Subjects of tolerance: Why we are civilized and they are the barbarians

Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World

Volumn , Issue , 2006, Pages 298-317

  Brown, Wendy ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 79957063740     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
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References (48)

1. Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim / Bad Muslim: America, The Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Pantheon, 2004), 18.
2. Bernard Lewis, "The Roots of Muslim Rage," The Atlantic (September 1990)
3. Samuel Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?," Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 31
4. both cited in Mamdani, Good Muslim / Bad Muslim, 20-21.
5. Immanuel Kant, "What Is Enlightenment?" in Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 54. Kant, of course, also problematizes this very formulation.
6. On Bush's regular consultations with rapture Christians and the effects of these consultations on foreign policy, see Rick Perlstein, "The Jesus Landing Pad," in The Village Voice, May 18, 2004.
7. See also Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), in which Bush responds to the question of whether he consulted his father before deciding to launch war on Iraq: "You know he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to" (94). Bush also told Woodward, "I believe the United States is the beacon for freedom in the world⋯. I say that freedom is not America's gift to the world. Freedom is God's gift to everybody in the world⋯. And I believe we have a duty to free people" (88-89).
8. Chandran Kukathas is a significant exception in his argument that liberty of conscience and autonomy are not only not equivalent but may well conflict at times. He argues that liberty of conscience, not autonomy, is the basis of toleration and that liberty of conscience must trump autonomy when they do conflict. See his The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), esp. chap. 1, 36-37.
9. Susan Mendus, Toleration and the Limits of Liberalism (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1989), 56.
10. Will Kymlicka, "Two Models of Pluralism and Tolerance" in Toleration: An Elusive Virtue, ed. David Heyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 97.
11. Bernard Williams, "Toleration: An Impossible Virtue?" in Toleration, ed. Heyd, 24.
12. Michael Ignatieff, "Nationalism and Toleration," in The Politics of Toleration, ed. Susan Mendus (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999).
13. In his comments on my work at a symposium, Barry Hindess reminded me that the temporalization of difference is an insidious and pervasive trope in Western political and social thought, one that is not limited to liberalism or even to colonial discourse. Comment by Barry Hindess at the Launch of the Center on Citizenship, Identity, and Governance, Open University, Milton Keynes, England (March 2005). For an elaboration of this position, see the essay he co-authored with Christine Helliwell, "The Temporalising of Difference," Ethnicities 5, no. 3: 414-18.
14. See, e.g., Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1995).
15. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1962)
16. Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1952).
17. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1950).
18. The phrase "primary mutual hostility" appears in Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 69, and natural "sexual rivalry" in Totem and Taboo, 144.
19. Freud, Group Psychology, 68.
20. Continued revelations about the deliberate development and approval of the techniques of torture and abuse practiced at Abu-Ghraib, and their continuity with those practiced both at Guantánamo and in United States detention sites for "suspected terrorists," gives little credence to initial defenses of the Abu-Ghraib scenes as "animal house" behavior. For news on these links, see, e.g.: Josh White, "Abu Ghraib Tactics Were First Used at Guantánamo," Washington Post, July 14, 2005, A01
21. Oliver Burkerman, "Bush Team 'Knew of Abuse' at Guantánamo," The Guardian, September 13, 2004, http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1303105,00.html
22. Richard Serrano and John Daniszewski, "Dozens Have Alleged Koran's Mishandling," LA Times, May 22, 2005, A1.
23. The latter distress is one Freud makes quite concrete in his brief discussion of panic, a feeling he describes as "feeling alone in the face of danger," which is experienced psychically whenever the emotional ties that sustain us are felt to disintegrate (Freud, Group Psychology, 36).
24. Rousseau's version of the social contract follows this model precisely, however. His effort to "transform each individual, who by himself is entirely complete and solitary, into a part of a much greater whole, from which the same individual will then receive, in a sense, his life and his being" parallels Freud's understanding of a group as individuals in love with something common that is also external to the group. See Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (New York: Penguin, 1968), 84.
25. Note, too, that commune moi ("common me, or common ego") is Rousseau's norm for the formation (exceeding a mere tie that binds) produced by and at the heart of the social contract (Social Contract, 61).
26. "Civilization⋯ obtains mastery over the individual's dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city" (Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 84). Cities represent the literal conquest of man, the containment of his instincts, but Freud is also analogizing the civilized psyche to a conquered city. Civilization thus entails a double subjection, first by the aim-inhibition required by civilization, and then by the introjection of civilization's demands into the psyche. Both of these are challenged by the psychic undoing that produces the group.
27. Freud, Group Psychology, 13-15.
