Culture and Multiculturalism: A Canadian Reflection

This article challenges the view, advanced in this journal by David Lewis Schaefer, that there are close links between modern phenomena such as relativism, multiculturalism, and the decline of American education and scholarship. This article argues that the view that “culture is everywhere” does not entail the relativistic belief that all objects of study are equally valuable. Nor is relativism entailed by multiculturalism, as widely claimed by multiculturalism’s opponents. Canada’s long experience with the policy shows that it involves an ongoing negotiation of the basis upon which we are to live together, rather than a belief that all cultures are somehow equal. Nor does multiculturalism rule out a pedagogical focus on what Matthew Arnold famously termed “the best which has been thought and said.” (The foregoing suggests that we must look elsewhere for the supports of current-day relativism; one oft-neglected root is mainstream social science.) Many conservatives also blame multiculturalism and relativism for the state of American education, and in so doing they adopt a one-sided view of the latter’s problems. But the educational challenge of addressing history and current social problems involves opposed dangers between which we must try to navigate.