So what?

Jesus and Mo on multiculturalism.

Tolerance and multiculturalism

The comments on Stephen Law's response to Ibrahim Lawson [link fixed] have become a conversation about multiculturalism.

Steve Chester appears to argue that condemning any behavior under the umbrella of a religion is tantamount to totalitarian oppression.

The problem with that stance, though, is that nobody supports absolute tolerance. We don't tolerate murderers, thieves, rapists, people who don't pay their taxes, or even people who jaywalk. The Nazis presumably had some sort of prosaic law enforcement, but we are not Nazi-like just because we enforce prosaic civil law.

The question is not whether to be intolerant of anything, it's about what specifically to be intolerant of; not whether but where to draw the line.

It's one thing to argue that we should tolerate some particular behavior. It's a horse of a different color to try to protect some behavior by arguing that we should draw no lines at all. It's so patently false — precisely because we do draw entirely uncontroversial lines — that one wonders why the speaker wishes to distract attention from the specifics of the behavior.

"Multiculturalism" has been assigned so many incompatible meanings that it's been rhetorically bludgeoned into meaninglessness. It can range anywhere from tolerating varying styles of dress to racial tolerance all the way to permitting and condoning the murder and mutilation of one's own children for trivial or even imagined sexual misbehavior.

Part of the problem is that multiculturalism and anti-multiculturalism have been adopted as smokescreens by people with objectionable hidden agendas. Right-wing extremists have adopted anti-multiculturalism to justify naked racism, racial oppression, and to justify wars of aggression to get those damn wogs off of our oil. Religious extremists have adopted multiculturalism to shield abhorrent misogyny and a genuinely totalitarian political ideology from democratic criticism. (Islam is not necessarily totalitarian, but Islamic totalitarianism is hardly a fringe movement, as evidenced by Saudi Arabia, the Afghani Taliban, the Northwest Frontier province of Pakistan, and any number of fundamentalist movements in other Islamic countries, even secular Turkey.

If people are going to live and work together, they need to establish some core values that are affirmed by everyone in that society. However, determining specifically what those core values are or should be is a nontrivial task, because it is also the case that beyond those core values, there is a considerable range of value that can be tolerated, and in many cases a range of values has value in itself.

It's a fundamental value of Western civilization from the dawn of the enlightenment that verbal criticism should never be suppressed. Although J. S. Mill makes the case most forcefully and coherently in On Liberty, it's arguable that freedom of speech is the sine qua non of Western Civilization. I view any attempt to suppress or condemn speech as speech on any basis — multiculturalism included — to attack the very foundation of my own values. Criticize the content of any speech to your heart's content, but to demand that anyone just absolutely shut the fuck up on any basis is beyond the pale.

Within my own (or other Western societies) if Muslims want to defend the practice of murdering their daughters, throwing acid in their faces, crippling their education, or restricting them from full civic participation and equal rights, let them argue the merits of these demands and submit them to full, vigorous democratic debate. To hide behind "multiculturalism" is nothing more than pure cowardice.

And if the racists and colonialists want to defend the practice of subjugating and denying full civil rights to brown people, if they want to defend wars of aggression and robbery on a national scale, if they want to enforce Christianity, let them defend those demands on their own merits. To hide behind "anti-multiculturalism" is equally cowardly.

Update: Here's an example of bullshit anti-multiculturalism (h/t to Political Crank):

Juashaunna Kelly, a Theodore Roosevelt High School senior who has the fastest mile and two-mile times of any girls' runner in the District this winter, was disqualified from Saturday's Montgomery Invitational indoor track and field meet after officials said her Muslim clothing violated national competition rules.

Kelly was wearing the same uniform she has worn for the past three seasons while running for Theodore Roosevelt's cross-country and track teams: a custom-made, one-piece blue and orange unitard that covers her head, arms, torso and legs. On top of the unitard, Kelly wore the same orange and blue T-shirt and shorts as her teammates.

I'm no fan at all of Islamic dress codes for women. I think these codes are inherently misogynist and oppressive, and they deserve criticism. On the other hand, singling out Ms. Kelly in this manner is just egregiously stupid, and the supposed justification is just slavish, authoritarian adherence to a different arbitrary dress code. When multiculturalism vs. anti-multiculturalism becomes a heated argument over which kind of petty authoritarianism to enforce in society, we have entirely missed the point of liberal democracy.

Multiculturalism and Islam

This excellent video by Pat Condell brings up a lot of interesting points about multiculturalism and Islam.



