Is multicultural accommodation inherently “irrational”?

I’ve been teaching a course semi-regularly on multiculturalism and political theory since graduate school, so when I saw Erik’s post below I anticipated some likely responses. Karen does not disappoint:

So how long until all the pro-Hobby Lobby trolls show up and accuse you of hypocrisy?

Seriously, assume for a minute that this issue came up because the town’s school board couldn’t find a source for Halal food that charged prices within the school’s budget? Will the school now need to offer meals for Catholics who avoid meat on Friday? Does it already? If the hijab is okay, what about the niqab? (That’s the burqa.) Is it even possible to have this debate in a rational manner?

It is indeed possible to have this debate in a rational manner, but in order to do so we need to not jump straight to slippery slope fallacies. IB’s response, in particular this: “Muslims in France who want halal food in schools are natural people with good-faith, internally consistent religious practices with which the state is actually interfering” is spot-on. Following up on that:

When it comes to multicultural accommodation, without endorsing his approach unreservedly I think Will Kymlicka is on to something when he suggests we make a stark distinction between the demand for external protections (efforts to reduce to vulnerability of minority groups to pressures from some economic, cultural, and/or political forces), as opposed to the demand for internal restrictions (restrictions a group places on its own members’ liberties). The former can and should be accommodated in a liberal society in many cases, and the latter should be met with skepticism in virtually all cases. It is a commitment to individual rights that motivates this  To offer some options consistent with a group’s dietary restrictions fits easily within that category. The Hobby Lobby case is in some ways worse than many minority group internal restrictions, as it imposes those restrictions on non-members (employees). And they were offered an accommodation anyway, which they reject, because apparently their religion prohibits filling out paperwork. The cases are easily distinguishable on these grounds.

This case also serves as a reminder that in many important ways the goal of state neutrality is a dream that we need to let die. All too often, what is perceived as neutral is, in fact, reflective of the preferences of the majority culture. This is most obvious and uncontroversial when we think about a government’s language policy. Naturally, the language of the state is most likely to be the language spoken by the majority culture. Hiring translators and printing government documents and ballots in a variety of languages in a multi-linguistic society could prove expensive indeed; it could well exceed existing budgets. But that’s not a reason it shouldn’t be done. The preferences and values of the majority culture get encoded into public policy in all manner of ways that are rarely question until a minority group speaks up and forces them to do so. What is a “neutral” lunch menu? Does anyone think the preferences, practices and habits of the majority were not considered when choosing the lunch menu?

And to be clear: this is not, inherently, a bad thing. I don’t think any useful purpose would be served, for example, by the US government rescinding recognition of December 25th as a federal holiday. (Note, too, that even French laicite fails this neutrality test). That would be a crappy outcome for millions of workers and their families. Nor do I think government business should be conducted in Esperanto, even as the language government chooses clearly benefits the majority culture. Once we recognize that in all sorts of mundane but non-neutral ways the government privileges the majority culture, making accommodations for minority groups a straightforward fairness demand. I treat students’ absences for non-Christian holidays as excused and demanding accommodation on my part in a way other absences do not in large part because it’s necessary to treat them fairly at a University in which classes do not meet on the majority religion’s major holidays.

A bit more philosophically, I think we have good reason to resist the tendency of the state to interact with its population as it wishes to see them–as the kind of abstract ideal ‘citizen’ it imagines they ought to be, rather than the particular peoples who actually make up the citizenry. Treating people as they are, rather than as the state imagines they should be, may require spending more resources on fair and equal treatment in some cases. We must get past the hope that treating everyone fairly and equally is not the same as treating them as if they were identical. “Our official ideology tells us our citizens should be like *this* so we’re going to disregard their actual identities and treat them as if they already are” is a dangerous path for States to adopt (see James Scott for more).

As Kymlicka would readily admit, the above doesn’t give us clear, bright-line principles to adjudicate every case; a fair amount of muddling through will remain necessary. But it’s not hopeless and it’s not inherently “irrational.” It inevitably involves balancing tests and making difficult distinctions, but I see no reason to characterize such efforts as irrational. That’s just part of politics.

Others in the thread point out that French Republicanism has a particular history that makes French political culture resistant to the line or argument offered here, well beyond the White Nationalism party featured in this particular example. And this is true, although I suspect some of the mainstream French politics jumping on the laicite-against-Muslims bandwagon partly out of a defensive reaction to the rise of Front National. (Marine’s father making it through the first round of voting in the 2002 presidential election was a moment of profound embarrassment the French left in particular and mainstream French politics more generally). This certainly complicates matter, but it should hardly be treated as dispositive in how we evaluate French policy here. The particular history from which US political culture emerges certainly contains some pretty huge and illiberal blind spots, but we rightly don’t treat that as an excuse to continue to indulge them. Nor should we do so on behalf of the French.