one of the issues that arises i think for for liberals
generally and for classical liberals included
is how to deal with the fact of of cultural diversity and this may exist
in part because a society is religiously diverse but it may also be
because it's diverse as a result of of ethnic variation
and the fact that a society is is one that
has you know multiple cultural traditions
in operation within it in societies like say the united states or australia
some of these traditions reflect the um the colonial origins of the society so
you may have native peoples who have very different
cultural traditions um but also because of immigration over
the years there may be cultural diversity
as a result of this now one response to this has been to say well
what we need to do is to protect this diversity by
establishing um cultural rights of some kind that is to say to recognize
that people have rights to some kind of some kind of cultural protection to make
sure that they can in fact live according to their
own cultural traditions now i think this is um
a difficult solution to
to defend in some ways because while on the one hand it's it's good
to you know to recognize that diversity and to allow for
uh different kinds of ways to to flourish
one of the problems is that um it assumes in a way that
when we say that there are cultures that exist
we're assuming that they simply somehow exist
naturally and they exist independently of
the kinds of rights and protections that exist
whereas in fact to some extent cultures and traditions also exist
because of particular kinds of norms or rights and laws that
that are in fact in operation to give you a kind of
almost trivial example or a hypothetical example imagine that
a law was passed that said that that anyone of uh you know of portuguese
mexican descent in the united states would be
entitled to free college education okay i suspect that everyone who's got
even the slightest hint of a mexican or portuguese background will
go looking for it and try to say yes i belong to this
particular group but absent that particular entitlement
this group wouldn't have any any real existence it's there partly
because of the the laws that have come into place and
we can find more you know
particular examples of this kind of thing in
in societies where the laws have changed to recognize
different kinds of ethnicities and so on the recognition of
an ethnicity may mean that a certain ethnicity then
comes into existence or comes into prominence
so i think to try to say what we've got to do is somehow protect
particular cultures is a difficult thing to do because that
itself may you know give rise to the existence
of particular cultures now that said i don't want to deny that
you know some kinds of traditions and cultures have a very very long
history i mean for example the jewish people don't exist simply because
someone has made a rule that says if you're jewish
you get all these advantages they have a long history
similarly you know there are other traditions
religious and otherwise within a society that exists
not because of very specific laws that are created
so here the question is okay how do we make sure that you know people from
different kinds of
traditions and cultures do get some kind of protection without
making that protection too explicit because as i said one of
the problems is that making an explicit can give rise to particular entities
that don't exist except for that protection
but also when you give an entity a kind of protection what you're also
doing is you're not just um
protecting something that is somehow
a natural thing that belongs to the whole of the
cultural or the tradition what you're doing is you're also granting a certain
amount of power to those who are the um
the leaders or the dominant class within those
those groups and so you know they're the ones with whom you'd be
negotiating and discussing and you know seeking accommodation
so what you're doing is you're really giving them power
over their own populations and that's something that you might want
to be wary on because those groups themselves
might have within them smaller groups that might also be wanting to be you
know independent or tolerated or you know given some kind of
protection so protecting one kind of group
may mean that you you know advantage one group to the disadvantage of
internal groups so from my point of view as a
classical liberal i i think the the answer is to
um allow for you know the accommodation of diversity and difference by
essentially saying look we don't recognize any
group or tradition as somehow having the right to be protected and
preserved but neither do we recognize the right of
anybody to suppress them to dominate them to
stop them from from forming from living together and so
on but that does mean that you know those
who want to descent from those groups are also free
to do so they can't be forced by the groups within which they find themselves
to conform to those particular norms so in a sense what it's doing is
applying a kind of principle of hyper tolerance
to to everybody we we accept that you can go
live your own lives in the ways that you see
fit but we don't recognize your right to force other people
to live according to the way you see fit and that's how
i like to think about the the classical liberal response to the problem of
cultural diversity