IS THE LINEAGE/TRANSMISSION APPROACH AN ALTERNATIVE TO ESSENTIALISM?

Patten identifies the dilemma of essentialism as central to the debate over multiculturalism. In broad strokes, the issue is this. Multiculturalism, as I remarked, requires a robust theory of the continuity of communities. There are two principal concerns motivating this requirement. The first, which Patten focuses on, is closely related to the desideratum of continuity and to how we understand loss and alteration (738). A second concern is the need to offer a concept of the normatively relevant sense of continuity between an existing cultural community and its involuntarily incorporated antecedent. Patten does not directly consider this function of continuity, although it does seem at least partially implicated in his understanding of societal cultures and of cultural disruption, and it is found in other parts of the multicultural literature.

To secure a serviceable concept of cultural continuity, multiculturalism does not need some specific content to be invariable, but it does have to show the enduring hold of a community over its culture—that the culture remains the community's despite its changes over time. Failing that, assimilation, the death of a culture, or the adoption of another culture would all be much less problematic than multicultural theory holds them to be (Rushdie Reference Rushdie and Rushdie1991, 15, 17, 20; Waldron Reference Waldron and Will1995) Some variety of essentialism would seem ideally suited to this task.Footnote ² But for familiar reasons essentialism falls afoul of multicultural normative demands. Central here is the ethical priority attached to choice and revision, which means that liberal multiculturalism is drawn to notions of cultural continuity that are open to these possibilities. If, however, multiculturalism reaches for a nonessentialist concept of culture, thereby meeting its normative strictures, a different problem is born: how to ground cultural continuity and its related concepts of loss and alteration.Footnote ³

Patten takes up this second challenge. He rejects the essentialist understanding of culture as both normatively and empirically inadequate, criticizes the multicultural literature that deploys a functionally essentialist idea of culture while disavowing just that approach, and offers an alternative account. Here in brief is his resolution of the dilemma: It is, he argues, the social lineage of the controllers of cultural transmission that, uninterrupted, gives that group a continuity of culture (738, 741) Conversely, a “significant disruption of the processes” (739) by which a culture is transmitted can cause it to be lost. Disruption here occurs not in the mode of transmission as such but in the lineage of the persons controlling it. Continuity then is grounded in a kind of controlled succession by which members of one generation pass a culture on to the next generation's members (739). The concept of transmission is, in short, embedded in the question of who owns/controls that process. Consider the Québec case. There the process of cultural transmission evolved dramatically as the province moved from being a religious, primarily rural, society to an urbanized secular one with modern means of communication, public education, and so on. But the process was nevertheless continuous, Patten says, because those in control of it were Québécois (740). Under that account, the continuity of Québec's culture is rooted in ownership/control by the right lineage: something passed down from one Québécois hand to another, across generations.

Patten's alternative holds that cultural continuity is present when members continuously control the cultural transmission process. On its face, that seems to meet the goal of offering an empirically credible and nonessentialist theory of continuity, change, and disappearance. There is, however, something question-begging in this view, because cultural continuity already seems to be presupposed in the idea of the right lineage (i.e., of cultural group members as the controllers of the transmission process). In other words, one must already have in hand a concept of that enduring culture in order to identify a lineage (of control persons) as belonging to it. Patten defines these persons as “incipient members of the cultural group. . .in the sense that they have already received some socialization into that group in other contexts” (740). But socialization describes a process whereby individuals are inducted into a culture understood to be theirs—something roughly like religious socialization (e.g., education for a Bar Mitzvah or a Catholic Confirmation) as a prelude to admission to a full active membership in a community of faith. Also prior is the identification of those attributes of individuals that mark them as already “us,” eligible to be inducted into what is in one sense their culture, and ultimately to become transmission controllers of the right kind. Even the socialization of outsiders depends on there being a prior “us” into which we have decided to allow them admission. Without this background, social lineage and socialization are empty in relation to the community and its cultural continuity.

