Cultural Diversity

FOR MANY on the political left, cultural diversity is not just a fact about the modern world but a central value, an ideal that combines two important themes of leftist thought. The first is the belief that we are not just self-interested individuals competing for economic satisfaction. More importantly, we are members of communities or cultures that shape our individual identities. The second theme is the idea of progressive social growth in which each culture is seen as a selfcreative communal entity that must be allowed to develop in its own unique way. Hence the freedom to participate in the creative development of one's unique culture is a key ideal on the political left.

Although today we think of the peoples of the world throughout history in terms of their cultures, the idea of culture is a relatively recent idea. Before modernity began in about the 17th and 18th centuries, people in Europe saw themselves not as participants in various cultures but as members of competing religions. With the secularizing trends of early modernity, social scientific ideas began to replace religious terms in the selfunderstanding of Europeans. The idea of culture was first defined by Edward Tylor (1832–1917), the English founder of cultural anthropology. In the opening lines of Primitive Culture (1871), Tylor first described it as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, [Page 116]art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”

However, Tylor did not believe in cultural diversity, neither as a fact nor as a political value. He thought of culture as synonymous with civilization and that all “higher cultures” would come to share similar standards. In contrast to Tylor's cultural universalism, the political ideal of cultural diversity holds that each society should be allowed to develop its own unique standards. This self-developmental idea came from continental Europe with German thinkers like the philosopher Johann Herder (1744–1803) and the poet Johann Goethe (1749–1832), who emphasized the idea of self-creative uniqueness for individuals and groups.

In the 20th century, the influence of this idea led many thinkers to abandon the distinction between higher and lower cultures. Hence today's political ideal of cultural diversity emerged from the synthesis of a pair of earlier European ideas, the Romanticist belief in self-creativity and the original anthropological idea of culture.

The idea of self-creativity as the core value of cultural diversity is articulated in UNESCO's Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (United Nations, 2002). It asserts that “culture should be regarded as the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group, and … encompasses, in addition to art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs.” While this definition is similar to that of Tylor, UNESCO goes further to argue that “diversity is embodied in the uniqueness and plurality of the identities of the groups and societies making up humankind.” Accordingly, the declaration calls for all nations to guarantee self-creative freedoms such as the rights of artistic expression and intellectual self-development.

...