Culturalism, The Euthanasia Of Liberalism
Bromwich, David
Hume said that absolute monarchy was "the easiest death, the true Euthanasia, of the British constitution." I offer some notes and questions about a line of political apologetics that if pursued...
...The move in the next, to the imperative of "understanding," will be baffling to anyone who has not read a fair amount of the culturalist literature (recall Walzer: "The left has never understood the tribes...
...To ascribe to a culture the virtue of integrity is an exorbitant choice for a left-wing theorist...
...In the following passage, the appearance of detachment goes over almost into satire: What is new . . . is that the demand for recognition is now explicit...
...With the first sentence I have no quarrel...
...It makes a poor comfort to the recalcitrant member of the departing tribe, who may have felt driven to go because claimed by her kind, and claimed in a setting where the ugliness of that appropriation was one degree less intolerable than the certain death promised by the culture-hardened members of the rival tribe...
...Now we want a word with more substance, and society will not do: it suggests a sharp look at social arrangements, at the workings of the judicial system, the state of tax regulations, and so on...
...On the present view, what reason could we cite for barring their adherents from tribal status...
...In this transposition, Taylor actually goes a step further than Walzer...
...The fire may scorch us in the years to come...
...It explains the encounter of our lives with our options...
...What is initially puzzling about this view is that it should want to call itself liberal...
...I think they could well erupt again...
...We ought to try to find some good in the separations, if possible...
...However, still tracking the flexible continuous analogy of games/skills/ways-of-life/culturesofdoing-things, Raz declares that "liberal multiculturalism" is not "opposed to the assimilation of one cultural group by others...
...and that they are sufficiently flexible proprietors to allow us a spotless conscience as we commit to their care individuals of the many nations and nationswithinnations tending now toward dissolution...
...Taylor has been a major public participant in discussions of the separation of Quebec, and he is a declared optimist regarding the probable consequences of separation...
...How else could he work, considering that he knows nothing personally that he does not know culturally...
...It would seem the cultures themselves can be trusted to guard against that...
...But I give most attention to Walzer for two reasons...
...Michael Walzer, "The New Tribalism," Dissent, Spring 1992...
...For culture constitutes identity...
...WINTER • 1995 • 101 Arguments A liberal society has a commitment not to infringe the rights of unaffiliated talent...
...the effort is really to claim the virtues of an individual life for individual cultures...
...One thing we can be sure of...
...Considered any other way, "Many of them won't go all that far" is an astonishing euphemism...
...To realize oneself is to pass from false into true consciousness...
...Culture is necessary for the others...
...and the various sects, clans, and dormant nations that serve as bearers of the revived racial and religious enthusiasms clamoring for recognition and for authority throughout the world today...
...In length of atrocious cultural self-invention the peoples of Bosnia have gone very far while going nowhere...
...Each culture is said to "reiterate" in a different way the general hope or yearning...
...But let anyone imagine what it would be like to engage in the comparison suggested by Raz...
...They have 92 • DISSENT Arguments come out of the deep freeze, they are here to stay, and he must say what he can on their behalf, for "The left has never understood the tribes...
...Joseph Raz, "Multiculturalism: A Liberal Perspective," Dissent, Winter 1994...
...Can we then imagine someone saying, "Even though my culture is inferior to others, I love it unshakably...
...We feel one way about people interested in recognition as a group—another way about a group of people on the point of dying out as a group...
...But it goes further into what Taylor in an essay of 1979, "What's Wrong with Negative Liberty," called "some of the most inspiring terrain of liberalism...
...Sanity too can be rare...
...The matter is too intricate...
...What are the consequences for the individual person of the culture's requirement of integrity...
...I learn to value who I am by coming to know that others value the sort of person I am—"sort" being determined not novelistically but from the available social science categories...
...Culture is more piquant, if shiftier...
...Charles Taylor, "What's Wrong with Negative Liberty," in Philosophical Papers, vol...
...It is different when we come to the "divided selves" of the members of the liberal commercial democratic societies...
...At the same time, it reserves a place for the particular adaptations or cultural idioms by which ends are realized that may turn out to be universal after all...
...But, with cultural extinction on the line, a plea for cultural entitlement acquires much of the urgency of an appeal for human rights as such...
...The conclusion is plausible only if the self of the first sentence was defined, as it did not then admit itself to be, in wholly cultural terms...
...So we are offered not persuasion but description: a Wittgensteinian layering of verbal effects, with plenty of words suggestive of denseness, texture, and nuance to bring out the impalpable weave of the medium Raz is describing...
...and thereby suffer also a loss of integrity to each member...
...It is understood that in the course of doing so we shall have to modify our idea of the proper duties of the liberal state in keeping with the demands of two constituencies: the speculative thinkers who "construct" the individual to accord with the supposed priority of the group in the making of identity...
...But he did not want to seem to ignore the imperative of personal, of individual, choice, and this gave the misleading cue to the sentence...
...No final understanding is attainable of what I am: this axiom of Mill's may even have been shared by Wittgenstein...
...To judge by the tenor of these articles, Walzer is fairly sure that religious wars are a thing of the past...
...With this demand goes a tactical subordination of, and a growing incapacity to do even rhetorical justice to, the data of personal and temperamental differences...
...Walzer, plainly, would prefer to be neither sort of paternalist, but he is struck by the immodesty of the second assertion...
...the hypothesis being that the cultures will allow it and that, having seen the good of the principles, they will yet prefer to remain on the whole illiberal...
...Or are the sympathizers hardheaded, in the sense of cynical, when they decide the complaint must be met and the bargainers recognized...
...or to say "We believe personal autonomy to be the final freedom, the aim of the least wicked way of life we can imagine...
...Having in mind the Eurasian republics, Bosnia, and many other current examples, Walzer remarks: "Rather than supporting the existing unions, I would be inclined to support separation whenever separation is demanded by a political movement that, so far as we can tell, represents the popular will...
...There seems no sure way of discriminating the integrity of a total politics from the integrity of a self-sustaining culture...
