Robin:

Hello, Agnes.

Agnes:

Hi, Robin.

Robin:

Should we tell everyone why you feel so relaxed and in a good mood today?

Agnes:

I finished my book. So you will be hearing the ideas and reasoning of the new me today, me post writing my book. So just, you may not recognize me. Robin may not recognize me. Right. I look the same on the outside, but on the inside, it's like a different person. Okay, so we're going to talk about this paper by Stanley Fish called Boutique Multiculturalism or Why Liberals Are Incapable of Thinking About Hate Speech from 1997.

Robin:

In Critical Inquiry?

Agnes:

In Critical Inquiry, yes. If you want to look it up. It's a really fun read. I recommend reading it, but we should summarize it. Robin, do you want to summarize it? Do you want me to summarize it?

Robin:

I'll take a stab, and then you can correct for what you might say. So he says there's two kinds of multiculturalism that he calls it. There's boutique, and then the other thing he calls it a politics of difference. So boutique multiculturalism embraces shallow features of cultures. I would call this shallow multiculturalism, various languages, foods, holidays, things like that. but presumes that we should all share some basic fundamental values, and that it's not very tolerant of these different cultures having different attitudes to abortion, or war, or gender equality, and things like that. And the politics of difference, he describes it as trying really hard to give cultures full powers to be different. And he says that's sort of the basics of say, campus speech codes or things like that, where people are allowed to, not allowed to be racist against people of color, but quite allowed to be racist the other way, because that gives them full expression of their culture. And he says that even they don't go all the way in embracing these cultures in the sense that in some sense a culture could and plausibly might fully embrace itself and fully dislike all the other cultures and want its culture to completely win out and therefore not to have multiculturalism or not to embrace it. And he says, that kind of multiculturalism doesn't go that far. It backs off at that point and therefore isn't really multiculturalism. And so he concludes, no one is really multicultural but there's this word multiculturalism and it's used in various ways and he calls that ad hoc and says that's just the nature of a lot of things they're ad hoc there is no elegant simple principle behind multicultural practice it's a variety of compromises people make between wanting to embrace diversity, and also taking the point of view of particular cultures and embracing particular values as ones that everyone should share.

Agnes:

Yeah, right. So let me just repeat the essence of what I take you to just have said, which is that basically he introduces a distinction between a very superficial form of multiculturalism and then a slightly deeper form. And then he says, actually, they're not very different after all. That is the politics of difference, which is his slightly deeper multiculturalism. It just amounts to a version of boutique multiculturalism. And then he imagines, what would it be if you were really a multiculturalist? um a strong multiculturalism that would be to like um uh to kind of go all in with a particular instance of diversity which would just mean that you were not a multiculturalist at all but a proponent of some particular culture as being the best culture um and so really really strong multiculturalism is just not multiculturalism it's uniculturalism So that's sort of one half of this essay. The second half is kind of an attack on liberalism. And I take it that the first half is in the service of the second half. So basically, Fish is saying that There is this sort of conceit of liberal thinkers like Rawls. He also cites Amy Gutmann. I don't know. He has a bunch of different Habermas. People who are like, look, we can have a civilized, rational conversation to adjudicate our disagreements. Except, of course, not with the crazies. And, you know, there's certain forms of disrespect that are just not on the table and etc. And what Fish is saying is that all the important disagreements have been sidelined by that move. And so the sort of liberal move, which is that we can create like a space for substantive disagreement is an illusion that's based on the thought that most disagreement is intellectual disagreement. And he thinks now the fundamental disagreements are just the wars between different groups who want to annihilate each other. Those are the real disagreements and tolerance is just inappropriate there. And you just got to fight for your group to win. Tell me whether you agree with that summary of the second half of the essay.

Robin:

I paid less attention to the second half, I have to admit, but roughly I think. But I was more interested in this fundamental trade off or conflict in multiculturalism, which is highlighted by the title. But I think you're right that he says that liberals tend to think that disagreements are intellectual, by which they mean we could argue them out and agree on the answers based on the premises we share. And many of those might be value premises, and that Fish is saying your disagreements are about these value premises that you can't argue your way out of. They are just different fundamental values, and it's hard to argue for or against them. And when you believe them strongly, you're just going to go with yours.

Agnes:

right right and he i mean he even i think there's a sort of additional claim that he makes which is that we don't even really we can't i don't think he even really thinks we see ourselves as having like a disagreement with say the racist We think of racism as a problem, as like a pathology that we have to eliminate, where we need to give them like therapy or something for their racism, but not actually as like, well, they have a theory and we have a theory and, you know, we got to figure out which of the two theories is correct. And so when it comes to hate speech, racism, etc., in effect, we give up our liberalism without noticing that we've given it up by pathologizing. But he thinks that's the fundamental truth there, is that we ought to pathologize it. And we just ought to not have this conceit that we can adjudicate any such disagreements by means of rational thought.

Robin:

Right. So I see two interesting issues here for us to discuss. Yeah. One issue is, how far can we go with reason to get past disagreements, even relatively fundamental political disagreements? And the other related one is, how far can we go or should we go to promote diversity, given that diversity could be regarding deep values that we might cherish? Those are the two key issues. The second one I've been thinking more about lately, but the first is also related and quite interesting.

