There’s a pattern to public misperception. Arrangements that are very local are often taken to be universal, and those that are quite recent are taken to have always been. A case in point – I won’t say an obvious case in point, because my point is it’s not obvious – is Western liberalism. “I have a right, dammit, to speak my mind!” or “to wear what I like”, or … That kind of thing.
But that kind of talk, indeed the thinking that makes it intelligible, is the product of the confluence of a number of conditions, both material and political, conditions that were peculiar to Western Europe at a time we call the Enlightenment. I say material because you can’t claim a right to dress as you like if there’s only one sack cloth on the hanger. And I say political because the conflict between Catholics and Protestants reached a deadlock such that it was either a war to the last man standing or an agreement to leave each to his own. Put more pithily, liberalism requires freedom to and freedom from. There’s no freedom to if there aren’t at least two options, and there’s no freedom from if one of the options is disallowed.
Colonialism and imperialism are two different animals. The former replicates, the latter imposes. Liberalism flourished where its enabling conditions were replicated in places that were colonised – North America and the Antipodes. But elsewhere in the world, where it was merely imposed, these conditions were not in place, and generally are not in place. Where the conditions giving rise to and sustaining it aren’t met, liberalism doesn’t catch on because it makes no sense. And even where it does catch on, it’s always tentative, because those conditions are always tentative. Look what’s happening in the UK, the US, Canada and the Antipodes today.
What drives this illiberalism? That people have druthers. A hermit doesn’t have a problem imposing his druthers on himself. But most of us live in proximity to others, others on whom our druthers produce negative externalities. If these externalities can be accommodated – as they were, until recently, in the West – live and let live is sustainable. But if not not.
Church bells and Christmas carols can be accommodated by Jews and Muslims and atheists alike. But for Christians, the five-fold blaring Call to Prayer is proving a tad more challenging. “Peter, I can see your house from here!” can be tolerated even by devout Christians. Mocking the Prophet can’t be, even by token Muslims. That it should be makes as much sense as women should go swimming topless because men do.
The laws against blasphemy are as definitive of Islam as they once were of Christianity, and before that of Judaism. Jews and Christians forfeited their demand for orthodoxy because, as already noted, they had to. But Muslims don’t have to.
They don’t have to if they stay where they are. But they do if they want to live here. And even if they could accommodate themselves to our way of life, we can’t accommodate ours to theirs. Hence the call to put the kibosh on Muslim immigration. It’s not that we’re terrified of a Muslim majority. It’s that, for the same reason, we don’t want them on city council.
I’d be amiss to make it sound like (what Samuel P. Huntington infamously has called) the Clash with [Western] Civilisations is confined to Islam. The like can be said – and is being said – about aboriginal culture in Canada. Prior to Contact the aboriginals of North America were stone-age peoples. Stone-age technology cannot do better than stone-age ways of knowing. More particularly, what’s true is what the knowledge-keeper or shaman or elder says is true, because his guess is better than no guess at all. These kinds of cultural protocols don’t die overnight. So, “How do you know there are 215 children buried in the Kamloops apple orchard?” Because our elders told us so. “Isn’t there a way to see if they’re right?” No, because that would be disrespectful.
As indeed it would be. Just as it would be to ask how the Gospel writers could have known what Jesus said to his Abba when he was alone in the Garden of Gesthemane. A people isn’t defined by its articles of faith, except that, well, yes it is! So to suggest that these elders are as ignorant as their children is on par with accusing Mohammed of being a pedophile.
One solution to these conflicts is, Well, let them believe what their elders tell them to. What harm can it do? And don’t accuse Mohammed of being a pedophile. What good can come of it?
None and none. And so this is precisely the case for censorship. Mill was right that freedom of enquiry conduces to truth, and truth conduces to social improvement. But ‘conduces’ is too weak for the case Mill wants to make. Where it doesn’t conduce – and about the Kamloops 215 and Mohammed’s sexual predilections the truth arguably doesn’t – Mill’s instrumentalist argument for freedom of enquiry is anathema to our social wellbeing.
The problem of course, is which enquiries are, and which enquiries are not, anathema to our social wellbeing. But that is itself an enquiry, an enquiry that is, or is not, anathema to our social wellbeing. So whatever we do we’re begging the question. That’s why freedom of enquiry has to be accepted as axiomatic or not at all. But that’s not what either side wants to accept. The liberal wants to say all is permitted save what is demonstrably injurious. The illiberal wants to say all is prohibited save what is demonstrably helpful. But note that neither, neither injury nor help, have anything, at least necessarily, to do with truth.
Let’s test our intuitions about this. Monica Schafer is a Holocaust denier. I’m not. But which of the two of us is deferring more to his elders than to the evidence? Well, I might say, what harm can come from questioning the Holocaust? Undermining the justification for the State of Israel. What good can come from questioning the Holocaust? Undermining the justification for the State of Israel. So Holocaust assertion and denial are both political acts. And liberalism prides itself as separating enquiry from politics. Muslims, aboriginals, Christian nationalists in America – they all acknowledge, if only implicitly, that the two can’t be separated. That doesn’t make them right about their illiberalism. But it does make them arguably right.
What would make them right is if they used the liberal’s own premises to ground their illiberal conclusions. To wit: What justifies our various freedoms, says the liberal, is that they service the needs of the individual. Otherwise we’d be back to the ontological nonsense that underpins Plato’s Republic. But one of our needs as individuals is the need to belong. Belonging, by definition, requires community. And community requires at least a minimum measure of orthodoxy, the beliefs we share – in our case, that all authority is subject to ridicule – and orthopraxis – in our case enjoying Christmas carols on loudspeakers in the park.
Muslims and aboriginals and Christian nationalists are free to enforce their own beliefs and practices on their own people, but not on the rest of us. Nor we ours on them. But that just means reintroducing the very apartheid liberalism prides itself in having abolished.
So yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Clause. But no, there’s no free moral lunch. If we want their curry we’re going to have to put up with their Calls to Prayer. Or we can learn to make their curry ourselves. I think that’s called cultural appropriation. Which, in retrospect, is what liberalism is all about!
Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy
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