When the question of tolerance is raised, the talk is necessarily of Us and Them. In this conference, the emphasis has been on Them, and on expressions like `Them'. I want to talk rather about Us, and `Us'. My message in a slogan is this: you'll never abolish `Them' unless you abolish `Us'. The quotation marks in this slogan are important: I shall come to them in a moment.
Paradoxes of tolerance.
The idea of tolerance raises two paradoxes:
To see the nature of the paradoxes I have noted, we must distinguish three levels of reflexivity.
1. the level of discourse;
2.the level of epistemology;
3.the level of concrete behaviour.
Let me explain.
1.Discourse. We philosophers like to distinguish between use and mention of expressions. When I saw the title of this conference, I was intrigued by the way it played on a kind of creative and illuminating confusion of use and mention. I'm sure that no such subtlety escapes Paul Bouissac, so it was certainly intentional; but it might look a little different to a philosopher than to someone in other disciplines. In any case, this is how it looked to me: ` ``OTHERS'' IN DISCOURSE' mentions the word `other', rather than using it. So it doesn't mean what hearing the title of the conference (assuming you can't hear the quote marks) might lead you to suppose it means: namely that this conference is about the way that we talk about others. Rather, it's about the role of expressions such as `others' in such talk. As such it draws attention to our capacity to talk about talk: after all, where else would (the word) `others' appear than in discourse?
At the level of discourse, then, the question is how the word `others' and its equivalents are used to exclude, to denigrate, to propagandize, and so on. From what I've heard of the conference papers, this has been treated, in its multifarious aspects, with superb depth and breadth over the last four days. I shall say almost nothing about it. I shall only note that the capacity to raise this question rests on our ability for metalinguistic talk.1 There is not yet anything paradoxical in this, and indeed many people (from Sartre [1956] to Julian Jaynes [1976]) have defined the peculiar character of human consciousness in terms of a certain capacity for explicit reflexivity. At the level of discourse this is, quite literally, the capacity to recognize that discourse exists -- a capacity embodied in the ability to refer to linguistic items, to ``mention'' expressions as well as to ``use'' them. In other words, without denying the existence of simpler forms of consciousness that common sense assumes we share with animals, the claim is that I can be accounted fully conscious, only if I am able to identify my thought as such, my language as such. This means talking about talking: it is a kind of mental duality that arises from the capacity for reflexivity -- for thought about thought, consciousness about consciousness, etc.
2. Epistemology. Suppose that on some difficult question I arrive at the best answer I am able to devise. Is not my confidence in the correctness of my answer just exactly measured by my confidence in the error of alternatives? Short of a relativism that essentially recognizes no objective truth, that seems the only possibility. At the level of epistemology, then, the ideal of tolerance again requires a kind of duality of thought: on any issue about which I have opinions, I must hold together in the mind two levels of thought, one of which explicitly refers to the other. At the first level, I must perforce endorse what I sincerely believe. I can't in consistency say that I believe p, but that it isn't true. At a second level, however, I must be able to contemplate as a genuine possibility the prospect of my being wrong. This kind of epistemological tolerance is sometimes called fallibilism. Actually, it differs little from the scientific attitude as traditionally understood. Science is a search for truth that is genuinely focused on the need to believe what is most likely to be true, coupled with the explicit recognition that the acceptance of these truths is tentative, and subject to subsequent disconfirmation.
3. Behaviour. Finally, at the level of practice, tolerance poses an even more acute problem. For no one can tolerate in others just any kind of behaviour, and we can't avoid asking where the limits of tolerance should be and what transgresses them. Intolerance, for one, seems to transgress: for tolerance, in tolerating intolerance, destroys itself. What is to be tolerated is essentially what offends without harming.2 If it doesn't offend, there is no need for tolerance. If it is truly harmful, it should not be tolerated but condemned as criminal. So one wants to tolerate only the objectively harmless. But of course here's the rub: different people make different judgments about what is objectively harmful. Those who advocate a ban on homosexuals in schools, the pulpit, or the military, for example, or those who advocate clitoridectomy, would surely not acknowledge that their favoured practice is objectively harmful. If they do, they must be committed to the claim that the practice they advocate has benefits that outweigh any harms.
