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Spring 2001
Volume 00, Number 2

Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience

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"Can We All Get Along?"
Multiculturalism and Social Justice

Charles Verharen
Howard University

"A culture…is always the result of an exceedingly long series of related experiments in living in which each experiment is designed in the light of what was learned in earlier experiments" (Bernard Boxill, 1998, 118).

"Culture goods, once evolved, are no longer the exclusive property of the race or people that originated them. They belong to all who can use them; and belong most to those who can use them best" (Alain Locke, 1989, 206).

In an essay on majoritarian democracy and minority cultures, Bernard Boxill argues that social cultures are best defined as "experiments in living" (Boxill, 1998, 117). Boxill uses Mill's arguments from On Liberty to show that majority cultures act in their own best interest by attending to the flourishing of minority cultures in their midst. If societies should give free rein to "freethinkers, eccentrics, and intellectuals" because of their potential to discover new ways of living that are "fit to be converted into customs" (Mill cited in Boxill, 117), then they have even more reason to support minority cultures. Far more than solitary groups of reformers, minority cultures present pragmatic prophecies tested over time and circumstance. They offer both experimental results and long-term reflections upon those results.

Reflecting on the conditions for social justice in multicultural societies, Boxill argues that minority cultures can not flourish without proportional political representation. He doesn't assume that "people from the majority culture cannot care about the interests of those in minority cultures and cannot possibly understand and devise the kind of legislation that would enable theme to thrive" (Boxill, 114). However, he does claim that those who share the same culture are more likely to "identify" with one another, and "consequently to love and care" for one another more than "outsiders" could (Boxill, 114).

Furthermore, Boxill argues that members of minority cultures are potentially in the best position to know what legislation would promote their thriving because they understand their own cultures intimately, both from the inside and outside: "they live in a society dominated by the majority culture and are therefore often compelled to step outside their own culture and to operate in the majority culture. Consequently, they will be able to gain the perspective necessary to assessing its strengths and weaknesses" (Boxill, 114).

Noting the exceptions, Boxill remarks that the Japanese and Jews "have done remarkably well in the United States although they are usually represented by Caucasians and Christians who neither understand them nor particularly care for them" (Boxill, 115). However, he says, such cases are anomalies.

Boxill suggests that Thomas Hare's proposal to defuse the "tyranny of the majority" in democracies by means of a single transferable vote deserves contemporary attention (Boxill, 119). Nevertheless, the path to ending democratic forms of tyranny cannot be easy.

If a technique for circumventing majoritarian tyranny can be found, Boxill argues, a multiculturalism sustained by a legislature that gives voice to minority cultural interests can best promote a society's thriving. At the same time, multicultural political representation is the only sure path to social justice. A majority culture striving for social justice acts to ensure its own flourishing.

In the remainder of this essay, I want to examine several challenges to Boxill's promotion of multiculturalism and consider the consequences of his theory for global multiculturalism. Because his brief essay does not confront these issues, I will turn to Alain Locke's philosophy of cultural pluralism. Calling for a "new world order" (Locke, 152), Locke promotes a global multiculturalism grounded in a revised version of democracy that can itself only be styled as "monocultural." Locke justifies this new melange of mono- and multiculturalism as the only ground for international social justice.

Challenges to Multiculturalism

The United States has become something more than a melting pot-that pleasant trope that tries to turn the injustice and hardship suffered by millions of immigrants from thousands of different cultures around the world into a faded memory of a vibrant and enjoyable time.

Now the United States is a cauldron of ethnic rage and culture wars. The Rodney King incident that gives this essay its title caps a long line of riots and rage stretching back to the '60's and beyond. Indeed, the cauldron rather than the melting pot characterizes the very beginnings of our republic, given the rage of enslaved persons, indentured servants, women serving as virtual slaves in otherwise "respectable" households, and children working up to eighteen hours a day at labor that destroyed their health before they reached adulthood.

Can a campaign for social justice that promotes respect for minority cultures ease the rage? A phalanx of conservative thinkers insists to the contrary that cultural difference itself hinders the expression of social justice in multicultural societies. Alan Bloom, for example, compares cultures to the cave in Plato's Republic. For Bloom, ethnocentrism is the original human condition, and only philosophy can save us from being cave-bound, or "culture-bound" (1987, 38). Bloom imagines that the Greeks were not only the "first men we know to address the problem of ethnocentrism" (1987, 37), but also the first to solve it. Ironically, Bloom's Closing of the American Mind proposes to stop cultural conflict by dissolving cultural difference. His position is that European culture has reached the pinnacle of human achievement. Allowing other cultures prominent places in the United States would entail regression to inferior ways of living.

