Call it shouting you down if you will, but what _is_ your alternative? Actually Ia m asking you to speak up. I feel enough of the pull of holism to experience the tug of communitarian critiques of liberal anomie and dissociation, the yearning for a place and a shared way of life -- or I did, up until the ethnic cleanings of the early post-Communist era, which tried to make communitarian societies real by expelling or killing the ones who didn't fit made extremely vivid the virtues of liberalism, whatever its vices.
Either you make room for autonomy and allow for difference -- or you don't. And the "don't" fork of this dilemma is James Madison's rejected alternative, where in discussing faction he says we can seek of ameliorate its effects (his preference, which the design of the US Constitution is supposed to do, I don't say how effectively) or suppress its causes. That means enforced uniformity, intolerance, unfreedom, ethnic cleaning, state religion (whether you call the God you worship Progress or Christ or Allah), and it ends -- as far as I can see -- in the refugee camp or the mass grave for the ones who don't fit it. Sorry if this feels like shouting you down. Show me where Ia m wrong.
There really doesn't seem to me to a third way here. If I'm lacking in imagination, which is likely, I'd really like to know what the third alternative is. Rousseau, who thought about this more deeply than almost anyone, didn't think there was a third way unless you could start over with a small Swiss village, which you can't (he thought), and even then it would have a mandatory civil religion and the death penalty for apostates. See Du Contat Social VIII, de la religion civile (last chapter). Hegel, who tried of course to overcome this contradiction, to give us Sittlichkeit, the ethical life (as it is inaccurately translated) in which we all unthinkingly follow the laws because that's who we are, the community of people who follow these laws, failed: that mindless conformism does not survive the Antigones who want to know Why and do things differently, and so we spiral down to the various forms of self-alienated spirit. (Rousseau's he characterized with lethal accuracy as the Absolute Freedom that leads to the Terror.) But his reconciliation of Sittlichkeit with reason, a community in which we are all at home and which is the embodiment of rationality, where we think the same way because we understand things correctly and not because we are forced too -- that's a fantasy.
I take my cue here from my old teacher Bernard Williams, who had a keen appreciation for the tragic sense of life. (He was also a socialist and a life-long left Labourite.) He followed Thucydides rather than Plato, and understood that the best we have is often deeply flawed, that we can't get all we yearn for and attempting to do it will often lead to sacrificing what good we have.
So, while I am open to an account of what a third way might be, and I know there are forms of social life that we have imagined, some of which might be better than what we have, I think we should meditate long and hard before we trade in freedom, tolerance, and diversity for anything else. They come at a price. We may be lonely. But an alternative will come at a price too. And the price of the alternatives we have have been so far have been appalling high and the benefit not worth the loss.
Our tragedy, the tragedy of reasonably well-off enlightened citizens of bourgeois society (anywhere in the world), which of course is rather different from that of poor people in Bolivia or China, much less the victims of holism in Iran, or at its worst, Dafur or Rwanda -- our plight is that the communitarian critique of liberalism is unassailable and unanswerable, and yet there is no acceptable alternative to liberalism.
--- bhandari at berkeley.edu wrote:
> Continuing with operation personal autonomy, Andie
> writes
>
> "I don't want to intimidate anyone from pointing to
> negative consequences of liberalism. It may be that
> freedom, tolerance, and diversity mean that we must
> deal with social isolation, alienation, troubling
> emptiness. If so, that's too bad.
>
> "So maybe you will have to put up with social
> isolation, alienation, troubling emptiness as the
> price of the freedom to pursue your vision of the
> good, the tolerance of others in putting up with
> your
> following goals they thing are pointless or even
> bad,
> and social isolation because lots of people are
> pursuing different aims.
>
> "Things could be worse. They are in lots of places.
> You
> could be made to march in lockstep, swear fealty to
> ideals you despise at pain on persecution or death,
> have to forswear the things that mean most to you
> because other think your sexual preferences or life
> goals are sinful or counterrevolutionary; you may
> find
> your life full of sociability and meaning in shared
> resentment at the enforcers of virtue."
>
> Perhaps worse for you and me. But for some personal
> autonomy is no
> compensation for social alienation, absence of
> shared social purpose, the
> freedom to pursue an absent good as the good is
> shared and social, and
> consequent meaninglessness.
>
> You are basically trying to shout these people down,
> telling them that
> freedom is more important than community, that they
> should accept as the
> good life the right of all to pursue privately and
> antagonistically their
> version of the good,that collective indifference is
> not too great a price
> to pay to keep the state neutral.
>
> We shouldn't turn our backs on the wish for holism
> even if we are mature
> enlightenment Kantian men. It percolated in Weimar
> until it was finally
> respected and manipulated.
>
>
>
> So I never did say as you suggest here:
>
>
> "2) Neutrality doesn't even begin to imply
> relativism.
> I cannot believe that so intelligent a person as you
> repeats so stupid an argument."
>
> Thank you for calling the argument stupid and me
> intelligent.Both are wild
> mis-characterizations.
>
> At any rate, I did not make this argument. I said
> that the failure of
> liberalism to hold the imagination had to be
> understood...sympathetically
> at times. Not shouted down. If it is
> shouted down, then we will have created
> respectability for fundamentalism
> and Jacobinism.
>
>
>
> "3) The opposite of freedom, tolerance, and
> diversity,
> which is not a liberal vision of a good life but a
> liberal conception of the conditions of whatever you
> might think is the good life, is, so far as you have
> indicated, Rakesh, oppression, intolerance,
> uniformity. You say that is a false dilemma."
>
> You miss my point. Not your private understandings
> but the shared social
> understanding of freedom, tolerance and diversity do
> in fact serve to
> underwrite and ensconse a new kind of veiled
> collective oppression, a
> slavery in fact. I think you are just at sea with
> the paradoxes of
> liberalism Marx illuminated.
>
> Rakesh
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>
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