The idea that Britain is a multicultural society is now so deeply embedded in our consciousness that the only time we ever really encounter a challenge to it is when groups that we perceive as racist begin to stir up trouble for ‘immigrants’. Of course, our ancestors were all immigrants at some point – we sometimes forget that the question of immigration is about time more than it is about space; about who got here first and what that might plausibly mean. But beyond this, the ideal of toleration that leads to a multicultural society permits different groups of people to live together, but at a vast cost: it requires us to accept a wilful ignorance about who they are. Britain is a multicultural society only in so much as we are willing to tolerate different beliefs – which is to say, that we are willing to ignore differences except when they deviate from certain ideals we hold above this one. Within multicultural Britain, all cultures are far from equal.

The mythos of ‘multiculturalism’ is something that liberally minded individuals – such as myself – tend to take for granted. In the United States, where my wife is from, liberals can become pathological in their defence of it. But if we take up the floorboards of this idea, as Mary Midgley suggests is a philosopher’s task, we’d have fewer reasons to celebrate our ‘tolerance’, since the unacknowledged baggage of a multicultural society is an arrogant faith in our own correctness. It is only because we have faith in rational truths that everyone is obligated to accept that we graciously allow others to have their own beliefs. Beneath the warm mask of compassion that multiculturalism likes to wear is a vast and condescending gulf. We are proud to share Britain with Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists – as long as they accept the rational restraints we put upon them.

Since at least the time of Kant, and arguably as far back as Aristotle, the foundation of morality has been envisioned as rationality. It was Kant who developed this idea along rigorous lines that led, eventually, to the creation of Human Rights statues at the end of World War II. The terming of these ground-breaking statutes as ‘Universal’ in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights is thoroughly rooted in Kant’s idea that rationality can legislate universal laws of morality – conceptual statutes that are universal precisely because they are rational, and thus binding for all rational beings. Along parallel historical lines, Kant also gave us the split into objectivity and subjectivity – and along with it the division of academic subjects into sciences and arts. Indeed, it is only because of a faith in objective perspective, a debt Western philosophy owes to Plato, that universal law is in any way plausible: if there were not objective standards of right and wrong, how could we possibly legislate anything with a claim to universality?