The need for Mental Duality
My central argument is that something like the capacity for mental duality exemplified at the discourse and epistemic levels is also required in connection with the question of the identification of who is to count as ``we''. Indeed, I want to plead for an attitude that is bound to encounter strong resistance from many who identify themselves with minority groups of all kinds -- whether blacks, women, gays, or bicycle riders. It is this: that essentialist, as opposed to political group identification is nothing but the mirror image of the very pernicious tendency of oppressive groups that has caused the myriad forms of exclusion, ranging from slurs to murder, to which minorities have been exposed in the first place and which they are legitimately trying to resist.
I need briefly to explain this distinction between the political and the essential, for it is precisely in relation to this distinction that the duality I advocate must lie.
The Spuriousness of Group Essentialism
At the political level, solidarity is indispensable to any sort of effective action; and some sort of group identification seems to offer the best promise of effecting practical solidarity. At the level of reality, however, solidarity can easily mislead us into believing myths which sooner or later are bound to result in more rhetoric of exclusion, more intolerance, in short, more of just exactly we are trying to reject.
I offer these reflections with some trepidation, because I am aware that they will be unpopular with many people. I persist in doing so because anyone here has in effect defined themselves as committed to tolerance by their very participation in this conference: at worst, if you think I am perniciously wrong, I will at least be giving you an opportunity to exercise just that sort of duality of mind which I have characterized as lying at the heart of tolerance.
So, out with the first of my shocking claims:
To qualify: obviously I don't mean to claim that no person's skin is darker than others. Obviously I don't mean to deny that some people have a sexual preference for people whose anatomy is configured on one plan rather than another. Nor do I claim that no one has recent ancestors who lived on the American continent before it was invaded by Europeans. And so on. Rather, the point is this: the exclusions of which those various groups have been the victims have always been morally wrong precisely because they were the result of extending putative differences in all kinds of factually gratuitous directions from the point of departure represented by the original uncontroversial difference. And since most of the excluded groups have been identified first by opposition to some other group in a position to oppress them, their identity as a group is largely owed, not to themselves, but to those who have excluded and oppressed them. Adopting the identity first foisted on one can, to be sure, be a splendid gesture of defiance: thus throughout history groups of people have adopted as a war cry what was originally the denigrating slur foisted on them by others: -- witness `whig', `queer', `crone', etc. As a political strategy this can be fine; it can also be fine, up to a point, as a psychological antidote to the demeaning power of exclusionary slurs. But what I am arguing is that to accept such identities fully and literally as even partly defining one's own individual being is to give in to precisely the racism that was responsible for the original problem.
Actually, I think every X PRIDE movement is essentially guilty of just the -ism that it it is allegedly rejecting. If you are proud of being white, you are a racist. If you are proud of being black, you are also a racist. How can it be otherwise, if racism is the essentialist belief that your important properties are determined by your membership in a race? If you are proud to be a man, or of being heterosexual, you are a sexist. If you are proud of being a woman, or of being gay, you are a sexist. For in an essential -- or rather essentialist -- sense, groups don't exist, and so no one can owe their essence to the fact that they belong to one group rather than another.
To repeat my disclaimer once again (aware as I am that in this context `disclaimer' may sound like something of a dirty word): I am far from denying the psychological and political reality of groups.3 Groups are all too real. By and large, groups are even more stupid, primitive, and murderous than individuals. They are all too real, most importantly, in one another's members' minds. Political action of all kinds is bound to and indeed needs to exploit this fact. But my plea is this: Even if you have a political need to emphasize your ``group identity'', do not con yourself into believing it.
