Year: 2010

No, I don’t agree with Taner Edis, and I agree even less as he clarifies. This is all the odder in that he doesn’t even agree with himself – he prefers secular liberalism himself, but says he can’t defend it. Yes you can, Taner! Try harder! It can be done. It can’t be done absolutely, or permanently, or in such a way that no one anywhere will disagree – but it can still be done.

Meanwhile…

My political preference is very much the opposite. I would, personally, consider a multicultural regime a dystopia…My reasons for all of this, however, have almost everything to do with my particular interests and aspirations, and next to nothing to do with any claim that these are universal considerations applicable to all reasonable people.

Well you can fix that. Read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights again. Read Susan Moller Okin’s ‘Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?’ Read the first few articles in Martha Nussbaum’s Sex and Social Justice. Read some Amartya Sen. Re-read Mill.

How, then, would multicultural laws work? We do have proposals to this effect, and they come down to communities having a good deal of autonomy in regulating their own affairs…

But again, that treats ‘communities’ as if they were people. ‘Communities’ don’t have affairs; people do, one at a time. The affairs of one person may be different from those of another person, and it just isn’t safe to assume that ‘communities’ as such treat all their members equally. We know that some ‘communities’ don’t treat all their members equally, and that that’s why it’s dangerous to give communities certain kinds of autonomy.

[The state] leaves the internal affairs of communities alone. Particularly areas such as family law become the domain of quasi-autonomous communities. After all, if devout Muslims feel that the ability to communally follow sharia law is essential for them to live their religious commitments properly, well, why not? Why interfere?

Because ‘devout Muslims’ aren’t identical to one another, and because one cannot assume that putative ‘Muslim communities’ contain only ‘devout Muslims,’ and because even devout Muslims don’t necessarily agree about what it means to ‘communally follow sharia law.’ Isn’t this obvious? Consider a teenage daughter who wants to refuse a marriage for instance – the community’s autonomy to regulate its own affairs is not in her interest! Consider a married woman who wants to work or go to school; consider an adult daughter who is seeing a man from some other ‘community,’ against the wishes of her parents; consider any girl or woman who has had or is having non-marital sex; consider any girl or woman who doesn’t want to wear hijab; consider anyone at all who wants to leave Islam. Autonomy for their ‘community’ is slavery or death for them. Sorry but it’s just callous to say ‘why not?’ and ‘why interfere?’.

This is not theocracy—Christians, Buddhists, or even secularists can live according to their own law regulating their interactions within their own communities.

No they can’t. That must mean something much more limited than the actual words say, because the actual words are just wrong. There are a very few religious exceptions in US law, for instance (most of which should be repealed), but there’s certainly no blanket right for people to ‘live according to their own law’ even within their darling communities.

Groups are real, they shape and serve their members’ interests, and it is only practical to arrange state institutions to recognize this reality.

Sure, groups are real in some sense (though not in all senses – they are after all an abstraction in many senses), but they do not necessarily or automatically serve the interests of all their members. This is the thing that is absolutely crucial to remember about groups and communities and even families – they are made up of individuals and it is not safe or fair to assume that all those individuals have the same interests all the time. That is precisely why the state should not treat communities as homogeneous and putative community ‘leaders’ or ‘representatives’ as genuinely representing everyone in the notional community.

Now, there are all sorts of practical questions that arise. How, for example, do we propose to keep communities from oppressing some of their members lower in their internal hierarchies? To some extent, this will happen, and there might not be much to do except shrug and say some oxes are always gored under any political order. Still, especially since massive oppression itself can threaten the peace, we would need institutional arrangements to help ease such problems.

Oh, god, Taner – there you go right off the rails. That’s a horrible thing to say! Shrug? I’ll be god damned if I will! There’s plenty of that as it is, we don’t need more of it. And do you really mean to minimize the inherent badness of oppression itself, even if it doesn’t ‘threaten the peace’? If so, why on earth? Oppression is bad – humans treating other humans like crap is the curse of our species – it’s the nightmare from which we can’t awake, to adopt Joyce’s phrase – it’s our horrible dreadful heritage, from the Armenian genocide to the corpses in Jos to the misery of generations of children in Irish industrial schools to the tens of thousands of girls kept out of school in Afghanistan. It’s not something to shrug at.

Taner Edis thinks Gary Bouma is right about secularism and that Russell Blackford is wrong. I think Taner is mostly wrong that Russell is wrong that Gary Bouma is wrong. Still with me?

Note that, as often in the liberal tradition, the main pragmatic argument Blackford uses to promote a secular regime is that it helps keep the peace between rival sects…Such arguments tend to overlook how such reasoning is difficult to generalize beyond the context of Western European Christianity in the modern era.

