Multiculturalism

Is Living Together Possible?
If so, How?
Immigration and integration; identity and tolerance; truth and relativism; terrorism and democracy; freedom and security…
After the failure of the utopia of “multiculturalism,” which tried to establish social peace on a generic tolerance of everyone that left people strangers, Western society questions itself on whether it is possible for different traditions and experiences to live together
From where can we start over so as to ensure a human face for our society and that respect for the person which everyone holds to be precious? You and I belong to the same human condition, as The Religious Sense teaches. Everything is born, or reborn, from this
Traces held a roundtable discussion with a Spanish theologian (Javier Prades), a Parisian teacher (Silvio Guerra), an English lawyer (Chris Morgan) and an American monsignor (Lorenzo Albacete). Here are their contributions toward a judgment

edited by Roberto Fontolan

What are we talking about when we speak of multiculturalism? It is quite a puzzle, the enigma of all enigmas, the mystery of mysteries, adding to and emphasizing the anxieties of this tormented epoch. Governments and study centers, Churches and institutions have been trying to understand what kind of world we have ended up in at the start of this new millennium. Big words, too big, are bandied about; words like identity, living together, relativism, half-breed culture; not to mention the formula banner: conflict of civilization. Those who sustain its existence, even distractedly, have ipso facto taken sides, while those who doubt it are assigned to the other side. There is almost no way to reason. All this is multiculturalism, and many, remember, have not decided whether the word describes a simple fact (there are many different cultures) or a recent Western ideology (that cultures must live together on an equal level). Here, however, we want to reason, in search of a recognizable (human) face for our society, above all in an attempt at intelligent unravelling, offered by the occasion of the International Assembly of the CL Responsibles in La Thuile, Italy. Around a table we collected Chris Morgan, who lives in London where he works in finance; Javier Prades, a Madrid theologian; the Italian, Silvio Guerra, who has taught for many years in a Paris high school; and Lorenzo Albacete, a monsignor and writer well known to the readers of Traces.
Let’s begin from London and that bloodstained July. We were all astounded when we learned that the terrorists were British citizens, grown up and educated in that world, in that society. (But then again, Bernard Henri Levy’s research book on the murder of the American journalist Daniel Pearl began just from this affirmation: the strategist of the kidnapping and decapitation of poor Danny had studied at the London School of Economics…)

Morgan: One was a teacher of handicapped children, one year married and with a child. To all his colleagues, he was a normal person, a very good teacher. This led me to think that the problem we have in Britain is that everything is flattened out, everything is relativized. There is no identity; you can believe and do what you like in your home, but there is no relationship, no comparison between the different races and the different religions. You’re not allowed to ask someone about his personal experience, of things to do with religion or with tradition. Only in the pub, when people are a little drunk, does something come out. So, in the silence and in the theorized and practiced indifference, anything can happen–even a good teacher can blow himself up on the underground. Everything is taught and everything is allowed–apart from Christmas, which in some places is forbidden so as not to offend other faiths. This is England today.

Guerra: In France, instead, the problem is almost the opposite; that is, the identity of the communities is felt as superimposed over the identity of the State and puts the integrity of the “Republique” in danger. Whether you are born in Marseilles or in Lille, you must have the same possibility for success in life, the same rights; there must be equality. The State fears that if a community affirms another origin and another value, it threatens this unity. But we have to add that the question regards Islam above all, which is thought to be a danger for the Republic and its social security. In the outskirts of the big centers, the imams found groups and communities of extremists that are often influential on the rest of the believers.

What answers are proposed?
Guerra: Until the eighties, France needed immigrants, because after the two world wars the population was very low. Then the problem of the “first generation” arose: integrating the children of those first immigrants. Sports were tried and this created the Zidane phenomenon, vaunted as an example of integration and success. Then came the period of music, with the rap and hip-hop singers, but the music turned out to be a boomerang, because the texts exalt a separate identity, not to speak of the violence, the role of women, and so on.

