Tag: multiculturalism

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Books, essays and others Politics & government Society

[3017] One day in Babel

As a member of the generation who grew up and still believes in the multicultural project under the aegis of liberal democratic order, the 2020s is a decade of constant disappointment at home and abroad. The disappointment stems from betrayal of various parties that used to express liberal sentiments but now has turned against it for whatever reason.

Criticisms of the current state of affairs are everywhere, including in contemporary literature. Two books from my recent readings rise to the top of my mind. Omar El Akkad’s non-fiction One Day Everybody Will Have Always Been Against This and RF Kuang’s fantasy-scifi-historical fiction Babel or The Necessity of Violence.

One of those betraying parties are many liberals in the West.

El Akkad’s thesis is clear from the book title itself, with ‘this’ being the genocide in Gaza and apartheid across occupied Palestine. He points out the hypocrisy of Western liberals, especially US liberals, where human rights are held up only for some but not others. That has been a constant criticism of the US and Western Europe (the centers of such liberalism) for a long time but the idea has gained its greater purchase in the past several years, especially with the wildly different approaches taken by then with respect to Ukraine and Palestine.

El Akkad’s criticism goes deeper than simply highlighting the hypocrisy. He believes many western liberals are really interested in messaging and virtue signalling all to make themselves look good. When push comes to shoves, they would create a caveat to wriggle their way through the issues while pretending there is no hypocrisy involved after all.

This, I believe, is one of several reasons why Western liberals no longer hold the prestige they once had in the eyes of many Asian liberals. I have summarized my thoughts on the matter on Kam Raslan’s A Bit of Culture over radio some weeks back. In the same show, I recommended El Akkad’s work as a book to be read.

That hypocrisy is one of several themes explored in Babel. But more than that is another relevant but more damning fatalist criticism developed from that hypocrisy. It is that people of different culture, or more specifically, minorities in a white world would never be considered as equal. Set during the European industrial revolution on the eve of the Opium War, the novel traces the life of the hero and his small cohort at Oxford, some who are radicalized over the injustices of British colonialism.

Babel is an excellent novel and I enjoy Kuang’s writings. In fact, Babel is my second Kuang’s work I have read, with the first being Yellowface. Even so, I won’t yet be as pessimistically fatalistic about multiculturalism as Babel is, even in this current decade of disappointment. Babel takes place during a time of severe power imbalance between the Western world and everything else, where the subscription to the idea of equality can easily be corrupted by hypocrisy that those in power.

With the ongoing multidecades-long rise of Asian economies, the gap representing power imbalance is shrinking and for some, has been reversed. This, I hope, would make that same hypocrisy harder to sustain and a more genuine inclusivity more achievable.

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Education Liberty Society

[1253] Of coercion, cohesion, unity and liberty within the Malaysian education system

The issue of vernacular schools funded by public money is a very difficult subject for me. The difficulty arises due to choices involving coercion, cohesion, unity and liberty.

For liberals, the racially divided Malaysian society is a painful reality to live in. The history and nature of our society give rise to our current predicament where most issues could be seen through racial lens, be it right or wrong. Our education and political systems reflect exactly that primitive thinking that we suffer.

Before I progress further, the importance of education must be emphasized. Liberals in general, including libertarians, place education very high in their list. Through my readings, the birth of liberalism would not be possible without the accessibility of knowledge to the masses. It is through knowledge, or education, that individuals could fully appreciate personal responsibilities, placing the individuals — the basic unit of a society — on a higher plane compared the situation in a centralize society. Liberalism at its heart is about trust in the individuals; the trust that one shall respect others’ same rights. It is trust that individuals are able to do good. Aristotle’s words describe part of that trust: “I have gained this by philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law“. It is through this trust, through personal responsibilities that one frees oneself from shackles imposed by tyrants. Without education, it is hard for any one of us to build that trust. Lack of education provides fertile ground for dictatorship.

Education is the sculpture of a society. It is a tool. The greater the education level of individuals, the greater the possibility of a creation of a freer individuals and freer individuals create freer society; liberal society. For liberals, primitive communal thinkings do not appeal to them.

The tool could be used to eliminate the primitive division we suffer. This is why the education system receives so much attention, at the very least by liberals, within our society. Liberals understand the gravity of the matter. We understand that the education system could mole a new society that would do away with outdated communal-based politics.

There are liberals that believe the promotion of multicultural society to erase the legacy of divisive communal politics from Malaysian society. They would actively promote the creation or the enhancement of multicultural society — such policies are called multiculturalism — to answer the division that could very much lead to clear expressed bigotry. Once, this appealed to me but I found a clear hint of coercion in multiculturalism. That leads to my rejection of multiculturalism. That however does not mean I reject multicultural societies. I enjoy diversity but I do not wish to have such societal characteristic to be stuff down my throat to suffocate me.

One aspect of multiculturalism through Malaysian context, at least, I seem to think so, is the rejection of vernacular system and promotion of a religiously unbiased national system with the national language as the medium. Through this, tolerance, which is a goal of multiculturalism, would be achieved. After all, inculcating tolerance in the young is easier than trying do to the same thing for an already bigoted adults.

Rejection of multiculturalism however left me grappling to answer a question: how do we overcome this primitive communal politics without multiculturalism? Could a source of bigotry be solved with coercive cohesion at the expense of liberty? Is the liberty so sacred to liberals — libertarians — worth bypassing the unity that all liberals dream of?

The questions relevant to the Malaysian education system, with all those factors in mind is this: should the vernacular system be abolished in favor of national system in the name of unity or should it be left as it is in the name of liberty, for fear of forcefully committing active assimilation against others’ will?

