78CHAPTER 3 Culture opportunities as people in every nation.” His earlier quotation about hating freedom targeted the Al-Qaeda extremists who attacked the United States. However, violent Islamic extremists do not represent the broader Islamic culture, which encompasses a range of beliefs and values. Indeed, intense debates within Muslim societies regarding democracy, the role of women, and other cultural matters take place every day. The results of global public opinion surveys show that democracy is widely popular in both Western and Islamic cultures—even though it has yet to fl ourish in Muslim countries despite 2011’s Arab Spring uprisings. However, those same surveys show signifi cant differences in the degree of support for gender equality, social tolerance, and freedom of speech (Inglehart and Norris 2003; Welzel and Inglehart 2010), indicating that the reality is complicated, not just a matter of a simple clash of civilizations or an idealized belief that all societies share a unifi ed set of cultural values. As we have seen, different cultures within a society can also encounter the problem of incompatible values or beliefs. Feminist political philosopher Susan Okin (1999, 117) argues that “many cultures oppress some of their members, in particular women, and . . . they are often able to socialize these oppressed members so that they accept, without question, their designated cultural status.” For example, clitoridectomy (the removal of the clitoris) and other forms of genital cutting, and the prearranged marriage of children are accepted practices within some cultures. What, if anything, should be done when people from such cultures move to Western societies, where those practices are considered violations of individual rights? Should their adoptive countries accept these practices out of respect for different cultural traditions? Or do Western notions of individual freedom, human rights, and gender equality trump these traditional customs? Such questions have been on the front pages of newspapers in Europe. For example, in 2010 the French parliament enacted legislation that prohibits Muslim women from wearing face-covering veils in public places, on the grounds that such clothing confl icts with the values of French secular society (Crumley 2009; Erlanger 2010). This issue raises complex questions about incompatible cultural values and practices and challenges us to consider whether it is legitimate to condemn cultural practices we fi nd offensive and whether we can articulate a universal standard of human rights. Some U.S. critics of multiculturalism are not concerned with such questions because they reject its value entirely. Instead of encouraging people from diverse cultural traditions to coexist peacefully, these critics argue that new immigrants must assimilate into the dominant culture of their adoptive country; otherwise, they maintain, the common ground that is essential to unite a nation will be lost (Huntington 2005; Schmidt 1997). Some of these critics call logic of our own culture. At the same time, once we are able to recognize our own values and beliefs—key dimensions of our own culture—we have taken an important fi rst step toward understanding the experiences of people who live in very different societies. THE CRITICS OF MULTICULTURALISM Less than two weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush framed the assault in cultural terms by telling Congress and the people of the United States that the members of Al-Qaeda, the Islamic fundamentalist group that had claimed responsibility, had attacked because “They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other” (Bush 2001). That quotation came to symbolize one way of thinking about the ongoing confl ict between Western secular societies and Islamic societies. It suggested the confl ict was based on fundamentally incompatible cultures. One of the best-known discussions of this concept of a “culture clash” came from political scientist Samuel Huntington (1993, 1998), who argued that after the end of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, most new global confl icts would now take place between cultures rather than countries. He went on to describe what he saw as eight basic cultures (which he termed “civilizations”) in the world: Western (United States, Australia, and Western Europe), Eastern Orthodox (Russia), Latin American, Islamic, Japanese, Chinese, Hindu (India), and African. These civilizations, he contended, are based on fundamentally different religious and other cultural beliefs. The Islamic world, for example, has few democratic institutions because it does not have a cultural history of separating religious and secular authority, of valuing social pluralism, and of protecting individual rights and civil liberties from the power of the state. In this way, it differs fundamentally from Western civilization. Huntington maintained that as long as globalization results in more frequent contacts between people living in these civilizations, we are doomed to experience more frequent cultural confl ict. There is no doubt that increased contact between vastly different cultures can result in confl ict. However, if we analyze Huntington’s thesis from a sociological perspective, we can quickly expose some of its shortcomings. For one thing, it oversimplifi es the complex mix of cultures around the world and glosses over the enormous variation within each of these cultures (Arnason 2001). None of the so-called civilizations Huntington identifi es has a single unifi ed culture. As globalization advances and more people, products, and ideas fl ow across national borders, cultures continue to blend. Also, by focusing exclusively on culture, Huntington’s theory ignores the ways that longstanding inequalities in the distribution of privilege and power have helped fuel global confl ict (Evans 1997). In addition, many different cultures do share common values. President Bush recognized these shared values when he told a graduating class at West Point, “The peoples of the Islamic nations want and deserve the same freedoms and S P O T L I G H T on social theory Emile Durkheim, whose work was influential for the proponents of functionalism, focused on social solidarity—on how cultural values serve to unite people. How do you see this process working today in multicultural societies like that of the United States?
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