IF YOU live long enough, you will encounter the most unlikely ironies. What makes me feel very old indeed is the emergence of the Roman Catholic hierarchy as the champions of (a) pluralism and (b) an ultra-leftist notion of multiculturalism, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
For most of my life, the Catholic hierarchy defended its dominance of the primary education system on the simple ground that the overwhelming majority of the population of the Republic of Ireland was actively Catholic. It followed that the education system should reflect this weight of numbers. Minorities – essentially Protestants or Jews – could be fobbed off with their own schools. Those with naive belief in the importance of children of different religious and ethical traditions growing up together were probably communists, perverts or idiots and could count themselves lucky to have their children accepted on sufferance in any school.
Being paragons of intellectual principle, the bishops now take the directly opposite view. They now love pluralism like a rapper loves bling. They crave diversity as fervently as Jordan courts publicity. To listen to them these days, you’d think they invented tolerance and respect. Now that it suits their own purposes, they embrace the idea of infinite choice in the global supermarket of religions and beliefs.
This contradiction isn’t all that new. The church has long spoken with two voices. In societies where Catholicism has been dominant, it has demanded supreme power for itself at the expense of other faiths. In societies where other faiths have been dominant, it has demanded tolerance and freedom for all. The contradictions have sometimes been sufficiently sharp to cause embarrassment. In the late 19th century, for example, the American bishops (fearful of Protestant domination) were all for separation of church and state, but when they tried to give this position a coherent philosophical basis they were virtually accused of heresy by the Vatican which wanted no such nonsense in Catholic Europe.
What’s funny about the current arguments of the bishops and their supporters in Ireland, however, is the way they dovetail with a version of multiculturalism that arose from the identity politics of the far left in the UK and the US. The basic proposition here is that everyone is primarily defined as a member of a particular ethnic, cultural, sexual or spiritual group. Each of these groups must be regarded as being of equal validity and everything it defines as part of its “tradition” must be respected.
There are profound philosophical and practical problems with this version of multiculturalism. Philosophically, it ends up eating its own tail, as respect for one “identity” ends up cancelling out another. If female genital mutilation is a protected part of an African identity, what happens to women’s rights? If it’s okay for imams to preach hatred of homosexuals, is it okay for homosexuals to teach hatred of Muslims? And who gets to define a “tradition” anyway? (Usually, of course, middle-aged or elderly men in dresses.) Most obviously, of course, the purveyors of this ideology in the religious sphere don’t actually believe it themselves. With a very few exceptions, religions are founded on the idea of a unique and superior access to the mind of God. The relativism that they sometimes adopt is merely strategic. If the Catholic bishops actually believed the stuff that they are currently spouting – that everybody’s faith or lack of faith has the same status in a lovely world of pluralism or diversity – they would be Bahais or Unitarians.
Practically speaking, the consequences of this notion are equally bad. The logic of identity politics is a balkanised society in which loyalty to the group is far more important than the weak attachments of citizenship. It is also ludicrously expensive. If everyone has the same right to a state-funded school (and indeed hospital) that reflects his or her own identity, every village in Ireland has to have half a dozen schools. Scientologists, Jedi, Wahhabi Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses and so on – all have a right to be catered for separately at the State’s expense.
Very few people on the liberal left now support this discredited version of multiculturalism. The vast majority stress respect for pluralism within a framework of common values and citizenship. The point is not to obliterate the differences of identity or belief, merely to regard them as the natural and enriching variety within the shared space of republican democracy. Contrary to the dishonest claims repeated by Bishop Leo O’Reilly in The Irish Times on Saturday, no one is talking about schools that “exclude religious instruction”. (Space can easily be made within a shared system for different churches to teach their own faiths.) Nor is the alternative to the current system a centrally-run State bureaucracy – the present idea of boards of management, made more open and democratic, can remain.
This is, as the bishops tell us, all about choice. We can have a clapped-out, trendy lefty multiculturalism, remodelled as an argument for the power of unaccountable bishops. Or we can have a republic that respects its citizens enough to believe that they can live and learn together.