...My second reason for attending to Walzer is that he is the best writer and the clearest presenter of the communitarian idea of criticism, together with its culturalist background...
...It aims at the individual rather than the race, and it tries to picture a temperament...
...What those people want, what their leaders assure us they want, seems to be group distinction above all...
...The truth is that faithful culturalism must be opposed to assimilation in practice if not in principle...
...When we think of the nation," concludes Walzer, drawing on Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, "we are led to think of boundaries . . . and then we are led to think of other nations: this is a useful intellectual progress...
...If the writers I discuss should persuade many others that such congeniality is a good thing, it will make a lasting difference to what liberalism takes itself to be...
...As a matter of experience, I think the argument is wrong...
...The reservation that my question implies has been anticipated in a reserve clause of "The New Tribalism": "I don't mean to underestimate the nastiness of tribal zealots...
...The word in its Lockean usage had none of the grudging tone that Raz imputes to it, and it is a word we should care enough for not to move to the pejorative column...
...The reply of the Enlightenment liberal must be that the case for the shift of principle has not been made...
...The previous paragraph had mentioned "inequality, exploitation, and injustice" and I find it impossible to grasp "cultural misrecognition" except as a description inclusive of such harms as the above, to which they alone give pragmatic meaning...
...on no account may we make it the beneficiary of the lesson we learned from religious wars: that the thing to do with a cultural identity is to keep it to yourself...
...The trouble with invoking authenticity at all—we shall see by and by how irresistible the WINTER • 1995 • 93 Arguments category has been for the culturalists — is hardly that it fails to contain enough specimens...
...People, he says, bent on the difficult project of cultural survival will want to explore a "politics of difference" based on "judgments about what makes a good life—judgments in which the integrity of cultures has an important place...
...In such cases—America is the prime example— tribal feelings are relatively weak...
...Self-realization presumes a "negative" freedom from constraint...
...He has to assign to society itself—which, in effect, he chooses to rename a multiculture —the individual traits ordinarily linked with personal character...
...Inferior and superior are not ascriptions that people commonly make of cultures...
...This was the idealism that made Whitman write, in his Preface to Leaves of Grass: "America does not repel the past or what it has produced under its forms or amid other politics or the idea of castes or the old religions...
...Self-fulfillment thus belongs, as a local product, to a larger and endless process for which culture supplies the tools...
...His wish to do justice at all costs to cultural coherence as a good in itself emerges in many choices of words...
...Suppose I state now an opposite thesis...
...The second is apt to create more prosperous livelihoods for members of a deprived culture, and thereby, in a possibly relevant aggregate sense, to improve and even enrich the life of the culture...
...Since, argues Walzer, justice itself has been variously invented, being "one more product of human creativity," we ought not to expect "a singular and universal justice" for all...
...Must it be justified by testimony from solid sources to prove its connection with our old friend authenticity...
...If asked why a liberal theorist would embrace such an idea, I am at a loss...
...It is novelistic rather than abstract and socialized...
...Walzer believes, in a formulation I paraphrased earlier, that "the commitment of individuals and groups to their own history, culture, and identity . . . is a permanent feature of human social life," but in assessing the tribes his emphasis falls on the history, culture, and identity of groups...
...Raz tries hard to purge his argument of such vestiges...
...For a fascist, such a move would be commonplace: ascription of integrity to a culture is what is needed to get a fascist politics off the ground...
...But the old objection returns: how does the state sort out the true from the false claimants to cultural status...
...Speaking as someone who would like to de-authenticate as many ideologies as possible, I see nothing obvious about the process of sorting the authentic from the spurious tribes...
...But that form of progress has no implications for what we may choose to do about the X (the person) or Xishness (the culture), once we have admitted either phenomenon to exist...
...In short, the mesh is at once too fine and too wide...
...In my observation it has been the small groups that have the most committed memberships...
...Charles Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition," in Amy Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton University Press, 1992...
...This method Taylor has lately supplied with a proposal that liberal societies invent a new legal right, the right to cultural "recognition...
...In the sentence above, the commasplice is also a thought splice...
...Something similar happens in his use of the phrases a life and a way of life...
...Suppose then that an individual culture requires integrity...
...Every time less than a pulsation of the artery Is equal in its period and value to six thousand years, For in this period the poet's work is done...
...but it is possible to characterize what the theorists are doing when they write with sympathy for the idea of culture...
...So equivocal an experiment of thought will only occur to a mind whose ideas of cultural membership are at once benign and detached...
...And as we know, all goods are at bottom cultural goods...
...What can reasonably be expected is that the interpreter should evince a proper regard for a given way of life as it is refracted in the medium of a shared commitment...
...The last word unpredictably changes the tenor of the discussion...
...His solution is to build liberal protections into the cultures that bear the illiberal threat: "Multiculturalism urges respect for cultures that are not themselves liberal cultures...
...Individual interests, even our enlightened interests, may be more exacting than this...
...Culture becomes the province not so much of the knife-wielding warlords bent on expelling monsters from the outer regions, as of the necklace-carving, lullaby-singing grandmothers and grandfathers whose full-blooded ministrations give an ancient resonance to the idea of "home...
...I suspect one main disagreement is at stake...
...There may be historical situations, as well as grammars, in which the comma cannot be spliced...
...But in the name of what principle, conviction, or value of our own do we wish upon others the good of the oppressive culture which is all they can have...
...Let me suggest a difficulty of putting into practice any of these proposals...
...He, or she, does not know the meaning of that energy...
...Our "core options" in life, he asserts, have the structure of a game like chess...
...I will identify myself with more than one tribe...
...2 (Cambridge University Press, 1985...
...Or, "Granted my culture seems impoverished beside the neighboring culture I am coming to know, still I prefer to be forever attached to mine...
...the difference here has not been split with very much care...
...I draw the last word from aesthetics with Walzer's sanction, for he likens the selfinvention of a culture to the creativity of a playwright...
...He instances the Katangese secession of 1961...
