Author: Ophelia Benson

Some more from The Ethics of Identity. Appiah cites on page 124 a term (via Kymlicka via Margalit and Raz) ‘decayed cultures’:

If what we have is a troubled period of cultural transition, though, it isn’t obvious that such conditions diminish our liberty or autonomy – our ability to choose among a wider range of options. Indeed, as John Tomasi suggests, a greater degree of personal autonomy may be afforded by a less rigid “choosing context,” where there are fewer constraints on what counts as an acceptable life plan than there would be in a more stable cultural community.

That’s pretty much what drives my interest in this whole subject, I think – the idea (and the possibility, the possible fact) that the more stable and rooted and unchanging a culture or identity is, the less liberty and autonomy there is, and the more constraints there are on what counts as an acceptable life plan. Now…I can certainly see that the value of liberty and autonomy and a wider range of options does not automatically or self-evidently trump the value of stability and rootedness, of security and familiarity. But then neither does the value of stability and rootedness self-evidently trump the value of liberty and autonomy. The rhetoric of community and identity too often seems to assume that it does.

And even if the value of liberty doesn’t automatically trump the value of stability, it does seem to be an empirical fact that once people get a taste of freedom and choice and the possibility of a range of options, they tend to like them, and to be upset when they are taken away. Literature and history are full of stories of people escaping from tyrannical parents, masters, owners, bosses, small towns; there are relatively few stories of people escaping from freedom to go back to tyranny. I don’t think that’s just some random fact; I think it reflects human desires and longings.

I think the deeply obscured, masked, disguised fact about the longing for community and stability that communitarians and communalists urge on us is that what is longed for is the confinement and limitation of other people – but not of the self. In other words, it may be that community and tradition and stable cultural communities appeal a great deal more to people who are in a position of power over other people in such communities than they do to the underlings. Brahmins like the old ways better than dalits do. It was slaveowners who were nostalgic for The Old South, it wasn’t slaves. I think that’s worth at least keeping in mind when we muse on community and identity.

Liberals tend to be sympathetic to a Millian notion of experimentation and social progress; the prospect of freezing existing prejudices and inequities and bigotries – the edict that “whatever is, is right” – is hardly a palatable one.

Page 125, we’re on now.

Raz, in a 1994 essay on multiculturalism, seems to be upholding something unexceptionable when he states, “It is in the interest of every person to be fully integrated in a cultural group.”…Much depends on how you construe this requirement. Was Rimbaud – scandalizing tout le monde before he went hopscotching through Africa – fully integrated into a cultural group? What about the Sudanese Islamic scholar Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, who was executed for heresy in 1985 because of his opposition to traditional sharia? Some people, it appears, actively resist being fully integrated into a group, so that they may gain some measure of distance from its reflexive assumptions; to them, “integration” can sound like regulation, even restraint – especially to liberals who, by tradition, favor Freiheit over Einheit.

Exactly. I’m one of those – I favor Freiheit over Einheit. And the thing about that is, freedom leaves you free to choose unity (though only for yourself, not for your slaves), but unity doesn’t necessarily leave you free to choose freedom. So if there is a forced choice between the two, it seems considerably fairer to go with Huck and Jim than to try to find our way back to Tara.

As I mentioned, I’ve been reading a lot of good sense in Anthony Appiah’s book, and here’s some related good sense from Amartya Sen. The identity two-step.

What we ought to take very seriously is the way Islamic identity, in this sort of depiction, is assumed to drown, if only implicitly, all other affiliations, priorities, and pursuits that a Muslim person may have. A person belongs to many different groups, of which a religious affiliation is only one…[T]o give an automatic priority to the Islamic identity of a Muslim person in order to understand his or her role in the civil society, or in the literary world, or in creative work in arts and science, can result in profound misunderstanding.

Or to the Catholic identity of a Catholic person or the Hindu identity of a Hindu person, and so on. But it’s such a common move. We could call it the Bunting move. (But that would be unkind. Only she’s been so chatty lately.)

The increasing tendency to overlook the many identities that any human being has and to try to classify individuals according to a single allegedly pre-eminent religious identity is an intellectual confusion that can animate dangerous divisiveness. An Islamist instigator of violence against infidels may want Muslims to forget that they have any identity other than being Islamic. What is surprising is that those who would like to quell that violence promote, in effect, the same intellectual disorientation by seeing Muslims primarily as members of an Islamic world. The world is made much more incendiary by the advocacy and popularity of single-dimensional categorization of human beings, which combines haziness of vision with increased scope for the exploitation of that haze by the champions of violence.

Could not possibly agree more. So why is it such a common move, one wonders. Habit? Partly. People seem to be in the habit of thinking that’s a ‘progressive’ and kind and sympathetic way of looking at things. It’s time to break that habit, folks.

In fact, of course, the people of the world can be classified according to many other partitions, each of which has some—often far-reaching—relevance in our lives: nationalities, locations, classes, occupations, social status, languages, politics, and many others. While religious categories have received much airing in recent years, they cannot be presumed to obliterate other distinctions, and even less can they be seen as the only relevant system of classifying people across the globe. In partitioning the population of the world into those belonging to “the Islamic world,” “the Western world,” “the Hindu world,” “the Buddhist world,” the divisive power of classificatory priority is implicitly used to place people firmly inside a unique set of rigid boxes. Other divisions (say, between the rich and the poor, between members of different classes and occupations, between people of different politics, between distinct nationalities and residential locations, between language groups, etc.) are all submerged by this allegedly primal way of seeing the differences between people.

Those rigid boxes – how I hate those rigid boxes. How I hate the way we all keep being shoved into them.

To focus just on the grand religious classification is not only to miss other significant concerns and ideas that move people. It also has the effect of generally magnifying the voice of religious authority. The Muslim clerics, for example, are then treated as the ex officio spokesmen for the so-called Islamic world, even though a great many people who happen to be Muslim by religion have profound differences with what is proposed by one mullah or another.

Oh, just read the article. It’s one of those ones where I want to quote great chunks, and that’s copyright violation, and you can just read it anyway. It’s great stuff.

Maryam has an update today.

Thanks to all those who have asked about Reza Moradi and how they can help. We are now in the process of finding a solicitor and organising a campaign in his defence. We’ll need loads of help then. If you want to know a little bit more about what happened, see the upcoming TV International English programme (broadcast Sunday) where I interview him and also show my speech at the March 25 demo for free expression. We’ll keep everyone posted on any new developments as soon as possible.

Here is a photo of two cops in conversation with Moradi. He looks exactly how I would feel and look in such a situation. One can almost see the words ‘what the hell are you hassling me for, I haven’t done anything wrong!’ floating in the air.

A blogger gives pictures and eyewitness accounts here. There’s what appears to be a picture of the guy who complained to the police about Moradi doing just that while Maryam speaks to the crowd. A sinister moment with a baffling and infuriating aftermath. There’s no law against the cartoons, there’s no law against the demonstration, but the Crown Prosecution service is looking into Moradi’s ‘case’ all the same. Why bother having any laws at all, if you can just be prosecuted any old time for ‘offending’ people? At that rate, it’s a miracle I’m not a lifer!