Agnes:

Right. OK. I was going to say, in response to what you just said, who cares about diversity? Why is diversity even important? Don't we just want the truth? And ultimately, that's going to be one thing. We're all going to have to agree on the truth. But I'll say what I anticipate response from you on that. And then you're going to say, no, diversity until we get innovation. Because we just got to let people form these little islands where they mostly go wrong, but then some of them are going to happen to go right in their little island. And then I guess eventually the ones that go right will win out. And that's a form of innovation that's only possible if we have isolationism And like a petri dish or something that will allow all these different cultures, most of whom are in fundamental error to thrive.

Robin:

Well, I was thinking we could try to first reason about similar issues in a easier to handle context. I was thinking of food and medicine as two simple contexts. So you could make an approximation to food and say, well, food is supposed to be tasty and also nutritious. And most of the world has access to pretty much the same foods now. So it's, you know, there's no particular reason for people in different areas to eat different foods that much anymore. Some people may have just different taste buds in their mouths, but honestly, most of our different tastes are probably cultural, you know, things we learn over time. So you might think that, you know, in principle, there's just the best food. the most cost-effective food, and therefore the world should just have that one food and not have the rest, or maybe a certain mild variety of foods, the sort of variety you could handle over a week, and there should be the optimal portfolio of food. And if anybody out there has different foods, then that's just expressing disagreement on that, and you should just wanna push for your kind of food to be the one food everybody eats. If you think it's in fact the best food by these objective criteria, And you might be reluctant, though, to impose your current judgment about the one best food in the entire world. You might think, maybe it's better if different people in the world just eat different foods and try them out and try to persuade their friends and family that theirs is better and maybe over time we would learn. more what the best food is rather than you just taking your current attitude or position on the best food and trying to force everybody to follow it. That would be a attitude about food we can have. And a similar thing by medicine, you could say people more, I think, have the sense that there's one best medicine for a certain set of symptoms and a certain available technology. There's one best treatment. And therefore the world should just go around and make sure that for each set of conditions, the one best treatment is applied. we might think that would be a problem because then maybe we won't learn as much about what good treatments are as if the world contains a lot of people trying different treatments on similar conditions.

Agnes:

So as I understand it, disagreement is fundamentally, disagreement, again, where I mean the word in the way that I usually use it in our conversations, not in the way that you use it in our conversations, namely the process of arguing, okay? So not some end statement, but the activity of disagreeing is inquisitive. So we engage in that activity in order to find the answer to the question on which we've already made an assertion. So suppose I knew what the best foods were. Suppose I knew. I wouldn't argue with you about it. If you disagreed with me, what do I care? I know the answer. So I have nothing to learn from you. I mean, maybe if you come to me and you're like, please, please tell me your correct answer. And I'm feeling nice that day, I might tell it to you, but I get nothing out of disagreeing with you. So I wouldn't have no incentive to argue with you about that. Um, so I, as I understand it, um, now imposing my, my views on you when I seems to me to be a thing that I sometimes do when I have views about what the best food is, but I know. that they're not knowledge. I know that they're just my opinions about what the best food is. I can't justify them. I couldn't give you a decisive proof that those are the best foods. But I somehow need the illusion that this is definitely the right answer. And I can foster that illusion in myself by getting other people to do what I'm doing. Seems pretty useless to me, pretty pathological. And so I would think, yeah, you should, if you think, if you have like a grip on what you think are the best foods, but you don't have knowledge that those are actually the best foods, then the best thing for you is to be arguing so as to you can figure it out. And part of that process of figuring it out is going to involve letting people try a bunch of different things. So the question is, for any X, the question is, are we still figuring it out or do we already know the answer? That's a really important distinction. And if we're still figuring it out, we're gonna need to do a lot of experimentation and have a lot of different options on the table as part of figuring it out. But if you know the answer, you know the answer, and then you're done disagreeing and inquiring and all of that.

Robin:

Right now, plausibly, from an a prior point of view, on big, fundamental things about very complicated situations, it would seem like we shouldn't be very confident. And so it would be surprising if we thought we were that sure about answers for things as complicated as medicine or food or fundamental cultural values. But a striking fact about culture is that in fact, people often do treat these things as things they're quite sure of. And that's a puzzle and something maybe to reflect on in explaining the things we're talking about here. That seems to be driving part of the whole process. Why do people feel so confident about their cultures?

Agnes:

Do you want to know the answer? I have an answer. I'm not claiming that my answer has the finality of knowledge, but I do have an answer. The answer is that confidence, you shouldn't confuse two things. One of them is like how passionately and strongly you hold a given belief and whether your inquiry into that belief has been completed. So whether you're at the end stage of knowledge or not. Those are two different things. And in fact, in many, many cases, you can really only conduct an inquiry if someone's going to be very confident that they're right. So someone's being very confident can make them a really good interlocutor. It can make them a really good person to talk to about that exact question. The person who's just like, I don't know, I'm not very confident of anything. I have some theories, but they could be wrong, whatever. That often isn't the best person with whom to conduct an inquiry. So our competence in the tenets of our culture is an asset for inquiry. Now it has some side effects and it can lead us in bad directions because of the thing that I mentioned earlier, which is that we can, you know, we can try to short circuit from sort of to give ourselves the appearance of knowing something. by shutting down debate and disagreement. Because what it looks like when you actually do have knowledge is that nobody disagrees with you. And so we're like, great, I'll make myself have knowledge by making nobody disagree with me. You're creating for yourself an illusion or an appearance of knowledge. So that's really the problem. The problem is not the confidence. Confidence is great. The problem is the creation for the self of the illusion of knowledge.