...They are heeding a wish for compassion from people whose ways, and needs, they are frankly unequipped to understand...
...Ku Kluxers do not make good Lubavitchers, Lubavitchers do not make good Ku Kluxers, but the compatibility of their values can be understood on the analogy of a society that incorporates generals and philosophers...
...Of course, if one ever sought to enforce such a plan its effect would be either to crush the orthodox heart of the cultures or to repel every effort to assert the liberal right of exit...
...I imagine," writes Walzer in opening, "tens of thousands of old men and women whispering to their grandchildren, singing folk songs and lullabies, repeating ancient stories...
...but let the difference of idiom speak for itself: "Only through being socialized in a culture" — substitute "culturalized in a society" and the meaning is the same—"can one tap the options that give life a meaning...
...By contrast, Raz invokes "multicultural liberalism" to describe the outlook he recommends...
...What, then, are we to make of the expedient by which late-coming tribal feelings are evoked in order to foster a strong conviction of natural identity...
...For Taylor, the highest ideal of life is "self-realization" —an ideal that heavily marked the entire strain of German romanticism that descends from Herder...
...We look different as we do so, but we are looking differentially for something iterable in other idioms...
...Consider misrecognition of a personal kind: it might be expressed in acts of ostracism, which would be a form of injustice...
...In a complex being, the process will not be one of mere ratification...
...4) Public support must be found for "autonomous cultural institutions" such as museums, charities, and so on, favoring the larger groups "with a more committed membership...
...In works of art we can say the individual has his flowering...
...What, one might ask, is real recognition...
...102 • DISSENT...
...At some point the irony must be reengaged...
...He added, regarding all those forms that have earned the name of culture, that America "perceives that the corpse is slowly borne from the eating and sleeping rooms of the house...
...I have to recur to the same note more somberly...
...Some of the features are worth trying to discourage...
...He writes without obscurantism, quite free of pedantic or theoretical obsessions, and this is a great advantage...
...On the other hand, for consistency with the plural: "Peoples have to choose for themselves, each people for itself...
...To achieve their ends, they required a sense of community that was large because it had been thinned of its racial, religious, and in some cases of its national connections...
...And liberal theorists in the past affirmed a commitment to respect the claims of such persons against the culture they were making less sure of its integrity...
...Does he set the human standard unrealistically high...
...The critic works to reform a culture from within the culture...
...For nasty, read murderous—but what should follow from this knowledge...
...A culture may be like a family...
...We owe nothing to any object or condition as a mere forced consequence of its permanence...
...The premise Taylor requires for this axiom is that human beings are dialogically constituted...
...The thoughts, "This culture is deeply mine," and "This culture is perhaps inferior," simply do not coexist in a single mind...
...The last phrase is evasive...
...Every way of life is somebody's way, it did not come from nowhere...
...We are to imagine someone considering, with love, his culture and considering at the same time that it is not the only culture thinkable from inside—this thought itself being entertained from inside, since thought, like all the other options, is cultural...
...Nation and Universe" was an anthropology and epistemology of the culturalist idea...
...To suppose that they can is a version of the bad faith of supposing the essence of a person can precede the existence...
...1) The young of all cultures "should be educated, if their parents so desire, in the culture of their own groups...
...Historical experience suggests that one can, with hard suasive work, shame people out of the brutal pleasure of the violence, since most people have other pleasures...
...By the self-evasion and the pandering of our belief in culture as the maker of identity, we rob the cultures with whom we profess to sympathize of the very clue that has made liberal democracy the distinct entity we are growing every day uneasily convinced it is...
...Within liberalism, a congeniality toward illiberal societies so long as they are real communities might seem to involve a strange accommodation...
...Real damage, real 96 • DISSENT Arguments distortion," says Taylor, can come from misrecognition...
...Raz sees no special difficulty here because he thinks exclusionist cultural self-images are much the same thing as divergent vocational temperaments...
...good wherever it convincingly represents the popular will, so far as we can tell...
...Room for maneuver and invention here denotes the scope of choice allowed to a particular culture in constituting its texture...
...and the culturalist idea has imposing consequences for one's sense of what social criticism can be...
...we ask, and we sympathize...
...Culture meanwhile picks up some happier, though still quite vague, associations from a friendly acquaintance with Mardi Gras, museums of folklore, and Ukrainian dance groups in universities...
...Community was a baggy enough word, with an admonitory function in a selfish decade...
...If the manners of a liberal society are not inherited by successive generations in the prospering democracies, if their incompatibility with certain other options is not understood, talk will be at an end regarding the right of exit we fondly hope to attach to the illiberal societies in return for our recognition of their right to be just what they are...
...That would seem to depend on how many links have been severed: how many were the assassinations...
...it WINTER • 1995 • 99 Arguments contains in itself the understanding of what we did and did not become...
...Taylor appears to have read Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity as a narrative of progress—a curious and original misreading—and to have felt the propriety of extending an idea of authenticity to apply to culture as well as its constituent persons...
...It is not clear at first glance what pragmatic difference separates this view from liberal ideas about enlightened judgment that have a less thoroughly culturalist shading...
...But why must each of us be more than matter-offact in committing our lives to our history, our culture, our identity...
...My inclination to put the matter this way must mean I share the Enlightenment prejudice against religion rather more than Walzer does...
...Charles Taylor has long been struck (as he WINTER • 1995 • 95 Arguments remarks in an introduction to his Philosophical Papers) by "the way in which an individual is constituted by the language and culture which can only be maintained and renewed in the communities he is part of...
...What then of duration that includes an interval of lapsed tribal memory followed by a reassertion from the ground of recovered memory...
...Liberalism already tells us that the parents should not be forbidden from such a venture...
...It will be seen that what this comes to is universalism with a plea for "thick description" of the variants...
...This worry can only apply to cultures with a low rate of literacy, as that is defined by a liberal society...
...Race, that sine qua non of culture-makers, is frequently left quite out of account, though one may come across delicate mentions of "blood-ties...
...Maybe that is another way of saying it is not a culture after all...
