Multiculturalism and Individualism

...The answer has to do in part with the second of the centrifugal forces at work in contemporary American society...

...Men and women are free to participate or not as they please, to come and go, withdraw entirely, or simply fade away into the peripheral distances...

...local governments and philanthropies command fewer resources...

...no one is intimidated or quiet...

...perhaps they won't come about at all...

...and • the rising tide of random violence...

...When these people find themselves in trouble they look for help from similarly identified men and women...

...Often they are on the run from family, class, and community, seeking a new life in this new world...

...The United States in the 1990s is socially, though not economically (and the contrast is especially striking after the Reagan years), a more egalitarian place than it was fifty or sixty years ago...

...I am inclined to think that these processes, on balance, are more worrying than the multicultural cacophony—if only because, in a democratic society, action-in-common is better than withdrawal and solitude, tumult is better than passivity, shared purposes (even when we don't approve) are better than private listless 188 • DISSENT ness...

...The centrifugal forces of culture and selfhood will correct one another only if the correction is planned...

...I can't cite statistics...

...Everyone complains (I mean that all of them complain) that there are so few of them...

...But I want to focus again on cultural associations, since these are the ones thought to be so threatening today...

...I want to be very clear about this history...

...if they need to look back, they are likely to find the people they left behind barely able to support themselves...

...Some mysterious combination of responsibility, ambition, and meddlesomeness carries them from one meeting to another...

...The driving force will be the more 190 • DISSENT active members, socialized by their activity...

...We need to find other programs of this kind, through which the government acts indirectly to support citizens acting directly in local communities: "charter schools" designed and run by teachers and parents...

...the long-term decline in voting rates and party loyalty (most dramatic in local elections...

...Individuals are stronger, more confident, more savvy, when they are participants in a common life, responsible to and for other people...

...They have less reach and holding power than they once did...

...Multiply the opportunities for action-incommon, and activists will emerge to seize the opportunities...

...Today all that is, as they say, history...

...If they make good their escape, they never look back...

...And there is one further difficulty that we ought to welcome...

...For unemployment is probably the most dangerous form of dissociation, and unions are not only training grounds for democratic politics but also instruments of economic democracy...

...It is associational weakness, and the anxieties and resentments it breeds, that pull people apart in dangerous ways...

...No one is shushing us anymore...

...This is an old argument, first made on behalf of Protestant congregations and conventicles, which served, so we are told, as schools of democracy in nineteenth-century Great Britain, despite the intense and exclusive bonds they created and their frequently expressed doubts about the salvation of nonbelievers...

...don't say anything provocative...

...There are many ways of doing this...

...It helps to explain why engagement works, in a pluralist society, to undercut racist or chauvinist political commitments and ideologies...

...They can't count on steady or significant communal support...

...Add to all this the apparent stabilization of high levels of unemployment and underemployment, especially among young people, which intensifies all these processes and aggravates their effects on already vulnerable minority groups...

...And consider, second, the territorially based heterogeneity of the old multinational empires (the Soviet Union was the last of these) and of states like the former Yugoslavia, the former Ethiopia, the new Russia, Nigeria, Iraq, India, and so on, where a number of ethnic and religious minorities claim ancient homelands (even if the boundaries are always in dispute...

...For many of us lack the means and the power to "do our own thing" or even to find our own things to do...

...it is especially evident among the newest and weakest, the least organized, groups...

...the ambition and mobility of the most vigorous members liberalizes the group...

...Why is this so...

...Resources are accumulated over generations, cooperatively...

...We need more such associations, not fewer, and more powerful and cohesive ones, too, with a wider range of responsibilities...

...But these patterns need to be greatly extended—since coverage at present is radically unequal—and more groups brought into the business of welfare provision: racial and ethnic as well as religious groups (and why not unions, co-ops, and corporations too...

...Some of them, no doubt, will be narrow-minded and bigoted, but the greater their number and the more diverse their activities, the less likely it is that narrowmindedness and bigotry will prevail...