I think liberals are missing a trick with this whole multiculturalism thing. The right seems to want to throw out the baby of general cultural and racial tolerance with the bathwater of Islamic barbarity, but the many on the left seem intent on protecting the bathwater.

I'm in favor of neither course. I think multiculturalism—in some sense—is critically, fundamentally important to a democracy: There is no set of arbitrary cultural values that is objectively privileged. On the other hand, we in the West have spent the better part of the last five centuries developing not only a culture, but also a set of legal and ethical traditions. It is those legal and ethical traditions which deserve our protection, not our "culture".

Where each person comes from—language, history, traditions, manners of dress, holidays—are both nontrivial and important. We are richer for celebrating them. I'm glad we celebrate Cinco de Mayo, I would be equally glad to see a celebration of Eid. I'm one of the few (I think) atheists who likes Christmas, at least in an abstract sense (after raising two children, I'm kind of burnt out on the holiday). I have no objection to seeing saris, and I object to the hijab only because it is a mark of misogyny and the oppression of women.

Cultural and racial diversity is not only unobjectionable, it's necessary. But along with cultural and racial diversity, in one nation we have to have one law and one system of public ethics. All of this cultural diversity has standing to contribute to this one law, but one law we must have. And the existing members of a nation have an interest in protecting their law and public ethics and acculturating newcomers and immigrants. The whole world does not get to actually vote on American, French or British law, or even Iranian or Saudi law.

Criticism becomes racism and bigotry only when it criticizes that which does not affect ethics and law. It doesn't matter to the law if you wear a sari; it doesn't matter to public ethics if you're brown, it doesn't even matter directly to law and ethics if you stick your ass up in the air five times a day and proclaim your submission to Allah; it matters no more than sitting in a church on Sunday. It does matter, at least here in the West, when you beat your wife, murder your daughters, mis-educate your children, and in general fail to integrate yourself into the social, legal, political and ethical system of the country in which you live.

Multiculturalism and sociology

For your reading "pleasure", here are two entirely vapid essays on multiculturalism. Multiculturalism, citizenship and national identity and The many faces of multiculturalism. Neither says much of anything at all, much less anything interesting.

As I've noted before, "relativism" by itself is vacuous. Everything is relative, in some sense, to something else. Just saying that culture is relative to the people who comprise it is not by itself a particularly interesting observation. Which properties of the individuals are relevant to culture? To the extent that culture is anything at all, as some sort of abstraction of those properties, what sort of abstraction is it? What specifically is relative to what? What specifically is invariant with respect to what?

There are no principled, philosophical answers to the above questions. There are no objective normative truths what properties should comprise a culture, what abstraction culture should represent, what should be relative or invariant to what. We must ask, rather, scientific questions: How do people actually construct "culture"? How do people actually want to construct culture? How can an individual make rational decisions about these questions to maximize her self-interest?

We can answer the first question through the sciences of sociology and anthropology in the usual scientific manner: Construct theoretical frameworks consisting of falsifiable hypotheses, test them against reality and, accept them if they're supported by the evidence. Especially with something as complex as culture, there will be many perspectives, many theories, which can fulfill these scientific criteria and give us useful insights; until Hari Seldon appears on the scene, we won't have any sort of grand unified theory of sociology. This sort of approach is "postmodern" in the sense that it privileges a priori neither an overarching metaphysical notion of "culture" nor any particular scientific perspective. It is still scientific, though, in that only those perspectives with evidentiary meaning and support have any currency—thus excluding the trivial vacuity of the linked articles on methodological, not metaphysical, grounds.

I'll leave most of the sociology to professional sociologists, but one meta-theoretical perspective is glaringly obvious: Culture is, like personality, normatively self-descriptive. Just as "who I myself should be" is a matter of absolute personal privilege, "what culture X should be" is a matter of absolute privilege of the members of that culture.

On the other hand, actuality is a matter of real scientific truth: "Who I myself actually am" (as opposed to who I should be) is a matter of real[1] truth and can be empirically determined. It should be noted that an abstract quantity, "Who I am" has different answers (i.e. is relative to) depending on how the question is specifically constructed. One can look philosophically at this sort of scientific "relativism" either as perspective relativism or as property pluralism: One can get scientifically true views from different perspectives, or one can scientifically determine different properties. The meaning of the perspective or property relative to the way the scientific question is framed.

In precisely the same way, what a culture is is a matter of real, empirically determinable truth, and relative to the sort of scientific question asked.