...This varied and "reiterative" universalism is set over against the Kantian, or "covering-law" universalism, according to which every choice by an individual ought to be made as if against a background of the twin ideas of autonomy and freedom shared by humanity as a whole...
...Then the appeal is transferred to "the people" to whom the persons belong...
...They do a fair job of it in any nonrepressive society, and their affirmations come at the expense of many other things...
...We therefore do them wrong to impose assumptions about individual personality that we take for granted...
...William Blake would not have agreed that cultural identity is a necessary feature of human life, though he believed that art was and that contest was...
...in the long past of culture and custom he has his soil...
...Contextualized, he is worthy...
...What kind of knowledge is this meant to evoke?—that given by a science, or sympathy, or any sort of persuasive narrative...
...I offer some notes and questions about a line of political apologetics that if pursued far would lead to the euthanasia of liberal society...
...Notice how subtly in this scheme of thought the culturalist outcome is clinched in advance...
...We ought to treat them with respect, reply the culturalists, in the knowledge that they give us what life we have...
...The call is loudest in states without a tradition of liberal government...
...But the second policy in no way differs from the enlightened egalitarianism of a nondiscriminatory liberal state...
...Or by the perishability of its systeMs of belief in the absence of help from a liberal government inspired by culturalist theory...
...Suppose one described the same citizen as a man of subtle scholarly temperament, with a driving affection toward friends and family and an active benevolence toward many others, animated by a strong impulse of gentleness in all his recorded dealings...
...In any case, it is the third form of liberalism he wants to argue for, a liberalism of "affirmation...
...Here the question arises: should cultures suffering that privation be educated in their own way of thinking, or in a way designated by the society...
...In the past five years, an argument first ventured in academic circles, which associates human dignity with cultural identity, has made deep inroads toward acceptance by liberal theorists...
...They are doing something that Walzer, Taylor, and Raz agree is epistemologically impossible...
...alone, he evades our instruments—he must consent to pass unremarked...
...Grammatically, the structure is ablative absolute, close to the jimmied-out variety known as a comma-splice: two clauses join in a rush, they mimic the speed of a single thought...
...First, I have a practical interest in social criticism, and a view of it as far less "connected" to the expectations of a community than Walzer believes it to be...
...Many contemporary forms of Satanism are likely to be survivals of the lapsed-identity sort, the most potent of their customs often many centuries old...
...Why should we value human agency if we are unwilling to give it any room for maneuver and invention...
...We have seen this operation twice before...
...Merely on the human level, one could argue that it is reasonable to suppose that cultures that have provided the horizon of meaning for large numbers of human beings, of diverse characters and temperaments, over a long period of time— that have, in other words, articulated their sense of the good, the holy, the admirable—are almost certain to have something that deserves our admiration and respect...
...Two highly favorable points about religious wars may as well be admitted...
...As the paternal tone of his argument makes plain, he has not lately cherished, or does not now remember, any thoroughly attached experience of an identity-culture...
...We could say that, thanks to this idea, misrecognition has now graduated to the rank of a harm that can be hardheadedly enumerated along with the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph...
...The right of exit unconditionally recognized by every truly vital culture is the right to become a nonperson, the right to permanent exile, the right to be killed by a flourishing community of unimpeded members...
...This last transposition occurs in the following sentence: "People have to choose for themselves, each people for itself...
...Those who would like to be moved by the latter are brutal sentimentalists...
...As I will be compelled to say again and again in these pages, the idea seems to me trivially true...
...It is indeed a mark of intellectual refinement to say to someone "You are an X and Xishness is real to me," rather than to say "You are a does-not-compute, sorry...
...In sympathizing with an oppressive culture, and forging a bond to prove the substance of our sympathy, we condemn to deeper oppression by that culture the very rebels against it whom liberal principles adjure us to admire...
...We had better admit from the first that we are touched by individuals, and by the idea of their lives, and that by association with these alone do we ever come close to imagining a race or its way of life...
...What could it mean for a liberal society to add its affirmation of the cultures to their affirmation of themselves...
...Liberal culture, if we can call it a culture, is the only one that has ever disclaimed property in the persons of its members...
...Where Walzer's construal of the priority of culture was anthropological common sense, and Taylor's a late version of German romantic organicism and expressivism, Raz evidently draws his conception from a reading of Wittgenstein on games...
...The metaphors that Walzer and Taylor borrowed from art Raz borrows instead from the domain of craft or skill...
...The person who thinks "My culture is perhaps inferior" is halfway to thinking his way into a different culture and dangerously close to the thought that "No culture is worthy of my love in the way that humanity, and particular human beings, are...
...This is a new sort of assumption for a liberal theorist to make...
...They are trying to shed a habit of irony...
...Nevertheless, they are doing it...
...Competing cultures do not claim simply "the virtues of the competing ways of life" where we can read "ways of life" as a synonym for skills, routines, acquired itineraries...
...But, taken in the strong sense in which alone it is worth discussing—the sense in which "my culture" is a fact endowed with a dignity and deserving of a respect comparable to the dignity and respect I would claim for myself— the idea seems to me a lie...
...Race, religion, and native language take precedence over profession, region, and political affiliation...
...The word particularist has here been brought in to split the difference between individual and culture...
...And yet Raz in his last sentence seems to affirm that culture can do it...
...I grind out the paradoxes to show that the claim of authenticity is in this context tautologous to the point of inscrutability...
...The few qualities here that do not belong to the usual ascriptive traits of "democratic character" are such as might be fostered by any society that functions as a society...
...On the whole, this prototype compares favorably with such alternatives as Bosnia and Ireland...
...Personal dignity is mediated by cultural recognition...
...For the time being, we are encouraged by Walzer to suppose the confusion will press against natural limits, because "Obviously, there is such a thing as inauthentic tribalism...
...Within a picked corps of rulers, given a freedom comparable to what the SS enjoyed during the war, one can imagine a certain diversity of character persisting in this culture— within limits of course, but ours too has its limits...