...the decline in memberships (in unions and churches, for example...

...Compared to the men and women of any earlier, old-world country, we are radically liberated, all of us...

...But that is another and a longer story...

...It is probably true, moreover, that many of these dissociated individuals are available for political mobilizations of a sort that democracies ought to avoid...

...Does anyone remember Richard Hofstadter's AntiIntellectualism in American Life...

...First and foremost among them, it seems to me, are government policies that create jobs and that sponsor and support unionization on the job...

...the sudden appearance of homeless men and women...

...I remember, for example, how in the 1930s and 1940s any sign of Jewish assertiveness— even the appearance of "too many" Jewish names among New Deal Democrats or CIO organizers or socialist or communist intellectuals— was greeted among Jews with a collective shudder...

...and so on...

...But it is equally true that Britain was saved from Protestant repression by the strong individualism of these same useful citizens: that was a large part of their usefulness...

...Mutual assistance, cultural preservation, and self-defense are loudly affirmed but ineffectively enacted...

...The critical conflict in American life today is not between multiculturalism and some kind of cultural hegemony or singularity, not between pluralism and unity or the many and the one, but between the manyness of groups and of individuals, between communities and private men and women...

...Programs like these will often create or reinforce parochial communities, and they will generate conflicts for control of political space and institutional functions...

...we can never be communitarians or liberals simply, but now one, now the other, as the balance requires...

...It is only in the context of associational activity that individuals learn to deliberate, argue, make decisions, and take responsibility...

...But surely high culture divides us, as it always has—and probably always will in any country with a strong egalitarian and populist strain...

...The noisiest groups in our contemporary cacophony and the groups that make the most extreme demands are also the weakest...

...SPRING • 1994 • 191 SPRING • 1994 • 189...

...It's the articulation that is new, obviously, since difference itself—pluralism, even multiculturalism— has been a feature of American life from very early on...

...Don't make noise...

...The old maxim about idle hands and the devil's work isn't necessarily true, but it comes true whenever idleness is a condition that no one would choose...

...Today, as I have been arguing, the level of resignation is considerably lower, and if much of the subsequent noise is incoherent and futile, it serves nonetheless to remind the rest of us that there is a larger social agenda than our own success...

...It seems to me that the best name for the balance itself, the political creed that defends the framework and supports the necessary forms of state action for both groups and individuals, is social democracy...

...Here are welfare societies within a decentralized (and still unfinished) American welfare state...

...at its center, with regard to religion and ethnicity rather than race, it was relatively benign...

...The same people show up for union meetings, neighborhood projects, political canvassing, church committees, and—most reliably—in the voting booth on election day...

...But weakness is a general feature of associational life in America today...

...don't attract attention...

...and the current wave of immigration from Asia and Latin America makes for significant new differences among American citizens and potential citizens...

...There are no borders around our cultural groups and, of course, no border police...

...Neither of these views is entirely wrong...

...The separated groups appear to these critics as exclusive and intolerant tribes, the separated individuals as rootless and lonely egotists...

...It is the product of a historical period when social equality outdistances economic equality...

...recruiting...

...No doubt, this relation doesn't hold for every common life...

...These lines were already inaccurate when Jay wrote them in the 1780s...

...Even in the most protected American environments, we all experience difference every day...

...Curiously, this supposedly necessary and necessarily singular culture is often described as a high culture, as if it is our shared commitment to Shakespeare, Dickens, and James Joyce that has been holding us together all these years...

...From their perspective, the real alternative to multiculturalism is not a strong and substantive Americanism, but an empty or randomly filled individualism, a great drift of human flotsam and jetsam away from every creative center...

...An immigrant society welcomed new immigrants or, at least, made room for them, with a degree of reluctance and resistance considerably below the standards set elsewhere...

...In the past, organized groups have succeeded in entering the American mainstream only by leaving other groups (and the weakest of their own members) behind...

...tenant selfmanagement and co-op buyouts of public housing...

...individual men and women seem more adrift...

...In fact, we have had (so far) only intimations of an openly chauvinist and racist politics...