Since the normative character of an individual or a culture is self-defined, one must, fundamentally, ask questions of the individual himself or the members of the culture themselves. One can collect evidence from outside the individual and culture, but the evidence must causally connect with the individual or members to be about that individual or culture. You cannot tell much of anything about me, for instance, by examining the character of my wife.

On the other hand, since all the members comprise a culture, no subset of a culture can, by itself, authoritatively define that culture. One cannot, for instance, determine what Islam is by repeating what one Imam says about Islam: You can determine only what Islam means to that particular person. Since many members comprise a culture, only statistical abstractions will have any meaning.

I'll leave the rest of the general sociology to the professionals, and repeat my two philosophical exhortations: First, don't get hung up on a priori metaphysics, just ask interesting questions about reality. Second, make sure you're asking scientifically meaningful questions, i.e. questions that are empirically falsifiable. It has been our exclusive experience that when you ask enough scientifically meaningful questions, coherent theoretical frameworks will emerge from the answers.


[1] Constructing "real" as the union of the subjective (minded) and the objective (non-minded).

Multiculturalism and rationality

Multiculturalism derives in an important way from meta-ethical subjective relativism: Given that there are no objects our ethical beliefs reference, there are no objects referenced by cultures (in the sense of collections of ethical beliefs adhered to by people who chose the same or similar self-identification). So there is no objective (non-minded) or "neutral" basis by which to differentiate or compare cultures, just as there is no objective way to compare ethics.

This truth has to just be swallowed whole: There is no objective basis to compare personal, cultural or social ethics.

(One can objectively critique a culture to the extent that the people in the culture do or do not hold scientifically established beliefs about objective reality. All cultures, however, dishonestly promulgate their ethical beliefs as objectively true, and predicate other beliefs on false or unprovable statements of objective reality, so this sort of critique is not very useful specifically as a comparator.)

Lacking an objective basis, how can we compare cultures? The central tenet of multiculturalism is that, fundamentally, you can't. Thus, some conclude, we ought to tolerate everything. This conclusion is logically fallacious. "Ought to" is the big clue. Let's put in the enthymeme and make the logical contradiction obvious.

(T): If there is no objective reason to prefer one action over another, then one ought to approve of both actions.

The problem is that (T) declares an objective ethical truth, but it contradicts the premise that there are no objective ethical truths. It is therefore internally contradictory with meta-ethical subjective relativism, from which we derive multiculturalism. One cannot rationally hold both MESR and (T).

MESR and multiculturalism are not ethical statements. They do not say you should not compare ethical beliefs, they say you cannot, at least not objectively. It is not "forbidden", it is impossible to do so rationally.

Our attachment to rationality and the pervasive acceptance of (T) has caused no end of confusion in ethical discourse. Even more fundamental to this confusion is the idea that rationality pertains only to objective reality. Emotions, tastes, preferences are dismissed as "irrational". Even such a luminary as Richard Dawkins exhibits this position:

Rather than the fanatically monogamous devotion to which we are susceptible, some sort of 'polyamory' is on the face of it more rational. ... Could irrational religion be a by-product of the irrationality mechanisms that were originally built into the brain by selection for falling in love? [emphasis added]

Monogamous love, because it does not have an objectively true referent, is ipso facto "irrational".

I call bullshit on this notion. It would be irrational if I drew conclusions about objective reality on the basis of only my naive beliefs. I'm married, I prefer monogamy, and I do in fact like my wife "a hundred times more" than I like anyone else. To conclude that she is in objective fact a hundred times better than anyone else would indeed be irrational—but it is not irrational on its face to like her a hundred times more.

Dismissing our pure subjective beliefs (emotions, preferences, tastes and ethical beliefs) as prima facie irrational Puts us in a double bind. If it is morally wrong to act irrationally, and if rationality is restricted to objective reality, then it is morally wrong to do anything just because we want to. But we do all sorts of things just because we want to; are most of our lives spent doing something morally wrong? Must we give up all subjective preference?

On the other hand, to deny the (subjectively) normative value of rationality makes criticism of those who make false statements about reality considerably problematic. "Who cares," one might say, "that it's irrational to believe that God sends fags to hell? You just said there's nothing wrong with irrationality."

Fortunately, there's an easy way out of this paradox: Redefine "rationality".

(R) Rationality consists of believing and acting in such a way that, all things considered, one's own personal, subjective self-interest is maximally fulfilled."

