Cultural accommodation: How to navigate societal diversity | Chandran Kukathas | Big Think

One of the issues that arises, I think, for liberals generally, and for classical liberals included, is how to deal with the fact of cultural diversity. This may exist in part because a society is religiously diverse, but it may also be because it's diverse as a result of ethnic variation. The fact that a society is one that has, you know, multiple cultural traditions in operation within it. In societies like, say, the United States or Australia, some of these traditions reflect the colonial origins of the society.

So, you may have native peoples who have very different cultural traditions. But also, because of immigration over the years, there may be cultural diversity as a result of this. Now, one response to this has been to say, well, what we need to do is to protect this diversity by establishing cultural rights of some kind. That is to say, to recognize that people have rights to some kind of cultural protection, to make sure that they can, in fact, live according to their own cultural traditions.

Now, I think this is a difficult solution to defend in some ways. Because, while on the one hand, it's good to recognize that diversity and to allow for different kinds of ways to flourish, one of the problems is that it assumes, in a way, that when we say that there are cultures that exist, we're assuming that they somehow exist naturally and independently of the kinds of rights and protections that exist. Whereas, in fact, to some extent, cultures and traditions also exist because of particular kinds of norms, or rights, and laws that are, in fact, in operation.

To give you a kind of almost trivial example or a hypothetical example, imagine that a law was passed that said that anyone of, you know, of Portuguese Mexican descent in the United States would be entitled to free college education. Okay, I suspect that everyone who’s got even the slightest hint of a Mexican or Portuguese background will go looking for it and try to say, yes, I belong to this particular group. But absent that particular entitlement, this group wouldn't have any real existence. It's there partly because of the laws that have come into place.

We can find more, you know, particular examples of this kind of thing in societies where the laws have changed to recognize different kinds of ethnicities and so on. The recognition of an ethnicity may mean that a certain ethnicity then comes into existence or comes into prominence. So, I think to try to say what we've got to do is somehow protect particular cultures is a difficult thing to do. Because that itself may, you know, give rise to the existence of particular cultures.

Now that said, I don't want to deny that, you know, some kinds of traditions and cultures have a very, very long history. I mean, for example, the Jewish people don't exist simply because someone has made a rule that says if you're Jewish, you get all these advantages. They have a long history. Similarly, you know, there are other traditions, religious and otherwise, within a society that exists not because of very specific laws that are created.

So here the question is, okay, how do we make sure that, you know, people from different kinds of traditions and cultures do get some kind of protection without making that protection too explicit? Because, as I said, one of the problems is that making it explicit can give rise to particular entities that don't exist except for that protection. But also, when you give an entity a kind of protection, what you're also doing is you're not just protecting something that is somehow a natural thing that belongs to the whole of the cultural or the tradition.

What you're doing is you're also granting a certain amount of power to those who are the leaders or the dominant class within those groups. And so, you know, they're the ones with whom you’d be negotiating and discussing and, you know, seeking accommodation. So what you're doing is you're really giving them power over their own populations. And that's something that you might want to be wary on. Because those groups themselves might have within them smaller groups that might also be wanting to be, you know, independent or tolerated, or, you know, given some kind of protection.

So protecting one kind of group may mean that you advantage one group to the disadvantage of internal groups. So from my point of view, as a classical liberal, I think the answer is to allow for, you know, the accommodation of diversity and difference by essentially saying, look, we don't recognize any group or tradition as somehow having the right to be protected and preserved. But neither do we recognize the right of anybody to suppress them, to dominate them, to stop them from forming, from living together, and so on.

But that does mean that, you know, those who want to dissent from those groups are also free to do so. They can't be forced by the groups within which they find themselves to conform to those particular norms. So, in a sense, what it's doing is applying a kind of principle of hyper-tolerance to everybody. We accept that you can go live your own lives in the ways that you see fit, but we don't recognize your right to force other people to live according to the way you see fit.

And that's how I like to think about the classical liberal response to the problem of cultural diversity.