Multiculturalism is kind of the holy grail, but it requires that all participating culture value multiculturalism above all.
It is similar to democracy, you must accept and yield to the fact that everyone should have an equal say, and deserve basic rights, irregardless of your own beliefs and judgements.
You have to value live and let live above all else. You have to value having someone else do as they please as long as it doesn't prevent you from doing as you please above all else, even above your belief of heaven and hell, of how God wants men and women to act, of what you think is decent or not, good or bad, fun or boring, smart or dumb, etc.
I think this is often abridged as valuing Freedom and Liberty above all else. Where freedom is the ability to do as one wills and what one has the power to do; and liberty is the absence of arbitrary restraints, taking into account the rights of all involved. That means your top most value is maximizing Freedom while respecting the Liberty of others.
And traditionally, a Liberal is someone who has this as their top most value.
And this is the paradox, because values are often a big part of one's culture, but for multiculturalism to work, all must share this one value, and so you could say that makes it they must share culture to some extent, as they must all share this one value and have it as the most valuable value of all, that means multiculturalism only works if everyone is a Liberal.
I just described the underpinning of multiculturalism. It only works if everyone shares this one value, which means it doesn't work to just put a bunch of people together that don't share this value. That makes multiculturalism its own culture.
In practice, it will make for a very diverse place, but in terms of value, everyone will value this diversity above all else.
Edit: Most of the time it also helps to value fraternity, which is that you value mutual support within society. So you'd want to maximize freedom while respecting other's liberty, and provide support to others when in need. I think this has to be the commonality between all members for multiculturalism to work well.
This seems like a sensible, agreeable answer. What do you think about the folks who advocate for restricting freedoms (e.g., speech) in the name of multiculturalism? Are they false multiculturalists? Or does multiculturalism require that we censure people who don't share our (often very narrowly-defined) multiculturalist views? And if so, is it a worthy enterprise?
Freedom is restricted in the name of Liberty and Fraternity. That's why I didn't just say your top most value is Freedom. Your top most value must be to maximize Freedom while respecting others' liberties and supporting others in need.
So if the speech doesn't respect other's liberties, then it is a problem to a multicultural society yes, because it wouldn't be in-line with the key top value that is critical to the success of a society that embraces diversity to get along with each other and prosper.
Think about it, I'm saying that the requirement to a successful democratic multi-cultural society is that everyone shares this as their top value. Therefore any attack to this core value or attempt to subvert this core value is an attack on that society's core.
So if your speech attacks this, it is natural to see a defense against it.
Of course, practically speaking, balancing how to maximize freedoms while respecting each other's liberties and supporting those in needs is a tricky act. There's no unambiguous infallible bullet point that always tells you exactly how best to do so. Like any optimization problems, finding the global optimum is a very hard problem (I believe it is NP hard, if not harder). And in the case of human dwelling, N is massive, and the number of variables in the equation are as well.
So what we have to do is our best, and as long as we have the right intentions, which is we come to the table with that same Liberal core value, then I think we can work it out.
Tensions will be created when anyone at the table will start to no longer believe the others value liberalism. So I think that be a good start is for everyone to be clear that they still value this core value, and then discuss where within that they feel like either there is a way to bring even more freedom while being respectful of liberties and supporting those in needs, or that they themselves feel a conflict between their liberty and the one of others which they want addressed.
I think this makes sense, but "tricky act" and "paradox" indeed.
Free speech absolutists often argue that free speech is the only viable way to be multiculturalist (they'll cite the counter-productivity of censorship, free speech is necessary to even debate what is/isn't multiculturalism, speech codes that prohibit anti-multiculturalist speech are easily abused, etc) while many others (predominately left-wing folks, I think) argue that multiculturalism demands that advocating for any kind of multiculturalism besides their own narrow strain is anti-multiculturalist (e.g., this was the basic charge against James Damore, David Shor, Lee Fang, etc). [^1]
If we say that anti-multiculturalist speech is intolerable, then "multiculturalism" becomes a hollow word that we can use to bludgeon each other. It can even work against its own purported goals in that you can have a powerful, narrow ideological segment that censures the rest of society arbitrarily by invoking "multiculturalism" however tenuously (consider again the folks who advocate for racially segregating society in the name of multiculturalism).
Maybe this is a problem with any core value, but we just see abuses of multiculturalism more frequently because of some particularity of the present moment?
[^1]: I'm not arguing that right-wing folks are more likely to be speech absolutists than left-wing folks (although at present this may well be true due to momentary political power dynamics); rather, that right-wing folks are unlikely to argue that free-speech is the best way to achieve a multiculturalist society because (as I understand it) multiculturalism isn't a right-wing value.
There's two issues here, and I think we have to dissociate them to better understand each one.
Issue 1:
Could restrictions on free speech actually backfire and hurt the liberal core value?
I think some free speech absolutists argue that allowing some form of anti-liberal speech is necessary so that pro-liberal speech itself is forever guaranteed a place in the cultural debate.
Those believe that facts and reason will prevail, and that everyone will eventually converge on believing in liberalism if its ideas are freely debated against others. And that if you start to censor some speech, you risk having it backfire and either preventing the debate which would have convinced non-liberals into becoming liberals, or you open liberal speech up for being censored and repressed as well.