The issues here involve more than whether Patten's argument is question-begging. The assumption that authentic lineage and socialization are the precipitates of a cultural community given in advance is a familiar view. Consider the Québec nationalist slogan that gives this article its title: maîtres chez nous, “masters in our own home.”Footnote ⁴ It suggests that there are right and wrong masters or, in Patten's account, controllers of the right lineage steering the transmission process. This depends on the presence of a chez nous, of us, and our home: All are a “precipitate” of that being-at-home. Something similar can be seen in James Joyce's “The Dead.”Footnote ⁵ There one protagonist, Gabriel Conroy, tells the guests that he enjoys keeping “in touch with [foreign] languages” by traveling to other countries. The nationalistic Miss Ivors rebukes him, saying, “And haven't you your own language to keep in touch with—Irish?” To which Gabriel answers, “Well. . .if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language” (Joyce Reference Joyce, Scholes and Litz1996, 189). Miss Ivors’ assumption that Irish is his language need not—indeed almost certainly would not—rest on her beliefs about the facts of the world, here that he actually speaks it or has spent some time being socialized into it. Rather her view rests on a more primordial sense of the possessive pronoun “your”: that as an Irishman, Irish just is his language, his to learn and speak.

The critique implied in Miss Ivors’ challenge is that the failure to speak Irish is to renounce one's belonging to a community, to threaten its transmission, and to expose it to outside control rather than that of the right lineage. This is not a claim that would apply to just anyone—a visitor, for instance, who could not speak Irish—but rather it holds a cultural community and membership in it as prior to and determinative of a process of transmission and socialization. Miss Ivors’ view is that persons are in the first instance not made Irish by their socialization, but in some unspoken, perhaps essentialist, way are Irish, which then establishes their normatively laden lineage and requires a certain kind of socialization: They are x and so should speak its language and share and transmit its culture. For Miss Ivors, it is that understanding that makes Gabriel's response, “Irish is not my language,” quite jarring. He does not reject speaking Irish or being socialized into it, but rather counters the implied assumption that it is, in some fate-like sense, what he is, his unchosen identity. We might imagine that, for Gabriel, learning Irish is of a piece with studying the other languages he is also interested in— French and German. He seems to move easily from one culture to another without ever being fully at home in any. This sort of comportment might well suit a person of a liberal, perhaps more universalist, disposition, one who does not feel the pull of belonging and particularity. It would be very difficult, however, for such a person to make sense of notions of right lineage, the importance of transmission by our own kind, or for that matter the value of continuity itself that are on offer in the social lineage account.

If Miss Ivors reads the “underlying continuity” of social lineage theory in roughly the way that she understands language, culture, and belonging, these same ideas would not only be readily intelligible to her but would also exert a considerable normative force.Footnote ⁶ Lineage and socialization are not free-floating concepts, but rather are anchored in an identity that is their foundation. Notions of what is “ours,” of the right lineage of its controllers, and the meaning and value of transmission/socialization into a culture all make a certain sense, though not a liberal one, when anchored in a foundational being-at-home. If all are the “precipitates” of that background of belonging, then the lineage account seems not so much an alternative to essentialism as a variant of it.

DOES LINEAGE HAVE OR CONFER NORMATIVE VALUE?

Patten's lineage argument proposes an answer to the problem of finding a nonessentialist way of expressing the idea of continuity and survival. As I just noted, it may be more a variant of than an alternative to essentialism: The thesis seems itself to depend on a prior notion of culture that allows us to see the transmission controllers as possessing the right kind of markers needed to underpin continuity as social lineage. That said, I now turn to the normative significance of this approach and offer three reasons for concern.