E.D. Hirsch offers a less presumptuous and more pragmatic reason for diminishing cultural difference in the United States. Inasmuch as a nation's strongest bond is a common cultural core, multiculturalism weakens national solidarity (1987, xv).

Nathan Glazer straddles the line between rejecting and embracing multiculturalism. Proclaiming that "we are all multiculturalists now" in his book of that title, Glazer portrays himself as a reluctant multiculturalist. He argues that the driving force for multiculturalism has been the United States' inability to assimilate African Americans into mainstream culture (1997, 160).

Anthony Appiah proposes "a multiculturalism that accepts America's diversity while teaching each of us the ways and the world of others" (1998, 52). He defines multiculturalism as "an approach to education and to public culture that acknowledges the diversity of cultures and subcultures in the United States and that proposes to deal with that diversity in some other way than by imposing the values and ideas of the hitherto dominant Anglo-Saxon cultural tradition" (1998, 48). Appiah praises this version of multiculturalism because the "Christian, Anglo-Saxon tradition was rooted in…racism and anti-Semitism (and sexism and heterosexism…)" (1998, 48). Also, "making the culture of one subculture the official culture of a state privileges the members of that subculture…in ways that are profoundly antiegalitarian and, thus, antidemocratic" (1998, 48).

Appiah's multiculturalism cannot encourage members of minority groups to dedicate themselves to passing on their cultures to their children, however. He argues, for example, that an Afrocentric strategy for healing cultural conflict is "to teach each child the culture of its group" (1998, 49). Against the Afrocentrists, he claims that attention to specific cultural history is impractical and dangerous because it "would require segregation into cultural groups either within or between public schools in ways that would be plainly unconstitutional" (1998, 50). Afrocentric emphasis on unique group history is "dangerous" because it leads us "prefer our own kind… Culture undergirds loyalties" (1998, 52). Citing examples in Nigeria and Ghana, Appiah imagines that cultural loyalty is the greatest danger to national unity (1998, 41-44).

Alain Locke's Multiculturalism

Against Appiah's position, Locke claims that "loyalty to loyalty" must serve as the primary principle of multiculturalism (1989, 49). Cultures are grounded in philosophical principles that must command unswerving loyalty in order for them to survive and flourish. Multiculturalism must respect this commitment. Where cultural loyalties force cultures into mortal opposition, some method must be practiced to moderate cultural conflict.

Locke proposes a technique called "cultural relativism." The first step of the method is to "implement an objective interpretation of values by referring them realistically to their social and cultural backgrounds" (1989, 273). The second step "interpret[s] values concretely as functional adaptations to these backgrounds, and thus make[s] clear their historical and functional relativity. An objective criterion of functional sufficiency…would thereby be set up as a pragmatic test of value adequacy" (1989, 273). The method will "claim…no validity for values beyond this relativistic framework, and so counteract value dogmatism based on regarding them as universals good and true for all times" (1989, 274). Cultural pluralism regards ideology's function as a rationalization of values subject to pragmatic critique. The method assumes that value concepts change through time and circumstance, and tend in the direction of overgeneralization (1989, 274).

Locke assumes that cultures can get along because they are ultimately grounded in core values that all cultures share under a principle of "cultural equivalence" or "culture-cognates" or "culture-correlates" (1989, 73). He refuses to specify these values in advance of anthropological investigation, but he expects that such research will confirm the tenets of the world's major philosophical and religious precepts (1989, 76).

Philosophy in league with anthropology and other social sciences like sociology and psychology must undertake a search for universal, quasi-absolute values that undergird all cultures, so that cultures can see themselves in others and thereby all get along. Locke's new philosophical methodology is based on consilience: "a philosophy and a psychology, and perhaps too, a sociology, pivoted around functionalistic relativism" (Locke, 50). The philosophy of cultural relativism, beginning as a "mere philosophy or abstract theory of values" must depend on the social sciences for an "objective and factual base" in carrying out its "task of reconstructing our basic social and cultural loyalties or of lifting them, through some basically new perspective, to a plane of enlarged mutual understanding" (Locke, 72).

