Polarisation – A multiculturalist response

Theorists of multiculturalism are seldom thought to offer a response to polarisation and might even be thought to exacerbate it as their ideas are often claimed to be divisive. This article shows why once we have a clearer idea about what polarisation is and when it is a problem, the multiculturalist Bhikhu Parekh has plausible ideas about how to respond to it.

Note that Bhikhu did not write about polarisation. Yet one indicator of the significance of a political thinker is that she or he has enough insight into the nature of political life for their ideas to have implications for features of political life they have said little or nothing about. This I believe is true of Bhikhu, and it is why his ideas can indicate how to respond to polarisation.

I first show what polarisation is and when it becomes a problem. Second, I discuss why Bhikhu’s ideas offer a plausible response to it.

What is polarisation?

When we think and talk about ‘polarisation’ we usually have in mind large differences of opinion in a single democratic political community about, for example, an issue such as Brexit or a politician such as Donald Trump. Just as ‘cohesion’ or the ‘ties that bind’ members of a political community to one another are metaphorical ways of describing their unity, ‘polarisation’ is a metaphorical way of referring to large differences of opinion among them. No one is literally at a pole, but the beliefs and practices that people use to interpret their lives lead them to interpret such an issue or political figure in conflicting ways as follows.

Certain frequently found beliefs and everyday practices lead to one frequent opinion while other frequently found beliefs and practices lead to another divergent opinion. Such frequently found beliefs and practices are tendencies in the thought and behaviour of members of the political community, and they conflict. Hence, they include, for example, the emerging tendencies in thought and behaviour of the young and the residual ones of the old or those with rural and urban or secular or religious ways of life. Such tendencies in thought and behaviour compose perspectives or ways of perceiving various subjects, and those on one pole share a perspective just as two or more people on a hill may share a view: they see similar things (Young, 2000). Those on the other pole have the opposing perspective about the same subject.

Hence, if vast socio-economic inequalities in a political community are perceived, this can lead to polarised perspectives on socio-economic issues. Doctrines emerge about the cause of these inequalities, why they are indefensible and how political communities can become more equal or just. Such doctrines or ideologies provide reasons to calibrate but also defend such perspectives and can help to justify divergent socio-economic perspectives. When a political community becomes multicultural through mass immigration, new tendencies in thought and behaviour enter it. Some existing conflicting perspectives are attractive to new members; thus, for example, many religious minorities in Britain value the role of religion in public life and want to retain an established Church (Modood, 2016: p.195), whereas others have long sought to disestablish it. Equally, the needs of cultural minorities are related to racial, cultural and other forms of discrimination and stereotyping that existing socio-economic perspectives and ideologies do not recognise, thus new perspectives emerge that conflict with existing ones.

Such conflicting perspectives can lead to a polarised democracy that entails multiple popular, socio-economic, ideological and minority perspectives. Multipolar social polarisation can lead to multipolar political polarisation as various political parties and politicians try to represent these different perspectives. But in a two-party system, multipolar social polarisation can become bipolar political polarisation. One political party and its leader represent different socio-economic, ideological and cultural perspectives; the other represents opposing ones.

These conflicting perspectives and tendencies in thought that compose them seem ineliminable without unacceptable levels of coercion. Politics requires these conflicting perspectives to alert us to the need for changes or to slow down change when it is too quick, disruptive and costly. Politics also requires disagreements about what is just or good to determine the most defensible answer in different situations and competing views are essential to make different forms of intellectual progress and are presupposed in adversarial parliamentary and court systems. Such conflicting perspectives are necessary but also become a problem when the following occurs.

When politicians exploit ‘wedge issues’, and for example, give speeches that legitimise certain perspectives but disparage widely held other ones, they legitimise only particular tendencies in thought and behaviour and perspectives, and delegitimise others. They are not trying to convince those with sincerely held opposing perspectives, or to offer a compromise, or to reconcile conflicting views. Instead, they are exaggerating these perspectives and portraying them as mutually exclusive. Political institutions cannot reconcile mutually exclusive perspectives as it is logically impossible to do so. Whichever one they endorse delegitimises such institutions for others whom such institutions must also serve. If these political activities are widespread, they can make the democratic institutions that reconcile differing tendencies in thought and behaviour seem illegitimate and create an institutional danger.

The ability of members of a political community to think of themselves as a unit or a group and to possess unity also reduces. Often, members of a political community need only assume they are a unit or group from time to time when, for example, conceptualising a collective problem or collective solution. In difficult times, such as during war, they may need to also to think of themselves explicitly as a group to work together and to be loyal to one another. Like the unity among family members or friends, the unity among members of a political community must become more explicit with need. Yet the practices of politicians noted above target conflicting perspectives and make them feel less like a group, and there are other social dangers too, as follows.