Robin:

So you're describing this as sort of a pride-based mental mistake. That is, your pride is driving you to want to act more confident than you are because that feels good or something like that.

Agnes:

I mean, no, no, I wouldn't put it that way. What I would say is, in general, whenever you have a goal, whenever there's something that you want, you have some kind of incentive to think that you already have the thing that you want. So Freud thought this was like the fundamental mystery of human psychology is why don't we just die because of hallucinatory wish fulfillment? That is, we're able to hallucinate the fulfillment of our wishes. So if I'm hungry, it's possible for me to produce images for myself that I have the food. And he's like, wait a minute, why doesn't everyone just die? Because they just produce the images and then their bodies just wither away. Now, that doesn't work with food, I guess, because evolution has tempered us to some degree, though, not 100%, because we do this a little bit. But so pride is, I think, not the right word. It's a much more fundamental phenomenon.

Robin:

So wish fulfillment, let's call it then. or hallucinate, you know, pleasant hallucinations.

Agnes:

Something like we're taken in by the illusions that we ourselves produce. Yeah.

Robin:

So I would call attention more to the cultural evolution analytical framework. to say that human minds and their capacities have been greatly shaped by cultural evolution. And so we're not just smart creatures, creatures who happen to be much smarter. We happen to have gotten smart through the process of cultural evolution. So our particular mental habits are quite shaped by that. And cultural evolution, by its nature, induces people to just accept their local cultures and to denigrate or reject other cultures just more fundamentally. That's kind of the nature of cultural evolution. People are not sort of looking at all possible cultures and equally weighing their various insights and doing some sort of weighted average. We humans are designed to embrace our local culture and believe its core claims with less evidence than you might think we would need, and also contrary to the claims of other cultures. This is a key feature of humans and culture.

Agnes:

Sure. I don't disagree with that. I mean, that's just a different, I think it's just a different way to put the thing I was saying. That is, we're also designed to assume that we need food when we're hungry, and like, we're designed to do lots of different things. And then, um, And you might say, well, we just assume we need food when we're hungry without waiting for a lot of evidence and getting proof of that. And that's right, we do. And so the idea of searching for evidence seems to be actually a relatively small part of human life. That's not how we mostly operate. And so in order to survive, we have to have instincts. And then in order to survive in groups, we need to have cultures where there's just a bunch of rules about how you behave. But we can then ask the question, should I do what is going to lead to my bodily survival? And then we can also ask the question, should I do what my culture asks of me or whatever? Are these good things to do? And it's not easy to question those. assumptions. And I think in general, in particular, it's very, very hard to question them by yourself or even with another member of your same culture who tends to just get to be agreeing with these claims. But I don't think it's impossible.

Robin:

But this seems to me like important context for this issue of boutique multiculturalism or politics of difference. If we just thought of people as ordinary reasoners in the way they might reason about anything they hardly cared about, we might come to different conclusions that if we saw people as these creatures who tend to latch onto a culture and embrace it strongly, even without considering the evidence and hostility to other cultures, now we ask in that world, what's the relative advantages of just going with one culture and embracing it totally or trying to embrace a wider diversity of cultures?

Agnes:

Right. Well, are you asking what's the benefit for the individual?

Robin:

And what's the benefit socially? Both questions you should ask. Yes. So this is my reason that pushes me to be more multicultural. I agree with Fish that I'm not going to go so far in being multicultural that I just embrace some particular culture. That's not very multicultural. And I agree that to be multicultural, you can't be fully embracing all the multicultures that you are trying to be multiculturally embracing. But I still think it's possible to move away from your own focus on your own culture and everything you like about it to try to be more embracing of diversity. And I think this, puts that in important context. That is, I would say, a part of the reason to be embracing our diversity is your realization that we are prone to be overly attached to our culture of origin.

Agnes:

You don't agree with Fish. You disagree with Fish. Fish thinks that there are exactly two possibilities, conceptually or philosophically, Namely, either you're a fake liberal multiculturalist, like you actually are, and so am I. Well, but I'm Socratic, so yeah, that's a different story. But where you're going to espouse a lot of the Rawlsian liberal platitudes, and you're going to like the foods of the different cultures or whatever, or you'll have the stronger version of that that's really different from it. That's one possibility. And the other possibility is embrace a given culture. And maybe I'm just the second one. Yeah, I think I am just the second. That is, I just think there's one particular culture that's correct. But you know what it is. Sorry?

Robin:

But do you know what it is?

Agnes:

Not in all of its detail, no.

Robin:

OK, well, then you still might be interested in a process by which we might learn.

Agnes:

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm interested in, like, any amount of politics and whatever. But the point is, I think that Fish is posing a really interesting problem. which is a problem that liberals are constantly, constantly sidelining and ignoring. And this is, I take it, the real advantage of his essay. I'm not sure he's right, but this is the claim that he's making, is that there is no space where you're claiming there's a space. That is, there is no such thing as, but still I'm pretty respectful to these other different cultures. They have different ideas from mine, but I have respect for them. I want them to exist. I think that what his view is to have respect for them would just be to agree with their substantive views. That's what respect is. And the thing you have, which is like, the thing you can have apart from that is a kind of patronizing thing of like, I want you to be able to make your errors for whatever reason, to have multiple colors, to have, you know, the best winner went out, whatever. But you don't think they're right. You think they're wrong if you hold on to your culture. And so he thinks that's not real multiculturalism.

