“A armadilha da identidade cultural: do multiculturalismo à radicalizaçÃo”

My contention is that radicalization is largely a result of how multicultural societies are governed, i.e. assuming that no political-social order is feasible without shared background values. This ‘Parsonsian’ view leads one to conceive of culture as a set of shared values. To this conception, I oppose another one that, following Geertz, considers culture as a set of symbolic resources through which people experience and attach meaning to the world: culture as a toolkit that, thanks to the analogical transfer of schemes, enables one to perform infinitely diverse tasks and to solve new and complex problems for which no settled strategies exist. This conception allows us not only to understand the instrumental value of cultural pluralism in complex diverse societies, but also to avoid the spiral of mutual radicalization.