This type of decision is hard, no one has an absolutely accurate prediction power. To predict which of the two options will in the end be best at promoting and safekeeping liberalism isn't easy to guess, and that's where a lot of debate is happening. That's healthy debate in my opinion, we need to test our prediction models against many brains to hope to make the sensible choice.
The important bit here is that all parties strongly believe in liberalism and really just want to protect it, but they diverge in their prediction of which approach best protects it.
I think for this debate, you have liberals on both sides: Democrats and Republicans, and they share the same core value, but have different ideas of how to best deliver it.
Issue 2:
Some people simply don't share the liberal core value I've been talking about.
Some free speech absolutists aren't really defending liberalism by arguing for free speech, in fact, they wouldn't care if the speech being censored was the liberal one.
What they care about is actually imposing their non-liberal values upon others, they want to break down the liberal democracy and put in place something that better aligns with their values, often religious, or racist, or classist, or nationalist, or selfish, etc.
In any case, they value something above the liberties of others, maximizing Freedom of all, and helping those in need. And they'd want to see society change so the top value is no longer this liberal core value, but their own top value instead.
Now that's a direct attack on the core value, and this one is stirring a lot of controversy I think. It's a reality few are prepared to face in the west, I think most people assumed everyone shares the liberal value, and to see that a very large number of people don't is a surprise, and puts the society they love and cherish at a much bigger risk of collapse then they thought.
Personally, I think at the end of the day, people want what is best for themselves. Liberalism makes the claim that a liberal society is best for everyone, and so it is best for each individual and for all. Meaning it is best for you and for everyone else, what is there not to like?
And I mean, it has proven itself in that regard, the top liberal democracies are probably the most accomplished societies ever in terms of delivering what's best to its citizens.
But in recent years, there's been more and more challenges, poverty is accentuating, international conflicts are arising, pandemics, water shortages, climate changes, oil constraints, recessions, etc.
When that happens, some people think, maybe this isn't in my best interest anymore, especially the tight populous groups, like in the US that would be white Americans for example. As a white American, seeing that things are slowly getting worse for yourself, you might start to think maybe liberalism is no longer best for me? Maybe our forced dominant position of the past would be better for me, and maybe we should bring that back.
I'm using white Americans as one example, an easy one to make, but this is true of all groups. If people no longer believe liberalism is best for them, they will revert to the only other option: forced privilege. You'll band together with the people most like you, and try to strongarm your way into making a society that is best for you and those like you, even if that means it's taking advantage of others.
I like to believe we can work it out, and this is why I said multiculturalism is the holy grail. But maybe we can't, and I wouldn't judge us if we didn't, there is a practical reality to consider: Can we sustain freedom, liberty and fraternity for all? Even as population grows, resources wades, and challenges arise? If that can't be sustained, liberalism will never work, and then it becomes a case of: is it better to evenly split our food but still there isn't enough for anyone to be satiated, or should we let some starve so others can eat to their fullest?
I think for this debate, you also have Democrats and Republicans both no longer believing in the core liberal value, but the more radical left side would want to push for more forced economic oversight, as they see capitalism as the thing that failed to sustain liberalism. While I think on the more radical right side they want more forced social oversight, as they see the loss of the traditional social fabric as responsible for the failure to sustain liberalism. While similarly I think a lot of people on both side Dems and Reps, less radical, still believe that liberalism is sustainable and that force isn't the option, but simply more liberalism is, with minor corrections. If my position hadn't come through yet, I fall in that later category.
Sorry, I know I got a bit dark here, but fundamentally I think this explains the current discourse we are seeing in the US, and across the western countries, its the elephant in the room in my opinion.
It is similar to democracy, you must accept and yield to the fact that everyone should have an equal say, and deserve basic rights, irregardless of your own beliefs and judgements.
You have to value live and let live above all else. You have to value having someone else do as they please as long as it doesn't prevent you from doing as you please above all else, even above your belief of heaven and hell, of how God wants men and women to act, of what you think is decent or not, good or bad, fun or boring, smart or dumb, etc.
I think this is often abridged as valuing Freedom and Liberty above all else. Where freedom is the ability to do as one wills and what one has the power to do; and liberty is the absence of arbitrary restraints, taking into account the rights of all involved. That means your top most value is maximizing Freedom while respecting the Liberty of others.
And traditionally, a Liberal is someone who has this as their top most value.
And this is the paradox, because values are often a big part of one's culture, but for multiculturalism to work, all must share this one value, and so you could say that makes it they must share culture to some extent, as they must all share this one value and have it as the most valuable value of all, that means multiculturalism only works if everyone is a Liberal.
I just described the underpinning of multiculturalism. It only works if everyone shares this one value, which means it doesn't work to just put a bunch of people together that don't share this value. That makes multiculturalism its own culture.
In practice, it will make for a very diverse place, but in terms of value, everyone will value this diversity above all else.
Edit: Most of the time it also helps to value fraternity, which is that you value mutual support within society. So you'd want to maximize freedom while respecting other's liberty, and provide support to others when in need. I think this has to be the commonality between all members for multiculturalism to work well.