Monsignor Albacete, is the concept of a “melting pot,” which for many years described American society, still a reality?
Albacete: The pride of bringing people from all over the world and making them feel American… That was the idea. With the symbols, the flag, the language, work: integrating everyone in American narrative, the great common mentality, always defined by Protestant Christianity (it’s interesting to note that historically this is why Catholics had the greater problems of integration, problems now fully resolved: the Protestants saw them as a threat to individual religious freedom). Multiculturalism is coming to be a popular theme thanks to two factors. The first is the presence of very many Hispanics, with whom the process of integration in the American dream seems to have come to a stop; a relatively new factor, because we are seeing it in these recent years. The more recent immigrants are very many and not only do they not speak English, but they tend not to integrate because the countries they come from are rather near; they can go home. They don’t have the pressure to start a new life–in fact, they expect to go back home when they have made enough money. So Spanish remains their first language, and there are sectors of social, commercial and economic life where only Spanish is spoken. Americans are beginning to get concerned especially about this. There are fewer fears on other levels; even the religious question, so debated in Europe, is not felt as a threat. We are still an open country that ensures the maximum religious freedom and that is convinced of its ability to assimilate. This is the meaning of President Bush’s insistence, “We are not at war with Islam.” This is how multiculturalism is lived, a wealth for our society, able to make many different experiences live together and make them all feel American. As I was saying, though, this concept is going into crisis. As well as the Hispanic factor, there is the intellectual factor. That is to say, multiculturalism has become a theory, an ideology that aims at totally secularizing the American dream, and detaching it from its Christian matrix. It is a cultural and social agenda insisting particularly on the themes of ethics and the family. It wants to create a divide–on one side the believers and on the other everyone else; on one side politics and on the other faith. The “politically correct” is a fruit of this ideology: you cannot say anything because it would be against American multiculturalism. But multiculturalism as an experience was precisely “you’re all welcome.”

For Spain the debate is a more recent question…
Prades: It’s tied up with immigration, which is a thing of the past few years, less than twenty, when the Latin Americans and people from the Maghreb began arriving. From that moment, Spanish society began to feel the presence of others who, in some sense, are, for linguistic, religious, or ethnic reasons, different from what we would consider a Western European society (leaving aside the problem of nationalism, a very real and complex matter for us). What are the answers? Latin American immigrants fit in more easily for the evident reasons of language, faith and culture. As for the Muslim immigrants, I would say that we have to distinguish between the common experience of the people and what the mass media have to say. People do not yet have much experience of direct relationship and are in doubt; the general attitude is a mixture of openness, curiosity and fear–the fear unleashed on March 11th. Onto this basic feeling has been grafted an artificial and ideological mentality, which, in Spain, takes the so-called “three cultures” as a starting point. In the Middle Ages, there was a period in which Christians, Muslims and Jews lived together peacefully. It is a much debated question, which is used, though, in ideological terms, in other words, as a cover up for the modern lay idea of tolerance. Apart from the historical events, which we have no time to deal with, what is proposed is the idea that in reality the religions must reduce their claim of being related to man’s destiny; they must abandon their totalizing character in order to become a constructive factor in society. This is an operation that reveals our weakness in transmitting tradition; or, let’s say, a weakness in education. All the educational models present in Spain, both the public and the religious, do not develop, do not deepen man’s elementary experience as the criterion for judging everything and everyone–a heart capable of recognizing the other as my equal and at the same time different from me. If this education of the elementary experience is weak, then its place is taken either by traditionalist ideology, which distances the other, or by the lay ideology of tolerance that says, “We are all equal provided no one is himself.”

So multiculturalism as an ideology, perhaps the most modern…
Albacete: No, it is really a cover up for ideology; the real ideology is relativism. In America, relativists speak the language of multiculturalism.

Morgan: I think the enemy of this ideology is precisely Christianity. It’s Christmas that is forbidden, not the Muslim or Hindu feasts. In this sense, it’s an intellectual operation that arouses unease in ordinary people.

But doesn’t all this questioning and discussion of multiculturalism arise because we don’t really know how to relate to Islam? Is not this the true name of the multicultural problem? Does Western man know how to answer the question of how to enter into relationship with this “other?”
Albacete: In New York, if you have a problem with Islam, forget the taxis–all the taxi drivers are Muslims… What I mean to say is that, despite everything, the great majority of Americans do not want to believe that there is a problem with Islam; many of us do not want to give up living together. I would also add that the real possibility of relationship with the other lies in the religious sense–the impact with reality comes before everything else. We were speaking of elementary experience…

Morgan: My experience is the same as the other person’s; we are together, if we go to the roots. The relationship, the comparison is on the correspondence with life–there can be no clash.

Guerra: The problem begins when the encounter, the relationship, is manipulated for political motives. Today, the Republic is not able to guarantee a sufficient level of unity, and so uses religion as a glue. But it’s the State that has a problem of unity and it throws it onto society.

Prades: We cannot forget that the cultural precedent of this confused situation is the theory (spread by structuralism in France in the fifties) that cultures are incomparable. The theory claims that there is no unitary vision that permits a comparison, because this would lead back to the hated European ethnocentrism. The consequence, though, is that in the absence of a criterion, we don’t know what to do–whether to send the other away or to be indifferent to him. Fortunately, today the dogma of relativism is coming under discussion; there are anthropologists, children of this very structuralism, who are beginning to say that there is a human condition. And they are saying that even the other, however different, is an “alter ego,” another “I.” So we can at last acknowledge that you and I belong to the same human condition, as The Religious Sense teaches. Everything is born, or reborn from this. The Christian event makes it historically possible to look at the other in this way, since Christ reveals the definitive destiny of every man and proposes Himself to his freedom so that he can discover at no cost the fullness to which he is called.