Robin:

I don't much care whether he thinks it's real anything. I do think there is a range of possible positions in terms of if you are in a particular culture in the world where your family grew up a certain way and your neighborhood was a certain way, On the one hand, you could just want to as fast and vigorously as possible spread that way to the rest of the world and have everyone else adopt it forthwith with all deliberate speed and fully and on reservation, without reservation, get them all to adopt it. Or, even though you like your culture and maybe for, you know, given any random other culture out there you'd rather you live in yours than theirs and you even might recommend yours and theirs, you might want there to be variety in the world. That's possible even if you don't think that's fully respecting them. you could still want that variety to exist. And in part, as I said, because that might be a better learning process where over time the entire world could learn better about different cultural features.

Agnes:

See, it seems to me, though, that those are not really the two warring options. The two warring options are there's people who are raised in a culture and who are enmeshed, like live inside of that culture their whole lives. They never contemplate leaving it. They don't much care what lies outside of it. They're not trying to make it take over the world because they don't much care about all that stuff that's far away from them. But they're really committed to their culture and to its ways. and to perpetuating it in, you know, not to take over the world, but just like to have another generation. That's one group of people. You're not like those people. The second group is like, yeah, I came from a certain place, from a certain background, from a certain family, but I am going to step outside that. And I'm kind of going to be an overseer of the world. And I'm part of the global elite or whatever. And I'm not like, the fact that I happen to have been raised in a particular tradition in these particular ways, that's almost like a little tacky to me, right? I don't want to be trapped. So there's the people who are, in some sense, inside. There's people who have a culture and people who don't have a culture, I guess.

Robin:

Well, I think Fish is saying those second people do have a culture. And he thinks he's right.

Agnes:

Fine, I think it's fine to say that in a sense, the second group have a culture, but like, as I see it, it's really more, it's more like there are those two different groups of people, and there are fewer and fewer people in that first category. And that's a certain, whatever kind of culture that is, like resolutely local culture, we can call it that, resolutely local culture, that seems to me like kind of, Less of a force.

Robin:

I think there's not a clear line between people wanting their cultures to be preserved and wanting them to expand. Quite often they take opportunities to expand when they show up without much preservation. So I don't know that there's really people who just want to hold some static line about the scope of their culture. They definitely resist the scope falling, but they also eagerly, you know, embrace opportunities to expand.

Agnes:

Yes. So I think for each, let's imagine these two groups, right? So I'm going to call them, like the local culture people. And then, I mean, really, I just think it's the group, the very tolerant group is the global elite group. That's the group you belong to. That each sees the other as in some sense totalitarian in the making. So the elite group who are like, I want a thousand flowers to bloom is like, you know, these little individual ones, they're trying to take over, but I just want them all to have a place. And the local culture thinks, oh, these people think they're overseers of us. They think there's some kind of objective thing where they're looking over all the cultures and valuing them. They don't like, they're condescending to us in effect. And they're in effect trying to like take over and be in charge of everything. So either group could easily see the other group as trying to dominate.

Robin:

I think if we think in cultural evolutionary terms, there is an objective fact about how much cultural diversity there is in the world. That's the sort of thing we could measure. And therefore, you can have an opinion about that diversity and whether it should be larger or smaller. So for example, little Amish groups are growing up in small Amish communities, but their Amish are doubling every 20 years. And as they go out and spread into the world, they spread their Amish ways. And if they continue to succeed at that for another, say, four centuries, the world might be full of people like them. And then we could ask, is that a larger or smaller degree of overall cultural variety? You could have, you might disapprove or approve, but I want to say that there is this objective question about cultural variety and it's objectively related to the degree to which we have search in the space of possible cultures and how much we will learn about possible cultures. So I think it is possible to put more weight on that search and that diversity that can support that search or less weight on it in your prioritization about cultures.

Agnes:

So, like, would this be like a way you would reason? Oh, the Amish will take over in, you know, a couple of dozen generations or whatever, if we don't stop them now. So now's the time to crack down on the Amish. For the sake of cultural diversity.

Robin:

That could be a coherent argument. I might think it's too early to make an argument like that. That is, initially, they are adding to diversity, but if allowed to go too far, they might then take away from it. So calculating the consequences of supporting any one subculture with respect to diversity could be complicated.

Agnes:

So we need like a diversity committee that's in charge of the entire world and knows when we need to clamp down.

Robin:

I am not recommending central government here. So as you know, you can think about the nature of the world and think about what would be better or worse. That doesn't mean you want to empower a world government to take charge, an agency to take charge. Those are just two different issues.

Agnes:

OK. But say we really do want this worldwide. We want the world. We want to maximize diversity. which as just to be clear, I don't think is a thing to maximize. I don't agree with you, but I'm just saying, supposing we did want to maximize it. And so one option is a world government that, you know, keeps very good track, does all this empirical work, studying the various diversity and trying to maximize it. What are the other options for maximizing diversity?

