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Critical Review
Toleration and Multiculturalism
by Ryszard Legutko
*
Abstract
By viewing toleration—which is usually interpreted as a personal attitude—through the lens of peaceful coexistence, Michael Walzer links toleration to political arrangements. The consequence of this approach is to blur basic political categories such as the state, political power, culture, and political creed. Moreover, while Walzer clearly prefers an immigrant society as embodying the practice of toleration more fully than any other regime, he fails to identify either its cultural or its political preconditions.
Contemporary discourse about tolerance is full of paradoxes, of which I will mention only two. The first concerns the concept’s apparent simplicity. If we define tolerance, as many writers do, as respect for opinions we dislike, we run into the problem of explaining why we should act against our nature, as it were, and accept what we oppose. This explanation will demand that we resort to such ideas as freedom, equality, autonomy, rights, justice, fairness, and utility. What seemed rather simple is suddenly complicated, and the complexity only increases when we recognize that tolerance, while primarily invoked to function as a minimalist modus vivendi among individuals or groups who differ, often irreconcilably, about freedom, equality, autonomy, rights, justice, and so on, is now linked to the very ideas it was supposed to rise above. One would be almost tempted to say that tolerance works best when it is pursued without rational reflection; once we begin to think about it, it dissolves into the very conflicts it is supposed to avoid.
The other paradox is that the West has been more and more preoccupied with condemning allegedly ever-more-sinister forms of intolerance, even while from all appearances, tolerance has never been as widely accepted and as deeply rooted in social and political norms as it is today. The struggle to legitimize eccentricity—proclaimed more than 150 years ago by John Stuart Mill and seen henceforth by many as a litmus test of tolerance—has been won, so it is not obvious why we should continue to attribute to tolerance such importance; more and more groups with various cultural, religious, and ideological loyalties are being incorporated into the mainstream of political life, and there is therefore less and less ground for concern that people will remain marginalized as aliens or outsiders for long. The present clamor for toleration thus seems to be out of proportion with the actual state of affairs.
Disregarding these two paradoxes can thwart any attempt to shed light on tolerance by reducing such an effort to a monotonous litany of predictable, philosophically sterile, and politically impotent moral appeals and condemnations.
On Toleration, by Michael Walzer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), seems, at least, to avoid both paradoxes. To sidestep the first one, Walzer speaks of toleration rather than of tolerance: that is, of practice rather than of theory. Whatever theoretical justification it might have, tolerance serves its purpose only as toleration, that is, as social practice, and Walzer points out that different institutional arrangements have allowed different forms of toleration, such that one should not hasten to evaluate them unequivocally in terms of progress (whether he, himself, has managed to take his own advice I will discuss in due course). Regarding the second paradox, Walzer decides to ignore the question of how far we should tolerate individual forms of eccentricity—a question to which all the answers worth pondering have already been given—and concentrate instead on the vital issue of “the peaceful coexistence of groups of people with different histories, cultures and identities” (2); and, specifically, on several “regimes of toleration,” that is, several institutional arrangements that have made this coexistence possible, each in a different fashion.
Before considering whether Walzer’s approach really does get around the paradoxes of his topic, let me take a closer look at some of the ambiguities that pervade his book.
Regimes of Toleration
I will start with what is apparently for Walzer a basic concept—the regime of toleration. He mentions five such regimes: the multinational empire, international society, consociation, the nation-state, and the immigrant society. The word “regime” is here understood in an ordinary sense as a political arrangement that secures internal peace. The five regimes are thus five types of institutional structures that Walzer compares in order to see how they serve the purpose of peace and coexistence, with no intention—at least no explicit intention—of evaluating them on a scale of moral progress.
