and English Canada are still a major problem, as I shall try to make clear, there is no longer as much interest as there used to be in constitutional accords. Unlike Webber, I shall try to achieve the desired clarification without venturing onto the hotly disputed territory of aboriginal reconciliation, despite its close theoretical relation to multiculturalism, as is clear from an ill-fated historical document, Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, a 1969 “white paper” that appeared under the authority of Jean Chrétien, who was then Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. The paper revealed that the Trudeau government was hoping to achieve reconciliation by offering cultural recognition (“positive recognition by everyone of the unique contribution of Indian culture to Canadian life”) combined with the abolition of the separate legal status of Indians (“the legislative and constitutional bases of discrimination”) in order to make them full and free participants in Canadian society, entitled to a full measure of its opportunities and rewards. “To be an Indian must be to be free—free to develop Indian cultures in an environment of legal, social and economic equality with other Canadians,” the document declared.
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Mathieu Bock-Côté, Le multiculturalisme comme religion politique (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2016), provides a complementary account of the deeper ideological roots of North American multiculturalism, emphasizing the collapse of Marxism-Leninism in the 1950s (for the intellectual avant-garde) and the 1990s (for the rest of the world) and the resulting need (“comment liquider le marxisme-léninisme sans sacrifier l’espérance révolutionnaire?”—14) for a new social scientific narrative of oppression and emancipation. In France, in the 1960s, a New Left was born when the discriminated Other took the place of the exploited Worker as the “sujet révolutionnaire.” The controversies and events that Bock-Côté describes were in the background during the infancy and childhood of multiculturalism in Canada, when it was nourished on more pedestrian fare, available locally, as I shall try to show, but familiarity with some of its more distant sources helps to clarify its distinctive character and to project its future development.
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Facts, acts, and ideals are the terms used by Richard J. F. Day, Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity (University of Toronto Press, 2000), 6, 44, for distinctions that have been in the literature since the 1970s. See Evelyn Kallen, “Multiculturalism: Ideology, Policy, and Reality,” Journal of Canadian Studies, 17:1 (1982), 51–63. Will Kymlicka has used the terms fact, policy, and ethos to make the same point about the different meanings of multiculturalism. See Kymlicka, “Disentangling the Debate,” in Janice Gross Stein et al., Uneasy Partners: Multiculturalism and Rights in Canada (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007), 138. Ethos, originally a Greek term with a variety of meanings (custom, usage, manners, habit, nature, disposition) related to ethnos (race, tribe, nation, or people), is at the root of ethics, ethical, ethnic, ethnic group, and ethnicity, and thus shines a revealing light on “ideals” and “ideology.”
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Ken Dryden, when he was a contender for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada, suggested that “the multiculture” might be a better term than “multiculturalism” for what is commonly called multiculturalism in Canada. He thought it would more accurately represent the reality of substantial but carefully limited Canadian diversity, and hence be less likely to arouse unreasonable expectations in some quarters while provoking groundless fears of excessive diversity in others. See Dryden, Becoming Canada (McClelland & Stewart, 2010), 198–201, 214–216. The Canadian society Dryden envisioned—one that had “become what it is”—would enjoy, among other advantages, the renown for having discredited some troublesome theories about the “clash” of fundamentally different cultures. For a refreshing splash of cold water on the overheated theorizing about multiculturalism in Canada and elsewhere, including credulous estimates of the miraculous impact of bureaucratic programmes costing only a few million dollars a year, see Randall Hansen, “Assimilation by Stealth: Why Canadian Multiculturalism Is Really a Repackaged Integration Policy,” in The Multicultural Question: Debating Identity in 21st-Century Canada, ed. Jack Jedwab (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 73–87. My only reservation, to be developed later, concerns Hansen’s rather under-theorized account of “what all the fuss is about.” Cf. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
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See Gilles Paquet, “Political Philosophy of Multiculturalism,” in Ethnicity and Culture in Canada: The Research Landscape, ed. J. W. Berry and J. A. Laponce (University of Toronto Press, 1994), 60–80, and Paquet, Deep Cultural Diversity: A Governance Challenge (University of Ottawa Press, 2008), for evidence of the long-standing unease in some quarters with the actually existing Canadian balance, understood to be a problem of the bureaucratic management of the material and symbolic rewards of diverse citizens, who have complementary obligations towards the system that supplies the rewards.