Locke specifically claims that for critical relativism to accomplish this task, "anthropology in the broadest sense must be the guide and adjutant…" (Locke, 72). Writing in advance of contemporary claims that anthropology is an inherently ethnocentric enterprise, Locke claimed that with "the aid of anthropology, whose aim is to see man objectively and impartially in all his variety, cultural relativism seems capable of opening doors to such new understandings and perspectives as are necessary for the new relationships of a world order and its difficult juxtapositions of many divergent cultures" (Locke, 72). At the same time, Locke also claims that scientific "objectivity" must keep philosophical "relativism" in check. For example, Locke is highly critical of Melville Herskovits' "overemphasis" of the hypothesis of "African cultural survivals" in the United States (Locke, 218-219). Locke tags Herskovits with a "reformist zeal" that transforms the thesis of Africanisms in the United States "from a profitable working hypothesis into a dogmatic obsession, claiming arbitrary interpretations of customs and folkways which in all common-sense could easily have alternative or even compound explanations" (Locke, 225).
In fact, Locke claims that scholarship like Herskovits' that insists on African retentions as the basis of African American cultures might evoke conclusions that "damn the Negro as more basically peculiar and unassimilable than he actually is or has proved himself to be" (Locke, 225).1

Locke proposes the intervention of critical relativism as a first step for dissolving cultural conflict. Locke thought that World War II forced us to recognize a desperate need for cultural reconciliation to avoid global holocaust. While Locke imagines science and technology to be "relatively value neutral," 2 he believes they nevertheless heighten cultural conflict "as the geographical distance between cultures is shortened and their technological disparities are leveled off" (Locke, 76). Locke didn't know about nuclear warfare when he wrote these lines in 1944, but he anticipated its effects.

The successful exercise of Locke's method depends on good will. He assumes that cultural combatants must be predisposed to tolerate, even respect, cultural difference. But this respect must be reciprocated.
Stanley Fish's Critique of Multiculturalism

Stanley Fish argues that multicultural methods like Locke's are flawed at their foundations. Fish distinguishes between two versions of multiculturalism. One he trivializes as "boutique multiculturalism" and the other he calls "strong multiculturalism." The first version respects alien cultural traditions, but "boutique multiculturalists will always stop short of approving other cultures at a point where some value at those cultures' center generates an act that offends against the canons of civilized decency" (1998, 69). Examples are intolerance of the principles that led to Salman Rushdie's death sentence, Afrocentric curricula, Native American religious ceremonies that sacrifice animals or use controlled substances, or religions advocating polygamy.

Strong multiculturalists, on the other hand, engage in a "politics of difference" that values difference for the sake of difference itself: "Whereas the boutique multiculturalist will accord a superficial respect to cultures other than his own, a respect he will withdraw when he finds the practices of a culture irrational or inhumane, a strong multiculturalist will want to accord a deep respect to all cultures at their core, for he believes that each has the right to form its own identity and nourish its own sense of what is rational and humane" (1998, 73).
Fish would agree with Locke that the first principle of strong multiculturalism is tolerance. However, Fish finds that in the most interesting cases of culture confrontation, tolerance must confront intolerance. Right-to-life advocates, for example, will not tolerate abortion because they judge it to be murder, and no amount of Lockean critical relativistic patter will change their judgment.

The strong multiculturalist must then either tolerate such intolerance, or retreat to the boutique position, thereby excluding right-to-life advocates from the community of critical relativists. A promising multiculturalism is cut short.

In fact, Fish goes so far as to say that no one can be a strong multiculturalist since fierce human loyalties to culture prevent reconciliation with extreme cultural opposition. In such cases, Locke's reciprocity will be sacrificed to the intolerance that foundational loyalty to loyalty must engender. A "really strong" multiculturalist must commit himself to "the distinctiveness of a culture even at the point where it expressed itself in a determination to stamp out the distinctiveness of some other culture" (1998, 75). At that point, the "really strong" multiculturalist must "become (what I think every one of us always is) a uniculturalist" (1998, 75).