The premise of my argument is this: membership in a group by itself says nothing about x's nature as an individual. `Your people did this or that to my people,' says x to y: crucified Christ, enslaved my ancestors, -- what's the real meaning of `my people', `your people'? The designation is little more than mystification. For it wasn't literally I who did it, nor was it done to me. On the other hand, I share with both those who did it and those who endured it whatever is true of all humans; and history strongly suggests that this is not something anyone should be especially eager to boast of.
Cultural Essentialism
Some might agree with me in wanting to exorcise the ghost of genetic determinism, but may want to shift the argument's ground to the question of culture. Groups, you might protest, are not genetic in origin in any important sense. (Dobzhansky [1973] and many others have shown that from the biological point of view there is far more diversity within than between any two population groups defined as constituting two races, by whatever state's law this might be.) In the context of current debates about multiculturalism, this, rather than biological aspects of race, is obviously the right category on which to rest the claim for group identity, group rights, or group pride.
Defining the essence of this or that culture, age, or nation is a common pastime. I have neither qualification nor inclination to join in. In fact, I very much suspect that there is no such thing as the spirit of a culture: culture is just what some group puts it about that it is. For even the more modest attempt to define the essence of a person is just doomed to be an exercise in self-deception. A fortiori, the attempt to define an entire age or culture, to say what it is and when it began, is an exercise in fantasy. Out of the multiplicity of genuine properties I might pick out about myself the small number I come up with have no claim to objective salience beyond the very fact that I have picked them. But when I am speaking about myself, that is at least better than nothing. In attempting to define a culture, we are much worse off. For since a culture lacks a literal self, a culture's self definition is never more than the self advertisement of some of its members -- roughly: the ones with the printing presses. Surely there will always be individuals, and maybe groups, who care about rationality, and others who are obnubilated by religion, not excluding the `religion of reason' featuring some caricatured simplification of rationality. There will always be individuals and groups that will want to impose their implausible ideas on others, perhaps because of the very fear they have of seeing the childishness of their superstition exposed. But will there not always be others who face all that fanaticism with as much tranquil and skeptical tolerance as their means and social position allow? By characterizing a culture as if it were one, or belonged to just one of those groups, it seems to me that historians and anthropologists commit the very sin they so loudly deplore: they simply identify a certain view held by a certain particularly influential subgroup of those in power, and stick on it the label of a Culture.
What's good about culture anyway?
But let us even suppose that we can define particular cultures.4 And suppose also that cultures are indeed so powerful, as many have claimed, that individual differences are dwarfed by cultural commonalities and that you will learn more about someone by knowing what culture they belong to than from any other single factor. Still, one might ask, what's good about belonging to a group or culture? This too is dangerous terrain on which I scarcely dare to venture. For the wondrous benefits of culture are often loudly chanted. I can't, however, resist a few skeptical remarks.
Here, then, is my second Shocking Claim: Anything offered as a reason for a practice that is truly cultural AS OPPOSED to rational is a BAD reason.
The reason is one lightly suggested by Stanislaw Lem in his wonderful story ``die Kultur as Fehler,'' which broaches the thought that useful practices perpetuate themselves on their merits (Lem [1976]). The only ones that require one to adduce ``tradition'' as a reason for their perpetuation are those that are either pointless or positively harmful.
Against this, if you are a Humean or Post-Modern skeptic, there isn't all that much more that's rational about anything rather than anything else. Now of course there are plenty of things that belong to a culture -- its food, its ``customs,'' its folklore -- that are both arbitrary and harmless, and can quite properly be the object of one's interest and even admiration. That admiration and interest is just what we would have for non-human diversity: it's perfectly fine, but it's essentially esthetic. But when it comes to what really counts, with issues having to do with the justification of practices that cause suffering, infringe liberty, or are in some other way prima facie harmful, the reason ``because we've always done it that way'' is only appealed to when there is a conflict with some sort of rational procedure, and then the traditional is always a bad reason.5 For gross examples of practices both irrational and harmful which are supported, if not explicitly justified, entirely by reference to tradition, consider clitoridectomy, the refusal to ordain women priests, the ban on homosexuals in the army. But one could probably find examples in all the areas in which different cultures have laid down their special ways of regulating the activities related to food, sex, work, and the raising of children.
