Charles Taylor et al.: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
At the conclusion of his essay, “The Politics of Recognition,” Charles Taylor proposes a modest, decent neo-Burkeanism. The demand for cultural recognition can be prevented from sliding down the slope of relativism—a slide that would destroy the rationale for recognition itself—if liberal democrats view longstanding ‘cultures’ as likely to have respectable aspects, even if these are “accompanied by much that we have to abhor and reject” (72-73) in order to remain liberals and democrats. The “ultimate horizon” (73) or ‘end of history’ (when we can finally judge the worth of all cultures) has yet to be worked out. But we can make the provisional determination: The sheer fact of long-term survival suggests that a given ‘culture’ has or at least has had some real ‘strengths’ or virtues. Dialogue with its adherents should be fruitful; their cultural destruction might well be a loss not only to them but to members of the dominant culture. Taylor thus advocates a generous and prudent probabilism.
To this, the prominent feminist Susan Wolf responds in her “Comment” on Taylor’s argument: Women have long been recognized, all right, but this recognition has too often been restrictive or injurious to them (and, presumably, to self-deluded men as well). An appeal to the ‘long-standingness’ of a tradition cannot tell us which durable aspects of the tradition deserve abolition, and which deserve retention. What if the long-standing culture is compounded of a long series of abuses and usurpations?
Wolf is right, although the reason she is right cannot be found in her essay. In saying that non-recognition involves “insults and damage” (80), she too easily conflates insult and damage. Was the insulting gadfly Socrates damaging to Athenians—or beneficial? For surely feminism would insult and damage—indeed dismantle—any ‘culture’ of misogyny or patriarchy. If feminists say, ‘Destroying misogyny is good for the misogynist,’ that the best thing you can do for a pagtriarch is to depose him, in order to justify their claim they need some criterion not to be found in misogyny as such. To argue, as Wolf does at the end of her essay (84-85), that our own ‘culture’ will have hidden resources—that patriarchy (for example) will have aspects (e.g., the care for and protection of women) usable in a critique of patriarchy—may well be true. But it only gets us back to something like Taylor’s inter-cultural dialogue. Critique presupposes criteria. By what criteria can one launch a critique of a ‘culture’?
Wolf’s criticism of Taylor is right because Taylor refuses two themes Rousseau keeps apart: the citizen and the human being, the city and nature. I take this argument not in order to ‘catch’ Taylor in a misinterpretation of Rousseau, but in order to make the substantive point: Rousseau (and Hegel after him) see the problem of recognition more clearly than Taylor does.
As Taylor observes, Rousseau sets up the master/slave image, the import of which is a logical conclusion: I cannot ‘have’ the dignity I seek if I depend upon you for it. To be really ‘had,’ a thing must be inherent, either in the person, in the relationship with the ‘other,’ or both. Rousseau has at least two solutions to this master/slave dilemma. One is the political community described in the social contract, wherein man in ‘the state of nature’ exchanges natural for civil rights. In this model, equal respect is precisely social and therefore artificial; it is ‘built in’ by the Legislator. Taylor sees this quite clearly (48-49). The other solution is that of the Reveries. But the philosopher is no citizen. He is a solitary walker. Despite his very considerable degree of ‘culture,’ he remains—or rather becomes natural, in but not of whatever society he strolls through. His self-respect is ‘built in’ by his dialectical return to nature, to reason—his personal overcoming of ‘cultural’ detritus.
Taylor wants to combine these incommensurables. Whereas Rousseau requires the philosophic legislator of the social contract to disappear, Taylor wants something like a continual philosophic self-legislation within the political community. This assumes what Rousseau denies: that philosophers can somehow not only stay inside the political community but achieve that degree of prestige within it that would enable them to become legislators-in-residence.
One coherent way to do what Taylor wants to do, to marry tradition and Enlightenment, is to abandon democracy and make the Hegelian move: At the top of the political community will be not a philosopher-king but a monarch-sage (no mere wisdom-lover but a wise man). This is possible only if ‘history’ has ended, the slaughter-bench wiped clean and stored out of sight. But Taylor regards this aspect of Hegelianism as arrogant; multiculturalism in Taylor’s view demonstrates that ‘history’ is not over, at least insofar as ‘history’ has combined multiculturalism with democracy. The egalitarianism as much as the pluralism of modern democracy precludes any strong Hegelianism.
