Transculturalism as the Alternative To Multiculturalism
Discussion
Arran Gare:
"The failure of the New Left as a movement and the rise of neoliberalism was not the end of the New Left as an intellectual movement, however, although it greatly thinned their ranks. Many members of the movement accepted their defeat and abandoned all attempts to envisage a better world. They gave up on utopia, and as Russell Jacoby put it, embraced myopia (1999, pp.101-124). Some focused on their careers in academia, becoming “professional philosophers,” either promoting mainstream analytic philosophy or deconstructive postmodernism, which really meant contributing to the subversion of philosophy.
Others turned to identity politics, which really meant an abandonment of the quest for universal justice and the mobilization of different groups to assert themselves to gain more power within the existing order.
Identity politics was often associated with the defence of multiculturalism. As opposed to the transculturalism practiced by the theoretical biologist, sinologist, and philosopher Joseph Needham, based on the assumption that diverse cultures can both learn from and provide critical perspectives on each other, multiculturalism leaves people to simply assert their own cultural values against others. Transculturalism advances dialogue; multiculturalism precludes it.
However, the growing environmental crisis was evidence that the New Left were right in seeing something very fundamentally wrong with the civilization of modernity dominated by the logic of markets and instrumental reasoning, and right to argue for the subordination of markets to principles of justice."