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Intolerance can be very good |
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...in the interests of humanity's long-term
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If only we were more like the French
Call me a chippy atheist, but I'd rather see a headscarf ban
than Muslim ghettoes
Stuart Jeffries
Monday January 31, 2005
Guardian
I interviewed a Parisian anthropologist for a television series recently
(there's a sentence you don't read often enough). He admitted that the
French had banned Muslim headscarves and other religious symbols from
schools last year out of intolerance. "But intolerance is not racism, and
tolerance is not anti-racism," Emmanuel Todd of France's National Institute
for Demographics told me. "What France is saying [to the country's 5 million
Muslims] is that we want some of your daughters to marry some of our sons."
One might think that the ban is a crude tool for such multicultural social
engineering, but it is, Todd argued, better than what we do. In our
benighted land where children are free to wear Christian crosses, Muslim
headscarves and Jewish skullcaps at school and where faith schools become
places where young minds can be turned away from understanding other
cultures, he argued, British tolerance has become racism. Children of
different races and religious backgrounds can remain separate and
uncomprehending, and thus we become increasingly socially divided.
In any case, the ban on religious symbols in French schools is only part of
a broader policy of laicité (secularism), which stems from a French
revolutionary tradition. It is not in God that the French trust, the
feminist thinker Hélène Cixous explains, but in human rights and in the
power and responsibility of ordinary men and women to make a good society
without reference to gods or kings. The aim has been to create a secular
public space where individuals renounce part of what she calls their
"personal particularity", while the right to religious expression is
guaranteed in their private lives. A flourishing multicultural society, the
French insist, needs spaces where different races and religions can meet as
equals.
Why can't the British be more like the French? Why can't we recognise that
faith schools are inimical to an egalitarian multicultural society? Wouldn't
it be a good thing if our government thought it would be good for Britain if
more than a few Muslims married Christians or atheists, and if it tried to
do something about it?
The key reason the British aren't more like the French is that we have no
parallel revolutionary heritage. Instead of valuing égalité, we value the
virtues of tolerance and liberty that were expressed best in the works of
John Locke and John Stuart Mill. At best, this results in a cosmopolitan
city such as London where we - different ethnic and religious, and
non-religious groups - rub along without knowing or caring much about each
others' cultures so long as they don't intrude too much on our own. But
surely that is not good enough; nor does it produce the understanding of or
respect for other cultures that is surely necessary for Britain if it is to
defuse its growing ethnic and religious tensions. Worse yet, that Locke-Mill
tradition has arguably produced the ghettoised populations of northern towns
where the BNP has spread its defeatist message.
French intellectuals see these ghettoes and despair of the British. True,
those sceptical about French integrationist policies might well look to the
high-rise ghettoes that ring Paris and see something equally dispiriting: at
least, goes that sceptical argument, London's ghettoes aren't swept to the
outer limits of the metropolis where they and their problems can be ignored.
The 2004 French law on religious symbols surely sought to make Muslim
ghettoes a thing of the past. The British have no parallel political
conviction.
The French intolerance is one that will not accept a non-society of
discrete, uncomprehending ethnic or religious communities. Instead, they
want to create a cross-cultural fraternité. It is this intolerance that we
need more of in Britain today.
The problem with French égalité is that it doesn't go far enough. To
establish a truly egalitarian society, any schools founded on social
division should be abolished. That, of course, would mean the closure of
schools that are open only to those whose parents can afford the fees, as
well as all faith schools, especially those that fail to teach their
children about other religions (or the consolations of faithlessness).
But this sort of aspiration for our education system can only remain a dream
in Britain while we have an ostensibly egalitarian prime minister who chose
to send his children to a grant- maintained Roman Catholic school across
London from his own neighbourhood. You might see this as the perspective of
a chippy, state-school-educated atheist exasperated with Labour - and you
would be right: I detest the slide of this country into non-communicating
interest groups. What the French are doing seems to me to plot a more
hopeful trajectory.
· Stuart Jeffries' series Mindset, about the national philosophical
traditions of France, Germany and Britain, starts on BBC4 tonight at 9.30pm.
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