Liberalism, Tolerance and Difference Today: A reply to my friend

I think the republicanism/liberalism dynamic remains one of the best ways to understand our current political situation--i.e., secular democracy versus religious (fundamentalist) nationalism--so long as one doesn't simply oppose the two ideologies (republicanism/liberalism) as if they still expressed a straightforward dichotomy. If the classical debate pitted republicanism (which required the pre-political existence of a strong social-communal identity and a unified social agenda, or common good) against liberalism (which demands the recognition of the individual's moral autonomy--a la Kant--as well as the individual's ethical right to conduct life according to his or her own convictions), things are no longer as simple as they may once have been.

It seems to me that the problem today is that our secular (but that also means Christian, insofar as secularism itself emerges in the West as a sort of radical transmutation of the Judeo-Christian heritage) our secular political institutions fail to recognize the degree to which our shared classical "liberal" ideology effectively serves today as the foundation for "our" social-communal identity. This failure helps explain, for instance, why the neo-conservatives thought that the establishment of liberal democracies (through military force of course) was the solution to our problems in/with the middle east. They failed to recognize that the liberal notions of human equality (and thus equal representation) upon which democracy functionally depends, are not universally embraced, but are rather particular to western Europe's peculiar historical development (if not destiny) and thus particular to our own social identity in the "west" (however broadly one may want to define that term: "the west'). But the most interesting problems concern those who are, so to speak, "at home" in the west (geographically understood) and yet do not accept (nor conduct their lives according to) the liberal ideologies which provide the foundation for the communal identity (as, say, "Americans") that surround them. (I'm thinking here of young radical Islamic children of Pakistanis living in UK, polygamists in the American southwest, African immigrants in NY who perform female circumcision on their American-born daughters, etc.) The peace, cohesion and perhaps even survival of our society seems to demand that we exclude, reject or oppose those "offensive" and "archaic" practices, if not their practitioners. And yet, how can we exclude such "members" from our community without simultaneously threatening/undermining the very liberal ideals (the right to conduct one's life according to one's personal convictions, etc.) which we hope to preserve by means of this exclusion.

This question, I think, can best be articulated in terms of tolerance: How do we (lovers of tolerance) tolerate those who do not share our fondness, our love for tolerance? It would be much too simple to simply ask: how do we tolerate intolerance? For that formulation conceals the fact that our "sense of tolerance" (i.e., liberal ideology) is precisely what binds us together as a society (that is to say, it is what provides us with a social identity, like Cicero's sense of roman identity: Remember, JFK had just finished citing Cicero's "civis Romanus sum" when he delivered his (in)famous line, which might as well have ran "Ich bin ein American," since he was after all trying to express the fact that West Berliners shared the American sense of human freedom). I know it may sound a little far-fetched to claim that our sense of Americanism, our sense of "being American" is still based on such classical liberal notions as individual freedom, human rights, mutual tolerance, etc., but just listen to any number of Bush's speeches in which he provides a moral justification for the war in Iraq by invoking the language of freedom, tolerance and the individual pursuit of happiness (as if Jefferson might as well have been Iraqi).

At any rate, we are faced with a question. Put badly: "what are we to do about those that seek to disrupt, disturb, destroy "us" from within?" It seems to me that this internal disturbance is not a contingent historical fact (belonging to, for instance, the recent resurgence of various religious fundamentalism) but rather that it belongs to the essential structure of our current ideological configuration. To be sure, it would be logically incoherent to say that "our shared identity is based on the 'mutual' recognition of difference." But I what I find incoherent here is not, as one might at first suspect, that identity precludes difference and therefor is incompatible with it. On the contrary, the incoherence lies elsewhere--namely, in the very idea of the "mutuality" of the recognition which is supposed to span the distance between same and different. In other words, what is objectionable here is the idea that someone who recognizes (and therefore respects) your differences is truly different (from you). For, in fact, if this person is willing to participate in the game of mutual recognition--if he or she is able to respects your practices, beliefs, etc., even when s/he holds different ones him/herself--then s/he does not really represent a genuine difference. For s/he still circulates around the same ideological core as oneself. True difference emerges only with those who refuse to accept, recognize or live-with what is other or different. True difference does not enter into the fold of reciprocal recognition. There is no difference where there mutual recognition. So, we must say that today's secular, post-enlightenment ideology is based on the recognition of radical difference--the kind of difference embodied by those who refuses to re-cognize, to re-ciprocate, to requite or return our most profound gestures of tolerance (which, after all, is the only kind of tolerance that really is what it claims to be).

So, my thesis then: It is the very collapse or, better, "condensation" of the republican/liberalism divide which constitutes the dominant socio-political ideology in the secular west today (which is to say that liberal ideology is the normative foundation for our republican sense of social identity and solidarity) and that the most lamentable forms of political action today are marked by a failure to recognize the effects of this "condensation." But, like any co-llapse, this collapse cannot be understood if we ourselves simply abandon the initial distinction between the republican and liberal ideology.