Possibly. But then…this may sound crude, but the reality is, Western Europe is a pretty good place to live, and it and its descendants are better places to live than most of the rest of the world. Yes, that does sound crude, but it doesn’t sound exactly fictitious, does it. There aren’t great waves of migrants going from France or Canada or New Zealand to live in Pakistan or China or Nigeria, and that’s not just some random accident. Yes Western Europe and its descendants are prosperous as well as liberal, but then it is generally thought that there is a pretty strong connection between the liberalism and the prosperity. So even if it’s true that secularism currently seems easier to defend in (let’s call it) the liberal world than outside it, that doesn’t really indicate that the illiberal world (to put it crudely) has a good case for theocracy.

But today’s multicultural urban environments are different. We have to deal with not one fragmenting religious tradition, but people thrown together from very different faiths, including various kinds of Muslims, Buddhists, African Christianities, indigenous traditions, etc. etc.

Well not exactly ‘thrown together’ – as indicated above, it’s more a matter of people going to such places on purpose, for reasons, because they want to. It’s a matter of mass migration, of large-scale immigration, of people who are drawn to these places because, for whatever reason, they prefer them to their places of origin. For at least some of those people, secularism and liberalism in general are among the reasons, are among the attractions that draw people from all these very different faiths into today’s multicultural urban environments. It is not necessarily the case that people who move from one place to another want their destination place to transform itself into a simulacrum of the place they left behind. People don’t generally leave home in order to find the same thing elsewhere, so the fact that the new place has many unfamiliar aspects is not automatically a reason to change those aspects. For all anybody knows those are the very aspects that draw people in the first place.

[I]t is hard to say that individualist tendencies are clearly dominant over desires to retain some measure of community identity and cohesion. Governmental bodies, unless driven by an explicit secularism in the French style, can effectively deal with representatives of religious communities as intermediaries. Keeping the peace often means ensuring that South Asian Shiites and Korean evangelicals and so forth do not feel disrespected and disadvantaged.

Yes it’s hard to say, but it’s hard to say the reverse, too. It’s hard to say (for sure; without risk of being dead wrong; etc) that desires to retain some measure of community identity and cohesion are clearly dominant over individualist tendencies. And then with the next sentence, we get into the really bumpy territory. What does ‘effectively’ mean there? Sure in some sense government bodies can pretend that various self-appointed people can claim to be ‘representatives’ of all putative members of their putative community, and the two can agree between themselves what is to be done, but the reality is that that’s basically just lazy bullshit, and it gives away genuine representation to people who are not elected and not reliably accountable. It shouldn’t be taken at face value as a good way to ‘deal with’ various ‘communities.’

I think Taner is making the mistake here of treating groups as uniform blocs, when the reality is that all groups are made up of particular individuals, and no matter how instructed or persuaded or indoctrinated those particular individuals are, it cannot simply be assumed that they all think alike on any one question. Even the question of secularism, even the question of individual rights. Some putative members of the putative group may well simply disagree with their putative representatives or leaders – but those people are marginalized and ignored by any system that pretends that self-appointed leaders really can represent people who have no voice.

In a multicultural environment, you have to be careful where and with whom you voice criticism…Atheists will denounce the intellectual pathologies that support supernatural beliefs, but they will do it in academic circles or in small discussion groups. They won’t go to the mass media. That would be foolish, even dangerous.

Well if that’s true we’re screwed – and it’s not true, at least not yet. There is a huge amount of social pressure on atheists to confine our atheism to some small closet or other, but there is also a pretty robust resistance to that pressure. If what Taner says really does describe ‘a multicultural environment’ then I don’t want to live in one – but fortunately I don’t think that’s the only possible understanding of ‘multicultural.’

[A] broader historical experience has made the darker, coercive aspects of liberal politics more obvious. Postmodern multiculturalists legitimately ask why a liberal individualist model, with its violent, anti-communitarian aspects, should remain dominant in the legal realm.

I don’t think so. I think compared to the darker, coercive aspects of communitarian politics, liberalism as such (not liberalism as a front for imperialism or cut-throat capitalism) looks pretty good. I’m not sure what Taner means by that passage, so I won’t belabor the point further, in case I have him wrong.

Now, I don’t particularly like all this. My particular interests drive me toward secular liberalism, even after repeated disenchantment. I dislike tight communities. Multicultural bullshit may be useful bullshit, but I still have an aesthetic dislike toward it that I cannot seem to overcome. But all of this is hardly a basis for public policy.

There I think he’s simply selling himself way short. What he’s describing is not a mere aesthetic dislike. ‘My particular interests’ are what drive people in general toward secular liberalism, especially when they’ve been able to develop a healthy sense of their own interests. People – women, in particular – who’ve been raised within ‘communities’ that see them as inherently and permanently inferior and subordinate are often inhibited from developing a healthy sense of their own interests, but that’s not a reason to raise that inhibition to a general principle. On the contrary. And people’s healthy sense of their own interests is indeed a basis for public policy.