28. This converges with Hegel's analysis of the philosophical movement from family to ethical life: "Love means in general the consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am not isolated on my own, but gain my self-consciousness only through the renunciation of my independent existence and through knowing myself as the unity of myself with another and of the other with me. But love is a feeling, that is, ethical life in its natural form. In the state, it is no longer present. There, one is conscious of unity as law; there, the content must be rational, and I must know it. The first moment in love is that I do not wish to be an independent person in my own right and that, if I were, I would feel deficient and incomplete" (Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Allen W. Wood [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], Addition to Paragraph 158, 199). "The family disintegrates, in a natural manner and essentially through the principle of personality, into a plurality of families whose relation to one another is in general that of self-sufficient concrete persons and consequently of an external kind" (ibid., §181, 219).
29. Freud, Group Psychology, 15.
30. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 161.
31. See "President Sworn-in to Second Term," Inaugural Address, George W. Bush http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/01.
32. Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack, end of chap. 3.
33. See also State of the Union Address, February 2, 2005: "In the long term, the peace we seek will only be achieved by eliminating the conditions that feed radicalism and ideologies of murder. If whole regimes of the world remain in despair and grow in hatred, they will be the recruiting grounds for terror, and that terror will stalk America and other free nations for decades. The only force powerful enough to stop the rise of tyranny and terror, and replace hatred with hope, is the force of human freedom. Our enemies know this, and that is why the terrorist Zarqawi recently declared war on what he called the 'evil principle' of democracy. And we've declared our own intention: America will stand with the allies of freedom to support democratic movements in the Middle East and beyond, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world" (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/02).
34. For the Bush quotation, see coverage of Bush's interviews with the Al-Arabiya and Al-Hurra television networks, May 5, 2004 (CNN.com 6 May 2004 http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/05/05/bush.abuse/). Regarding Blair's statement, I heard this on BBC between May 3 and 5, 2004, but have not been able to find a corresponding print version.
35. Talal Asad makes a similar argument in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). See 268, 306.
36. Convergent studies that have linked liberalism's constitutive outside with its internal operations (as opposed to treating its involvement with colonial or imperial discourses as "alien intrusions," to use Barry Hindess's phrase) include: Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)
37. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)
38. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993)
39. Barry Hindess and Christine Helliwell, "The 'Empire of Uniformity' and the Government of Subject Peoples," Cultural Values 6, no. 1 (2002): 137-50.
40. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 87.
41. Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 106. Benhabib elaborates: "These norms expand on the principles of universal respect and egalitarian reciprocity, which are crucial to a discourse ethic⋯. voluntary self-ascription and freedom of exit and association expand on the concept of persons as self-interpreting and self-defining beings whose actions and deeds are constituted through culturally informed narratives" (132).
42. Benhabib, The Claims of Culture, 105 and 111.
43. Avishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal, "Liberalism and the Right to Culture," Social Research 61, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 491-510.
44. Benhabib tries to have it both ways: culture is both something to which one has a right and constitutive, in the same way that persons are "self-interpreting and self-defining," while their "actions and deeds are constituted through culturally informed narratives" (The Claims of Culture, 132).
45. Even Will Kymlicka, who works assiduously to establish "cultures or nations [as] basic units of liberal political theory" because "cultural membership provides us with an intelligible context of choice, and a secure sense of identity and belonging," formulates the project of "liberalizing culture" as a legitimate one even for those outside the culture at issue. Liberals, he writes, should "seek to liberalize [nonliberal nations]" and "should promote the liberalization of [illiberal] cultures" (Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996], 93, 94-95, 105).
46. The justification for this lies in the distinction between liberal legalism and culture that we have been considering. Drawing upon Yael Tamir's Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), Kymlicka depicts liberal nations as having "societal cultures," which provide their "members with meaningful ways of life across the full range of human activities, including social, educational, religious, recreational, and economic life, encompassing both public and private spheres" (76). Striking in their absence from this list of what "societal culture" comprises, however, are politics and law, the very domains liberalism treats as primary domains of power. Liberalized cultures (including the "societal cultures" of liberal society) are considered to generate and circulate meaning but not power, because liberalization is by definition the devolution of power to the morally autonomous subject theorized by Kant and Freud, and the secular state theorized by social contract theorists. Thus, while Kymlicka, more than many other liberals, acknowledges that liberal societies "are cultural too," he legitimates the imposition of liberal political values on nonliberals, i.e., he legitimates liberal imperialism.
47. George W. Bush, "State of the Union Address," U.S. Department of State, January 29, 2002, http://www.state.gov.g/wi/.
48. Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 257.