And so Taylor is stuck in a sort of nice guy’s muddle. Wolf is right: As a philosopher, Taylor is English-all-too-English, or perhaps Canadian-all-too-Canadian. To argue that liberal democracies should “weigh the importance of certain forms of uniform treatment against the importance of cultural survival, and opt sometimes in favor of the latter” (61) leaves the reader with no philosophic criterion for critique (or for affirmation). What is the scale upon which one is to do the weighing? Taylor’s neo-Hegelianism (more accurately, his democratic Burkeanism) leaves the philosopher, the ‘natural’ or reasoning person, without either the authority to legislate or the freedom to ‘walk.’ Taylor must make liberalism an “organic outgrowth of Christianity” (62), not a product of the collision (understood personally by Rousseau) of Christianity and modern philosophy. This not only distorts the history any historicist must rely upon, but it leaves citizen and philosopher alike adrift. There is too little dialectic in Taylorian ‘dialogue’ because he fails to separate dialectical reasoning form politics with Rousseauian rigor. He ends by reinventing (in academic life) Rousseau’s bourgeois: neither fully man nor wholeheartedly citizen. [1] If liberalism, as an allegedly organic outgrowth of Christianity, is a “fighting creed,” Taylor’s liberalism will leave the citizen-soldier unsure of what he or she is fighting for. [2]
Taylor’s paradigm is not devoid of all defenses against Wolf’s criticism, although they will not likely hold. The best move might be to make political and social egalitarianism the explicit criterion by which he will assess, reject, and appropriate ‘cultural’ traditions, mirroring one aspect of the Constant/Tocqueville response to Burke’s critique of the French revolutionaries. That is, he could say that democracy is still inevitable in the modern world.
A cautious way to make Taylorian traditionalism consistent with feminism would be to argue for an egalitarian version of the division of labor. Tradition requires men to hunt, women to gather, and, more recently, for men to bring home the bacon and women to cook it. Applying the egalitarian principle, societies would reward these activities equally. Married couples would enter a family benefit system, whereby all income is legally required to go into a joint account, with benefits, pensions, and other disbursements requiring consent of both parties. Such reforms would work better in economic life than in political life, where rights for women cannot be described as longstanding and participation cannot be compartmentalized so easily. There, Taylor would need to argue that the logic of longstanding democratic traditions requires women’s equal political rights. Moreover, even on the economic level such laws would miss the point of ‘second-wave’ feminism, which is about equal opportunity, not only equal economic rewards.
More radically, he democratic principle of equality could be used as a sociopolitical version of Ockham’s razor, cutting out those parts of tradition that are patriarchal, allowing those parts of tradition that are egalitarian to grow unimpeded. An advantage of ‘radicalized’ Taylorian feminism over some other forms of feminism would be an opportunity to retain ‘masculinism,’ i.e., whatever practices from the patriarchic tradition that still serve democratic purposes. Such an approach could (for example) seek ways of counteracting the feminization of poverty caused by gutter Rousseaus who walk away from households. The dismantling of patriarchy need not mean the destruction of fatherhood and its responsibilities. And of course (under the terms of egalitarianism) reciprocity in fatherly benefits (such as time with children) would go along with the responsibilities.
The danger of radicalized Taylorism would be the danger of pulling pieces out of any tradition. Can the virtues of a ‘culture’ survive the elimination of its defects? At some point, such pruning might damage the ‘organic’ tree of Taylorian traditionalism. The more any abstract criterion (such as equality) dominates, the less ‘organic’ things get.
In some sense, then, Wolf’s challenge looks sound. In Taylor’s defense it could be said, one could do worse, much worse, than to be ‘English.’ One can surely ‘think’ better, philosophize better than English dons do. Can one also do better, have a better politics than the politics of quiet, decent Canada? Looking around the world, one might say, ‘Maybe, but not everywhere and always.’
Notes
- A concrete example of this error may be seen in Taylor’s discussion of Frantz Fanon (69). Taylor treats Fanon as a spokesman for the ‘Third World,’ thereby ignoring Fanon’s forthright Marxism-Leninism, with its clear set of criteria for judging any tradition. There is obviously nothing more ‘Western,’ more a part of modern rationalism, than Marxism; it is anything but an outgrowth of any tradition or traditions indigenous to the ‘Third World.’
- In contrast, Wolf has the merit of insisting on knowing exactly what she’s fighting for. But although she knows what she believes, she does not indicate how she might attain a characteristic philosopher’s insight: that she knows she doesn’t know. She does not begin to think of a way of living the philosophic life in a democratic regime.
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