Robin:

Well, a man named Stuntz had a book about two decades ago. He was a Harvard professor who died soon after about the history of the American legal system. And he said that the American legal system initially gave a lot of autonomy to local districts to have different laws. And that was implemented and lasted for a long time, but it was slowly eroded because there were various moral crusades associated with drugs and prostitution and polygamy and alcohol and other sorts of things. And when one of those moral crusades came, It spread through the country. Many people advocated and they pushed the Supreme Court to make rulings to force the entire country to agree on those things. And then over several centuries, we no longer have great freedom of each county to have different laws. There are a great many constraints because of our shared concepts of, you know, acceptable morals that The whole country has to agree about laws and prostitution and polygamy and all these other sorts of things. So that's an example of two different regimes being more or less embracing of diversity.

Agnes:

But you're in the second one, which is less embracing and say you're like, suppose we wanted the world with more diversity. So that would involve a central government change. Right now, I guess the thought is it would involve a central government change with the central government says. Oh, when we made all those rulings saying everybody had to, like, all these different legal systems had to be the same, we're going to now undo that. That would be the idea.

Robin:

Right. So you could imagine Supreme Court rulings reversing these precedents and allowing more variety for each county and state to have its different laws and customs.

Agnes:

Right. And so, so, like, is there, were the, in the time when there were these different laws and customs, Were there more substantial cultural differences in the different parts of the country than there are now?

Robin:

Along some dimensions, less along others. That's hard because, you know, it was mostly a Christian nation then, even though the law didn't require it to be Christian, but it happened to be now. Perhaps it's less of a Christian nation, right? So, It might be hard to give a total accounting, but there's certainly with respect to legal local legal variety they they have a lot of local discretion to be different.

Agnes:

Right, but like I guess i'm.

Robin:

So we can find other examples if you're looking for policy. So let's say, for example, Brexit or various kinds of separation movements in the world, say Catalonia. These are, in a sense, efforts for local cultures to differentiate themselves from some larger unit they're embedded in by political separation. And of course, those are also going to produce more cultural variety. I just wanted to find a school that

Agnes:

I mean, so to me, the thing that Fish's article brings out is kind of the paradox of tolerance, right? That if you're tolerant, but you're not going to be tolerant of intolerance, that you're not tolerant of the most fundamental thing that you would need to be tolerant of. And I guess I think I sort of see the same problem with the cultural variety, because each of these cultures, to support them and help them flourish, what you're doing is helping them in their project to take over the world, because that's what a culture is. And so like in some sense, I'm not sure that the project of championing cultural diversity is any more coherent than the project of championing tolerance.

Robin:

In a world without law, I think we would predict a lot more violence. a lot more people would take their physical power and grab stuff. That's therefore, in some sense, a natural thing for people without law to do because we've seen people without law do it often in the past, right? So then you might say law itself is a contradictory enterprise because it's trying to restrain people from doing the thing they would otherwise do. It's empowering people to leave each other alone, where they might rationally, if they were completely unlimited, you know, not just flourish themselves, but grab stuff from other people through violence. So you could then say law is contradictory, but fine. It's contradictory in that sense, but you could still favor law over not law. In the same way, you could favor policies that promote diversity, even if you knew that had you given complete freedom to anyone, some culture, it might well try to take over everybody.

Agnes:

So the thing, the little story you just told about law is like a version of the story Hobbes tells. And like one way to interpret the way he's thinking about it is that we're in a prisoner's dilemma where the thing that's rational for each of us to do individually is not gonna leave us collectively better off. And the law creates a solution that's better for everybody. So that's the answer to the problem that you just made in the case of law. And it's just not obvious to me that anything parallel to that can be said about multiculturalism. Because the little cultures, they don't want what's good for everybody. They want their culture to win. If they'd rather the other culture not exist, then just them exist and nothing else exists. Because they're fundamentally committed to their own cultures being the only right way of being. That's what it is, as Fish argues.

Robin:

Right, but given, say, a 50-50 gamble between them being eliminated or taking over the world, They might rather prefer their status quo of staying a modest finite size. So we still might think there are gains from trade by allowing diversity and making it harder for any one of them to take over the world, but also making it harder for any one of them to be exterminated.

Agnes:

But like, I guess it's just not clear to me how you're gonna, how absent central government of some kind, you're gonna make it hard for them to take over the world. Like, you're like, okay, the Amish, we don't need to interfere yet. But like, you know, when the time comes, I mean, we don't want to wait too long because there'll be too many Amish and they'll organize against us.

Robin:

But the first place to start is just can I coherently talk about and have preferences over degree of cultural diversity? Once you accept that as a coherent concept, now we can talk about what do we know about what policies might promote it or not, and what complexities and things that might be misleading about that, sure. But we can at least start to talk about whether that's the sort of thing we could try to promote. So that's, again, we're starting out with Fish's article on boutique multiculturalism. And I'm trying to argue that it's possible to have a position whereby you are somewhat in favor of some degree of cultural variety, And then you are going to, on some margins, make some sacrifices of the culture you're in and most in control of for getting a bit more cultural variety. That doesn't commit you to completely embracing all the deepest tenets of every culture, which, as you know, it is mostly for it to win in the long run. But you could still be trying on the margin to promote diversity. So could we at least agree on that?

Agnes:

So I think we could agree on it if we have like a time parameter too. So the issue is like you could, you might think that having a really, really high amount of diversity at a given time might increase the chances that you end up, you know, sometime later with only two cultures. Whereas if you have lower diversity here, you might have more over here. So that is if you had like a couple of strong powers that were balanced against each other in this earlier scenario. So not that much diversity. then you're maybe more likely to have diversity. So I agree with you that it's coherent conceptually to care about diversity, but I think you've got to care about it over some stretches of time.