When social media habits expose people only to their own perspectives and ‘straw man’ opposing ones, their perspectives are not tested. If they talk only to those who share the same perspective, they can see it in detail and learn how to defend each step in it and thus become more confident about it and perceive less need for modesty. Empirical studies show how in such situations people become more extreme in their perspectives and confident about it and thus they push it to its logical conclusion (Talisse, 2021: p.73). With such confidence they become inclined to ignore perspectives that question their starting point and underlying tendencies in thought, and become less aware of how other tendencies in thought point in other directions. Their perspective comes to seem true for most of those they converse with, and those who disagree with them seem abnormal, and obtuse as is often said about the polarisation in the USA (Sunstein, 2017: p.73). The possibility of good faith disagreements reduces, and note an epistemic danger too (Benson, 2024).

If people are less attentive to conflicting perspectives, knowledge that conflicts with their perspective becomes less acceptable. Many historians face this difficulty (Fowler, 2023). Their work can calibrate but, for some some, should ideally corroborate not undermine popular perspectives as knowledge is confused with ideology. Equally, the capacity to not only converse but in turn learn from other cultural groups and see beauty and insight in their beliefs and practices despite the way they conflict with our own, rather as competing scientists or musicians might when considering each other’s work, reduces. These social dangers accompany the political ones to institutions and unity and require a response. Bhikhu’s work contains the following relevant ideas.

The Parekhian response

We saw that there is a need to foster unity among members of a political community. Bhikhu devised a distinct and valuable way of showing how national identity fosters such unity (Uberoi, 2018). Unlike liberal and conservative nationalists (Miller, 1995: p.19; Scruton, 2006: p. 18), Bhikhu (2008, p.56) shows how we think and talk about national identity in two related ways. First, as the identity of a political community and, for example, the identity of Britain or France. Second as the identity of a person and, for example, a person’s British or French identity. In the first sense, we have in mind a conception of what the members of the political community are: their territory, institutions, history or the tendencies in thought and behaviour that give them a recognisable character. This differs from a person’s national identity, which like their sexual or religious identity depicts part of what they are. Thus, imagine a person who says ‘I feel British’. They are not only saying they feel part of Britain, but also that Britain influences who they are through, for example, its legal, political and educational institutions; thus they may also say that they are British and refer to ‘their Britishness’ too.

The two ways of thinking about national identity are related as a person must use some conception of their political community to know that they feel part of it and influenced by it, even if this conception is vague. And a person cannot plausibly say that they feel ‘British’ or ‘French’ without having any notion of Britain or France. Equally, the relationship between these two ways of thinking about national identity can be empirically significant. This is because if ethnic minorities in Britain think that British people are solely white and Christian, then such minorities might think it strange to think of themselves as British. And if many in Britain think it is a white and Christian nation, as they once did, they may think that ethnic minorities cannot be British. The conceptions of a political community that its members have can thus influence how they think about their own and one another’s national identities.

Both ways of thinking about national identity can foster unity in the sense described earlier. Those who, for example, ‘feel American’ often think of themselves as a group just like those who share a religious identity, and are ‘Muslim’, or a sexual identity, and are ‘gay’, can. They often feel loyal to their ‘fellow Americans’, and they can feel proud of one another’s achievements because they assume that they are a group. Equally, those who claim that they ‘feel American’ must, we have seen, have conceptions of America that are often vague. Yet if these conceptions are clear they can help Americans to visualise themselves as a group. In this way, national identity in both senses can remind members of a political community that despite their conflicting tendencies in thought and behaviour, and opposing perspectives they are still a unit or a group.

Yet no government can force people to think of themselves as, for example, ‘British’ without an unacceptable level of coercion, and perhaps not even then. Yet a government can use school curricula to teach children that they are part of a political community by discussing their rights and duties as its members. Children can also be taught that their political community is likely to influence them as its legal, political and educational institutions usually unavoidably influence what its members think is ‘acceptable’ and ‘normal’. This influence affects so many in a political community that it can be hidden in plain sight, yet is often discernible when people go abroad. There people encounter ideas of what is ‘normal’ and ‘acceptable’ that differ from their own ideas and those in their political community and in doing so they often think that there is something, for example, ‘British’ about what they are. To encourage this thought, children can go on foreign exchange schemes and study beliefs and practices that are ‘acceptable’ and ‘normal’ in other political communities. Hence, the type of education that can encourage children to think that there is something, for example, ‘British’ about what they are need not be nationalistic, nationalist or national but can be international in nature.

Similarly, no education system can promote a single conception of a political community without running the risk of this conception seeming artificial and imposed. Yet a government can accept that features of a political community are interpreted and related in different ways by citizens who thus have different conceptions of it that children can learn about, choose from and develop. High school curricula can aid this by ensuring that children learn about and regularly debate whether, for example, it is plausible to think of Britain’s people and institutions as liberal, conservative, secular, tolerant, and so on. Such regular debates illustrate how features of a political community, such as its people and institutions and history are understood in a range of ways. Such regular debates also discourage children from just imbibing one conception and encourage them to think critically and to reject some views of the political community while endorsing others to form their own conception of it. ¹

Such debate can reduce the epistemic danger noted earlier, as can a second feature of Bhikhu’s thought. Parekh (2000a, pp. 148, 337) argues ‘all but the most primitive cultures are internally plural and represent a continuing conversation between their different traditions and strands of thought’. Bhikhu values intracultural dialogue and the way that it can correct perspectives in a cultural group that are indefensible. Yet Bhikhu (2000a, p.166) also accepts Isaiah Berlin’s insight that values conflict; thus no culture can realise them all and ‘different cultures thus correct and complement one another’. Intercultural dialogue is thus valuable too.