This construction indirectly preserves the notion of objective truth as rational, and objective falsity as irrational. Since many desires must be fulfilled via objective reality, true beliefs about objective reality will result in making effective decisions; false beliefs will result in making ineffective decisions.

The construction "all things considered" (or at least as many things as a finite being can efficiently consider) is critically important to this construction both to match our ordinary intuitions about ethics as being about more than just the fulfillment of superficial desire, as well as to keep (R) from contradicting MESR.

One might, for instance, have a subjective desire to rape and murder little girls, but also a subjective desire to not go to prison or be executed. If someone's desire to rape and murder outweighs the desire to avoid prison, it would be rational to rape and murder little girls and then, when finally caught, spend a considerable amount of time in prison. As much as we'd like to call such a weighting "irrational", there's really no justification for doing so. The best we ordinary people can do is simply say that we so strongly prefer that people not rape and murder little girls that we are willing to put them in prison, not for acting "irrationally", but for acting contrary to our preferences—and it is likewise rational to do so.

It's very important to understand that, while the above construction is, of course, strongly counter-intuitive, it fits the facts far better than our naive notions that our particular ethical beliefs are objectively true. The lack of an objective ethical basis of our laws and social norms affects only our sense of self-righteousness; it does not (always) effect the rationality of creating and enforcing laws and norms.

This construction is not tautological. Consider the notions of Heaven and Hell. If Heaven and Hell actually existed, then it would be rational to sacrifice a lesser, temporal self-interest for the sake of a greater, eternal self-interest. However, since Heaven and Hell do not actually exist, a decision taken on the false belief that they do exist will fail the maximize an individual's own subjective construction of her own self-interest.

One can see this sort of irrationality in Ayaan Hirsi Ali's autobiography, Infidel. She was convinced not of the notion that it was inherently or intrinsically ethical for women to cover themselves, but rather that if women did not cover themselves, then civilization would collapse into anarchy. She mistakenly believed that she was sacrificing one lesser self-interest (comfort and personal attractiveness) for a greater self-interest (a civilized, ordered society). But, since it's trivially obvious that women can show a great deal of skin without catastrophes of Biblical proportions, she was failing to maximize her own self-interest: She was sacrificing a self-interest for nothing she herself was interested in.

(Since all mistaken beliefs that affect one's self-interest are irrational, irrationality is, in many cases, merely a solecism. It's no great crime to be mistaken, but when does find out that one actually is mistaken it's stupid to refuse to correct one's beliefs.)

So let's swing back around to "multiculturalism". First, there's no objective basis to compare cultures. One can, however, criticize a culture directly for holding beliefs that are either provably false-to-fact (e.g. chaos resulting from women's "immodesty") or that are held as objectively true without evidentiary substantiation (e.g. Heaven and Hell). This critical framework can go pretty far, but only so far.

It is trivially easy to remove even something as egregiously objectionable (by Western standards) as fundamentalist Islam from this critique, and requires only the most modest and reasonable reinterpretation of the Koran and Hadith: Descriptions of Heaven and Hell, instead of being taken factually, are taken as merely emphatically specifying a degree of approval or disapproval of various acts. The rest is just subjective ethics: Individuals and the cultures they are members of simply hold the subjective ethical meta-belief that it is inherently good to act in strict accordance with the Koran, and inherently bad to act contrary to it. It is not, strictly speaking, necessary even to accept the existence of Allah as a metaphysical principle.

As purely a set of ethical beliefs, the Koran is nor more—and no less—subjective and arbitrary as is my own humanism.

On the one hand, MESR and multiculturalism denies that there is an objective basis to compare or criticize cultural beliefs. On the other hand, by the same token, MESR and multiculturalism also denies (T), that we must have a purely objective reason to believe and act. On this view, the question, "How can we compare cultures?" becomes incoherent. We must ask a different question.

The obvious alternative is, "How can members of different cultures most efficiently interact?" People do in fact have subjective preferences, and many of these subjective preferences are culturally and socially constructed—and people can also self-select cultures to fit their subjective beliefs—and it is rational by definition to maximize the fulfillment of these preferences (all things considered, of course).

Also complicating the issue is that every person is a member of multiple cultures, some by virtues of geography (I reside in the United States, which makes me a member of the American culture) and some self-selected (I label myself a member of the culture of humanists because I happen to hold humanist ethical values).

First of all, it's rational to try to change anyone's ethical beliefs or actions if they offend you. Most cultures and people, though, have ethical beliefs about what means should be employed to change people's beliefs and actions. For instance, American culture enshrines the ethical belief that it is always permissible to speak and write in such an attempt on nothing more than one's own personal authority. On the other hand, for those beliefs where speaking and writing will not do, there are mechanisms in place (again about which we have ethical beliefs) for implementing coercive action, usually limited by geography.

