Responses
Walzer, Michael
David Bromwich writes powerfully and at length about the sins of "culturalism," and my response here can only be brief and incomplete. But these are issues that we will continue to argue about...
...The constraints on individuals, in our culture, derive most importantly from the socialist critique of liberalism...
...Think of the philosopher Philo in ancient Alexandria, a pious Jew who ran with the neo-platonists...
...But he provides no account of indecent individuals—the murderous narcissists who appear so often in political life, the take-noprisoner egotists of the marketplace, the petty tyrants who wreak havoc in families, and so on...
...Only occasionally does one of the independent minds break free...
...and there are conformist and maverick versions of autonomy...
...It also means that they give distinctive form to WINTER • 1995 • 105 Arguments the ideas of usefulness or goodness held by their fellows...
...He is, to paraphrase his comment on Raz, a pluralist with prejudices...
...What Harold Rosenberg once called "the herd of independent minds" makes frequent appearances in modern liberal societies...
...When we think about decency and indecency, our recognition of "denseness, texture, and nuance" is likely to give way to more universal judgments...
...the differences are culturally determined...
...he only wants us to dislike intensely much of what gets protected...
...Some of the protected groups are, no doubt, illiberal...
...Nothing gives life meaning," he writes in what I take to be the key sentence of his essay, . except the socially illegible and arbitrary energy of a person...
...And here too men and women break free...
...and they are not trivial...
...the range of disagreement and the opportunities for originality vary across cultures in ways he doesn't, perhaps can't, acknowledge...
...Well, some do and some don't...
...Bromwich seems to deny this possibility: preliberal or illiberal (religious or ethnic) cultures make total claims on their members and so rule out truly individual distinctiveness...
...I would rather say that the great achievement of liberal societies is to have democratized both, to have made it possible for ordinary people to live freely within more than one cultural community...
...Bromwich is in favor of this kind of protection...
...Moreover, "options" of this sort certainly do precede the individuals who enact them, even though the enactments also differ among themselves, and we can recognize conformist and maverick mandarins, ascetics, rabbis, preachers, and so on...
...It protects its own competition—by tolerating, say, religious faith and practice...
...That only means that we have to look for political arrangements that constrain groups and individuals...
...similarly, the "arbitrary energy" of some of Bromwich's individuals is socially destructive...
...Hyphenated Americans, struggling to figure out how to be one thing and another at the same time, stand in a long tradition...
...I will look for occasions to deal in greater depth with Bromwich's critique...
...This doesn't necessarily mean that they become Bromwichian individuals, though that is one "option" in a society like ours, and perhaps even the favored one...
...But it follows from the openness and toleration espoused by modern liberalism that there are alternative herds...
...What are the callings, professions, careers, activities that it recommends and honors...
...But, of course, it isn't a question of instincts in a competitive race...
...Mandarin intellectuals, Hindu ascetics, rabbinic scholars, Athenian orators, Roman senators, itinerant Christian preachers, feudal knights, modern scientists, engineers, doctors—the list is long, but the point already obvious: within all these groups useful lives have "emerged...
...or eighteenth-century French aristocrats who were also enlightened philosopher...
...Sometimes this process fails entirely, sometimes it is only partially successful, sometimes it is badly designed or substantively flawed— and then we see most clearly what the arbitrary energy of individual men and women can come to...
...What are the goods that it values and pursues...
...or the Christian Aristotelians of medieval Europe...
...Here I want only to sketch my own critique of his positive argument about the individualist alternative to culture...
...Similarly, I think, Bromwich's autonomous, self-creating individual is a cultural ideal (our own), which precedes the men and women who try to plan their lives in accordance with its stipulations...
...But these are issues that we will continue to argue about in Dissent...
...Bromwich is quick to notice the repressiveness and brutality of (some) groups...
...But the lives are different...
...This, too, isn't entirely new...
...106 • DISSENT...
...And then, one sentence further on, "one may hope that, with the unselfish instincts allowed to run the same race as the selfish ones, a decent and useful life will emerge...
...None of the necessary constraints are endangered, all of them can in fact be supported, by writers like Taylor, Raz, and myself, who enjoy and want to preserve cultural difference...
...What makes for decency in human beings (I will come back to usefulness later) is a long and tangled socialization process, with all its inevitably cultural components: familial authority, schooling, moral codes, peer groups, virtues exemplified and taught, historical models, formal and informal systems of reward and punishment...
...But when we think about lives that are useful to our fellows, then it does matter how this particular group of men and women, the local fellowship, understands usefulness...
...in fact, he tends to reify groupness, to present us with an essentialist group, always repressive and brutal...
...It is even more characteristic of a liberal society that people run with more than one herd...
...They seem to appear in every human culture, and Bromwich is probably right to suggest (if this is what he means to suggest) that we have to confront them directly, without worrying overmuch about the cultural idiom in which they are expressed...
...Arrogance, cruelty, resentment, selfishness: these are individual traits...
...Liberalism has a dual character: it is a particular culture and also an inclusive framework for (other) particular cultures...
...How can it be destructive of liberalism to value these twin possibilities of social difference and self-division...
...It may be helpful here to think of the constraints on groups as classically liberal in character (Raz provides a good account of them...
Vol. 42 • January 1995 • No. 1
