MANY A classical liberal argued that since the liberal view of life was grounded in the fundamental truths of human nature and represented more or less the last word in human wisdom, nonliberal communities at home and abroad should be persuaded and, if necessary, pressured and coerced to assimilate into it. This belief informed J. S. Mill’s attitudes to the native peoples, the Basques, the Bretons, the Scots, and the Francophones in Quebec, and formed the basis of his justification of British colonialism in India and elsewhere. Alexis de Tocqueville shared his view. And since the fun-loving people of Tahiti lacked moral seriousness and high ideals and were little different from “sheep and cattle,” Kant wondered “why they should exist at all” and what the universe would lose if they disappeared altogether.
Most liberals today are more tolerant of nonliberal communities—some for prudential reasons, others on the basis of suitably reinterpreted liberal principles—and believe that they should be allowed the right to preserve their cultures. Contemporary liberals are, however, troubled by the fact that the communities concerned sometimes engage in practices that violate important liberal values. While acknowledging the obligation to respect minority cultures, liberals rightly think that toleration cannot be unconditional. Where, then, should they draw the line?
The standard liberal strategy is to derive the limits of toleration from the grounds of it. For Will Kymlicka, who has given more thought to this subject than most liberals, minority cultures should be tolerated because a stable culture is the necessary precondition of human flourishing. This means that no cultural practice should be tolerated that denies its members a measure of autonomy, choice between worthwhile options, dissent, and the right of exit, all of which he takes to be constitutive of human well-being. Since he defends cultural autonomy on liberal functionalist grounds, it is hardly surprising that he arrives at the liberal functionalist criteria of toleration.
Susan Okin shares Kymlicka’s approach and pushes it further. For her, minority cultures should enjoy the right to autonomy only when and only to the extent that they respect what she calls the “fundamentals of liberalism.” She singles out the equality of the sexes as one of these fundamental values and takes it to imply that women should enjoy not only equal dignity and rights but also the opportunity to lead equally fulfilling lives and to question their socially prescribed roles.
In her view many minority cultures are deeply sexist, treating women as inferior and relying on a combination of ideological and legal coercion to condition them into accepting their subordinate status, with the result that they often lead miserable lives and grow up without a sense of self-respect and capacity for autonomy. Okin insists that respect for other cultures should not become a shield for sexism, that their self-proclaimed leaders, mostly male and conservative, should not be allowed to become their sole spokesmen, and that since multiculturalism implies respect for cultural autonomy, feminists should not give it their uncritical support.
I find most of the substantive conclusions of her excellent and passionately argued paper unexceptionable. She is right to argue that respect for cultures can never be unconditional and condone acts of inhumanity and oppression. This is why respect for human beings does not necessarily entail respect for their cultures, for the latter might show no respect for human beings. Clitoridectomy and other most horrendous forms of female genital mutilation, forced or child marriages, callous treatment of rape victims, and suppression of women in general are all unacceptable practices and should be disallowed. In recent years Britain has produced even more horrifying cases. Since the communities concerned are unable to set their cultural house in order, even the staunchest champions of cultural autonomy have reluctantly asked the law to intervene.
While agreeing with Okin’s conclusions on these and related matters, I feel uneasy about her reasons and her wider theoretical framework. First, since she concentrates on extreme cases, she ignores the problems involved in judging other cultures. Clitoridectomy on children is unacceptable because it causes irreparable harm to helpless victims on the basis of dubious and contested beliefs. In some communities, however, it is freely undergone by adult, sane, and educated women after the birth of their last child as a way of regulating their sexuality, or reminding themselves that they are from now onward primarily mothers rather than wives, or as a religious sacrifice of what they greatly value for the sake of their children and family, or as a symbolic break with one phase of life. I wonder whether Okin wishes to ban this and why. Again, polygamy is unacceptable if limited to men, but what if women were also given the right to marry multiple partners? It then does not offend against the principle of the equality of the sexes. Indeed, it does not seem to violate any of the central liberal values, for it is based on uncoerced choice by adults, respects individual differences of temperament and emotional needs, encourages experiments in living, relates to the realm of privacy with which the liberal state is expected not to interfere, and so on. I am not sure that Okin’s theoretical framework is rich enough to deal with these questions satisfactorily.
Second, when Okin disallows such practices as clitoridectomy and forced marriages, she does so on the ground that they violate the fundamentals of liberalism. Liberalism refers to the way a set of values are defined, related, and integrated into a more or less coherent doctrine. Since the values can be defined, related, and integrated in several different ways, there are many kinds of liberalism, none true or claiming the allegiance of all liberals. Liberalism therefore has no fundamentals, though, of course, different liberals may confer such a status on different values. Okin is free to regard certain values as fundamental but wrong to claim the authority of the entire liberal tradition for them.
Even if we accepted certain values as fundamental liberal values, they are surely not self-evident and beyond criticism. Okin needs to show why they are worth accepting, especially in relation to non-liberals who deny their validity. It would not do to say that these are values which “they” must accept, both because we are not all agreed about them and because nonliberal citizens are now part of us. To insist that they must abide by our fundamentals is to expose ourselves to the same charge of fundamentalism that we make against them, and to rely solely on our superior coercive power to get our way.