Thus, I may always speak and write about my opinion of Islamic culture (it disgusts me). I can participate in various democratic political processes to pass laws specifying coercive punishment for members—by virtue of their geographical location—of my city, county, state and nation. There are furthermore political processes for coercively implementing ethical standards across nations.

On the other hand, there is simply no way for me to have any effect whatsoever on the past, distant alien civilizations or hypothetical possible worlds. Any preferences I might have about such inaccessible locations are irrelevant, and can serve only a descriptive purpose, not a normative purpose.

As an example, let me talk about the basis in meta-ethical subjective relativism for my violent disapproval—and the limitations of that violence—of the war in Iraq.

First of all, I do violently disapprove of the war in Iraq, and I mean "violent" in the literal sense. There is, however, a process in place in the United States for expressing and implementing violent disapproval, and any individual physical activity to this end is not part of the process. I would very much like, and would unhesitatingly support, the arrest, trial, and imprisonment of George W. Bush and many members of his administration under due process of law. Make no mistake, legal violence is still violence: The police have guns, and prisons have bars. But as much as I disapprove of Bush & company, I disapprove more of extra-legal coercion (and I don't want to go to prison, either).

On my own authority, I'll write and speak about my ethical opposition to the war in Iraq. I have general legal and social permission to do so, by virtue of the First Amendment and the social beliefs underlying it. These principles also give general permission to participate in the democratic political process underlying the establishment and enforcement of laws by means of speech and my vote.

There are a number of characteristics about the war on which I ethically disapprove. I disapprove of the immense death and human suffering the war has caused, both to American soldiers and the Iraqi people. I disapprove of the massive expense the war has entailed. I disapprove of government officials showing willfully negligent disregard to objective truth and actively lying. I disapprove in principle of the violation of national sovereignty. I disapprove in principle of wars of conquest and aggression.

I don't believe that any of this disapproval is in any sense "objectively" true. But I still disapprove, so strongly that I will vote to make the corresponding activities illegal and punish anyone who perpetrates them. And if you don't agree, fuck you, argue with me from prison.

I also disapprove, just as strongly (if not more strongly), of the way Saddam Hussein governed Iraq. What I might have done had I been a resident of Iraq during his rule is, in the normative sense, irrelevant; ethical beliefs about fictional possible worlds are incoherent. I'm not a resident of Iraq, though. In this actual world, the only world where my actual beliefs have any currency, I am a resident of the United States. From that perspective my approval of removing Saddam Hussein is not even remotely comparable to my disapproval of both means of removing him by aggressive war or the actual consequences of having done so.

I also have come to the conclusion that there are no small few beliefs underlying the Iraq war which are either false-to-fact or unprovable in principle. These are matters of objective truth and can be argued rationally.

The most obvious irrationally mistaken belief is that we needed to go to war to prevent Iraq from using or obtaining weapons of mass destruction. The ethics of WMDs notwithstanding, it was false to fact to assert that Saddam Hussein or any Iraqi government had such weapons or had the capability to develop such weapons. Furthermore, this falsity was asserted with willfully negligent disregard for objective truth, both by the Bush Administration as well as Congress. (For this reason I will never vote for H. R. Clinton or Edwards for dogcatcher, much less President.)

As much as I personally prefer democratic, liberal and Enlightenment values, there is no objective basis to call these values superior to those of even the most regressive, tyrannical Middle-Ages society. To justify any coercive action on their objective superiority is irrational.

Again, I do very strongly prefer and approve of democratic, liberal and Enlightenment values. It is possible, under some hypothetical dramatic circumstances, that I might approve of some limited coercive action to impose some values outside of my national culture. (For instance, I might support some coercive action, far short of aggressive war, to inhibit Female Genital Mutilation in Somalia.) On the other hand, the component of individual liberty is so deeply embedded into these values that it is prima facie incoherent to establish these values by means of war. You cannot force a culture, society or nation to adopt Enlightenment values: The mere act of submitting to these values is contrary to them. Anyone who thought that we could impose Enlightenment values on Iraq by means of an invasion, or who believes we can impose them by means of continuing the occupation, is simply irrational, not to mention egregiously stupid.

This is just a sample. There are so many moral and rational objections to the Iraq war that one could fill a whole blog with nothing but. And not just one.