Art & Multiculturalism. Why special treatment is bad for us

A couple of years ago the British Academy, in its infinite wisdom, decided to launch an annual book prize. The judgment was to be made on two criteria: academic excellence, and accessibility to the general reader. In this way the Academy hoped to interest the general public in the very best of scholarly writing published in this country.

Unfortunately, in its almost infinite innocence, the Academy also decided that the prize would be only £2,500. As this is so far below the level of the Booker, Whitbread, Samuel Johnson and Uncle Tom Cobley prizes as to deprive it of all news-worthiness in the eyes of journalists and literary editors, the publicity has been almost non-existent. Which is a pity, since the short-list of titles for this prize has shown yet again that the production of readable high-quality scholarship (especially, but not only, in the field of history) is one of the few areas of ever-increasing excellence in our contemporary cultural life.

For the 2002 prize, the judges (of whom I was one) drew up a short-list of six books. Three of them - by Eamon Duffy, Jonathan Israel and Jonathan Rose - had been very widely reviewed on publication; the others much less so. The award, which was announced last month, went to Professor Stanley Cohen of the LSE, for his powerful and original work, States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering. As his subject-matter was the psychology and politics of "turning a blind eye", it is not surprising that the book itself had been rather neglected by the public. People who do not want to know about other people's suffering probably do not want to read about their not wanting to know about it, either.

But in the case of one of the other short-listed books, the failure to make a popular splash is more mystifying. Brian Barry's Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism is one of the most stimulating books of political theory published in recent years; and the issues it deals with are ones which all of us, as newspaper-readers, citizens and voters, must come up against sooner or later.

Barry's target is "multiculturalism", as defended by modern theorists and put into practice by legislators and judges: a way of looking at society that classifies people in groups, defines those groups by "culture", attributes "rights" to such cultural groups, and favours the granting of privileges (subsidies, quotas, legal immunities, and so on) to them, in order to show respect for "cultural difference".

People who follow the debates about cultural politics in the United States will find this all too familiar. They will also be familiar with the standard responses to multiculturalism, which have come mainly from the Right - whether libertarian and anti-statist, or "moral majority".

Professor Barry, however, approaches multiculturalism from a very different direction: he attacks it from a strictly liberal point of view. "Liberal", that is, not in the vague sense in which the word is now used in America (where it has become a synonym for "Leftist"), but in the old-fashioned meaning of the term. He believes in freedom, equality of opportunity and the prevention or relief of suffering; and he thinks that the purpose of the state is to create a framework in which those aims can be satisfied.

From his obiter dicta about Reagan, Thatcher, the monarchy, theology and foxhunting (to say nothing of his major arguments on subjects such as taxation), readers will quickly see that Barry's political sympathies are definitely on the Left. But his barrage of arguments against the theory and practice of "multiculturalism" is more powerful than any attack that I have ever seen from the other end of the spectrum. The logic is rigorous, the command of political and judicial detail masterful. Here the multiculturalists have an opponent whom - unlike their conservative critics - they simply cannot affect to ignore.

Barry's attack has not come out of the blue, however. At the philosophical level, it is a long overdue counter-attack, not a dawn raid - more D-Day than Pearl Harbor. For the multicultural theorists have had traditional liberalism on the run for many years, claiming that it ignores human differences and imposes so-called "universal" principles (such as human rights) which are just projections of Eurocentric values.

Barry mounts a robust defence of liberalism against these charges. He argues that there are universal values; he shows that the moral relativism of his opponents is self-contradictory; and he dismisses as a canard the claim that liberalism aims to turn us all into pure rational beings with no local attachments or cultural differences. On the contrary, he says, liberalism is a political theory, not a cult of moral improvement; and the political problem to which it frames an answer is precisely the problem of how people who differ in all sorts of ways can live together in peace.

His quarrel, therefore, is not with multiculturalism as a state of affairs - the mere fact that our society contains people of different cultures. It is with multiculturalism as an "-ism", the body of theory which advocates such things as compulsory bilingual education for American children with Hispanic surnames (an education so stultifying that, as he puts it, they emerge illiterate in two languages), the imposition of "ebonics" (an artificially theorised version of black English) on black children, the right of Gypsies to deprive their own children of a proper education (something enshrined, in case you didn't know, in English law), the claimed right of parents from certain cultures to inflict genital mutilation on their daughters, and so on.

In case that "and so on" leaves the impression that Barry has picked a list of easy targets, it should be added that he also criticises the granting of special exemptions to Jews and Muslims for ritual slaughter; the English law permitting Sikh motorcyclists to dispense with helmets; and the American laws exempting the Amish from almost any civic duties you care to mention. For while his primary concern is with the most disadvantaged members of society (who, he believes, should be helped by properly targeted social policies, not ones tailored for "cultural groups"), he also cares about equality of treatment, consistency, and fairness.

Conservatives will not agree with everything in this book, such as his occasional statements of hard-line social egalitarianism (attacking private education and healthcare). And when he asks, in a memorable phrase, "If multiculturalism is the answer, what was the question?", his purpose is to remind us of other political and social problems which the "multiculturalism" debate has tended to obscure. But most readers - if they are believers in citizenship and equality before the law, whether of the Left or of the Right - are likely to conclude that, whatever the question may have been, multiculturalism is not the answer.