The first of these bears on the social lineage understanding of belonging to and transmitting a cultural community. Patten states that he wants “to elaborate a plausible nonessentialist concept of culture. . .[that] should help us to see. . .why culture is valuable to people. . . [that] it is good for people when their cultures are respected and preserved” (735). Writing about the importance of family to the preservation of culture, he argues that there is continuity of control, and hence preservation of culture, where children “hail from family backgrounds in which one or both of their parents belong to [culture] C” (740). In other words, belonging is a property of those who share in the life of, for example, a family already fully steeped in a culture. If that is what it means to belong to a community then one might be concerned that the social lineage approach privileges induction into a tradition over broadly liberal egalitarian understandings of belonging—for example Habermas's constitutional patriotism or Benhabib's notion of membership in a community of universal rights.Footnote ⁷

A second source of concern arises from the emphasis that the lineage-control approach places on the evaluative criterion that the persons exercising this control must be ours, of and socialized into a chez nous, so that culture is passed, as Patten writes, from one Québécois hand to the next (735, 740). The lineage-control theory of continuity offers no further criterion by which to gauge the normative value of modes of control/transmission once they are determined to have met the standard of being “ours.” Are those modes of control and transmission liberal, democratic, and broadly representative in character or authoritarian and paternalistic? Surely the normative weight of a culture's survival (and why it and its preservation are “valuable to. . .[and] good for people”) (735) is related to the way in which it has endured.Footnote ⁸ It is related in the sense that a culture imposed on a community, whether from without by conquest or from within by an elite, has no evident claim on being “ours” or on our “respect.”Footnote ⁹ If control over the transmission of culture is carried out in an authoritarian manner, say, one might think that what thereby survives is in no obvious norm-yielding sense the community's culture but rather that of its controlling group. That members of this steering group share the experience of a common socialization is hardly a sufficient foundation for recognizing that culture they fashion as “ours,” to be valued and preserved by us. So, for example, a patriarchal culture handed down across centuries can make no claim to be of normative value simply because it has been transmitted by the leading lineage group, nor can it claim that its survival is normatively important because (so the patriarchal group could argue) it is central to the identity of the community. Such a community might be better off, from a liberal perspective, if its authoritarian controllers, though possessing the proper lineage, were to be replaced by a democratic transmission process even if its controllers were not of the right lineage group. Patten's argument suggests that for him pedigreed control trumps other normative concerns.Footnote ¹⁰ But it is difficult to see how that position can be sustained given the criteria governing even a minimally liberal multicultural evaluation of the transmission process.

Finally, the idea of control can also be questioned in a third way. The control-lineage approach marks out not so much the continuity of cultural contents as the persistence of that culture as being “ours.” Loss and alteration, on this view, are descriptors not of contents but of degrees of ownership, of the extent to which we can preface a culture with the possessive pronoun “our.” But what normative weight does a culture gain from having been transmitted in that way, by controllers who are “ours”? Indeed, what value does that possessive pronoun carry? A nationalist, Joyce's Miss Ivors for example, would have no difficulty affirming that this is a free-standing good and that the struggle to preserve the continuity of our own control, to be masters in our own home, is a battle for a core good. For a liberal multiculturalist, in contrast, that response is not available, and so the challenge remains unmet: Lineage/transmission does not carry the needed normative weight.

HOW ARE WE TO UNDERSTAND THE IDEA THAT THE HISTORICAL WRONG DONE TO INVOLUNTARILY INCORPORATED CULTURAL COMMUNITIES ENDURES ACROSS TIME?

