Responses
Taylor, Charles
Adiaphanous screen seems to separate "liberals" from opponents, who are often grouped together (by "liberals") in clumps called "communitarians," or here "culturalists." One of the things that...
...If one permits oneself to be a little less parochial both geographically and historically, one can discern a number of liberalisms...
...Bromwich talks as though it were quite clear what this means, and as if it meant quite clearly one thing...
...Raising the issue whether I agree, it seems to me evident that in some cases it can approach harmfulness, in others the claim is specious, part of the rhetorical hyperbole of the present debates...
...I must say that I find it hard to understand how anyone could espouse such a position who wasn't almost totally dissociated from the realities of human life...
...Otherwise, we remain stuck in familiar grooves, running from one darkened station to another, rather like the intellectual dinosaurs who debate whether human beings are formed by heredity or environment, nature or nurture...
...Nazism was a bricolage, which put together elements of the sub-Nietzschean counterculture, along with viilkisch, racist, anti-Semitic, and anticapitalist strands, among others...
...I know it has something to do with what has defined the important, the holy, the worthwhile for many people over time...
...One of the things that doesn't seem to get through the screen is the sense attributed to the crucial words...
...I just didn't have space to go into all this...
...I have to add, in fairness, that there were places where Bromwich got me wrong that have not necessarily to do with the crosspurposes between us...
...I am not claiming that I have this vocabulary and Bromwich doesn't...
...He really gets me quite wrong at times, but this is not surprising, like someone trying to puzzle out a German text with a Dutch dictionary...
...The possibility that something quite different in crucial respects might be going on in ex-Yugoslavia is not even mooted, let alone explored...
...Bromwich describes my essay on "The Politics of Recognition" as "a Canadian sermon to Americans...
...When I spoke about misrecognition coming to be classed as a harm, I was basically reporting, not endorsing...
...campus to Bosnia...
...It is assumed that we already have the vocabulary to discuss these issues, and we just need to get on with it...
...But part of what people mean by culture in this quasi-anthropological sense is precisely that it is horizonal, that it provides the background, the basic vocabulary from which people make the moves they do, build the particular forms that they do...
...The case, in short, for aboriginal self-government...
...Culture or community is figuring in your equation, and I would maintain must figure in a liberal-democratic equation...
...I wish I had a clear answer...
...For the latter, there are questions on the agenda of a free society that don't even rise above the horizon for the former, questions concerning the "political culture" of a free society, for instance...
...and (b) that the social-historical world comes simply packaged, so that a phenomenon like "cultural solidarity" reappears identically everywhere from the aboriginal reserve to the U.S...
...A blanket priority here seems as unreal as one running the other way: always foster individual independence over the integrity of a historical culture...
...Nazism is an ideology, a move within (and partly against) European culture...
...Rather, my message is to American "liberals," and it would read: please take the outside world a little more seriously, and note the variety of political and cultural situations and forms even among liberal democracies...
...Think also of the different historical and social situations of Finland, France, Canada, the United States, Argentina...
...Start with "liberal...
...Let's say there's an aboriginal community, in some process of assimilation to mainstream North American culture, with a gamut of possible landing points at the end of the process, involving different adaptations of mainstream and tradition to each other, some obviously more positive than others, where "positive" is judged by a broad spectrum of understandable goods, including high on the list such goods as individual autonomy, creativity, and the like (liberal goods, these...
...You might learn something interesting...
...This has become common among American theorists, and involves a double identification: of liberalism with historical American practice, and of this practice with a certain philosophical justification of it...
...In short, the terms Bromwich proposes seem to me close to useless for discussing any real life issue...
...This assumption seems to me very wide of the mark...
...Then "culturalist": this is supposed to be some general position "endorsing" cultures in general, or endowing them "with a dignity and . . . respect comparable [to those] I would claim for myself...
...My point is not to rebut any arguments here, just to underline how we need concepts a little more refined than the portmanteau hold-alls proposed by Bromwich if we are to make any headway...
...Why would anyone want to do such a thing...
...Where exactly do you draw the line...
...Bromwich seems aware of this, because he cites this horizonal, enabling character as what motivates "culturalists" to make much of it...
...But if I have something to preach to (some) Americans, it is not: be like us Canadians (the absurdity of this is evident on the face of it, although unfortunately the equal absurdity of the reverse proposition is not as clear to everyone...
...I hadn't thought of it that way...
...One last burst of polemic...
...I think that the difference between Bromwich and myself is that he writes as though this weren't so...
...I think we are all struggling toward it, trying to do justice to the real diversity of things, and puzzling how to make real on the ground our liberaldemocratic commitments...
...For instance, like anyone who has used the term, I realize that we are still struggling to know what we mean by "culture...
...Questions that can't be answered by reiterating the lexical priority of individual rights over collective identity...
...This in turn seems to mean that the "culturalist" gives priority to the demands of group culture over those of the individual...
...104 • DISSENT...
...I am not alone in lacking one...
...Just philosophically, think of the distance between Kant and Tocqueville...
...The fact that you're empowering a group identified by culture and history shouldn't deter you, on the grounds that as a "liberal" you have to avoid "culturalism" at any cost...
...The contrary appearance only arises if you assume: (a) that our moral and political dilemmas can be resolved by adopting highlevel principles, attributing priority to different considerations, which we then follow through come hell or high water...
...Suppose that you judge that the process has more chances of going forward to a good end, and WINTER • 1995 • 103 Arguments with less risk of human disaster, if certain powers are devolved onto the group...
...Does it mean that one endorses all cultures, always gives them priority...
...It seems to me that you have to be operating in a dissociated world of self-enclosed theory even to formulate such propositions, let alone earnestly debate which one we should adopt...
...In this sense, there is no Nazi culture (evoked in the predictable fashion...
...I put the key terms above in quotation marks as a way of saying that they have no agreed sense, not even quite the same logic, in the writings of Bromwich (he is far from alone among American "liberals") and, say, my own...
Vol. 42 • January 1995 • No. 1