Fish's deconstruction of multiculturalism is a masterpiece that deserves full quotation: "It may at first seem counterintuitive, but given the alternative modes of multiculturalism--boutique multiculturalism, which honors diversity only in its most superficial aspects because its deeper loyalty is to a universal potential for rational choice; strong multiculturalism, which honors diversity in general, but cannot honor a particular instance of diversity insofar as it refuses (as it always will) to be generous in its turn; and really strong multiculturalism, which goes to the wall with a particular instance of diversity and is therefore not multiculturalism at all--no one could possibly be a multiculturalist in any interesting and coherent sense" (1998, 75).

Given Fish's critique, Locke must say, 'all cultures can play my multicultural game, but only if they follow my rules--and my rules make critical relativism's methodology the foundation of all multiculturalism.' But how can this be multiculturalism if cultures that manifest fierce loyalty to themselves cannot play the game?

Fish forces Locke to advocate a revision of Nathan Glazer's motto: "We are all multiculturalists now." Locke must now claim: "In order to all get along, we must all be monoculturalists now." Granted, Locke's new monoculturalism is a strange brand of monoculturalism. It embraces all cultures whose loyalty to loyalty permits them to respect cultural difference. In Locke's exquisite phraseology, his monoculturalism advocates a global culture whose unity is grounded in cultural difference (1989, 75).

Locke's Defense of Monoculturalism

Why should anyone fiercely loyal to her culture embrace a monoculture that while recognizing and respecting her culture, still insists that she moderate her culture on fundamental points? For example, if abortion is judged to be murder, then it cannot be tolerated simply for the sake of everyone's getting along. Value relativism to the contrary notwithstanding, some values are higher than the impoverished value of getting along. Pro-life activists, for example, might justify their actions with the following rationale: 'Abortion is killing innocents, and it is morally obligatory to kill those who would kill innocents.'

This line of reasoning shows why Locke refuses to name any absolute values, although he believes that there is a universal set of values grounding all cultures-survival or flourishing, or life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, with the latter defined by values such as truth, justice, beauty, goodness, and the like. Locke anticipates that his method of critical relativism will uncover "beneath the expected culture differentials of time and place" certain "common-denominator values that "would stand out as pragmatically confirmed by common human experience" (1989, 56).

Sometimes these core values compete with one another: one can take a life to save a life (the position of advocates of abortion, just wars, and capital punishment); one can tell a lie to save a life (contra Kant); one can take a life to protect the truth (Socrates taking his own life); one can give up life for the sake of love (Christ); one can sacrifice justice for the sake of truth and community (Kwasi Wiredu's understanding of the South African truth commissions).

Values are relative, not only to cultures but to individuals and one another. This is the fundamental assumption of Locke's value relativism. But Locke is proposing an astounding contradiction of his value relativism. Locke's value absolute is in fact the conviction that we all must get along, and all cultural difference that obstructs that objective must be sacrificed to this higher, indeed, highest value.

How can Locke possibly enter into this glaring contradiction? We may hypothesize that Locke was so apprehensive about the power of modern technology that he thought that unchecked it could destroy the very possibility of tolerance, respect and reciprocity, by destroying human life itself.

What horrendous force would make us tolerate what we find to be ntolerable by reason of our fierce loyalty to loyalty? A force that would end the very possibility of toleration. But how can mere tolerance be the supreme value? Doesn't some other value ontologically precede tolerance? Only life itself can be the absolute value that allows Locke to subsume all other values to tolerance and reciprocity. How could Locke come to this position? Before Locke's time, intolerance and exclusivity could only be local, not global threats to life. Humans exhibit a long record of genocide and decimation of populations. But never before on a scale that would wipe out all human life.

Granted, I'm giving Locke powers of prophecy here that even Cornel West might be unwilling to claim. But all Locke had to do was extrapolate from history. The bombing of civilian populations in World War I and at Guernica in the Spanish revolution set the stage for the carpet bombing of European population centers by both the allies and axis in World War II.

Those acts signal the end of any distinction between civilian innocents and armed combatants. War has always aimed at the innocent. The most brutal hatred aims at the extermination of genes, not people. The "great" wars of the twentieth century simply translate that resolve into mass execution. Locke did not have to go far to imagine the execution of life itself in the transformation of execution through technological "prowess."
Is life in fact the one, good, true absolute value? We tend to revere most those humans who have given up their lives for the sake of something far higher than life--Socrates, Christ, Gandhi, King, Malcolm. But without life itself, those figures could not have exercised their choices. We can ask all humans to give up their most sacred, their most cherished differences only for the highest cause. And that cause can only be what makes the very choice of difference possible--life itself.