...The practical force of Raz's statement must therefore be that such education ought to be paid for by the state...
...Indeed, I do not see what to make of the shift of attention unless it backs a hypothesis with practical force: that the individual differences that liberalism existed to protect may be less important, because to our eyes less expressively marked, among people who have grown up in illiberal cultures...
...What when the expedient is worked out specifically in relation to government subsidies, educational ideology, the provision of public and forensic space for the cultivation of cultural identities...
...I make this as non-robust as I can, and it is not yet finished because no first-person wants it to be: the story of oneself is made by second and third persons (including oneself in some future, where one might as well be a second or third person...
...To understand a person we need to know how that person came to be what he or she is, that is, to understand what she might have been and why she is some of those things and not others...
...but the acceptance of assimilation is quite at odds with Taylor's worry about "survival": if the cultures are assimilated by a liberal society, they will surely suffer extinction, however involuntary...
...By contrast, reiterative universalism points out the difficulties of translation enforced by physical or anthropo90 • DISSENT Arguments logical distance...
...often startled or shocked their audiences, opted out of the terms set by a given community or a going debate, and thereby changed the meaning of community by enlarging it...
...The people who do the affirming are, once again, groups...
...An (individual) life has its setting in a (communal) way of life...
...I do not finally see how to assess the culturalist argument except as a weakening of this commitment in favor of other affirmations...
...On what ground do we refrain from speaking to the tribes with this understanding...
...On the other hand, only tribes without selfsufficiency will have the need or the desire for support...
...But the differences of expression count, and are to be honored as large differences...
...and in that case their conquering way of life would have come to be called life...
...Are we therefore to presume it is a happy family...
...All they can have of what...
...But for the others— even "oppressive" cultures deserve our support for their sake because "They provide many of their members with all that they can have...
...Yet so long as the very possibility of "respect and concern" is at stake, any individual would be misguided and possibly heartless to offer a description of a culture in terms not derived from that culture...
...The applicants are an almost endless array...
...If such descriptions were given credence, we might not consent to call "a way of life" a life...
...That must mean continuity of blood (such as could be verified under a slide...
...I ask my readers to listen for the sounds of knives being sharpened...
...And so much the better for liberalism...
...or of folk depth (such as could be verified by an archaeologist or ethnomusicologist...
...Obviously...
...Adequate representation for a culture may have seemed an extension of democratic rights...
...That cultural identity is "a permanent feature of human life" is trivially true...
...Does it follow that the way of life supplies the particularities any of us would look for in a life...
...I began by saying that liberal culturalism was a lie, a gesture of shrugging off irony adopted late by persons who think habitually as ironists...
...Now, what, if any, are the duties of a liberal toward this particular person, whom we are urged to surrender to the vivid particularism of the culture...
...The first attempt I know by Walzer to sketch a theory of cultural recognition came in his 1990 Tanner Lecture, "Nation and Universe...
...Had that inauthentic secession worked out politically, it is a fair surmise its backers would seem in a hundred years as authentic as the Irish in Great Britain or the Slovenes in Yugoslavia...
...In this way culture constitutes identity...
...This embarrassment, or "fear," must be the other side of the unintimidated confidence Raz supposes one might cherish instead...
...Nazi Germany, the extreme case of an integral culture, did have a well-articulated sense of "the good, the holy, the admirable...
...I confess I cannot share the mood of this sentence...
...The strangest word in the passage is "hardheadedly...
...Only one of these names denotes what most people would call a tribe...
...The critic derives his language, it is said, from this community...
...Recognition is the gesture or ritual, on which Taylor would like to confer legal force, by which a state says to a culture or a culture says to another culture: "I admit you have a being (an identity, a collective self) capable and worthy of realization...
...These visible markers of culture are emphasized by the liberal culturalists, with an eye on their liberal audience, as if the terms actually mattered in descending order...
...11 (University of Utah Press, 1990...
...3) Cultures that are undereducated should be adequately educated, says Raz...
...The fact that many cultures a new-modeled liberal theorist may have to endorse are themselves illiberal was discussed in passing by Walzer and hardly at all by Taylor...
...As in the shifts of grammar in Walzer, a collective entitlement is asserted by soliciting attention to the fate of persons (their commitments, their sufferings...
...The illusion of a natural unity or origin comes from a founding that is far enough in the past to have been long forgotten...
...We all come from somewhere...
...2) Customs and practices of the culture should be "recognized [a transparent homage to Taylor's elusive word] in law by all public bodies in society...
...I pause to say one word for toleration—the best thing any society can offer and as much as any of us should want from a society...
...With luck, one may hope fate and fortune conspire to keep a mind and a body on the move, and 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...
...The case was for a universal right to "human flourishing," which can only be understood in the medium of this or that local variant...
...If there were no such result, what WINTER • 1995 • 97 Arguments could qualify as evidence that the misrecognition had even taken place...
...His argument deploys a nomenclature in which the classical liberal ideal of tolerance appears as tacitly discriminatory, and the actively anti-discriminatory ideology of modern liberalism appears as good-natured but still not sufficiently robust...
...Affectively, it is not clear that the thought of boundaries, a conviction of the otherness of the other side, is any improvement on the despised Kantian model of progress, by which one passes from self-respect to respect for others by saying, "You resemble me in the most important way I can imagine: by being similarly human...
...The nest belongs to a kind of creature they have never imagined, but there they sit and brood, with care and concern, thinking what comes will possibly look a good deal like themselves...
...It is with culture as with nature: the word, if it means anything, suggests a second nature grafted upon the first until the two become indistinguishable...
...with women included...
...These matters are left unaccounted for but they are a posteriori in any case, for it is plain to people of moral intelligence that "the withholding of recognition can be a form of oppression...
...We are now in a position to appreciate the vexing involutions of an effort to match the politics of cultural identity with the maxims of prudence in a pluralist democracy...
...A thinker may choose, as Spinoza once did, or an artist may choose, as Naipaul and Rushdie have, to cease to belong as reclaimable property to the culture that "constitutes" them...