But here a series of problems emerges. If a regime is a practical arrangement to secure peaceful coexistence, and if toleration is peaceful coexistence, then every regime may be legitimately called a regime of toleration, since a sufficient degree of peaceful coexistence is a prerequisite of any viable set of institutional structures. Such a conclusion, however, would deprive Walzer’s category of explanatory value, and would give toleration a meaning we rarely attribute to it. While it is true that speaking of toleration presupposes the peaceful coexistence of individuals and groups, it would be counterintuitive to claim that this coexistence is tantamount to toleration. In studying peaceful coexistence we either stay within the domain of the political and try to determine which institutional structures are most conducive to that end, or we go down to the level of the social and personal and attempt to identify those forms of behavior and those attitudes that precede and, as some might say, condition the functioning of political structures.
From the latter perspective, toleration—a rather mysterious mixture of indifference, calculation, inherited practice, self-interest, ethical education, personal affect, altruistic and communal instincts, social hypocrisy, good manners, and many other elements—would not particularly be determined by political arrangements. Instead, it would tend to determine them.
The ambiguous concept of “a regime of toleration,” however, blurs the borderline between the political on the one hand, and the social and psychological on the other. The peaceful coexistence of groups is undoubtedly one of the priorities of every well-ordered regime, but toleration never is, never has been, and probably never will be such a priority, the main reason being that if it is defined to include something more than rules of peaceful coexistence, it lies outside the scope of political arrangements. Political structures are about distributions of power, about civic duties, about security and stability, about law and order, while toleration is rather about personal attitudes whose connection with a system of institutions is notoriously unclear. Toleration can never sustain a regime, nor be its foundation. A regime reduced to, or evaluated solely in the light of, toleration would be like an economic system interpreted solely from the point of view of charity, or a system of justice seen solely from the viewpoint of mercy.
Walzer is well aware of the nonpolitical sense of toleration; whenever he discusses toleration without dealing with “regimes” he treats toleration as a state of mind. He enumerates several types of this state of mind. The first is “a resigned acceptance of difference for the sake of peace” (10). This type of toleration—going back to the settlement of religious differences in early modern Europe—is the only one that can, albeit not easily and without troublesome side effects, be linked to political arrangements (separation of church and state, limited government, basic rights, etc.). But there are other states of mind associated with toleration:
A second possible attitude is passive, relaxed, benignly indifferent to difference: it takes all kinds to make a world. A third follows from a kind of moral stoicism: a principled recognition that the others have rights even if they exercise those rights in unattractive ways. A fourth expresses openness to the others; curiosity, perhaps even respect, a willingness to listen and learn. And, furthest along the continuum, there is the enthusiastic endorsement of difference: an aesthetic endorsement, if difference is taken to represent in cultural form the largeness and diversity of God’s creation or of the natural world; or a functional endorsement, if difference is viewed, as in the liberal multiculturalist argument, as a necessary condition of human flourishing, one that offers to individual men and women the choices that make their autonomy meaningful. (10–11)
It is hard to see how these four forms of toleration can depend on the five institutional arrangements. Take the “liberal multiculturalist argument,” for instance. Political structures can prevent certain things from happening or, sometimes, facilitate certain actions and processes; they cannot, however, generate enthusiasm toward anything, including themselves. Any attempt to include such enthusiasm among the political objectives induces a totalitarian temptation that will have to be satisfied through psychological, not institutional, programs.
Multiculturalism and Power
The intermingling of the political with the social and psychological gives an ideological tinge to Walzer’s argument. Although he explicitly refrains from comparing the regimes, he clearly has sympathy for what he calls the immigrant society, and seems to believe that this is more or less our future. Whether he has been driven to this conclusion by his American experience, or by the ideology of multiculturalism, which he seems at least partly to accept—or by both—I cannot tell. Yet it is obvious that his arguments are largely inspired by multiculturalism, and whenever they fail, they fail because of their multiculturalist underpinnings.
The idea that one can enthusiastically endorse all differences not only runs contrary to human nature, which in this respect is rather selective, but also contradicts the basic standards of epistemology. A person enthusiastic about everything would be considered silly, and with good reason: an ability to discriminate and to evaluate is after all a primary quality of the intellect. Not to mention the fact that whoever is capable of such a strong positive emotion as enthusiasm will probably be also capable of an equally strong negative emotion.
