Communitarians, on the other hand, fail to define ‘community’: is it a
neighbourhood or the whole world? For the purposes of his argument Waldron
defines community as an ‘ethnic community’ – ‘a particular people sharing a heritage
of custom, ritual, and way of life that is in some real or imagined sense immemorial’
(Waldron, 1995: 96). Although we may need culture in a wide sense, we do not
need to exist in a single culture, such as an ethnic community. Indeed, he goes
further and argues that the only authentic response to modernity is the recognition
of cultural hybridity: ‘from a cosmopolitan point of view, immersion in the tradition
of a particular community in the modern world is like living in Disneyland and
thinking that one’s surroundings epitomize what it is for a culture really to exist’
(Waldron, 1995: 101).
Waldron does recognise the counter-charge to cosmopolitanism: that living with
fragments of culture generates incoherence. As Benedict argued, the meaning of a
particular item of culture depends on the whole, for a culture is all of a piece.
Waldron argues, however, that real communities are disparate and overlap and are
nothing like the aboriginal hunting bands or the ‘misty dawn in a Germanic village’
(Waldron, 1995: 102). Respecting culture does not entail valuing an entire culture,
as if a culture were a self-contained thing, but rather ‘meaningful options’ come
from a variety of cultural sources, and ‘cultural erosion’ is the key to cultural
evaluation: the failure of a culture to survive indicates that one culture – or cultural
trait – is better than another. Waldron’s argument can be read either as a critique
of multiculturalism or a particular model of multiculturalism. It is a critique if by
multiculturalism is meant a deliberate policy of maintaining, either through financial
support or the restriction of individual freedom, a particular culture, where culture
is understood as an organic whole. It is a model of multiculturalism insofar as it
presents a model of political society in which cultural diversity is valued.The right to cultural membership (Will Kymlicka)
In his first book, Liberalism, Community, and Culture(1989), Kymlicka argued
that Rawls’s theory of justice could, with a few revisions, accommodate the value
of community. In subsequent work he has sought to defend cultural diversity within
a Rawlsian framework: he argues that as individuals we have (moral) rights to
cultural membership. He maintains that culture provides a ‘context of choice’. This
is problematic, for it is unclear whether culture is instrumentally or intrinsically
valuable: does value reside in what we choose or in the fact that we have chosen
it? If the ends we choose are of instrumental value then it would not much matter
with which culture you identified, although the more compatible with liberal values
the better.
Although Kymlicka makes clear that it is the ends we choose which matter, rather
than our capacity to choose, the idea of culture as a context of choice does suggest
that oppressive and illiberal cultures are less valuable than those which permit
freedom, and so human autonomy – the capacity to choose – must have some
intrinsic value. Kymlicka avoids addressing this tension within his theory and instead
appeals to empirical examples to show that culture need not be oppressive. He cites
Quebec as a culture that has ‘liberalised’:344 Part 3 Contemporary ideologies