I now want to ask if the social lineage thesis helps with another central issue in the continuity problem, one not addressed by Patten but pivotal in other multicultural studies. On this view, cultures can be distinguished from one another by (among other properties) their different modes of incorporation (Kymlicka Reference Kymlicka1991, 167; Reference Kymlicka and Will1995a, 12; Reference Kymlicka1995b, 12, 219–20, note 5). In particular, an involuntarily incorporated minority culture is to be distinguished in a normatively relevant way from those whose presence has come about via choice broadly understood. The key difference between, say (to use Patten's example), Québec and the Italian American community is not that citizens of the former speak their ancestral language whereas the latter have ceased to do so. Indeed that criterion would have the odd effect of blending English-speaking aboriginal communities with assimilated immigrant ones, an effect that would blur the substantial and normatively relevant differences in the ways in which they came to their membership. Nor is it, for example, the majority francophone character or the vulnerability of Québécois culture (a vulnerability that it shares with minority communities generally) alone that makes that province a claimant on a distinct constitutional status and on laws and powers unique to it. It is not the goal of cultural survival that distinguishes it, because that goal could in principle be held by any cultural community, including ones that on the multicultural account would not be claimants on self-governance rights, a federal accommodation, or other robust powers related to survival. Rather, what differentiates these communities at their root and in so doing sets a foundation for their different claims under justice and their policy objectives are their varied modes of incorporation: voluntary or involuntary, immigration or conquest. The principal distinction then between French Québec and the Italian American immigrant community lies in the historical fact that one was conquered, forcibly incorporated into British North America, whereas immigrants from Italy or elsewhere chose (often under the pressure of the direst of circumstances) their new cultural setting.Footnote ¹¹

Patten's argument—that where the lineage of transmission/control is interrupted from the “outside,” a culture thereby ceases to be “ours”—creates important difficulties in thinking about the continuity of involuntarily incorporated communities. For many of them, their incorporation is at the same time the dismantling of their means of control over cultural transmission and other facets of their life-in-common. Adopting Patten's account, what follows after that catastrophe would not be theirs, but their conquerors’, and what was truly theirs, in contrast, would now seem to stand on the distant side of a historic rupture of control. Indeed, even the terminology of “theirs” might be misused in these cases. For in thinking about such a community in the here and now, a question arises: Are they now what they have become, after years or even centuries of outside control, effectively a new community, or do they retain as part of their present what they were before the loss of their control over their own affairs and culture? And if the latter, how are we to understand this continuity in a nonessentialist way, using Patten's social lineage theory? In short, where it is the case that the present identities of these communities were in substantial part born out of post-incorporation developments and shaped by that incorporation itself, and thus by outside nonlineage controllers, how are we to think about continuity?Footnote ¹² For example, on one reading of the British defeat of New France and the subsequent history of the province of Québec, the emergence of their particular identity as a people, the Québécois nation, as opposed to the (pre-conquest) identity of French settlers overseas, was largely a post-conquest achievement, shaped by that new though unwilled dispensation. Mandated by the nationalist Parti Québécois, license plates there now carry the statement, “Je me souviens” (“I remember”). In the original text from which that sentiment is drawn is found this explanation of what is remembered:

The lily here is the fleur-de-lis of France, the rose the national emblem of Britain (Bock Reference Bock, Phillip and Reid2012, 164; Ducharme Reference Ducharme, Phillip and Reid2012, 142ff; Havard and Vidal 2006, 609; Robitaille Reference Robitaille and Batigne2001, 153). Language, faith, and other cultural contents continued to be transmitted in Québec, by Québécois, but “under the rose,” under British control and with their forbearance, for their purposes and not without considerable penalties, discrimination, and other efforts to compel the assimilation of the French population. The lineage/control/transmission thesis seems ill equipped to express what continuity means under such circumstances, conditions that are by no means unique to Québec.

Here I want to look further at the particular continuity problem raised by the challenge of answering the present effects of a historical act of involuntary incorporation. For that original unjust act of historical incorporation to carry its normative weight into the present (i.e., to ground a present claim calling for a remedy in the here and now), it is necessary to have a concept of the continuity of the wronged and of the perpetrator community. In other words, it needs a theory of identity, not of the kind Patten offers—as cultural classification, subjective and objective: to identify with or to be identified as (745)—but of the morally relevant sameness of a community across time, as an enduring subject of attribution including not only culture but also the institutions of governance broadly understood. It is just such a concept that multiculturalism needs (but has yet to craft) to sustain its argument that, because of their history, involuntarily incorporated cultures have strong claims in the here and now on different treatment and powers up to and including a measure of self-governance.Footnote ¹³