The basic flaw in Walzer’s political argument is the absence of a positive notion of political power, and hence vagueness about politics and political regimes. For most multiculturalists, political power is either arbitrary and likely to become a tyranny, or it is something that has to do with particular cultural hierarchies. In the first case power is an artificial structure, rather dangerous, an object of constant vigilance because of its tendency to repress and discriminate. In the second case, power is either desired as something that should be given to oppressed groups and communities, or hated as an expression of the dominance of one group or community over another.
The first case—hostility to political power as arbitrary rule—is exemplified in Walzer’s description of the toleration in multinational empires:
So lonely dissidents and heretics, cultural vagabonds, intermarried couples, and their children will flee to the imperial capital, which is likely to become as a result a fairly tolerant and liberal place (think of Rome, Baghdad, and imperial Vienna, or, better, Budapest)—and the only place where social space is measured to an individual fit. Everyone else, including all the free spirits and potential dissidents who are unable to move because of economic constraint or familiar responsibility, will live in homogeneous neighborhoods or districts, subject to the discipline of their own communities. (16)
This description is one-sided, politically and historically. In no political system is the social space given to lonely dissidents, heretics, and cultural vagabonds a criterion by which one can measure the ability to diffuse conflicts between groups and to secure peaceful coexistence. Besides, in all political systems—nation-states, empires, consociations, and immigrant societies—big cities offer more space for eccentric behavior and unusual aspirations. Neither is it true that all empires enclosed those outside their capital cities within their own communities, nor that stability was maintained by the even-handed rule of the tyrants and, as Walzer writes further on, by the minimal fairness of the law and the imperial bureaucrats. Empires, of course, differed as regards their internal structure, but at least in some of them—Austria-Hungary, for instance—the political sphere was sufficiently large to absorb groups into various forms of government. Bureaucracy had a stabilizing influence as its nature was not national, still less nationalistic, but political and administrative, such that ethnic categories played a less conspicuous role. In other words, in the Austro-Hungarian empire there developed a semi-republican culture, extending over various ethnic and religious groups, and from the central bureaucracy to political parties, courts, and local governments. Other spheres of collective life can also have a supranational character: schools and universities; financial, industrial, and agricultural organizations; clubs; social and cultural associations; etc. All these, far more than the evenhanded rule of the tyrant and the minimal fairness of law, contribute to the more or less peaceful coexistence of groups.
The second case—political power as a form of cultural hierarchy—is exemplified by Walzer’s description of the nation-state:
In nation-states, power rests with the majority nation, which uses the state, as we have seen, for its own purposes. This is no necessary bar to mutuality among individuals; in fact, mutuality is likely to flourish in liberal democratic states. But minority groups are unequal by virtue of their numbers and will be democratically overruled on most matters of public culture. (55)
Walzer presupposes, first, that a nation is a rather homogenous entity that acts “for its own purposes”; and, second, that a political system has no essential qualities by itself, but is subservient to those purposes. Both assumptions go back to the biological concept of a nation that developed in the second half of the nineteenth century and that entailed a vision of history and politics as an endless conflict between nations. Multiculturalism has a similar vision of history and politics, although it no longer employs biological categories, using instead an ideologically malleable concept of culture. The difference between multiculturalists and cultural Darwinists is that the former aim to find a formula for the coexistence of the conflicting communities, whereas the latter never believed this possible.