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Kymlicka , Finding Our Way, 42, provides a useful list of 13 specific policies often associated with multiculturalism. Those seeking a detailed treatment of the political and bureaucratic processes of policy development and refinement will find much of interest in Andrew Griffith, Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism (Anar Press, 2013).
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Cf. George Grant, Lament for a Nation (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965), 94: “In our day, necessity is often identified with some fate in the atoms or the ‘life force.’ But historical necessity is chiefly concerned with what the most influential souls have thought about human good. Political philosophy … is concerned with judgements about goodness. As these judgements are apprehended and acted upon by practical men, they become the unfolding of fate.” For a classic presentation of the forward-looking “interpretive” alternative to the dominant, backward-looking “scientific” conception of explanation in the social sciences, see Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” in Taylor, Philosophical Papers 2: Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 1985), 15–57. In his most recent book, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (Harvard University Press, 2016), Taylor contends, in effect, that the influential Hobbes-Locke-Condillac (HLC) theory of language as essentially and legitimately only “designative” (applying arbitrary labels, like proper names or serial numbers, to already discriminated objects) impedes and misleads the interpretive understanding of politics and morality. The concern in the background, as Taylor explains, following Hobbes, is the deplorable tendency of some writers to “take over, on the authority of tradition, impressive-sounding but ill-defined terms, and thus to be led to absurdity” (105). Or as Hobbes wrote, “Words are wise men’s counters, but they are the money of fools, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas.” This danger, although it may explain, does not, Taylor maintains, justify attempts to “regiment” all language, following the lead of modern natural science. Rather than trying to banish or deny the “creative” and “constitutive” role of language in human life, linguistics and philosophy should rather strive to understand the more wayward uses of words, beyond the well-ordered precincts of the best-established sciences. As Taylor says, “Our language is wider and richer than the regimented, specialized forms…. The regimented, scientific zone can only be a suburb of the vast, sprawling city of language” (130, 263). My purpose here, paraphrasing Taylor, is to provide some glimpses into the reality of multicultural living behind the verbal shrubbery and the monumental value words such as “recognition” (from Hegel) and “authenticity” (from Heidegger) that have been featured on the real estate billboards lining the major arteries through the urban sprawl, boosting sales and raising property values in the “multicultural” suburbs.
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Cf. Edward G. Andrew, The Genealogy of Values: The Aesthetic Economy of Nietzsche and Proust (Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), 7: “If one were to conduct a survey on the good things in life, one might well receive responses of a medium-rare steak, a refreshing sleep, a baby’s smile, an exciting sporting event, or even author Margaret Atwood’s ideal of multiple orgasms with a husband who washes the dishes…. [But] a response of roast lamb, sex, and thinking to a survey of one’s values would merit the judgment, ‘he has no values’ or ‘he has not understood the question.’ …There is a world of difference between what we consider the good things in life and what we maintain to be our values.”