In the end, then, Fish is right. With Bloom, Hirsch, Glazer, and Fish, Locke must boldly proclaim that "we must all be monoculturalists now." But what a monoculturalism! It proclaims that we must all be multiculturalists now. But only under the terms of a very specific definition of "multiculturalism." As Lockean monoculturalists, we find the ground of our unity in difference: "What we need to learn most is how to discover unity…underneath the differences which at present so disunite and sunder us, and how to establish some basic…reciprocity on the principle of unity in diversity" (1989, 135).

Making the Most of Monoculturalism

Perhaps the most difficult task that Locke faces is to furnish arguments for his version of monoculturalism. Why is it somehow wrong for one culture to lord it over another? Cultural hegemony is perhaps the dominant theme of human history. Why stop now? Bloom and Hirsch's rhetoric justifies European culture along the lines of social Darwinism. If, as Bloom claims, 'European culture' is the 'best and brightest that's been thought and said,' then not only does it deserve to survive, but, being the best, it will survive.

Locke is tempted to fall in with this sort of thinking. He argues that culture critique can be based on more or less objective social sciences like anthropology. Such critique is based on whether a culture is actually capable of achieving its underlying objectives (functional constants) by following its own principles of action (1989, 273-274).

This is dangerous ground. The poverty of our imaginations sets limits to our powers of critique. The discoveries of the most revered thinkers beggar the imagination, as the discoveries of figures like Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Heisenberg, and Godel have shown.

What would make a critique of culture objective would be its power to help us anticipate the future. Culture is so complex that we simply cannot command that objectivity. Du Bois captured this idea perfectly when he asked what kind of cultural critique the ancient Egyptians might have made of the rude, cave dwelling Europeans--who finally conquered Egypt and colonized the world (1990, 188).
If we could be confident that a culture's actions must doom its realization of its goals, then we could perform a competent culture critique.

If I believed in the objectivity of culture critique, for example, I would feel quite confident saying that European culture must transform itself radically. In its present form, it poses a threat to life that other cultures cannot brook.

But European culture cannot be brought down, since it's merely a summation of the history of all cultures. If European culture were erased together with all knowledge of nuclear and biochemical weapons, the successors of European culture would recreate that knowledge in an instant of geological time (Schell, 1999). It is better to solve the problem of European culture now, rather than to postpone it to the indefinite future.

Locke is confident that true democratic principles lay the foundation for a future culture with the best chances of survival. European culture is not misguided in its primary principles, but only in its execution of those principles. Locke's version of European cultural hegemony is far more enlightened than Bloom's procrustean version that would reduce cultural difference to promote political unity.

But how can Locke justify his insistence that all cultures adopt a version of monoculturalism that demands universal respect for cultural difference? In support of his position, Locke might cite the usual ethical pieties: "all men are created equal," all have rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," every nation must promise "liberty and justice for all." These imperatives, while enjoining a certain version of monoculturalism, nevertheless preclude any form of monoculturalism that does not embrace all cultures acting in the spirit of tolerance and reciprocity.

In unanimously guaranteeing our right to be different, these imperatives recognize a basic fact of life: we are all born to be different, because we need difference in order to be. Variety is not simply the spice of life. Rather it's the stuff of life. However, we promote difference by insisting on unity. By insisting that we all be the same in guaranteeing the rights of others to be different, these imperatives increase our powers to multiply our differences.

We get our power from the unities we call "communities." Heretofore, because we have been relatively powerless, our communities have been grounded in unity rather than difference. Nevertheless, difference is precisely the seat of our power, so communities have always expanded to embrace difference, because difference grounded in unity yields power. The first memes to exert totalizing, universalizing force on our consciousness were those that enjoined us to embrace universal community--Hinduism, Buddhism, Moism, and Christianity.

These reflections are the prelude to the only moral question worth asking: why should I tolerate the other's difference, if it stands between me and what I desire? Only one reason can serve universally: the other's difference is the only effective means I have to reach what I desire. I desire in the end to "be all I can be," and I can only be what the other has made it possible for me to be. The larger the concept of the "other," the greater the possibility of getting what I want--even of conceiving what I want.