Most multiculturalists would of course reject, with indignation, the suggestion that they have any links to cultural Darwinists, especially because the latter assume the homogeneity of the community. Yet multiculturalists have to make this assumption implicitly; otherwise, they could not maintain, as Walzer does, that a nation or an ethnic group can use the state for its own purposes. For multiculturalists as for cultural Darwinists alike, in a nation-state the “nation” determines the “state.” “Among histories and cultures,” Walzer writes,
the nation-state is not neutral; its political apparatus is an engine for national reproduction. National groups seek statehood precisely in order to control the means of reproduction. Their members may hope for much more—they may harbor ambitions that range from political expansion and domination to economic growth and domestic flourishing. But what justifies their enterprise is the human passion for survival over time. (25)
One must remember that the Darwinist-multiculturalist concept of a nation is not the only one. To the Romantics, for example, who preceded the era of Darwinism and its fascination with biology, the nation was a matter of common political experience rather than of blood and ethnic bonds. This made the division between national groups less tangible and the prospect of national conflicts less imperative. As ethnic homogeneity was not yet a necessary condition of a nation, the concept of nationality had a wide scope, encompassing anyone with shared political experience. Poland’s greatest national poet could start his major poetic work with the invocation “Lithuania, my fatherland,” and nobody ever questioned either his profound Polish patriotism or the sincerity of his Lithuanian nationalism. In a way the relationship between the political and the national was the reverse of the one that was later to be propagated by the Darwinists and multiculturalists. A society became a nation through an experience in political sovereignty, that is, through developing an ability to manage its own affairs; the mere ethnic community of blood, or language, or religion, did not constitute a nation—or to be precise, did not constitute a genuine nation, which in the nineteenth century was labeled “historical.” In other words, “historical nations” were also political nations that had made the transition from tribe to state, from traditional to rational, or—in Hegelian jargon—from the particular to the abstract. The state—and thus also the categories of citizenship, constitutionalism, the rule of law, and so forth—abstracted from the particular or the ethnic.
Obviously the Romantics did not invent the concept of a political nation, but continued the tradition of earlier political theory, from Aristotle to Bodin and Hobbes. Their notion of a political community had its own version of toleration which Walzer mentions only en passant at the end of his book, but one that is far more in tune with the standard concept of politics than the five states of mind he enumerates.
The political argument for toleration runs: we tolerate people of different religious, ethnic, and cultural identities because we believe they are good citizens and care for, or at least do not threaten, the common good. This very widespread form of toleration differs from metaphysical beliefs in “moral stoicism,” “it takes all kinds to make a world,” “diversity of God’s creation,” and “human flourishing.” It does not inquire into what goes on in the tolerant person’s mind—whether he is or is not enthusiastic, whether he wishes or does not wish to learn from other groups—and it is therefore conducive to peaceful coexistence. It is also rational, in the sense of giving a politically sound reason for tolerating other groups. And finally, it can, and in fact often does, prevail in every type of regime on Walzer’s list: in multinational empires, in consociations, in nation-states, and in immigrant societies such as the United States. On the other hand, this version of toleration is consistent with the possibility that a political system as such has a logic of its own that transcends cultures, communities, and different institutional arrangements; and that a well-balanced and efficient mechanism of power imposes rules that, in securing coexistence, necessarily limit the degree of toleration, which may sometimes be detrimental to the public peace.
The Immigrant Society
Walzer’s sympathy with the immigrant society means, primarily, sympathy with American society. He praises the arrangement of social life in the United States because he believes it to preserve what he approves—a network of communities—and to minimize what he disapproves: the attachment of political structures to national culture and a strong spirit of civic loyalty (Rousseau’s “civil religion”). One is tempted to say that what is praiseworthy about the immigrant society is that it is more tolerant and less regimelike than other regimes. Thus, in American society, first of all, “everyone has to tolerate everyone else,” and “no group in an immigrant society is allowed to organize itself coercively to seize control of public space” (32). Individuals are free to live in communities they have chosen or have been born into, without fear of being discriminated against by the state or by the majority. Second, the state is neutral between groups and “autonomous in its purposes” (31). Third, Americanism is less imposing and more pluralist than other forms of “civil religion” and “can live fairly comfortably with what might be called alternative civil religious practices among its own participants” (79).
I will not discuss the first point, an empirical diagnosis of contemporary America about which my competence is limited. I will simply report that Walzer worries about individuals’ tendency to emancipate themselves from all communities, groups, and cultures. He expresses hope that although increasing individualism or social atomism are legitimate consequences of tolerational practices that have been constitutive of American society, they will not endanger communitarian tendencies that keep people together in common activities and cultural bonds.