Robin:

Sure. I've been thinking about this lately.

Agnes:

And that might mean you don't maximize it at a given time. Yeah.

Robin:

But, I mean, where I've been coming from thinking about this is that, say, three or four centuries ago, the world had enormous cultural variety, basically hundreds of thousands of cultures, each little peasant group was basically a different culture. And then in the last few centuries, we first formed nation states out of, you know, thousands of little local cultures and then we formed a world global culture elite of elites at least and so we have vastly less cultural variety than we did in the past and I think I see key problems as a result of this that is it's not just a hypothetical problem of not having diversity we see in particular with regarding fertility and so now I'm particularly eager to wonder how we could yet a bit more variety than we have at the moment. And because I see the other option as civilization basically falls like the Roman Empire did and produces diversity by poverty and collapse. And I'm wondering if there's a better way we could do that than that option, because that seems pretty bad.

Agnes:

Right. But so then, the idea isn't maximizing diversity. We may not want too much diversity, because too much may just end up back where we were before, and then we're going to consolidate again. What you want is like sustainable diversity. That should be your phrase, sustainable diversity. How much diversity is sustainable? And it may be that actually sustainable diversity is not a very high amount of diversity.

Robin:

But it might need to be enough for some purposes, but we can at least talk about it. So the multiculturalism I don't think should be committed to maximum diversity.

Agnes:

Right, but I've never heard that phrase. I like that. And so the idea is like, for instance, the amount of diversity we have right now, it's not just that we don't have that much diversity, it's also not sustainable in that it's collapsing. We're getting less diverse. So we're losing the diversity that we have. It's becoming more, our multiculturalism is becoming more and more boutique. It's becoming, you go to a different place, it's more like the place where you came from than it used to be. The foods are more similar. Even the superficial things are more similar. And so we're not sustaining our diversity, our cultural diversity.

Robin:

So, for example, the United States for a long time thought of itself as a melting pot. And part of the concept there wasn't just that people came from different cultures and merged into a new common culture. Part of the concept was that we would allow some substantial degree of variety of cultures here. And then a key question was, well, along which dimensions, how much? And in some sense, that's the key question about boutique multiculturalism. Along which dimensions are we going to allow variety and along which dimensions not? But there is a version of, say, the American history ideal, wherein we allowed a lot of diversity, and that that was part not just of what happened to be true, but part of our self-concept. And so we had norms trying to promote it. Say, the norm of free speech as a norm trying to ensure sufficient diversity in what points of view can be expressed, and that we might push, you know, pull ourselves back on any one inclination to squash some sort of speech we didn't like out of respect for the general concept of free speech. And in other ways, we might want to promote aloud. So for example, the Amish are remarkably different from a lot of the people around them. And I think part of the reason they've been able to get away with being different and defying larger cultures around them is our self-concept that we are more embracing of such diversity and less likely to squash it. That's why they're here and not in the rest of the world. There are lots of other places in the world that they would find it much harder to sustain that degree of difference from their neighbors.

Agnes:

I mean, like the Haredi they're in Israel and then they're in Belgium, in New York. They're not just in one place. Maybe it's just that the Amish didn't, they started off in a particular place and then they didn't travel.

Robin:

Again, the Belgians also probably have some concept of their willingness to embrace diversity, which is part of it. That's part of the potential resources here. To what extent can larger regions of the world have a self-concept that they only have to agree on some things and on other things that will allow diversity. That's at least a partial way to produce cultural diversity is to limit the number of things on which we feel we must agree. And in some sense, that's a classic libertarian vision. that to share a government we only need to agree on some minimal features of a minimal government, and that other aspects of society can be allowed to vary by private choice. But I agree, it's not clear how far this actually can go in the sense that the forces producing a world culture today are really many and varied and deep. It's a strong current, and you might wonder how far anyone could have prevented that with various alternative counterfactual policies, people really like being part of this world culture and they deeply crave it.

Agnes:

Let me give you two different scenarios and I just want, I wanted you to think through them from your, you know, this kind of diversity point of view. So imagine a group arises in the United, we commit ourselves to diversity, a group arises like the Amish, But their group just has a tradition of human sacrifice. So every five years, they sacrifice a newborn infant to a certain God for them to continue. And they believe that this is why their group has been so successful, and it's central to their religion. And so the question is, is this something where Like would this fall within the scope of like we ought to tolerate it on your view? So that's one example. Let me give you a second example. So actually, we might imagine, here's an easy second example. Suppose that they do the human sacrifice, but it's got to be an infant from outside the group. So they got to go and get some baby and sacrifice. Look, just one every five years. And this is our religion. It's got to be someone not from our group. OK. So that's the first pair of cases. Was there just a bug that flew into your office?

Robin:

Yes, there was. OK.

Agnes:

and the second pair of cases is or second case is just it's part of their thing that they do a ritual where once a year they find some random person outside their group and they like cover them with flowers or something and they're like they cover them with like jewelry and cloak and whatever but like whether or not the person wants it And this is just part of their culture. They have to go and do it. So I'm interested in these cases because in the last case, it's like a violation of maybe the personal space of the person outside the group. Right? And so that might be very salient, but they're not hurting anyone. Like, so I want to know, what are these fundamental things that we're agreeing on? Is it something like, don't kill? Or is it something like, just do whatever you want, but keep it within the closed doors of your group? Or is it just, you could even kill, but just don't do it too much? Or is it like, yeah, anyway, that these are some, like when you say we have to agree on some fundamental things, like these are some pretty fundamental principles and I don't know where you would land on them.