Given the social nature of humans, the only way I can get what I want is through the other. And if I choose to view the other as an extension of myself, a member of my most intimate community, then what I want is what the other wants. If the only way I can get what I want is through the other, then I should strive to enfold myself and all others into a universal community.

Only a perception that the other stands between me and what I want prevents a realization of a global community. What I want, I want for myself, not for the other. But in a community of perfect intimacy, what I want is what the other wants because we are united. How is it possible that self and other can be united, different as they must be? Here metaphors must supplant arguments. I can view myself as united with the other in the same way that the cells in my fingers holding this pen as I write are united with me. Those cells, I'm convinced, are quite different from me, and yet in the best case, the present case, they are me. I could lose the fingers that those cells embody and I would still be me. But I would be a sorely impoverished me.3
I can live in a community that deliberately excludes millions of others from unity with myself. But I would be a fool to do so. I would strip myself of power by this tactic, because those millions would give me a power I could never have without them--if only those millions see themselves as me and I as them: a unity of difference, and a difference that unites.

Locke's monoculturalism has a two-fold justification, then. First, we achieve the greatest power through the largest possible community. A universal community is our best shot at moving in the direction of universal power. How can we justify this lust for power? Because in seizing power, we imitate life. Life is an expression of the power to sever and create connections. We need power to continue the mission of continuing life. Second, Locke's monoculturalism is justified because it is the best possible way of promoting diversity, the ground of life. Life is diversity, and only diversity makes life possible. The evolution of monocellular life into these vast assemblages of life we call human beings is predicated on diversity.

To summarize the argument for Locke's position, then, we can ask the whole world to give up its fiercely held loyalty to loyalty in only one case: when that loyalty threatens our very ability to be loyal. Can we say that an exclusive loyalty to family or small groups was warranted in the past? Relatively powerless groups restrict their loyalty to small, tightly knit bodies that hold their power only by taking power from those whom they've "othered": "us" versus "them."

Truly powerful groups extend their power to the widest possible community because that very community is in fact the source of their power. The tendency of human groups toward gigantism illustrates this point. History may be read as a record of groups trying to make themselves larger, more powerful. Groups tend to limit their sizes only when internal forces cause their disintegration. Human invention rapidly worked out ways to coalesce groups, from extended families to tribes, nations, and empires.

Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel claims that one of humanity's greatest inventions was discovering how to meet the 'other' without killing him. Locke's monoculturalism proposes a second "greatest invention," a method for incorporating every "other" into a global "intimate community." In his essays on cultural relativism and ideological peace (1989, 67-78, 95-102) and moral imperatives for world order (143-152), Locke argues that a global intimate community is the indispensable condition for continuing the human mission.

Conclusion: Can Locke's Monoculturalism Help Us All Get Along?

Should Locke's monoculturalism be integrated into the political fabric of the nation? A final glance at definitions of "culture" may help resolve this question. The word has its roots in the idea of a "cycle." A culture consists of cycles of behavior, thoughts, feelings, and transformations of the environment resulting from them, shared by a group of people--or even, in the limit case, only one person. In the same way that we are unique as individual biological organisms, we are living works of art, perfectly, utterly unique, self-created "cultures of one."
Cultural differences arise for the same reasons as biological differences. As a manifestation of variety, life is both engendered by variety and prolonged by variety. Cultural variety is as important to our survival as agricultural variety. For this reason, Boxill argues that a culture "is always the result of an exceedingly long series of related experiments in living in which each experiment is designed in the light of what was learned in earlier experiments" (Boxill, 118).

But variety as the engine of survival is at the same time the most powerful agent of the destruction of life. We must be different in order to be, but difference is the gravest threat to our existence-unless we have power over difference.

