Multiculturalism, right and left

There is an excellent piece by the political and cultural commentator Agnès Poirier on the Guardian's Comment is Free site on the dilemmas of multiculturalism. Agnès is referring specifically to the conference held by Ken Livingstone last weekend purporting to discuss the thesis of the "Clash of Civilisations". She says:

There is something rotten in Ken Livingstone's political agenda. His multiculturalism debate, which took place last Saturday in London, was so misconceived and biased that, unlike Inayat Bunglawala [of the Muslim Council of Britain, whom I debated at the same event - OK], I felt I had no other option than to pull out.

Her argument is spirited and her observations acute. Note in particular her conclusion:

Last thing, at the end of the programme, there was a mention of facilities "available during the day": a crèche (great, that's always handy), a "female prayer room" and "a male prayer room". The Catholics not segregating between men and women, I guess these rooms weren't made for them. The Orthodox Jews do segregate according to gender but there wouldn't be any since the conference was organised during Shabbat. So what? Were these prayer rooms only for devout Muslims? And is it Ken Livingstone's idea of multiculturalism, one that acknowledges and condones segregation? Perhaps, you now see the point of French republicanism: don't give in to any specific religious demands. And let everybody go down the café if they want a change of scenery.

As some comments beneath her article cite me as a counterexample of a speaker unsympathetic to Livingstone's political premises yet who turned up to argue the case at the conference, I should say that I entirely agree with Agnès Poirier's observations. I consider the event was not only misconceived but also illegitimate. It presented a tendentious misreading of an admittedly deeply flawed political thesis as a matter of municipal responsibility in a great cosmopolitan capital city. I still can't quite credit that it was only when I was physically on the platform of the session preposterously entitled "Democratic solutions for the Middle East" that I fully realised that the interests of the conference's organisers and many of its attendees were not with the development of civil society in that turbulent and predominantly autocratic region, let alone with how municipal government in London might contribute to that end, but with certain familiar preconceptions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Another speaker at the conference, Martin Bright of the New Statesman, writing on his blog reaches similar conclusions to mine: "The conference was entirely misleading in its very conception: ostensibly all-embracing and generous, but, in fact, designed to set people against each other. I went home with a feeling of delayed shellshock."

One of the reasons I identify with the political Left in spite of everything is its traditional adherence to secularism and the notion of a common humanity that supersedes group identities. (I concede that I also count myself on the Left for the pragmatic but negative reason of not wishing to grant Mr Livingstone and those who think like him a proprietary claim to that label.) It is almost refreshing - or at least stabilising - in these circumstances to find that the traditional Right remains receptive to comparable or worse inflammatory nonsense on culture and religion. Take, for example, a demagogue called Dinesh D'Souza, a Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University (where one of my political heroes, the pragmatist philosopher and social democrat Sidney Hook, held a similar position in the last decade of his long and distinguished life).

I have read two books by D'Souza, who is a prolific author. One is a hagiography of Ronald Reagan, which as a discussion of the often contradictory and idiosyncratic policies of Reagan as President is worthless. (As a point of comparison, read the important and original studies by John Sloan, The Reagan Effect: Economics and Presidential Leadership, 1999, and Beth Fischer, The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War, 1997.) The other is a disgraceful work called The End of Racism, which comprises reams of assertions on the supposed pathologies of black Americans and a candid judgement that the Civil Rights Act ought never to have been passed.

D'Souza has just produced another book, called The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. Seriously. No, I haven't read the book, and no, I won't be doing so. There's an interview with the author in the conservative National Review, which is quite enough for me. D'Souza's thesis might almost be entitled, in emulation of so much tosh published after 9/11 in newspapers that are closer - geographically and ideologically speaking - to home than is National Review, "Why do they hate us?" Here is D'Souza's considered judgement:

Why did the guys who did it, do it? Surely five years after 9/11, it’s reasonable to ask this question. And both the Right and the Left have been operating under illusions. The radical Muslims are against modernity and science and democracy. The radical Muslims are upset because of colonialism and the Crusades. It’s all nonsense. That’s not what the leading thinkers of radical Islam say. And Bin Laden’s own views are quite different. In his Letter to America, issued shortly after 9/11, he said that America is the fount of global atheism and it is imposing its morally depraved values on the world. So Muslims must rise up in defensive jihad against America because their religion and their values are under attack. This aspect of Bin Laden’s critique has been totally ignored, and it’s one that resonates with a lot of traditional Muslims and traditional people around the world. A second point is that unlike [the bonehead Baptist Rev. Jerry] Falwell I don’t think “America” is to blame. Muslims in Indonesia and Egypt and Pakistan don’t see “America,” they see the face of American popular culture that is projected by our television and movies and music. They see the dimension of America that in their view corrupts the innocence of children, and undermines the family, and promotes homosexuality as a normal way of life. In fact, this is the America of the cultural Left. What the Left considers “liberating,” much of the world considers a scandalous assault on modesty and decency.

So let's have a return to modesty and decency in deference to the feelings of those who might otherwise ally with movements that declare holy war on us. I could scarcely believe what I was reading. Expounded at book-length, D'Souza's argument is still apparently a farrago of nonsense, judging by Alan Wolfe's review in the New York Times:

At one point in “The Enemy at Home,” D’Souza appeals to “decent liberals and Democrats” to join him in rejecting the American left. Although he does not name me as one of them, I sense he is appealing to people like me because I write for The New Republic, a liberal magazine that distances itself from leftism. So let this “decent” liberal make perfectly clear how thoroughly indecent Dinesh D’Souza is. Like his hero Joe McCarthy, he has no sense of shame. He is a childish thinker and writer tackling subjects about which he knows little to make arguments that reek of political extremism. His book is a national disgrace, a sorry example of a publishing culture more concerned with the sensational than the sensible. People on the left, especially those who have been subjects of D’Souza’s previous books, will shrug their shoulders at his latest screed. I look forward to the reaction from decent conservatives and Republicans who will, if they have any sense of honor, distance themselves, quickly and cleanly, from the Rishwain research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Unlike D'Souza, I take immense pride in the offence and provocation that my country, its culture and its godlessness cause those who value "modesty and decency". I celebrate our commitment to artistic self-expression, sexual equality, the separation of religious and civil authority, and what D'Souza terms the promotion of homosexuality as a normal way of life. To those "traditional Muslims and traditional people around the world" who find this offensive, I undertake to pay no attention whatever to the state of your injured sensibilities.