Robin:

I would want to set up the framework of analysis in terms of a cost-benefit trade-off. On the cost side would be some evaluation of how hard it will be to swallow these sorts of tolerances. So for example, at the moment, people can swallow more that the Amish wear weird clothes and eat weird foods or use a weird language. And they're lesser willing to tolerate Amish being gender unequal, that they treat their women different than their men. That just bothers people more.

Agnes:

But we do tolerate both of them.

Robin:

So far.

Agnes:

Okay, right.

Robin:

But the point would be, if we're asking the world to tolerate some variety, they might have some limited ability to tolerate it. And we might want, and the cross-eyed ask, how big an ask is it to ask them to tolerate some things? And so the child sacrifice might be a big ask. it would cost a lot because basically we have we need to get a coalition you know going that will support this continued tolerance and at some point if too much tolerance is asked of it that coalition may break and it may not last. So on the one side I'd be asking for any one kind of tolerance for asking how much is that costing you know in terms of the ability to preserve this norm and coalition around the norm supporting a certain kind of tolerance And on the benefit side, I would ask, well, if what we want is for, in the long run, humanity to explore a lot of cultural space so that we can find out what are actually best practices and best values and cultures, how much does this element contribute to that exploration? And that would be the benefit side.

Agnes:

And with opinion on this question, are we getting the people in the group or the people outside the group? they're going to disagree on that question.

Robin:

So this is the basic cost-benefit framework, and now we might say there is no committee we would trust to simply handle this as a cost-benefit calculation to, so how will we find another process to, you know, compromise here to make these trade-off choices without this using this explicit cost-benefit framework. So that's a standard political question. It's the standard question of politics. How do we make various kinds of choices where even if we could agree on some cost-benefit framework for it, we don't trust various parties to estimate those numbers. So then what we might often do is draw some crude lines and think that is the best compromise we can come up with. a limited range of things that, you know, so for example, we might say, well, look, we agree murder's bad, so sorry, we're not gonna allow variety on murder. That's gonna be, you know, one of the things that's just not gonna work. People are not gonna be willing to tolerate allowing murders and people, we don't really believe that there's that much to learn about murder. We actually are pretty sure murder's bad and we don't like it and we're just gonna stick with that.

Agnes:

Like, I mean, with the abortion issue, that's just what that is. Right. Yes. It turns out we're we're sort of tolerating diversity on the murder question there. So. And in fact, there are people who do think a lot of it's at stake there. That is, there's a giant value to being able to murder, as they would not call it, unborn babies. And so that's the problem, is that there's a disagreement both about the stakes of the value, which is you know, women's freedom and autonomy over their bodies. And then also about the question, like, is this murder? And they would say, we're not murdering. Maybe they're going to say, we're not murdering these babies. We're devoting their souls to the eternal whatever, right? And, you know, you guys murder babies all the time. We don't do abortion. We just, we just murder, we just do infanticide once every five years, way fewer than what you guys do.

Robin:

So here, here is, One of the policies people are most often drawn to here, and I think it does make some sense, which is just the problem with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on U.S. law over the centuries was that there was a Supreme Court who could do that. So if you just have decentralized polities, decentralized government and control, then there's just much less often going to be opportunities for some cultures to impose their So for example, even today, we have quite a bit of policy variety at the world level exactly because we don't have a world government. Well, we have our world elites who share similar opinions around the world but who often can't, you know, get the rest of the world behind wanting to make their place behave.

Agnes:

But we're moving towards something like world government. We are. I think the problem with decentralization is that it's decentralized. And that means it's basically a power vacuum where someone can take over and eventually somebody will, as in the same as in the case of the law.

Robin:

A power vacuum is only a vacuum if, in fact, there's a sucking force that pulls things toward it. But in fact, the equilibrium distribution of power centralization isn't obviously for all the power to be at the center. The sort of natural degree of centralization of power might be increasing over time, but it might still not be naturally world government.

Agnes:

I mean, I guess I feel like if decentralization were the kind of natural equilibrium that maintains itself without being enforced, we'd be there, but we're not. We could have decentralization, but we need a central authority enforcing it.

Robin:

I mean, we actually have substantial decentralization at the world level still.

Agnes:

Well, but as we were just saying, less and less. It's not stable. And we can make it stable. We can make it stable if we had a world government that enforced decentralization.

Robin:

Or we could have stronger norms, suspicious. So definitely one of the forces that has long made people reluctant to create and empower a world government has been widespread suspicion of that centralized power. I mean, that's in some sense, the driving force of say Brexit, was Britain's feeling suspicious of the central European government and wanting not to be overseen by that central power and wanting to have their more autonomy and that's a central force in a lot of, you know, separatist movements. And, you know, it's even a force today in the U.S. regarding the different parts of the U.S. and whether they should be allowed to have different policies on various things. So, you know, certainly one thing's at play is the degree of suspicion and hostility towards central governments versus hope and embracement of them. And that's related here to the degree of cultural variety. The point is there are just, there are some levers that plausibly correlate with this, but I don't mean to say that this is all easy, but I think most people who think they like multiculturalism don't think it's easy. I would certainly grant that to almost everybody who sees themselves as in favor of it. They see it as hard and tricky.