Okin’s approach also faces another danger. If minority cultures are to be required to conform to fundamental liberal values, there is no reason to stop with the equality of the sexes. One could equally consistently require them to respect such other fundamental liberal values as autonomy, individualism, choice, free speech, and open internal debate. This amounts to saying that minority cultures should be respected only if they become liberal, an extreme form of intolerance that shows scant respect for their identity. There is a fine line to be drawn between respecting others’ cultural differences and requiring them to conform to certain minimal values. Okin’s appeal to the “fundamentals of liberalism” to set the limits of tolerance does not allow her to draw it.
Third, although Okin rightly insists on the equality of the sexes, her definition of it is too broad to be practicable or even acceptable. It is one thing to say that women should enjoy equal dignity and rights, but an altogether different thing to say that they should also be equally autonomous, free to challenge their social roles, unconstrained by the subtle controls of patriarchal cultures, and so forth. The latter criteria are too complex to measure and apply across cultures, and rest on a view of equality that is unlikely to command universal consensus. Furthermore, in some societies women are treated as inferior when young or unmarried but are revered and enjoy superiority over men when they reach a certain age, become grandmothers, lead virtuous lives, or display unusual qualities. This is why these societies present the apparent paradox of being both sexist and accepting, even welcoming, of women leaders in all walks of life. Since women at different stages of life or in different relationships are perceived differently and endowed with different rights, the “woman” is too oversimplified an abstraction to allow us to appreciate the diversity of her status, roles, and power in the diverse array of human cultures. We need more nuanced and complex notions of equality than Okin proposes.
There is also the further question of how women themselves perceive their situation. If some of them do not share the feminist view, it would be wrong to say that they are victims of a culturally generated false consciousness and in need of liberation by well-meaning outsiders. That is patronizing, even impertinent, and denies them the very equality we wish to extend to them. This is not to say that they might not be brainwashed, for sometimes they are, but rather that we should avoid the mistaken conclusion that those who do not share our beliefs about their well-being are all misguided victims of indoctrination. In Britain several well-educated white liberal women have in recent years converted to Islam, or returned to some aspects of traditional Judaism, because, among other things, they found these traditions’ views of intergender relations more convincing or emotionally more satisfying than conventional alternatives. There is a lesson here for both liberals and feminists.
In France and the Netherlands several Muslim girls freely opted for the hijab, partly to reassure their conservative parents that they will not be corrupted by the liberal culture of the school and partly to reshape the latter by indicating to both white and Muslim boys that they were not available for certain kinds of activities. The hijab was in their case a highly complex autonomous act intended both to remain within the tradition and to challenge it, to accept the cultural inequality and to create a space for equality. To see it merely as a symbol of their subordination, as many French feminists did, is to miss the subtle dialectic of cultural contestation.
Fourth and finally, Okin fails to appreciate the full force of the challenge of multiculturalism and the opportunity it offers to liberals to deepen and enrich their self-understanding. Like Will Kymlicka she takes liberalism as self-evidently true, asks how it can accommodate minority cultures, and more or less reduces multiculturalism to a discussion about group rights, which is but a small and minor part of it. What is clumsily called multiculturalism is a revolt against liberal hegemony and self-righteousness. For centuries liberal writers have claimed that theirs was a transcultural and universally valid moral and political doctrine representing the only true or rational way of organizing human life. A multiculturalism that rejects this extraordinary claim is not so much a doctrine as a perspective. Pared down to its barest essentials and purged of the polemical exaggeration of its defenders and detractors, it represents the view that culture provides the necessary and inescapable context of human life, that all moral and political doctrines tend to reflect and universalize their cultural origins, that all cultures are partial and benefit from the insights of others, and that truly universal values can be arrived at only by means of an uncoerced and equal intercultural dialogue.
From a multicultural perspective the liberal view of life is culturally specific and neither self-evident nor the only rational or true way to organize human life; some of its values, when suitably redefined, may be shown to have universal relevance, but others may not; and liberal relations with nonliberal cultures should be based not on dogmatically asserted liberal values but on a critical and open-minded dialogue.
Multiculturalism deflates the absolutist pretensions of liberalism and requires it to acknowledge its contingent historical and cultural roots. Since no culture exhausts the full range of human possibilities, multiculturalism also requires liberalism to become self-critical and to engage in an open-minded dialogue with other doctrines and cultures. It rejects the liberal claim to enjoy the monopoly of moral good and to be the final arbiter of all moral values, its crude and tendentious division of all ways of life and thought into liberal and nonliberal, and its persistent tendency to avoid a dialogue with other cultures by viewing them as nothing more than minority cultures whom it would “grant” such rights as it unilaterally determines.
In her moving paper Susan Okin offers a liberal theory of multiculturalism in which liberalism is the hegemonic interlocutor and sets the parameters for nonliberal cultures. We need instead a multicultural theory of liberalism that both cherishes and appreciates the limitations of the great liberal values, assigns them their proper but limited place in the moral world, and provides a framework of thought and action in which different cultures can cooperatively explore their differences and create a rich and lively community based on their respective insights. When allowed to flourish under the minimally necessary moral constraints, multiculturalism is likely to generate radically novel ways of conceptualizing and structuring intergender relations that cannot but deepen and broaden the hitherto somewhat parochial feminist sensibility. Far from being the enemy of women, it gives them the unique historical opportunity to pluralize and transform radically the universally hegemonic and boringly homogeneous patriarchal culture that damages both women and men alike.