Walzer’s second thesis, about the American state being neutral, is somewhat peculiar in the context of his overall argument. Following his logic, it is in America that, for the first time in history, the state has not been determined by the nation. Unlike Europe, where political institutions had always been in the hands of a ruling nation that used them “for its own purposes,” the United States has managed to free its institutions from any ethnic interest. But if Walzer is suggesting that law in America does not favor any ethnic groups whereas law in Europe does, he is making an unfounded accusation against European legal systems. The political institutions of Europe do not discriminate ethnically among their citizens. So perhaps Walzer merely means that political mores have always been—for obvious reasons—more pluralistic in the United States than elsewhere. This does not in any way, however, corroborate Walzer’s thesis that the American regime is essentially different from European regimes because, unlike them, it has managed to be ethnically neutral.
Walzer is willing to grant that the American political system was originally a European, even an Anglo-Saxon invention, and he is even willing to grant—despite his sympathies for multicultural curricula—that the American educational system should still be largely based on classical standards, even if enriched by other “perspectives” and “narratives.” He never says, however, when the system changed from a European into an American model: that is, at what point European, republican neutrality—which apparently, for Walzer, is only partial and imperfect neutrality—turned into genuine neutrality of the American type. Neither does he specify exactly what generated this change or what specific arrangements were introduced into or subtracted from the old American system to give us the neutral state we have today.
Walzer does mention one symptom of that change: the emergence of “hyphenated or dual identity.” He explains that “the hyphen joining Italian-American, for example, symbolizes the acceptance of Italianness by other Americans, the recognition that American is a political identity without strong or specific cultural claims. The consequence, of course, is that Italian is a cultural identity without political claims” (33).
But this is puzzling for at least two reasons. First, it implies that America does not have a cultural identity in the sense that there is a German culture, an Italian culture, or a French culture. America is instead a collection of cultures, and what is common to them is said to be without weight. This would mean that whenever an American citizen seeks for culture he turns to that of his ancestors—to the heritage of Italy, France, Germany, Africa—or that he simply chooses whatever suits his taste, because there is nothing in the United States that can satisfy his desire for cultural identification.
If this is really what Walzer means, he appears to be conflating several different types of “culture”: artistic, spiritual, ideological, social, political, anthropological. The culture appealed to by multicultural ideologues and politicians is not the record of the experience of common history that finds expression in literature, mythology, education. It would be strange to suppose that four centuries of American life have produced only political forms of cooperation while leaving the culture of each immigrant group essentially intact. By this supposition, culture is not something that develops autonomously and spontaneously, something that we must accept and respect as given, but rather something that is inextricably linked to groups in their struggle for recognition. In this view, culture, even in its most sublime varieties, is a form of power, an instrument through which a group can impose control over another. Accordingly, ethnic, political, and ideological divisions can be seen as directly corresponding to cultural divisions, with all the ensuing consequences, such as the extreme politicization of education.
In reality, the fact that one is of Italian descent and has, say, a deeper-than-usual affection for the poetry of Dante and Petrarch and for Italian operas, cuisine, and close family relations does not make him an alien to the American culture that has shaped the language, institutions, morality, imagination, aesthetic environment, social practices, and basic categories of discourse in which he and his family have been living for several generations. One might insist that American culture does not exist or is socially and spiritually negligible if one viewed the existence of American culture as an obstacle to toleration. But even if the existence of an American culture were an obstacle to toleration, it would remain a reality in its own right.
The second source of puzzlement in Walzer’s statement about “hyphenated identity” is its assumption that “Americanism” is essentially a political notion. Not only, as before, does America alone seem to be political in the proper sense, that is, with a state that is “autonomous in its purposes” rather than being subservient to national objectives. More importantly, one must wonder what “the political” would consist of in an immigrant society, considering that all of the stronger determinants of this category have been consistently described as inimical to toleration. Political Americanism is thus as enigmatic as it is intriguing. It is enigmatic because Walzer does not say what “the political” means to him. It is intriguing because one might suppose that for Walzer a politics that is “autonomous in its purposes” might be, in the era of migrations, the common fate of the majority of modern societies.
