Normative multiculturalism and the paradox of tolerance
29 May, 2024 at 22:46 | Posted in Politics & Society | 1 Comment
Culture, identity, ethnicity, gender, and religiosity should never be accepted as a basis for intolerance in political and civic aspects. In a modern democratic society, people belonging to these different groups must be able to rely on society to protect them against the abuses of intolerance. All citizens must have the freedom and right to question and leave their own group. Against those who do not accept this tolerance, we must be intolerant.
In Sweden, we have uncritically embraced unspecified and undefined multiculturalism for a long time. If we mean by multiculturalism that there are several different cultures in our society, this does not pose a problem. Then we are all multiculturalists.
But if we mean that cultural identity and affiliation also entail specific moral, ethical, and political rights and obligations, then we are talking about something completely different. Then we are talking about normative multiculturalism. Accepting normative multiculturalism also means tolerating unacceptable intolerance, as normative multiculturalism implies that the specific cultural groups’ rights may be given higher priority than the citizen’s universal human rights — and thus indirectly become a defence for these groups’ (potential) intolerance. In a normative multiculturalist society, institutions and regulations can be used to restrict people’s freedom based on unacceptable and intolerant cultural values.
Normative multiculturalism, like xenophobia and racism, means that individuals are reduced unacceptably to being passive members of a culture or identity-bearing group. But tolerance does not mean that we must have a relativistic attitude towards identity and culture. Those who, in our society, show in their actions that they do not respect other people’s rights cannot expect us to be tolerant of them. Those who use violence to force other people to submit to a specific group’s religion, ideology, or ‘culture’ are themselves responsible for the intolerance they must be met with.
Society must be intolerant of those who want to force others in our society to live according to their own religious, cultural, or ideological beliefs and taboos. Society must be intolerant of those who want to force society to adapt laws and regulations to their religion’s, culture’s, or group’s interpretations. We should not be tolerant of those who are intolerant in their actions.
If we are to preserve the achievements of a modern democratic society, society cannot embrace normative multiculturalism. In a modern democratic society, the rule of law must apply — and apply to everyone!
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LARS P. SYLL 
Zygmunt Bauman was without doubt one of the most important social thinkers of our time. Even though he called himself a sociologist, a social philosopher would be a much more adequate designation, as his work is never dedicated to the analysis of very particular problems in a limited setting, as most of mainstream sociology is. But neither was he an intellectual of the “panelist” type.
In many of his works, Zygmunt Bauman has expressed a critical position regarding the politics of multiculturalism, showing how it can be and has been used to downgrade the problems of inequality and uneven access to education, while sequestering minorities in their inherited cultural situations,which are portrayed by the leaders of such communities as “fortresses under siege”.
Zygmunt Bauman argues in his book “Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World” that multiculturalism in practice is first and foremost about the right to indifference. When you claim that others should have the freedom to behave as they want, you do it because you ignore them and don’t want to have to take an interest in them – and because you don’t want others to interfere with what you yourself are doing .
According to Bauman, multiculturalism is first and foremost an ideological superstructure to indifference, it is basically just a variant of racism and it leads to the world being made up of different ghettos that carry out opinion coercion inwardly, against their own members, while at the same time giving it a blank in all others – unless conflicts of interest arise that lead to open confrontation.
Comment by Jan Milch— 30 May, 2024 #