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The Canadian Oxford Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 1998). There are similar definitions in all the standard British and American dictionaries, for example, the six major meanings distinguished in the online Collins (American option) dictionary: “culture noun 1 cultivation of the soil. 2 production, development, or improvement of a particular plant, animal, commodity, etc. 3a the growth of bacteria, microorganisms, or other plant and animal cells in a specially prepared nourishing fluid or solid. b a colony of microorganisms or cells thus grown 4a development, improvement, or refinement of the intellect, emotions, interests, manners, and taste. b the result of this; refined ways of thinking, talking, and acting. 5 development or improvement of physical qualities by special training or care: body culture, voice culture. 6a the ideas, customs, skills, arts, etc. of a people or group, that are transferred, communicated, or passed along, as in or to succeeding generations b such ideas, customs, etc. of a particular people or group in a particular period; civilization c the particular people or group having such ideas, customs, etc.” Note that the use of the word “culture” to refer to a group of people rather than the cultural pattern they (or at least some of them) may exemplify (or at least identify with), although now routine in the social sciences and political theory and practice, is so recent that it is not included in the definitions of the word in the authoritative Canadian dictionary, and neither of these dictionaries draws attention to the puzzle of subcultures (teen culture, valley culture, gay culture, gun culture, soccer mom culture, locker room culture, etc.) or the nuances of meaning in expressions such as “pop culture,” “toxic culture,” or “the culture industries.”
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Cf. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, II.v.13: “The cultivation of the soul is philosophy; this pulls out vices by the roots and makes souls fit for the reception of seed, and commits to the soul and, as we may say, sows in it seed of a kind to bear the richest fruit when fully grown” (Loeb, 1927, tr. King, 159).
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This extension is usually attributed to the publication of E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture in 1871. Raymond Williams provides a brief, helpful account of the early history of the term in his article on “Culture and Civilization” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1967), II, 273–275. For the more recent controversies about “culture” in Anthropology, see Adam Kuper, Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account (Harvard University Press, 1999).
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Doug Saunders, Maximum Canada: Why 35 Million Canadians Are Not Enough (Knopf Canada, 2017), 130–131.
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Cf. Stanley Fish, “Boutique Multiculturalism,” in Multiculturalism and American Democracy, ed. Arthur Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman (University Press of Kansas, 1998), 75: “Multiculturalism as a philosophical problems is what we’ve been wrestling with in the preceding passages, with results not unlike those achieved (if this is the word) by Milton’s fallen angels who try to reason about fate, foreknowledge, and free will and find themselves ‘in wandering mazes lost.’ We too become lost in mazes if we think of multiculturalism as an abstract concept that we are called upon to either affirm or reject.”
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Cf. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Mansfield (University of Chicago Press, 2000), II, i, 2: “When the man who lives in democratic countries compares himself individually to all those who surround him, he feels with pride that he is the equal of each of them; but when he comes to view the sum of those like him and places himself at the side of this great body, he is immediately overwhelmed by his own insignificance and his weakness…. The public therefore has a singular power among democratic peoples, the very idea of which aristocratic nations could not conceive. It does not persuade [one] of its beliefs, it imposes them and makes them permeate souls by a sort of immense pressure of the minds of all on the intellect of each.” See also Tocqueville, Democracy, II, iii, 21: “In all times when conditions are equal, general opinion puts an immense weight on the mind of each individual; it envelops it, directs it, and oppresses it…. As all men resemble each other more, each feels himself more weak in the face of all…. Not only does he doubt his strength, but he comes to doubt his right to it, and he is very near to recognizing that he is wrong when the greater number affirms it. The majority does not need to constrain him; it convinces him…. This marvelously favors the stability of beliefs.”
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It is a difficult “technical” question whether immigration, at some particular level, adds to or detracts from the prosperity of the host society, generally speaking. Michael Adams, Could It Happen Here? Canada in the Age of Trump and Brexit (Toronto: Simon and Schuster, 2017), 24, offers some evidence from opinion polls that Canadians generally accept the view the newcomers have a “positive economic impact” in Canada. But what exactly is that impact? A more productive and prosperous economy has to be distinguished from one that is simply larger. Distributional effects, that is, very roughly, the uneven effects of changes in the volume of immigration on wages, profits, and the price of land, also have to be taken into account. Without clear evidence to the contrary, one can safely assume that the simple old “laws of supply and demand” apply to doctors, dentists, and machine tenders, as well as to beans, bacon, and tomatoes: a larger supply, through importation from lower cost sources, will tend to reduce the “compensation packages” that those raised locally can command and that the local consumers who want them must provide. Immigration has undoubtedly made the fortunes of many Canadians by allowing them to “grow the economy” with relatively cheap inputs.