A comparison with the persistence of states and firms makes evident one source of the difficulties that the multicultural account faces. The foundation of the strong identity of states and corporations and the criteria for determining that identity are at least somewhat more in evidence than is the case with cultural communities. This is so in large part because states and firms have enduring institutionalized decision-making structures, constitutions, and individuating boundaries (French Reference French1992, 39–40).Footnote ¹⁴ Or they fail in one or more of these regards, in which case we may want to say that they cease to exist as, for example, the organized community they once were. Now plainly with many involuntarily incorporated multicultural groups, these enduringly clear and distinct institutional markers are not to be found. Conquest, as I noted, frequently involves the extensive dismantling of institutions of self-governance or their transformation into instruments of the conqueror's policies. Institutional survival is often not available to supply continuity in these cases of conquest, and in any event the end or absorption of institutions of self-governance and modes of cultural transmission may not necessarily spell the end of a national culture. Again, Québec's history could be read as an illustration of that possibility. Essentialist notions, Patten argues, are unacceptable, and others that might do this work in a liberal fashion have yet to be fully conceptualized.

THE QUÉBEC CASE: WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE “MASTERS IN OUR OWN HOUSE”?

To bring these strands together let us look at one of the more familiar multicultural tropes: Québec as an illustration both of the continuity of a cultural community and of an enduring historic injustice that grounds present claims to a special status and political powers. Consider Kymlicka's analysis of the francophone community in Canada, an analysis that, like Patten's, seeks a nonessentialist idea of cultural continuity. From a liberal vantage point, he argues, culture is valued not for any particular conception of the good it may contain, but as a context of choice and revision, a structure more than a content (Kymlicka Reference Kymlicka1991, 166–67, 191). This move frees Kymlicka from having to claim that cultures matter because they belong among the essential identity properties, bounded and unchanging, of a people or that they are to be valued for the substantive conception of the good they express. Thus Québec's 180-degree evolution from a conservative Roman Catholic society to “an urbanized, secular, pluralistic” community and the infusion into it via immigration of cultures different from that of its original European settlers do not pose any particularly thorny problems for his account (Kymlicka Reference Kymlicka1991, 167; Kymlicka Reference Kymlicka2001, 20).

A core set of issues related both to continuity and incorporation nevertheless persists, and they at least partially overlap with those in Patten's essay. Alongside the language of choice and revisability are the idioms of a strong continuity: Despite its radically changing content, “the existence of a French-Canadian cultural community itself was never in question” (Kymlicka Reference Kymlicka1991, 167). This description suggests an enduring entity and its persistent sameness in which the talk of a community's culture is grounded: Québécois culture may undergo alteration over time, but it is, invariantly, Québécois culture, “ours,” chez nous. As variable and porous, as hybrid and constantly contested as it is, culture (in this literature) is crucially the culture of a distinct and enduring group. That point simply restates the observation that multiculturalism is concerned with continuous communities. Given the capacity of culture to flow beyond any particular locale or community, its contents alone would not give a stable and particularizing definition to a group—one sufficient, for example, to allow us to make sense of the thought that there is a Québécois culture despite the radical changes that society has experienced over time. Something more is needed, something that distinguishes and defines the group, gives it boundaries and enduringness. In other words, the identity of groups, understood as their persisting sameness and boundedness, is a vital part of the multicultural argument. But it cannot itself be constituted by a concept of culture that is too evanescent, too volatile and transgressive of those very boundaries and sameness. Equally, it cannot be grounded in the illiberalism of essentialist accounts of community. Revisability and choice are clearly not able to provide that continuity, nor does the vague notion of a cultural “structure” seem promising (Patten Reference Patten2011, 737). For reasons I have already suggested, the social lineage alternative also appears unable to do the needed work here.