Needless to say, the claim applies to majorities as well as minorities. Conversely and not needless to say, it applies to minorities as well as majorities.
I was brought up in white Western culture (though landing in an English boarding school as a foreigner at the age of 8, I got a fair taste of xenophobia.) Yes, but why is this anything either to be proud or ashamed of? I didn't invent Western Culture, I didn't write Mozart's music or discover gravity, so where do I get off being proud of it? It has something to do with my ancestors, you say. But you only have to go back 30 generations for the number of your ancestors to exceed the entire population of the globe.6 Sure, there was overlap: many people were your ancestors many times over, and maybe some people in the world 30 generations ago weren't your ancestors at all. But everyone was your ancestor if you go back far enough. (As indeed, if you go further yet, were the ancestors of today's rats and dogs.) But those lineages couldn't possibly define anything very interesting that some have in common that others do not.
The idea that you could be defined by the fact that you belong to a certain group, rather than by the properties you actually have (some of which may or may not be more prevalent in some of the indefinitely large number of groups you might be classed with), just is racism or sexism or whatever -ism you profess to be complaining about. If it were otherwise, why couldn't I sensibly describe my actual identity predicament thus: ``As a 5-foot 7-inch tall person, I'm proud of the achievements of Newton, who was also 5-foot 7-inches, but deeply ashamed of the crimes of Jack the Ripper who was one too. So you see I'm tragically conflicted about who my people are, and therefore about who I am.''
The corollary of this is that accusations made against certain (usually white) people to the effect that they have inauthentically appropriated the voice of another beg the question of the reality of groups. If groups are essentially unreal apart from the myths that are perpetuated about them (often by others), then it follows that no one may set themselves up to speak for this or that group whether they share the identifying characteristic of the group or not. The only qualification for speaking in any voice is imagination: thus the test of authenticity has to be in the voice itself, not in its group membership credentials.
Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Groups
The situation is complicated by the fact that my belonging to a group may make statistically probable certain things about me. For many of the classes to which my individual characteristics assign me, there is a correlation between being a member of that class and having such and such another characteristic. But just as this is still not enough to warrant treating me in any special way because of my membership in that group and for no other reason, so it's just bad faith (in the sense of Sartre [1956]) for me to identify myself with a group. This doesn't mean I logically must deny that I am partly, or even, if you like (though I don't) largely the product of environmental influences. Nor is it to deny that pretending that membership in a group means something may, for political reasons, be an inevitable shortcut to the lesser evil in all too many a collective choice. But it does mean, I insist, that in so far as you claim that being a member of a group makes you this or that, you fall into exactly the trap you are so often trying to escape.
That's how people are different from atoms. Atoms of a certain natural kind are homogeneous even if their actual behaviour differs. Their homogeneity can be described in terms of a common propensity which they have (to decay within a certain period, for example.) But people are not in this way homogeneous: thus it might be true that the chance of a randomly picked Canadian to have blue eyes is 0.1, but it would be nonsense to interpret this as saying that every Canadian has an equal propensity, to degree 0.1, for having blue eyes.
Conclusion
I have argued that in order to get rid of `them' talk we must first demystify all talk of `us'. I haven't denied the political necessity of acting in concert, nor the psychological importance of the feeling that one is a part of a worthy group. But I have argued that the crucial sin of racism and attitudes like it is their essentialism, and therefore that taking group identity seriously as a reality rather than a mere tactic is just a way of being conceptually colonized by racism itself. In the face of the political necessity for group identification, I am advocating a reflexive mental duality that bears in mind the fact that this identification is based on myth. Variability is the cardinal law of biology, and only through tyranny of one kind or another does it escape being equally the cardinal rule of social life. In the face of actual diversity of opinion and behaviour, the reflexive duality I have been talking about is at the heart of tolerance. It is the only attitude that makes it likely that people will not view their differences as causes for hostility.