Cultures proliferate and become mortal enemies. Cultures increase their numbers of members in order to make themselves more powerful. As Kant pointed out (in an essay on universal peace!), universal war must follow the proliferation of culture, until only a few major cultures or powers have the resources to play the global war game.
In the end--that end would be the end of history, according to Hegel-one player trumps all, and universal peace will ensue. But Kant and Hegel got it all wrong: the game will begin all over again because life enjoins difference. A global monoculture would have little chance of survival. Threats like nuclear or asteroid winter, for example, would upset its fragile ecological balance.4

Given this gloss of Locke's position, multiculturalism is indispensable to human survival. However, cultural difference confronts a problem arising out of the "conservative" nature of life. Members of cultures must make the following kinds of declarations: 'We have survived by following our cultural script. Other cultures threaten both our script and the "capital" (in Marx' sense) we need to sustain our culture. We must either fight the encroaching culture to the death, find our niche in that culture, or force the other culture to compromise.' All three scenarios have been executed many times, as the diffusion of Indo-European languages in Eurasia and Bantu languages in Africa indicates. The human genome project will corroborate, I suspect, the linguistic record of the results of intercultural contact.

In short, we can't live with cultural diversity-and we can't live without it! What are we to do? Locke's monoculturalism can address the dilemma with some promise of success. The oldest cultures encode the wisdom of moving toward a single global community. But we have paid little attention to these injunctions. Christianity is one of the first codes enjoining universal community grounded in universal love. Yet "Christian" nations like Germany and Belgium have murdered some six million Jews and perhaps twice that number of Congolese Africans.
Can we make judgments about which codes to follow, which cultures to imitate, when we have a choice bout culture? The universality of a code prompts us to consider it favorably. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity still command world-wide followings. Cultures with clearly suicidal propensities like Nazi Germany have, it is to be hoped, brief life spans. Against this hope, however, we must note that cultures with imperial propensities like China, Greece, and Rome have exhibited achingly long life-lines.

Where Mill's "experiments in living" have produced cultural scripts that become nearly universal memes like Christian and Moistic universal love or European and Iroquoian fledgling democracies, we might missionarize or try to coerce or propagandize all cultures to "sell all they have and come follow us."

But while we may be smart enough to seduce the whole world into these cultural scripts, we're not wise enough to know whether that's a good idea. The missionary character of Christianity and democracy provoked a backfire from global Marxism and an Islamic fundamentalism that denies Church-State separation. We're playing with fire in heeding Locke's call to take the control of culture away from fate to entrust it to deliberate human control.
For this reason, Locke's cultural pluralism must be tempered with Boxill's vision of social justice. If a majoritarian global community grounds itself in Locke's "new world order" (1989, 152), then that community must make room for dissenting minority communities. Boxill leaves room open for the reconstruction of any community vision, no matter how unassailable it may appear to be.

Endnotes

1. Locke looks for the truth in a middle position between "that of the Negro as the empty-handed, parasitic imitator or that of the incurably atavistic nativist. In fact, because of his forced dispersion and his enforced miscegenation, the Negro must eventually be recognized as a cultural composite of more than ethnic complexity and cultural potentiality" (Locke, 225).
2. Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1986) and Paul Feyerabend's Science in a Free Society (London: NLB, 1976) make the case that neither science nor technology can be value free.
3. Deep ecologists like Arne Naess (1988) and Warwick Fox (1990) have developed concepts of an expanded or transpersonal self that encompasses both the human and non-human other. Eco-feminist philosophers Val Plumwood (1991) and Karen Warren (1990) criticize their concepts as thinly disguised versions of rationalistic egoism.
4. See Warren Wagar's A Brief History of the Future for provocative evocation of such scenarios. This type of scenario of "civilization's" breakdown is the strongest rationale for the journal, Cultural Survival's insistence that indigenous or aboriginal cultures be allowed to control territory necessary to sustain their cultures--should they freely choose to do so. Many have chosen not to, but outsiders interested in scarce resources like rare hardwoods or oil often constrain their choices.

Bibilography

Appiah, K. Anthony. 1998. The limits of pluralism, in Multiculturalism and American democracy, eds. Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 37-54.
Bloom, Alan. 1987. The closing of the American mind: How higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today's students. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Boxill, Bernard. 1998. Majoritarian democracy and cultural minorities, in Multiculturalism and American democracy, eds. Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 112-119.
Diamond, Jared. 1997. Guns, germs and steel: the fates of human societies. New York: Norton.
Du Bois, W. E. B. 1990. The souls of black folk. New York: Vintage Books/The Library of America.
Fish, Stanley. 1998. Boutique multiculturalism, in Multiculturalism and American democracy, eds. Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 69-90.
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Spring 2001 Volume 00, Number 2

Spring 2001
Volume 00, Number 2