Agnes:

I mean, I guess it's not obvious to me that Say you want there to be a world government, that you're against multiculturalism. You're against it in the long run once the world government comes into being, but you might in the short term, and the short term might be like 10, 50, 100,000 years, be like, no, we need a lot of cultures to come up. So let's say me, I talk about philosophy and I like to talk to a lot of different people with a lot of different kinds of ideas, right? So I'm like a multiculturalist when it comes to conversations. It's not because at the end of the day, I want there to be like a thousand different opinions in my head. I just only want the true ones at the end. I wanna have knowledge. But the way to do that when you don't have it yet is to not fix anything in your head at the moment. And the way to do that, because it's going to be fixed by yourself, is to talk to people who have a variety of different ideas. So it seems to me not quite right to say, well, you know, like diversity points to no world government, or points to even being against world government. I don't even know what the signs are here, because I think someone could be in favor of world government and really trying to make there be more diversity, at least in the short run. And the short run could, again, be tens of thousands of years.

Robin:

I think we often see this sort of a problem show up. I might say, I see a value to cultural diversity. And then you might say, well, if you're going to hold that up as your one maximum principle against all else, look how far it could go wrong. And I might say, I was never trying to do that. I was trying to say, here's a thing I see value in that doesn't commit me to any particular strategy for promoting it, or doesn't commit me to valuing it above all else in all possible situations. So we can just have intermediate levels of commitment to and embracement of things like multiculturalism.

Agnes:

Yeah. I mean, like, I guess I'm just, I'm not sure what that amounts to without more of a sense of why. So like you and I could agree, we could both favor more multiculturalism. And I could favor it because I want a world government eventually, right? And you could favor it for some other reason. And so we could sort of agree on this one point, but it doesn't really mean we're allies. It doesn't mean we're, there are many moves that are gonna appeal to both of us.

Robin:

And that's why I like having an analysis that tells me why I like multiculturalism. So then I'm more committed to the basis of that analysis than the particular multiculturalistic conclusion. So I would say that what I've realized lately is that humans are very dependent on cultural evolution. And cultural evolution can just go wrong in many ways. And those mistakes are usually fixed by selection. In a world of a lot of cultural selection, a lot of cultural variety produces a lot of selection. And in the world today, we have very little variety of cultures. So cultures can just easily go wrong in the way they always have that were usually fixed. But now, because they're big and rich, and there's very, very many of them, those mistakes aren't being fixed. And now that's my reason to worry about insufficient cultural variety and wanting perhaps more variety to fix it. But it's not... the multiculturalism isn't the fundamental value, it's the analysis that says why that's a problem. And if we find other ways to fix the problem other than multiculturalism, then I could be behind that. But it's interesting, at least, that this thing many people have said they're interested in, multiculturalism, I turn out to want to some degree. That's a surprise to me. Because I see a reason why that can be important. It might not be the reason they see. I mean, as an alternative, you might say, well, a society that could sufficiently control its cultural drift, a society that could sufficiently foresee the consequences of cultural drift and only allow them when they would have good consequences, well, that society might then no longer need cultural evolution so much to prevent it from going off the rails. And I might find that an acceptable solution if only I trusted whoever was managing this process to do it well.

Agnes:

Or you might think the thing you've called cultural drift isn't drift. It is a culture moving itself by its own devices, which is to say not by the needs of biology and not by the needs of adaptation to its environment, not even by the needs of adaptation to its cultural environment. What else could it be? But you might think it's, well, it's somehow moving under the force of its own ideas, trying to work those ideas out. And that's what the drift is.

Robin:

I mean, I agree that that's how they would see it. I just have to make this evaluation of does it work? And I think I've decided it doesn't really work in terms of functionality so far. So an analogy would be corporate cultures. Most corporations have a corporate culture, sort of thing that makes it different from other companies, the thing that's hard to change internally, but does get changed when some companies replace others. People try to manage and control that corporate culture to move it in a direction. There are leaders or firms who have quite a lot of power and abilities to try to influence corporate cultures. And nevertheless, I think what I see is corporate cultures drift to dysfunction. And they typically do have to be replaced by young firms. They cannot manage themselves into health. That's perhaps a surprising fact about corporations. You might think the CEO and leaders would have strong incentives to try to make sure that culture moved only in good directions for the company, but in fact, they fail. And in our civilizations today, leaders have much less control over culture than the CEO of a company does.

Agnes:

Right. I agree.

Robin:

And much less foresight and much less planning and much less committee meetings to make a plan and figure it out. We do that much less at our overall cultural civilization level.

Agnes:

Right. Though, I mean, I guess it just depends on how much continuity you see. But if you think, well, there's some substantial cultural continuity that we've had, say, over the past I don't know, 500 or 1,000 or 2,000 years, then we've just been a lot more successful than most corporations.

Robin:

I don't know what you mean by continuity. You don't mean stability, do you?

Agnes:

Well, I mean that there's a set of values that people are committed to that they have been committed to throughout that time.

Robin:

But there are a great many other values that they've changed over that time.

Agnes:

Right, and so a company could change in a bunch of ways, right? They could even change which products are their main products.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And maybe just companies are not as good at doing that as cultures are, and so they die because they can't change enough. We should actually stop because we're over.

Robin:

We should, but thanks for talking.