To encourage both types of dialogue Bhikhu (1986, p.23) argues that while children should learn about a public culture of norms, values and institutions that regulates the collective affairs of citizens, this public culture should be one in which intra and intercultural dialogue are central. Controversial subjects such as colonialism and slavery and the different ways they are viewed can be taught and debated by high school students to learn how to analyse, weigh and convey different sensitive perspectives and to defend them without offending others.

Bhikhu (1986, p.28) also justifies teachers asking ‘their pupils to set up a dialogue between their own and another society, exploring each in terms of the other, asking questions about another society that arise from their own, and asking questions about the latter that someone from another society would wish to ask’. In doing so they become alert to differing perspectives and questions that follow from them in other societies too. They experience differing tendencies in thought and behaviour as not only normal, but what Bhikhu calls ‘mini-Archimedean points’ which people adopt to make sense of a perspective that differs from their own to detect what is plausible in it and learn from it (Parekh, 2000b p. 251). This process makes people aware of a need to alter their own culture; thus Parekh argues, that ‘other cultures… enable’ people to view their own from the outside, tease out its strengths and weaknesses and deepen their self-consciousness…’ (Parekh, 2000a: p.167). Intercultural cultural dialogue can alert someone to the need for intracultural dialogue within their own cultural group to argue for changes.

Politicians must justify these policies that cultivate a capacity for dialogue and foster unity. This entails not only avoiding ‘wedge issues’ that undermine such efforts and accepting institutional dangers, epistemic and unity related dangers noted earlier. It implicitly entails a vision of a political community in which its citizens are united and not threatened by their differences and are thus willing to engage in dialogue to learn from them.

While we saw that education systems cannot promote a single conception of what a political community is without this conception seeming artificial and imposed, politicians can justify a vision for the sort of political community they want over time to create so as to win support for it. Bhikhu identifies such a vision of a political community as ‘a community of individuals and a community of communities’ or for brevity, what he called a ‘community of communities’ (Uberoi, 2021). Both phrases appear in the co-authored Parekh Report and Bhikhu’s (1990, p.114; 1997, p.100; 2001, pp.693-694), previous and later publications, and are often interpreted without any evidence. For example, journalists criticised this Report for claiming that a ‘community of communities’ should replace the term ‘Britain’ and the idea that Britain is a nation (Telegraph, 11 November 2000; Times, 12 November 2000). These claims are not in the Report. Scholars criticised the shorthand phrase in the Report as they claimed that it suggests dividing culturally diverse societies into legally autonomous groups as JN Figgis (1907, p.205), who also referred to a ‘community of communities’, suggested (Kelly, 2015: p.33).

Yet Bhikhu had argued since 1974 that the ‘full-blooded pluralism’, in which there is legal autonomy for each cultural community, leads to a ‘union of communities’, not a ‘community of communities’, as it undermines the community that smaller communities are part of (Parekh, 1974: pp.228, 1998: p.4; 2000a, pp, 200, 206; CMEB, 2000: p.45). And while many scholars such as Figgis and Martin Buber and politicians such as the former Canadian Prime Minister Joe Clark, used the phrase ‘community of communities’ (Uberoi, 2021: p.743), Bhikhu (1990, p.114; 1997, p.100) explicitly took this phrase from Gandhi. He expanded it to a ‘community of individuals and community of communities’ to suggest four ideas about contemporary political communities. First, they are comprised of individuals (CMEB, 2000, p.ix); but these people are not solely individuals as it is often difficult to individuate them when, for example, thinking of them as dependent children or parents (Parekh, 2000c: p.251). Second, a political community is made up of people who form and are influenced by ‘religious, ethnic, cultural and regional communities’ (Parekh, 2000: p.693; CMEB, 2000, p.ix). Third, despite individual and communal differences, the members of a political community develop over time a shared history and experiences, ways of regulating their affairs; thus we think of them as a unity, or a community, too (Parekh, 2001: p.694). Fourth, this community of individuals and communities requires ‘a strong commitment’ to dialogue (CMEB, 2000: p.44, 52) to develop understandings of their conflicting perspectives, learn from them, reconcile them, devise compromises or agree a way to proceed when compromise seems impossible.

This vision was so misunderstood by the media in 2000 that Parekh (2010) said that his Report was ‘born an orphan’ as the then Labour government, who were its intended custodians, initially rejected it. But over time many of the Parekh’s Report’s practical measures were introduced as were some of his ideas about national identity (Uberoi and Modood, 2013). To minimise polarisation and the institutional, unity, epistemic and other dangers above, this vision, even today, indicates the sort of political community that politicians seeking to promote unity and intra and intercultural dialogue should aim to legitimise and live up to.