...Consider, first, the (relative) homogeneity of countries like France, Holland, Norway, Germany, Japan, and China, where, whatever regional differences exist, the great majority of the citizens share a single ethnic identity and celebrate a common history...

...Personal freedom is certainly one of the extraordinary achievements of the "new order of the ages" celebrated on the Great Seal of the United States...

...Most of the associations, however, are precariously established, skimpily funded, and always at risk...

...the celebration of this freedom, and of the individuality and creativity it makes possible, is one of the enduring themes of our literature...

...Leonard Jeffries's AfricanAmerican Studies Department at the City College of New York is hardly an example of institutional strength...

...but I suspect that the number of Americans who are unorganized, inactive, and undefended is on the rise...

...A certain sort of stridency is a feature of what we may one day come to recognize as early multiculturalism...

...And without resources, individual men and women find themselves hardpressed by economic dislocations, natural disasters, governmental failures, and personal crises...

...They are socially exposed and vulnerable...

...But isn't it already deployed—given that multicultural conflicts take place in the democratic arena and require of their protagonists a wide range of characteristically democratic skills and performances...

...The voices are loud, the accents various, and the result is not harmony—as in the old image of pluralism as a symphony, each group playing its own instrument (but who wrote the music...

...Of course, there are local patterns of segregation, voluntary and involuntary...

...Nor is the success that is sought by one group always compatible with the success of all (or any of) the others...

...Lacking any sort of coercive power and unsure of their own persuasiveness, they demand governmental programs (targeted entitlements, quota systems) that will help them press their own members into line...

...This is the most depressing feature of our current situation: the large number of disorganized, powerless, and demoralized men and women, who are spoken for, and also exploited by, a growing company of racial and religious demagogues and tinhorn charismatics...

...They thought of themselves as guests in this country long after they had become citizens...

...the other sends individuals flying off...

...Even if the aim of associational life is to sustain difference, that aim has to be achieved here, under American conditions, and the result is commonly a new and unintended kind of differentiation—of American Catholics and Jews, say, not so much from one another or from the Protestant majority as from Catholics and Jews in other countries...

...They are constantly fund raising...

...These outcomes won't come about by chance...

...And yet the full-scale and fervent articulaSPRING • 1994 • 185 Multiculturalism and Individualism tion of difference is a fairly recent phenomenon...

...it's heterogeneous everywhere—a land of dispersed diversity, which is (except for the remaining Native Americans) no one's homeland...

...Democratic politics seems to me a more likely resource than the literary or philosophical canon...

...The two pluralisms make America what it is or sometimes is and set the pattern for what it should be...

...Individuals were indeed saved by congregational membership— saved from isolation, loneliness, feelings of inferiority, habitual inaction, incompetence, a kind of moral vacancy—and turned into useful citizens...

...Nonetheless, personal freedom is not an unalloyed delight...

...And so union militants, say, begin on the picket line and the strike committee and move on to the school board and the city council...

...The greater difficulties, however, come from failure, especially reiterated failure...

...Tax money is used to second charitable contributions in ways that strengthen the patterns of mutual assistance that arise spontaneously within civil society...

...The United States differs from both these sets of countries: it isn't homogeneous nationally or locally...

...Rates of disengagement from cultural association and identity for the sake of the private pursuit of happiness (or the desperate search for economic survival) are so high these days that all the groups worry all the time about how to hold the periphery and ensure their own future...

...And strong-minded individuals won't diversify their commitments and extend their ambitions unless there are opportunities open to them in the larger world: jobs, offices, and responsibilities...

...Old racial and religious identities have taken on greater prominence in our public life...

...But the help is uncertain, for these identities are mostly unearned, without depth...

...Taken together, but only together, they are entirely consistent with a common democratic citizenship...

...And if their primary aim is self-defense, toleration, civil rights, a place in the sun, the result of success is more 186 • DISSENT clearly still an Americanization of whatever differences are being defended...

...I'm not sure that anyone is collecting the right sorts of statistics...