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The numbers that economists and statisticians come up with, when they try to estimate the increase in immigration that would be needed to offset the effects of a low birth rate, are surprisingly large. For example: “Increasing [Canadian] immigration to 1% of population a year without varying its age distribution would slow the rise in the OAD [old age dependency] ratio only marginally. And raising immigration to this level while trying to select only very young immigrants with children, so as to lower dramatically the average age of immigrants, would still not prevent an historic rise in the ratio. Only … rapidly increasing immigration from less than 1% of the population to well over 3% for decades could come close to stabilizing the OAD ratio.” Robin Banerjee and William Robson, “Immigration’s Impact on the Growth and Age Structure of the Canadian Workforce,” in The Effects of Mass Immigration on Canadian Living Standards and Society, ed. Herbert Grubel (Fraser Institute, 2009), 142. For a more thorough examination of the question from a Quebec standpoint, see Benoît Dubreuil and Guillaume Marois, Le Remède imaginaire: Pourquoi l’immigration ne sauvera pas le Québec (Montreal: Boréal, 2011).
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The long-term goal could be to construct a Canadian nation that would mirror the population of the world as a whole with respect to racial, ethnic, and other cultural characteristics. This must eventually be the result of porous borders and non-discriminatory selection of those who cross them, and in the long run, it is perhaps the only cultural mix that can reconcile diversity with stability, for it is perhaps the only one that all can be brought to recognize as fair. But without an explicit policy directed to the creation of such an ideal population, there can be no realistic hope of reaching the equilibrium it promises in a reasonable time, such as a century or two. In fact, this policy or something similar to it could help even now to sustain faith in Canada’s multicultural ideals, policies, and ambitions.
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This conflation—or confusion, if confusion it is—has a distinguished ancestry. J. S. Mill, for example, seemed to endorse it. See his Utilitarianism, Chap. IV, beginning: “The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible, is that people actually see it…. In like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it.” Cf. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge University Press, 1903), 67: “The fallacy in this step is so obvious, that it is quite wonderful how Mill failed to see it. The fact is that ‘desirable’ does not mean ‘able to be desired’ as ‘visible’ means ‘able to be seen.’ The desirable means simply what ought to be desired or deserves to be desired; just as the detestable means not what can be but what ought to be detested and the damnable what deserves to be damned.”
- 20.
See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Harvard University Press, 1992), 63, 65, 383. For a more systematic explanation of the distinction, see Taylor, “What Is Human Agency?” in his Philosophical Papers, 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1985), 15–44. For the dependence of strong evaluation on articulated principles, that is, on human beings “being in the linguistic dimension,” see Taylor, The Language Animal, especially pp. 25–34. Taylor’s strong-weak distinction parallels the conventional distinction between rules or principles, on the one hand, and simple desires, on the other hand. Weak values, one could say, name the objects of our desires, the things we want to have, like food and sex. They are analogous to passions in the root meaning of that word. Strong values, by contrast, provide principles of evaluation, rules for deciding the relative value of different weaker values (money, food, fitness, etc.) and for resolving conflicts between them. They are like virtues, if by virtue we mean something that can govern a passion. Because value words typically have this double meaning, it is often unclear what is really being said when people talk about their values. (Thus when I say that I value freedom, am I saying that I would like to be able to do whatever I want to do, or am I saying that I strive to regulate my desires by a high standard of universal justice and respect for others? Am I saying that I want what I want, or that I am willing to accept restraints that I understand are fair and reasonable? Or is it a bit of both—saying one thing and hoping for another?) The language of values systematically blurs distinctions like these, and this is one of the secrets of its enormous appeal.
