Multiculturalism and the politics of identity
Charles Taylor argues that the sense of who we are is constructed in the eyes of
others, so that to fail to be recognised by others is to be denied the basis of one’s
identity: ‘non-recognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of
oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being’
(Taylor, 1994: 25). The politics of recognition is a modern concept, developing out
of the collapse of hierarchies in the eighteenth century. Hierarchies were the basis
of honour, and honour was linked to distinction, and hence inequality; against
honour we have dignity, which Taylor takes to be the basis of a liberal–democratic
society. At the same time as we shift from honour to dignity, we also experience
individualisation: morality is no longer to be understood in terms of mores but is
a matter of individual conscience, either in the form of a moral sense or, following
Kant, the capacity of an individual to will the moral law. However, after Kant we
get what Taylor terms a ‘displacement of the moral accent’: the inner voice is no
longer primarily concerned to tell us what to do – to connect us to an objective
moral order – but has become an end in itself. It is the terminus of identity. We
have to be true to our ‘inner voice’ if we are to be ‘full human beings’. The
conjunction of inwardness and authenticity – following that inner voice – creates
a danger that we lose sight of the fact that one’s identity is only possible through
other people’s recognition of us. Somehow we need to reconcile the inwardness of
authenticity with the ‘outwardness’ of recognition. In the days of honour the two
were unproblematic because ‘general recognition was built into the socially derived
identity by virtue of the very fact that it was based on social categories that everyone
took for granted’ (Taylor, 1994: 34). Inwardly derived, as distinct from externally
imposed, identity does not enjoy this automatic recognition, but must win it, and
that process may fail, such that ‘what has come about with the modern age is not
the need for recognition but the conditions in which the attempt to be recognized
can fail’ (Taylor, 1994: 35). Recognition is recognition of difference, but this is
combined with a traditional liberal emphasis on equality:
The politics of difference often redefines non-discrimination as requiring that we
make these distinctions the basis of differential treatment. So members of
aboriginal bands will get certain rights and powers not enjoyed by other
Canadians... and certain minorities will get the right to exclude others in order
to preserve their cultural integrity, and so on.
(Taylor, 1994: 39–40)
The conflict between ‘traditional’ liberalism and identity politics would be less
severe were it not for the fact that ‘the demand for equal recognition extends beyond
an acknowledgement of the equal value of all humans potentially, and comes to
include the equal value of what they have made of this potential in fact’ (Taylor,
1994: 42–3).
What is interesting about this presentation of multiculturalism is that culture is
conceptualised not as an imposition or constraint, but as something we identify
with, and in the process it becomes our identity. Despite Taylor’s criticisms
of traditional liberalism, his historical reconstruction of the development of
multiculturalism as one strain of the politics of recognition – another is feminism342 Part 3 Contemporary ideologies