The best we can hope for is tolerance

17 February 2007

John Gray, Britain’s foremost political philosopher, says that Ruth Kelly’s new campaign against Islamic extremism is doomed because it exaggerates the scope for cohesion in our fragmented modern world

In Britain at the present time, the threat of terror does not come from the millions who quietly practise their faith. It comes from a radicalised minority which has embraced a type of thinking that has more in common with radical Western ideologies such as Leninism and anarchism than with traditional Islamic theology. The most urgent task is to halt the process of radicalisation, and it is here that the current exaggerated revulsion against multiculturalism can be dangerous. If ours is an extremely diverse and in some ways fragmented society, this is not mainly a result of government enforcing multicultural policies — silly as these have often been. It is a consequence of forces that are integral to the way the world now works. Large-scale flows of people and ideas, the impact of the media and continuous cultural innovation have made Britain far more deeply pluralistic than it used to be. This anarchic vitality seems to me to be one of the more attractive aspects of globalisation but, whatever one may feel, it is here to stay. Britain has become home to an unprecedented mixture of styles of life and views of the world. There are fundamentalists of all varieties, large unobtrusive enclaves of traditional life and countless people who take a mix-and-match approach to the diversity of traditions. Why should Muslims be singled out for deviating from a national consensus that is now largely mythical?

There are many who maintain that we need to recover the timeless verities of liberalism. Neoconservatives never cease to rail against the doctrine that cultural difference is an end in itself, and many who are not neoconservatives insist that the current version of liberal values must be applied right across society. For these people, accepting the fact of different ways of life, not all of them liberal, is a type of relativism that undermines the universal value of freedom and disarms us in the fight against terror. The solution is simple: we must enforce human rights. There is a kernel of truth in the idea that a valuable part of the liberal heritage has been lost, but it is not any doctrine of rights that we need to revive. It is something much more prosaic — the old-fashioned practice of tolerance.