...in reading "The Politics of Recognition," one may feel some doubt whether the author is narrating a development of which he heartily approves or one he would prefer to qualify, reform, argue with, or in some measure retard...
...This need, culturalism says, is on a par with the need to be loved by a father and a mother, and with the need for a life of friendships and associations...
...He or she had certainly better not be divided...
...As a citizen of such a society, Walzer says, "I will acquire a more complex identity than the idea of tribalism suggests...
...My identity is defined, observes Taylor, "as an individual, and also as a culture," but the form of the statement is misleading...
...Some people," observes Raz, "fear, consciously or unconsciously, that if our culture is not superior to others, we are not entitled to love it as much as we do...
...I believe Raz had here in mind an older, and not an anthropological, usage, according to which cultural artifacts are judged by a mind not wholly submerged in the medium of a religious, racial, or national culture...
...Michael Walzer, "Nation and Universe," in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol...
...Anyway, the fear of inferiority is an other-people's-fear...
...Neither the same fellowship nor the same idea of respect will be universally shared—and then what demands respect is only indirectly the individual himself...
...What will become of these people...
...We ought to treat the cultures with respect, as befits the recognition that they are dead and we are living...
...As, in the usage here, particularism claims individual traits for a culture, so elsewhere people will transfer to separate peoples the traits of a person...
...I am to reflect my culture as member and reflect on it as nonmember and to conclude that from my point of view it is permissible though perhaps false to love it unquestioningly...
...The way out is to renounce tribal concern and respect as an act of idolatry that wants to extract an ethical good from religious and aesthetic phenomena...
...Notice how the multiculturalist outcome is contained in the culturalist premise...
...But weren't the zealots of the religious wars equally nasty...
...Or by the number of initiates...
...Irony, however, seems to be the natural condition of the social critic...
...Culturalism is the thesis that there is a universal human need to belong to a culture— to belong, that is, to a self-conscious group with a known history, a group that by preserving and transmitting its customs, memories, and common practices confers the primary pigment of individual identity on the persons it comprehends...
...But I had better warn in advance that I find the idea of "recognition" elusive...
...Neutrality is likely to work well only in immigrant societies where everyone has been similarly and in most cases voluntarily transplanted, cut off from homeland and history...
...And it has been made explicit in the way I indicated above, by the spread of the idea that we are formed by recognition...
...In the work of the liberal culturalists, all the efforts of unparochial recognition prove their thinking to have been, as it were, preliberalized...
...If it be answered "But theirs was not authentic," one can note the weirdness of adopting a Nazi criterion of worth in an attempt to invalidate Nazi culture...
...We must by no means look skeptically on the claims of a culture—a race, a religion, a tribe, or a not yet recognized nation...
...A judgment can be agreed on, Kantian universalism seems to say, no matter how wide the distance between the judge and other potential judges in other settings...
...What makes us affect gratitude instead of anger in return...
...Yet Blake declares that the artist is any man or woman, that his or her particulars are sufficient materials for reflection: nothing is faster than thought and nothing weighs more...
...Nothing gives life a meaning—nothing except the socially illegible and arbitrary energy of a person...
...I believe a similar picture could be reconstructed from the writings of Charles Taylor and others...
...Can there be wrong but well-meaning recognitions that do less than real damage...
...Can one be sure about Katanga...
...There is an awkward circularity in listing "cultural interests" under the options provided by an entity called a culture...
...It would be a good thing, we are asked to agree, for liberal states to answer the call early, and as fully as possible when they feel it close to home...
...A piece of extracurricular knowledge may be useful here...
...Science will not do it, poetry will not do it, psychoanalysis may produce the desired assent but that, too, constitutes no more than a provisional understanding, and what none of these things can perform no ideology or system of life is likely to achieve...
...And yet, to make that admission is to break again into the language of nonculturalist liberalism: a language in which we refuse to say that culture is the definitively naturalizing fact of life, or that it represents a humanization of the social artifice in a way that mere politics fails to accomplish...
...The statement is less sweeping than it sounds when you consider how much hangs on "so far as we can tell" and "represents the popular will...
...Cultures, as Raz noticed in another connection, come to us frankly professing to give a meaning to life...
...He is given a language by a culture, and his success is contingent on his work in the medium of that language...
...how frequent the random killings of civilians...
...At least, that is how it looks in translation...
...More palpably here than in Walzer, we are confronted with an idea of political fulfillment that is borrowed from aesthetics...
...Geographically, scarcities of transportation will contract the space in which an exclusionist pilgrimage is executed...
...Naturam furca expelles, tamen usque recurret: "Though you drive out nature with a pitchfork yet it will come back all the way...
...Philosophers do not make good generals, and generals do not make good philosophers...
...A pair of key sentences in "Nation and Universe" sketch a view of the particulars of life that matter most...
...In his argument, priority is ascribed again and again to the culture...
...The courtroom case for identity in Mashpee was that a tribe in possession again of a custom it had forgotten for generations had as much identity with itself as a person who loses contact with the data of identity while asleep...
...Yet to attend to all that occurs in such acts of taking possession is beyond the scope of the cultural interpreter, on Walzer's view...
...He agrees with Walzer in one large prescriptive assumption...
...I share the Enlightenment belief in progress rather less...
...The cultural negotiations already under way are brought forward as a strenuous but not discouraging example of what the future holds for the North Atlantic commercial democracies generally...
...Raz is the most troubled of these writers when he looks at this prospect...
...The quest for self-realization or self-fulfillment, as Taylor also calls it, is not undertaken by the individual alone...
...When he wrote the sentence, I believe the proper logic for a people was foremost in Walzer's mind...
...The particularisms are those of separate peoples and we are asked for the moment to suppress our knowledge that it is from just such collective agencies as this that personal identity is most at risk...
...But Taylor is willing to specify, more tender-mindedly than Walzer, the harm that may ensue upon "misrecognition" —an idea I confess to finding unintelligible, which Taylor associates with evils he thinks distinguishable from physical abuse, economic exploitation, and social subordination (for all of which the liberal state has sanctions already in store...