...And the men and women left behind commonly accepted their fate or, at least, failed to make much noise about it...

...When groups consolidate, the center holds the periphery and turns it into a political constituency...

...many prophets and would-be prophets, all talking at once...

...Surely we ought to worry about the processes, even though these are also, some of them, emancipatory processes, which produce dissociation and are its products: • the rising divorce rate...

...This is one of the most common findings of political scientists and sociologists (and one of the most surprising: where do these people find the time...

...Nonetheless, all our minorities learned to be quiet: timidity has been the mark of minority politics until very recent times...

...We are at a point where we can still safely bring the pluralism of groups to the rescue of the pluralism of dissociated individuals...

...The first of these forces is an increasingly strong articulation of group difference...

...Democracy fixes the limits and sets the ground rules for American pluralism...

...Understood in context, the two seem to me, despite the laws of physics, each one the other's remedy...

...If we want the mutual reinforcements of community and individuality to work effectively for everyone, we will have to act politically to make them effective...

...It is very much like the dissidence of Protestant dissent in the early years of the Reformation: many sects, dividing and subdividing...

...At its extremes it was brutal, as conquered Native Americans and transported black slaves can testify...

...The communal elders said, "Sha...

...locally initiated building, cleanup, and crime prevention projects...

...It is necessary to aim at a balance of the two—which means that we can never be consistent defenders of multiculturalism or individualism...

...I am not recommending religious cults or political sects—though men and women who manage to pass through groups of that sort are often strengthened by the experience, educated for a more modest commonality...

...It is perhaps the most individualist society in human history...

...But they will also increase the available space and the number of functions and, therefore, the opportunities for individual participation...

...They are, most of them, articulate, opinionated, skillful, sure of themselves, and fairly steady in their commitments...

...Consider now the increasingly dissociated individuals of contemporary American society...

...One breaks loose whole groups of people from a presumptively common center...

...experiments in workers' ownership and control of factories and companies...

...The contemporary poor have no strongly based or well-funded institutions to focus their energies or discipline wayward members...

...In response to this cacophony, another group of prophets, liberal and neoconservative intellectuals, academics, and journalists, wring their hands and assure us that the country is falling apart, that our fiercely articulated multiculturalism is dangerously divisive, and that we desperately need to reassert the hegemony of a single culture...

...the high rates of geographic mobility (which continually undercut neighborhood cohesiveness...

...This country is not only a pluralism of groups but also a pluralism of individuals...

...Two contrasts can help us grasp the radical character of this pluralism...

...Almost as important are programs that strengthen family life, not only in its conventional but also in its unconventional versions—in any version that produces stable relationships and networks of support...

...Everything is harder now—family, class, and community are less cohesive than they once were...

...Engaged men and women tend to be widely engaged—active in many different associations both locally and nationally...

...Consider, for example, the current set of federal programs—matching grants, subsidies, and entitlements—that enable religious communities to run their own hospitals, old-age homes, schools, day care centers, and family services...

...The conflicts are real, and even small-scale victories are often widely threatening...

...In American cities today, poor people, mostly members of minority groups, find it difficult to work together in any coherent way...

...Principles of government are our only stable and common commitment...

...Is this an inevitability of social life, so that an increase in the number of associations would only stretch out the competent people, more and more thinly...

...Multiculturalism as an ideology is not only the product of, it is also a program for, greater social and economic equality...

...And this is a conflict in which we have no choice except to affirm the value of both sides...

...All these are voluntary associations, with a core of militants, activists, and believers and a wide periphery of more passive men and women—who are, in effect, cultural freeriders, enjoying an identity that they don't pay for with money, time, or energy...

...Two powerful centrifugal forces are at work in the United States today...

...They require certain background or framing conditions that can only be provided by state action...

...Mass immigration turned the United States into a land of many different ancestors, languages, religions, manners, and customs...

...The two movements have to be considered together, set against the background of a democratic politics that opens a lot of room for centrifugal force...