A second cluster of issues highlights that further stake in continuity. These issues are centered around the argument that the persistence of the past grounds the claims of involuntarily incorporated cultural minorities for justice in the present, including measures of self-rule. A sentence of Kymlicka's captures the core problem at work here. He writes (Reference Kymlicka1995b, 2), “The original incorporation of the Québécois. . .[community] into the Canadian political community was involuntary.”Footnote ¹⁵ The reader may see in this statement a description of a direct normative-political continuity between the past of involuntary incorporation and present-day Québec and Canada, conquered and conqueror, a continuity that can help ground the justice of current claims. Yet there is an historical inaccuracy here, one that creates the appearance of continuity and, in so doing, underscores both the importance of the persistence of community to his argument about justice and the difficulties in theorizing it.

In fact, Canada did not conquer Québec in the 1700s.Footnote ¹⁶ At that juncture, English and French settlements in North America were part of their respective empires: institutionally tied to their metropolitan homelands and, so far as we can tell, on the French side at least, their members retaining a cultural identity as Frenchmen or as the denizens of the specific regions of France from which they came (Havard and Vidal 2006, 70–71, 591ff, 609–10). In the Seven Years’ War, the British Empire defeated the French monarchy and its colonials in New France. General Montcalm, who lost one of the final and decisive battles of that war (at Québec City, the Plains of Abraham, on September 13, 1759), was not a Québécois leader but a French marquis sent by King Louis XV to defend France's imperial interests. His adversary was General Wolfe, a professional soldier dispatched by the British Parliament to North America. It was the French Crown that, after the defeat, ceded New France to Britain, which then at first placed those communities under British martial law.

Perhaps there is a normative, justice-preserving, and remedy-demanding continuity between the multiethnic democratic federation that Canada is today and the British Empire of the 1700s, and between the province of Québec and the former French colony in North America, but it is by no means self-evident what the basis of it might be. More worrisome from a liberal multicultural perspective is that one candidate account of the bond between the French Crown's North American colonies and modern Québec, and between the British colonies and the rest of contemporary Canada, is ethnic continuity, genealogical ties among the (as they were once called) “two founding peoples.” If that latter continuity is implausible and normatively unacceptable, and no other liberal one is on offer by which to express the persistence of identity, then it is difficult to see how Kymlicka can ground, even partially, contemporary claims of justice between Canada and Québec in the actions of two entities unrelated in any normatively significant sense to them.

The Québec case, a commonplace illustration in the multicultural literature, helps bring to light the difficulties created by multiculturalism's twofold need for a concept of strong continuity. One of these needs is grounded in the importance it attaches to cultural enduringness, change, and loss. Patten (738) writes,

This “underlying continuity” can be neither a description of the contents of a culture nor an essentialist attribute. The social lineage alternative, for its part, raises the question of what properties the lineage agents have that make them bearers of this continuity. Absent another account, the reader might reasonably surmise that the “underlying continuity” has some other kind of foundation, functionally similar to essentialism, a foundation that must be at work in a narrative that sees a normatively relevant continuity between French settlers 400 years ago and modern Québec society.

A second need for a robust theory of continuity is rooted in multiculturalism's concern with involuntarily incorporated national minority communities. The Québec case leads us to ask: How is the defeat of New France an injury and injustice borne today by contemporary Québec? And how is the Canadian state responsible for an act of conquest that predated its existence and was the work of the British Crown? To sustain the present demands of historically and involuntarily incorporated communities, multiculturalism must have a theory of their continuity as the bearers of justice and injustice across time. In other words, their current situations have to be shown to be normatively related to those origins. A thin notion of continuity will not do the necessary work here, for the result of a significant relaxation or weakening of strong identity would be an erosion of our ties to both past and future, and thus a weakening of the persistence of relations of justice across time. Yet, a more robust version, adequate to that task, seems likely to violate Patten's normative and empirical strictures on the use of essentialist concepts. Depending on how one understands the lineage-control thesis, it is likely to be burdened by one or the other of those problems: either too thin to do the work of underpinning the community as the bearer of injustice across time or too thick to avoid the appearance of being functionally essentialist.