Unfortunately, the only thing Walzer has to say about the quality of citizenship in the immigrant society is that it is in fact less political and less civic than in Europe. American civil religion (a slightly misleading term because there is nothing religious in it for Walzer) is said to tolerate “alternative civil religious practices among its own participants,” which means that in fact political Americanism further recedes from view as it comprises or rather coexists side by side with other political creeds. “The stories and celebrations that go along with, for example, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, or the Fourth of July can coexist in the common life of Irish-Americans, African-Americans, or Jewish-Americans with very different stories and celebrations” (79). This may very well be true, but in that case the civil religion seems to be rather a framework of civil religions than a set of definitive political beliefs or propositions. On closer inspection, it tends to disappear in the same way that American culture disappears in the multiculturalist perspective, giving way to a plurality of cultures.
The essence of American immigrant—i.e., multicultural—citizenship, Walzer tells us, is that, being conducive to toleration, it is not as demanding, not as strict, not as obliging, as classical citizenship. It is “more relaxed” than republican citizenship. What this thing is that becomes “relaxed” we are not told. The only positive content that I can find is that the aim of multicultural citizenship is to lead hyphenated Americans “to understand and admire their own diversity” (75). This tells us nothing about what limits American citizenship sets on toleration to ensure the existence of the political order.
Nor is this rather thin civil religion enough to account for Americans’ rather conspicuous pride in themselves, their country, and their laws. But to promote a stronger form of political Americanism would be “an act of intolerance” (79).
Although Walzer states explicitly that the five regimes of toleration do not form a hierarchy, they obviously do for him. The immigrant society—as he describes it—is more tolerant than other regimes; and one is entitled to conclude that the more toleration, the better; or, in a more complex formula: the more diversified a society is, the more toleration it needs, and the more toleration it has, the better it is. Walzer defines toleration as the peaceful coexistence of groups, and more peaceful coexistence is always better than less. If Walzer sees any problems with too much toleration, he does not discuss them. For Walzer, the immigrant society seems to be the only regime of toleration worthy of the name, the only system in which toleration has so much permeated the political and cultural spheres that it has become the ruling principle of culture, and in a way, replaced politics. No political or cultural standard except respect for or endorsement of diversity can be formulated or even properly discussed by Walzer, since such standards would immediately be weakened by the political necessity of toleration. For whatever would lead to intolerance, more toleration is the only morally acceptable remedy.
Walzer turns toleration, a secondary category, into a primary one. It is secondary because it is an attitude—not a regime—that serves to soften a regime that already exists: a state, laws, institutions, mores, rules of coexistence. It may humanize them—sometimes too much, sometimes not enough—but not create them. Nor is their purpose toleration; it is peace, justice, the common good, security, wealth, or something else. Walzer, however, by introducing the notion of the regime of toleration, not only avoids a real discussion of primary ends, but endows toleration with creative powers. His multiculturalist vision of the immigrant society transforms this possibility into a political project that, he claims, is a reflection of today’s America (a question on which I suspend judgment).
Toleration in Walzer’s immigrant society has become both the end and the means of politics, the subject of education and the objective of education, the content of culture and the form within which it manifests itself, the ruling principle of the society as a whole and the basic article of faith of every citizen. Walzer’s toleration becomes so omnipresent and aggressively intrusive that one cannot resist feeling that there is something stifling about it, which—of course—contradicts the very essence of the idea.
Endnotes
*: Ryszard Legutko, Institute of Philosophy, Jagiellonian University, Grodzka 52, 31-044 Kraków, Poland, telephone 48-12-4224916, e-mail rlegutko@omp.org.pl, is most recently the author of Toleration: A Study of Strong Government, Law of Nature, Love and Free Conscience (ZNAK, 1997) and Plato’s Euthyphro: Translation and Commentary (Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1998). Back.