Cultural Rights Versus Civic Virtue

1. IntroductionThis paper will address the potential tension between two broadly stated policy objectives: one, the preservation of distinctive cultural traditions, often through the mechanism of formal legal rights, and two, the fostering of civic virtue, a sense of local community, and the advancement of common civic enterprises.Many political liberals have argued that liberal societies have an obligation to accommodate the cultural traditions of various subgroups through legal rights and a redistribution of social resources. The "right to cultural difference" is now widely (if not universally) understood to be a basic human right, on par with rights to religious liberty and racial equality.Other theorists writing in the liberal, civic republican, and urban sociology traditions have expounded on the necessity of civic virtue, community, and common enterprises initiated and executed at the local or municipal level of government or private association. These theorists have argued that common projects, shared norms, and social trust are indispensable elements of effective democratic government and are necessary to the altruism and public spiritedness that in turn secure social justice.These two policy goals therefore may at times conflict. This conflict is especially severe in larger, culturally diverse cities, where social trust and civic virtue are most needed and often in shortest supply. Policies designed to counter cosmopolitan alienation and anomie by fostering civic virtue, social trust, and common social norms will inevitably conflict with the cultural traditions and subgroup identification of some minority groups. Accommodation of any and all subgroup cultural practices will make it difficult if not impossible to foster a common civic culture and social trust.Programmatically speaking, the paper will argue that such conflicts are often best confronted on the field of political debate and policy analysis, not in the language of civil rights. Rights discourse, with its inherent absolutism, is ill suited to the type of subtle trade-offs that these conflicts often entail. While local government and public institutions must be sensitive to the needs of all cultural groups that they affect, the need for civic enterprise and social trust should not be subject to absolute and nonnegotiable demands for the accommodation of cultural traditions. The accommodation of some cultural traditions wiU impose severe costs in terms of strife, conflict, and the inability effectively to pursue other important social goals - in at least some cases, the cultural traditions, and not the other social goals, should yield.2. Rights to Cultural Difference and Civic VirtueAvishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal begin their essay: Liberalism and the Right to Culture with this sentence: "Human Beings have a right to culture - not just any culture, but their own."1 The rest of the essay is concerned, not with defending this proposition, but with exploring how it might be put into practice. This is only one example of a very widely held conviction. For many, one of the most crucial imperatives of a multicultural society is what one might call a "right to culture." Many argue that the statement in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, "everyone has the right to participate in the cultural life of the community," entails a right to cultural difference: the right of ethnic and cultural subgroups to retain and perpetuate the practices, norms, and mores of their culture.A right to culture may be a rhetorical figure meant to signal a significant ideological commitment. As an ideological commitment, the right to culture may take the form of a general commitment to learn about and respect the cultural traditions of various culturally distinct groups in a society. It would counsel tolerance of cultural difference and an embrace of a multicultural society; it would stand in opposition to the policies of national assimilation that have so often characterized the nation states of the West. …