...To repeat: I do not believe that the imputed state of mind has occurred or that it can occur, in the nature of culture and in the nature of the way people use culture...
...If," Walzer affirms, "there turn out to be political or economic disadvantages in their departure, they will find a way to reestablish connections...
...Works Cited James Clifford, "Identity in Mashpee," in The Predicament of Culture (Harvard University Press, 1988...
...A main duty of the state is to see that the course of cultivation is allowed to go on unimpeded...
...The best shaming device is the suggestion that cultural identity is nothing to be puffed up about: that there are persons, whose approval is to be desired, who respect people less for their self-image than for other traits...
...Perhaps, in Bentham's manner, we could arrive at a quotient incorporating at once the intensity and the popularity of the commitment...
...Its translation from idealist psychology to republican politics is an uneasy affair, in ways the translator has not always taken into account...
...Very likely, its liberality is assured by the fact that culture itself is progressive...
...One might, that is to say, make the way of life one's own, give it the coloring of a life one says one has chosen...
...Anyway, the version of progress he invokes, which manages to encompass progress both toward universality and toward tribal 94 • DISSENT Arguments intensities of feeling, is out of my imaginative reach...
...I am not convinced that Raz's first two kinds of liberalism are historically or ideologically distinct...
...their effort to be moved is an emotional exertion with a practical correlative...
...They—culture, history, identity—have done many things for us and many things to us...
...Rather, the culture and its claims are legitimate until proved otherwise...
...We may believe in the dialogue of the mind with itself, or other forms of inward colloquy, but these emerged from an internalization of a public process: they are the forming and reforming of a self-image that was always already social...
...5) What is done for artistic and community activities should extend to "public space (as well as air space on television...
...Its plausibility has come from throwing around the idea of culture a sympathetic haze that owes its charm to a reminiscence of the atmosphere of a person...
...Every pragmatic suggestion of culturalism betrays itself in a forcing together of two, mutually repellent, hypotheses: that the tribal cultures will abate not a jot of their property in each member whom they own...
...The demand of culturalism is to heighten continually the moral burden of attention to the expressive phenomena of the group...
...The only lesson drawn appears to be that we have an obligation not to interfere with the popular force of a nation coming late to its sovereign cultural identity...
...But what must strike anyone reading this characterization of the mobile, multi-essential, divided life of the liberal tribalist is how consciously impoverished it is...
...The options turn out to include—in a generic and unspecifying list— "cultural, sporting, and other interests we develop...
...His style is calm, settled, and ameliorative, though it tends to cover its traces by rhetorical turns at moments where crucial choices are made...
...But it does so while imposing liberal protections for individual freedom on those cultures...
...My experience as a reader is that turns of phrase like this are too fine in what they accomplish to be a product of conscious planning...
...The final point is made glancingly...
...I said "illiberal societies...
...Yet Walzer concedes that all cultures are artificial...
...Is this a state of mind that has ever been attained...
...Michael Walzer has defended this conception of the social critic in two recent books, The Company of Critics and Interpretation and Social Criticism...
...without the actions at Telemark and a few other turns of fortune, their culture might have been strong enough to win the last world war...
...a wholly antitheatrical character with a tacit but deep antipathy to dramatic displays, whose appetite to be a spectator at any catastrophe is an absolute zero, and whose imagination of disaster may in consequence be cooler than is sometimes useful in predicting the dark developments of a bad time...
...As it gets worked out, choice is quickly transferred to the culture, its "particularism" being the only WINTER • 1995 • 91 Arguments relevant one...
...His essay is in some ways a Canadian sermon to Americans...
...As the argument proceeds I will try to keep in mind those necklaces and lullabies...
...Individual and culture are alike expressive...
...Raz compares the unconditional character of this attachment to the love we feel for our children...
...whether or not the tribe itself counts women...
...A too-liberal structure of laws, such as might impede the culture from exerting creative control in shaping its members, he compares to the censorship that would prevent the playwright from assuming control of his craft...
...The culturalist story acquires its pathos in the usual way, by the personification of an abstract entity...
...Self-sufficiency might easily be considered evidence of authenticity and hence of worthiness of support...
...Really, the shortest way back to a grasp of authenticity is by a consistent reversion to natural rather than artificial ideas of community...
...Many of them won't go all that far...
...it is more immediately the way of life, the culture of respect and concern, that he shares with his fellows...
...They are preparing themselves by delusive affection for the empty charity of war...
...Raz's grave enthusiasm may seem obtuse, but in another sense his is a necessary, and a doggedly honest, effort to call 98 • DISSENT Arguments the theoretical bluff of the culturalists...
...The plurality of cultures is just a plurality of callings...
...We, the argument seems to say, know better, or rather some part of us knows...
...The first option is the more culturalist...
...Let the people go who want to go," Walzer continues...
...Still, why not put it the other way: "Rather than support separation, I would be inclined to support the existing unions except when "9 A disposition to favor the separatist claims in practice seems to be an irresistible effect of having granted in theory a superior reality to "particularism...
...Independence, inner direction, individualism, self-determination, self-government, freedom, autonomy: all these can be regarded as universal values, but they all have particularist implications...
...they would be unlikely to do so even if stupefied by theorists into thinking of 100 • DISSENT Arguments themselves only in the context of culture...
...In practice it gets its force from a literal correlation with region, religion, and race, in ascending order of importance...
...It brings a characterization of the critic as someone who owes his first loyalty to the community in which his thought, being, and social identity have matured...
...Cultural self-definition will prove to be, thinks Walzer, what totalitarianism was not: an eternal fact of human nature...
...To the extent that Raz fails to affirm the anti-assimilationist scruple, his politics stand exposed as nothing but pluralist liberalism cured of its prejudices...
...How much, Blake asked, that we care for, how much that we habitually associate with culture, does not come from art, from contest, and from the personal imagination that culturalists ask us to connect essentially with culture...