My status quo position until now was the abolition of the vernacular system and placing full support for the national school. Of course, the support for the national system requires qualification and few of them are meritocracy and independence from religion.

Through limited time that I had to contemplate on the matter, I have come to a conclusion that strengthens my trust in the individuals. It is a conclusion that satisfactorily breaks the dualism between coercion and cohesion, between unity and liberty; it is possible to achieve cohesion without coercion, liberty with unity.

This is how: as mentioned earlier, education is the sculpture of a society. Greater level of education introduces greater possibility of one thinking for oneself. This enables one to trust oneself, breaking away from superstitions and illogical orthodoxies, creating confident individuals that rely on the mind to move forward towards enlightenment and beyond. The ability to self-regulate transfers sovereignty from leaders or society, benevolent or malevolent, to individuals.

Higher education level increases the possibility of the birth of another liberal individual, regardless of strain, or at least, individuals that respect others’ liberties. If all liberals are allergic to the communal politics and to an extent accept that vernacular system promotes communal politics and are concerned with coercion and liberty, they would support the national system without actively depriving others of opportunity to vernacular system, assuming all else the same, assuming all qualifications that I stated earlier are incorporated. As the education level of the population goes up, there will be a point that most would like to do away with vernacular education system and thus, only one system that is supported by public money. For a liberal that values tolerance, he would try to inculcate the liberal value in his child and he would likely enroll his child in a system that offers exposure to tolerance. Between a national and a vernacular system, there is more exposure opportunity to tolerance in the former. Hence, the liberal would choose the national system over vernacular system, with all else being the same. Through this, slowly but surely, we will phrase out the public-funded vernacular system without coercion.

If my reasoning is sound, then what we need to do is to increase the quality of our education system to create a less communal politics within our society. This would mean that all we need is the patience and resilience to improve the quality of our education system and eventually, through that system, a quiet revolution for a liberal society.

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Liberty Society

[1092] Of liberalism, multicultural societies and multiculturalism

One of the characteristics of liberalism is tolerance. While that might be true of liberalism taken as a whole, as usual, I am interested in classical liberalism and will refer such liberalism as simply liberalism. This tolerance originates from the non-aggression axiom. While I understand the relationship between tolerance and the non-aggression axiom, I had a hard time trying to justify multiculturalism in the name of liberalism. It turns out that it is hard to justify because it is unjustifiable.

I had the impression that multiculturalism is the apex of tolerance where different people from very different backgrounds come and live together in harmony, respecting each others’ rights. This impression, that both are related to tolerance, has brought me to assume that liberalism actively supports multiculturalism by virtue that both share the characteristic of tolerance. That opinion further strengthened my opinion on the relationship between liberalism and multicultural societies; that a liberal society is a multicultural society and multicultural society is synonymous to multiculturalism.

After a couple of headaches, enlightenment rained upon me. I somehow began to realize the difference between the descriptive multicultural and the prescriptive multiculturalism. The former merely describes a state of a society without espousing what state should the society be. The latter actively advocates for a state of multicultural through policies collectively called multiculturalism. With that realization, I have come to the conclusion that liberalism is neutral of multicultural society and unsupportive of multiculturalism.

It must be noted that a multicultural society is the natural course of a liberal society. Be aware that this is not similar to stating that the only cause a multicultural society is liberalism.

Liberalism by its very nature is tolerant and a liberal society is a tolerant society. This tolerance exhibited by liberal societies attracts people from all over, especially from illiberal societies. While liberalism produces multicultural societies, multicultural societies are not the goal of liberalism. To make the idea clearer, multicultural society is a side effect of liberalism; liberalism indirectly causes the creation of multicultural societies. The relationship between liberalism and multicultural societies stops there and goes no farther.

To actively encourage the formation of a multicultural society is taking it one step farther; that is multiculturalism and not liberalism.

A pillar of liberalism is spontaneous order. The policies of multiculturalism contradict the spirit of spontaneous order. A liberal must not force to turn a society into a multicultural one. By force, I mean, the state, which has the monopoly of policing power, actively promoting multicultural society as an end. It is worth reiterating that a liberal society would sooner or later become multicultural unconsciously. Forcing the process to go faster is counterproductive. Just as we cannot force others to be free, we cannot force society to become multicultural.

While multicultural society is, depending on point of view — I certainly do see it as such — a positive unintended effect of liberalism, liberals themselves, or rather, liberal states, should be neutral on issues relating to multicultural societies. Such neutrality is essential because whether a society is multicultural or monocultural, it is not related to liberty. In an already liberal society when negative rights are secured, do we expect the state of multicultural to affect liberty in any way?

I would answer no.

I do believe that I was not the only that that had tried to say multiculturalism is part of liberalism. A lot of multiculturalists do call themselves as liberals and it is easy to understand how such confusion could occur.

As stated earlier, a creation of a multicultural society is a side effect — a symptom — of liberalism. Advanced liberal societies more often than not are multicultural societies. Those that misunderstood the relationship between liberalism and multiculturalism will try to emulate these advanced liberal societies to the letters, instead of to the spirit. The strong relationship between liberalism and multicultural societies blurs the causality and causes many liberals — I would call these liberals as neophytes — to accept multicultural societies as central to liberalism.

Again, multicultural society is a symptom of liberalism; a multicultural society is simply a sign of a maturing liberal society. Multicultural society is not central to liberalism while multiculturalism is out of the equation.

For us to emulate advanced liberal societies, we need to secure the roots of liberalism, not the symptoms of liberalism. For once the roots are secured, the symptoms will come in good time.