Russell Jacoby: Multiculturalism is the opium of the intellectuals

From a lecture by the history professor to the Royal Society of Arts, in London

Now we've entered the era of the fight against terrorism, which is pure evil. What does the West stand for in this fight? It's revealing that at a moment in the war against terrorism Bush asked Americans not to falter – in what? In shopping. He said this was not a time to stop shopping and buying; this was a time to express your faith in American business.

Previously there was a sense of sacrifice for a cause against Nazism or a belief in freedom, and now the sense was: "You're going to show your belief in the West by shopping, by going out to the mall and buying."

The wind has gone out of political thinking, certainly among politicians. I don't think that's unexpected, but equally significantly the wind has ebbed among commentators, intellectuals, and political theorists.

Why is that? Certainly the gross political events of the past year are relevant but I am almost more concerned with the roots of the depletion of political thinking. Part of it turns upon what I call the fetish of pluralism. In the 1940s and 1950s there were many refugee scholars – Hannah Arendt, Karl Popper and to some degree Isaiah Berlin, if he can be considered a refugee scholar – who offered defences of Western liberalism which turned on pluralism. In some sense there's this cult of pluralism which plays a role in undercutting political thinking. What I think has happened, at least in part, is that a lax idea of pluralism has begun to gut political thinking and approaches. Pluralism and choice become the end-all and be-all of social life and politics.

Here I think one can situate the jargon of cultural pluralism which has become called, certainly in the United States, multiculturalism. In a sense it refers to choice, to more styles of life, to more food options, to more restaurants one can order in. The issue is really not pluralism or cultural pluralism in itself. Ideas of diversity are neither false nor objectionable. The problem is not a preference for pluralism but its cult, and it's a fetish that sabotages a sober inspection of reality by catering to the love of quantity. The lingo of pluralism underwrites the basic hype that more is better: more things, more items, more cars, more cultures.

I think here we see a kind of failure. Multiculturalism is the opium of the intellectuals. It becomes an idea in the absence of any emphatic belief about the future. It becomes a blank cheque payable to anyone in any amount. It not only suggests politics; it begins to replace politics. One wish is to include more voices in the curriculum or more faces at the office. The goal of including more people in the established society might be laudable but where is the vision here?