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Those who claim to be “tolerating” (with clenched teeth and pinched nostrils) the diversity they refuse otherwise to affirm and celebrate can of course argue that tolerance in the old, sniffy, inegalitarian sense is still tolerance and that a broad welcoming smile for newcomers has not always been considered the essence of real toleration. They can even insist that a firm policy of “zero tolerance” (e.g., regarding certain stereotypes, or racist jokes) is still not universally accepted as evidence of a deep commitment to tolerance as a value. But they cannot deny that the word “tolerance” is now being used more and more often to refer to the current ideal of warmly welcoming and sensitively incorporating different cultures in a single society, nor can they reasonably deny that an increasingly diverse society needs an increasingly sophisticated intolerance of old-fashioned “tolerance,” despite the conceptual tensions of such toleration. Stanley Fish, to whom is owed the questionable comparison of cultural solecisms to belches and farts, maintains that progressive liberals must simply abandon their unsustainable pretence of reliance on “neutral principles” as the basis for a strong and meaningful multiculturalism. “The [old liberal] distinction between what is respected and what is tolerated turns out to be a device for elevating the decorum of academic dinner parties to the status of discourse universals while consigning alternate decorums to the dustbin of the hopelessly vulgar…. [Enemies are dispatched] not by being defeated in combat but by being declared ineligible before the fight begins.” Stanley Fish, “Boutique Multiculturalism,” 80–81. In fact, according to Fish, those who threaten the only possible (i.e., unicultural) multiculturalism are “enemies” who are owed only such strategic toleration and recognition as will hasten their eventual extinction.
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The simplest formula for it is perhaps I + R = mc2. This compact formula, where I stands for immigration and R for recognition, with the subscript on multiculturalism (mc) serving to direct attention to culture or cultivation in the secondary sense of multiple cultures and away from the more basic idea of creating a new amalgamated “multiculture” of egalitarian accommodation, nicely suggests the explosive power of multiculturalism in the contemporary political world, but it should not be confused with a mathematical equation between measurable variables. For an attempt to think consistently (mathematically) and objectively (on the basis of measurements) about the conditions for the growth or decline of cultural consciousness and cultural rivalry, see H. D. Forbes, Ethnic Conflict: Commerce, Culture, and the Contact Hypothesis (Yale University Press, 1997), esp. 136–139 and 159–166.
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The classic Anglo-American account of toleration remains John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1858), which promoted the extension of toleration from a plurality of religious denominations (the differences between them assumed to be of only private significance, like the finer points of theology within a common religion) to “individuality,” involving the public display of non-conformity to commonly recognized standards, but still on the assumption that the eccentricities in question had only private significance and would not threaten the tolerating society—and might even accelerate its progress. The extension of toleration to group (or “cultural”) “eccentricities” aggravates the classic old conundrum about tolerance: is it or is it not intolerant to be intolerant of the intolerant? In the old liberalisms of religious toleration and personal eccentricity, the assumption of privacy (that the differences in question had no immediate public significance) alleviated this logical difficulty, but the new evasions required by cultural differences bring it back to the surface, and they are a key source of the tension between an older liberalism and contemporary multiculturalism, as we shall see presently.
- 24.
This was a major theme in the first book-length criticism of multiculturalism in Canada, Reginald Bibby’s Mosaic Madness: The Poverty and Potential of Life in Canada (Toronto: Stoddart, 1990), which was picking up a theme already familiar from American sources, such as Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).
- 25.
In The Language Animal, Taylor draws attention to the simultaneous and interdependent development of new social relations, linking whole categories of persons in new ways, and new linguistic “coinages” that define and give a clearer shape to the norms governing the new relations, a process which he says “generally leads to an enriched metapragmatic vocabulary, involving the introduction of new terms, or new, unprecedented meanings of familiar terms” (280). The alterations in the meaning of tolerance already explained and in the meanings of freedom and equality to be presented shortly may be taken to illustrate Taylor’s point.
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Forbes, H.D. (2019). Introduction: Celebrating Diversity. In: Multiculturalism in Canada. Recovering Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19835-0_1
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