I am acutely aware that what I have said about resolving the real problem of determining the line between the harmful and the merely different presupposes the possibility of rational discourse. I have no time to defend this assumption here, except to point out that it appears presupposed by the discourse of any conference such as ours. That is not to minimize the immense difficulty of arriving at rational answers in particular cases.
In the paper that he was unable to come here to present, Takdir Alisjahbana [1993] pleads for a global sense of identification, a Culture of Inclusion. Alisjahbana cites Alfred Weber's contention that ``the simultaneous social and cultural upsurge [in China, India, the Middle East, and Greece] around the 5th Century was caused or at least related to the utilization of the horse as steed and draft animal...'' (The horse gave distances a new measure.) He pleads, in effect, for all human beings to identify themselves as part of a ``we'' that spans the Globe. I want to conclude by endorsing this sentiment, except that where he speaks of a man on a horse, I would rather speak of a human being perched on his or her capacity for rational reflexivity. Once the only group identification of human beings is with the human race as a whole, the range of our solidarity will extend beyond any of the narrow groups currently bent on defining one another by mutual negation. Instead, we shall be able to address rationally and on their merits the very real problems of an ideological and practical nature that will always remain. These will include, of course, questions about where to draw the limit of harmless difference. Pace those who deplore the rising uniformity of the modern world, I doubt if the spread of rationality will ever remove most interesting differences. If we, then including the whole world, succeed in widely spreading the kind of ``double think'' I have set out as central to the reign of tolerance, then we shall live to celebrate diversity.
1 . This use of quotes to mark the distinction between use and
mention shouldn't be confused which the use of ``scare quotes'', as in
the phrase just used, which according to this convention I must refer to
as ```scare quotes'''. The single quotes alert us to the fact that an expression
is being used to refer to itself. The double quotes merely alert you to
the fact that a phrase being used is unfamiliar, strange, or maybe something
to be apologized for as being slightly embarrassing -- such as the present
piece of jargon.
2. This definition makes good sense of the fact that the problem of
tolerance was historically posed in the context of religious freedom. Since
one religious system is hardly likely to prove its superiority to another
either in terms of objective truth or in terms of objective utility, and
since the nature of religious belief and observance makes it peculiarly
vulnerable to the threat of skepticism, it is not surprising that religious
practices have, in at least some traditions, proved capable of generating
the most murderous prejudice. Religion is a good example in that it cannot
be said to be harmless, but the harm comes entirely from its capacity to
offend. The ideal of tolerance intervenes to demand that offense not be
allowed as a motive for harm.
3. `Disclaimer' can seem a dirty word if one thinks of the paradigm
`some of my best friends are ------', where '------' stands for any despised
group that one then goes on to criticize. My disclaimer here has the opposite
logic, since what I am disclaiming is not the blanket adoption of group
stereotype, but the blanket rejection of all group attributes.
4. Otherwise, someone might say, the job of anthropologist would be
too sad. Actually I think an anthropologist could still take an interest
in promoting our knowledge of human diversity even if she didn't claim
to characterize any given culture; but that's another story.
5. Earlier on in the conference, Heather Murray quoted someone
as saying of the Ku Klux Klan, that they ``began in mumbo jumbo and ended
in murder.'' I sometimes think that might be a good definition of any
culture.
6. A matter of simple if startling arithmetic. Assuming that each
person has 2 parents, the number of your ancestors is 2 to the power of
the number of generations considered, or 2 (power 30). That
is something over 1 billion. Not until a few generations ago did the entire
human population reach a billion.
Dobzhansky, Theodosius [1973]. Genetic diversity and human equality: the facts and fallacies in the explosive genetics and education controversy. New York: Harper.
Jaynes, J. [1976] The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Lem, Stanislaw. [1979] A Perfect Vacuum. New York: Harcourt Brace (Harvest Books).
Sartre, J.-P. [1956]. Being and Nothingness. Tr. H. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library.