...Consider for a moment the cultural (ethnic, racial, and religious) groups that constitute our supposedly fierce and divisive multiculturalSPRING • 1994 • 187 ism...

...they were utterly falsified in the course of the nineteenth century...

...gender and sexual preference have been added to the mix...

...And participating individuals, with a growing sense of their own effectiveness, are our best protection against the parochialism of the groups in which they participate...

...There are writers today, of course, who claim that multiculturalism is itself the product of such mobilizations: American society in their eyes stands at the brink not only of dissolution but of "Bosnian" civil war...

...The defense of this freedom against puritans and bigots is one of the enduring themes of American politics, making for its most zestful moments...

...Group life won't rescue individual men and women from dissociation and passivity unless there is a political strategy for mobilizing, organizing, and, if necessary, subsidizing the right sort of groups...

...at the same time, however, it doesn't make for strong or cohesive associations...

...Remember that this has happened before, in the course of ethnic and class conflict...

...If multiculturalism today brings more trouble than hope, one reason is the weakness of social democracy (in this country: left liberalism...

...John Jay, in one of the Federalist Papers, describes the Americans as a people "descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in manners and customs...

...but a jangling discord...

...the growing number of people living alone (in what the census calls "single person households...

...I suspect that demand-side economists have a better story to tell about this "human capital...

...preaching against the dangers of assimilation, intermarriage, passing, and passivity...

...A long history of prejudice, subordination, and fear worked against any public affirmation of minority "manners and customs" and so served to conceal the radical character of American pluralism...

...There is no American Slovenia or Quebec or Kurdistan...

...Both these decentering, separatist movements have their critics, who argue that the first is driven by a narrow-minded chauvinism and the second by mere selfishness...

...And all this is expressed, so it seems, all the time...

...Minority groups adapt themselves to the local political culture...

...We need to think about how this resource might usefully be deployed...

...Multiply the calls for competent people, and the people will appear...

...Footloose individuals are not reliable members...

...Ultimately, I'm not sure that it makes for strong or self-confident individuals...

...Stronger organizations, capable of collecting resources and delivering real benefits to their members, will move these groups, gradually, toward a democratically inclusive politics...

...the street world of crime and drugs is more frightening...

...scrambling for workers, allies, and endorsements...

...Unemployment makes family ties brittle, cuts people off from unions and interest groups, drains communal resources, leads to political alienation and withdrawal, increases the temptations of a criminal life...

...This freedom, again, is one of the advantages of an individualist society...

...So, we need to strengthen associational ties, even if these ties connect some of us to some others and not everyone to everyone else...

...Unions, churches, interest groups, ethnic organizations, political parties and sects, societies for selfimprovement and good works, local philanthropies, neighborhood clubs and cooperatives, religious sodalities, brotherhoods and sisterhoods: this American civil society is wonderfully multitudinous...

...This is, again, a one-sided perspective, but by no means entirely wrongheaded...

...That doesn't mean that differences are defended quietly— quietness is not one of our political conventions...

...Religious and ethnic activists begin by defending the interests of their own community and end up in political coalitions, fighting for a place on "balanced" tickets, and talking (at least) about the common good...

...We are free to plot our own course, plan our own lives, choose a career, a partner (or a succession of partners), a religion (or no religion), a politics (or an antipolitics), a life-style (any style)— free to "do our own thing...

...there are ethnic neighborhoods and places inexactly but evocatively called "ghettoes...

...The cohesiveness of the group invigorates its members...

...If one studies the history of ethnic, racial, and religious associations in the United States, one sees, I think, that these have served again and again as vehicles of individual and group integration— despite (or, perhaps, because of) the political conflicts they generated...

...neither is quite right...

...don't push yourself forward...

...Becoming an American means learning not to be quiet...

...But none of our groups, with the partial and temporary exception of the Mormons in Utah, has ever achieved anything like stable geographical predominance...

...Empowerment is, with rare exceptions, a familial, class, or communal, not an individual, achievement...

...I don't mean to sound like the famous Pollyanna...