...This is an example the liberal theorists of culturalism want very much not to see brought into view, but the Nazis were great pioneers of identity culture...
...Critics, and even reformist leaders like Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr...
...I am looking ahead in the argument but I should like these questions to be held in mind...
...Person (singular) and people (a culture) are brought into play in the first clause, in the second only people is cashed, yet we are made to feel we have learned something important about persons (the synonym for people in the first clause, uncashed but kept in play...
...It is all they have...
...Are we to understand the misrecognized as hardheaded, in the sense of calculating, when they deliver their complaint...
...Tribalism being a category of authenticity, what is posited in the defective case seems to be an inauthentic authenticity...
...We had better understand it, if only to coexist with it...
...James Clifford dealt with such a case in "Identity in Mashpee," drawing the moral that, for a legal claim of tribal status, the difficulties were apt to be formidable in the eyes of a late, liberal, artificial culture...
...What can it mean for liberals, holding the beliefs we hold about politics, to say without a contest: "Let the people go who want to go...
...Which—it may be asked—is the grosser paternalism: to say "None of our brute individualism for you, in your otherwise flourishing, value-filled cultures...
...On this plan liberalism is required to integrate, into the self-understandings of other cultures, the political freedoms that make liberal ideology what it is...
...But look at what Walzer actually wrote...
...Reading for consistency with the singular subject, we come up with: "People have to choose for themselves, each person for himself...
...If to be socialized at all is to be drawn into the web of beliefs, customs, and practices that define a culture, then to be initiated into a society where diversity is supposed a good thing is already to have embraced the multicultural condition...
...The proposal is sketched in his essay "The Politics of Recognition" (in Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition, 1992), a secondary purpose of which may be to suggest what the tribes will look like once their struggles for power are reduced from wars for authority to contests for representation...
...Every effort he makes toward a reform of its life and habits will presuppose the critic's rootedness and his desire for continuing WINTER • 1995 • 89 Arguments membership...
...Many permanent features of human life are bad and partly eradicable: envy comes to mind...
...Shall duration be the sole criterion...
...When I look into the meaning of the assumption, I am first troubled, then baffled...
...The individual will be respected to the exact degree that he shows his markings by belonging to a "culture of respect and concern...
...We iterate, each according to our group's custom, the goods we care about...
...It makes, at least, a different and a possible description of the author of the argument we have surveyed...
...The theorists of cultural identity are hatching dragons...
...It is not yet firmly entrenched, but Taylor writes as if it almost were and invites consideration of the question: what would it be like if many liberals came to think like this...
...There is a revealing moment in Taylor's essay on negative liberty when he observes that freedom without a positive idea of self-realization is "philistine...
...And yet, at just this point the writers in question shift their stress...
...Thus, in the name of liberal values, the believer in liberal justice is obliged, as an act of cultural faith, to let the good particularism of the culture take charge of its members—their way of life, their life, and their lives, which are different names for the same thing...
...In the light of facts like these, "They won't go all that far" is an apothegm almost parental, and generalized from the experience of a parent in a lucky family...
...The "options" on this view do not precede the person...
...I doubt that Raz has felt it...
...Of goods...
...Shall we judge authenticity then by countable rituals...
...Joseph Raz's essay "Multiculturalism: A Liberal Perspective" (Dissent, Winter 1994) aims to pass from Walzer's "understanding" and Taylor's "recognition" to an idea of multicultural toleration as a natural right of citizens in a liberal democracy...
...Knowing his audience well, Taylor, by the mere evocation of national tranquility, is able to sidestep the challenge of liberal secularism to all bargains with cultural identity...
...Enlightenment theorists of culture like Burke tended to compare it instead to the love we feel for a grandparent...
...In a more recent essay, "The New Tribalism" (Dissent, Spring 1992), the bearings are more worldly: what ought to be the liberal response to the struggles for cultural identity and nationhood in Europe and elsewhere today...
...This commonality of interlocking practices," he continues, "making up the range of life options open to anyone socialized into them is what cultures are...
...They give a meaning to life, and they are fun...
...As I see it, a decent appreciation of such critics requires that we reject the culturalist idea...
...If it went on to survive a hundred years or more, any culturalist would be compelled to admit it was indeed a culture with a horizon of meaning...
...But Taylor himself soon aborts the inquiry...
...The suggestion is preposterous...
...To the culture, there is no substitute for six thousand years...
...A century of Little Rocks, made infinitely repeatable by a government that intones the legitimacy of a century of Orval Faubuses: the education budget and the military budget required to pay for such an operation would work nicely in concert for each other's increase, while negating each other's effects...
...The theorists assent to the culturalist argument from a belief that we ought, as a matter of democratic duty or international realism, to widen our support for acts of membership in identity-cultures...
...In the light of the new uses we have looked at, this piece of phrasing points to the survival of an earlier, pre-culturalist, layer of his thinking...
...how brutal the tortures, the rapes, the religious racial propaganda strewing the path of the defeated...
...Raz concludes his essay with some practical liberal multiculturalist proposals...
...Do we want to set it realistically low...
...I am what I am," writes Raz, "but equally I am what I can become or could have been...
...I will be an American, a Jew, an Easterner, an intellectual, a professor...
...The shift is one more symptom of the tenderness culture now admits among the debts that are properly owed to it once personified...
...When Taylor comes to describe the goods of an identity-culture, he is not far from describing goods already associated with the life of a liberal society...
...All that remained was to find a method by which the routines of authentication could be decently bureaucratized...
...However things are with divine creativity, the values and virtues of human creativity can best be understood in the reiterative mode...
...In fact," writes Walzer, "it is entirely possible to inherit a life and still possess it as one's own...
...Instead of the construction of a person by a culture, the topic becomes "the importance of cultural survival...
...The shedding of irony is a gesture that they hope will be taken seriously...
...We may each make the passage distinctly, yet, for all of us, self-realization is a discovery of the meaning of life...
...One might choose to treat America as the rare case of normal humanity and not therefore eccentric...
Vol. 42 • January 1995 • No. 1
