What kind of human being does multiculturalism presuppose?

What kind of human being must be real for a political theory to work? It is a question we should ask ourselves more often. Especially when a political theory, before it has even been tested, is elevated to a moral value, as has happened with multiculturalism.

Europe has known racism, antisemitism, persecution and deportation. It has rightly recoiled in horror and has gradually assigned a positive value to cultural diversity, to the point of considering coexistence between different cultures a political goal and a good in itself.

Yet that step is not self-evident. That racism is an evil does not prove that multiculturalism is a good. It proves that we must not discriminate against human beings on the grounds of their origins. That is a different matter.

Nietzsche observed that there are no moral values in themselves, but moral interpretations of values. Well, we have interpreted diversity morally, assigning it a value it does not necessarily possess, as a matter of course and regardless of everything else. Diversity is a condition, not a virtue. It can produce richness, conflict, indifference, cross-fertilisation, separation. It depends on how it differentiates. It is a stem-cell condition that depends above all on human beings. For a society is not a container into which we can pour different ingredients, without looking at what they are, expecting a good mixture to emerge simply because they are different.

The ingredients, in this case, are people with convictions, allegiances, loyalties, fears, desires and prejudices. And above all, they have different ideas about what is right and what is wrong.

Let us try, then, to imagine a European society composed of Catholics, Muslims, atheists, anti-Christians, antisemites, liberals, conservatives, first-, second- and third-generation people. People who regard individual freedom as the supreme value, and others who subordinate the individual to religion, family or community.

What is the recipe for making this society work? What kind of human being must we presuppose for this to work? How many individuals must recognise religious freedom? How many must accept that a woman can live as she wishes? How many must consider it legitimate to leave their religion, criticise it or even mock it? How many must recognise that civil law takes precedence over religious precepts? Everyone? Ninety per cent? Sixty?

And what happens when a sufficiently large and differentiated community fundamentally rejects some of these principles? 

It is not a question of ethnicity. A Muslim can be a committed liberal, and someone whose family has been European for generations can be an authoritarian. Origins do not automatically determine values; it is not only where people come from that matters. What matters is the idea of coexistence they bring with them. A multicultural society can work if its members share at least some fundamental rules. But then a paradox emerges: to work, multiculturalism needs a common culture that sets limits on other cultures, bringing them into alignment at least on the fundamentals. It must, in other words, ask everyone to be, at least in part, less different.

And this common culture is not neutral. It is a specific historical and philosophical construction, made up of individual freedom, equality before the law, secular institutions and rights that cannot be abolished by a religious or communal authority. In other words, to live together we do not necessarily all have to think alike. We do, however, have to agree sufficiently on what no one may impose on others.

This is why we need to ask what kinds of human beings we presuppose when we maintain that a certain society can work. An individual capable of tolerating what they consider wrong? Of accepting that their own values do not automatically become laws? Of giving up imposing their own idea of the good on others? How many such human beings do we need? And how many do we actually have at our disposal?

For we can assign a political theory all the moral value we wish. But if that theory, in order to work, requires a human composition that does not exist, or exists only under certain conditions, we face the problem that, once again, we cannot turn a utopian theory into a society that works.