**http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=f2281gdy909q6jfczpj22f7gtkg3cqft ________________________
"Sounds good, but Brown isn't having any. Her critique of tolerance challenges the common assumption that the differences the sharp edges of which tolerance is supposed to blunt "took their shape prior to the discourse called on to broker them." No, she insists, those differences are *produced* by a regime of tolerance that at the same time produces a status quo politics built on the assumption that difference cannot be negotiated but can only be managed. When difference is naturalized, she explains, it becomes the mark not of an ideological or political divide (in relation to which one might have an argument), but of a cultural divide (in relation to which each party says of the other, "See, that's just the way they are"). If people do the things they do not because of what they believe, but because they are Jews, Muslims, blacks, or gays, it is no use asking them to see the error of their ways, because it is through those same ways — *naturally*theirs — that they see at all. When President Bush reminds us of '"the *nature* of our enemy,"' he is, in effect, saying there's no dealing with these people; they are immune to rational appeals; the only language they understand is the language of force. ... "On balance, I think it is the latter; she wants a better universalism than liberalism's, but her articulations of it are without content, as they will necessarily be if she thinks to derive it from her critique of liberalism and liberal tolerance. That critique, to repeat the point made earlier, tells you what liberal tolerance is made of; it doesn't tell you whether it is bad or good, and it certainly doesn't tell you what should be put in its place. A phrase like "deep knowledge of others" is a teaser: Deeper than what? Deep, how? How deep do we go? If the knowledge is deeper than the surface differences — of religion, ideology, culture, tradition — that now divide us, then what it brings us to is the "thin" personhood of liberalism and a politics in which substantive beliefs are subordinated to some form of Kantian proceduralism, precisely what Brown has been arguing against. And if the knowledge is deeper than the caricatures that fill our political rhetoric, and what we're supposed to do is really understand, say, the Islamic temperament from the inside, then we would either have to become Muslim (in which case we would inherit the exclusionary as well as the generous aspects of that faith), or we would have to view Islam from a perspective above all faiths, and that would again bring us to classical liberalism and its claim (denied by Brown) to occupy a position that is not one." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20061116/ee262c62/attachment.htm>