[Paleopsych] Hedgehog: Richard V. Horner: Maintaining the Trajectory of Freedom
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Richard V. Horner: Maintaining the Trajectory of Freedom
The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture
http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=849753&textreg=1&id=HorMain2-1
Richard V. Horner is a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced
Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He is currently
working on a book entitled, Possibilities of Pragmatism, which focuses
on pragmatic responses to the post-modern impasse into which modernity
has led.
Introduction
The hope of American democracy does not lie in the reassertion
of self-evident truths, nor in the reconstruction of moral
foundations, nor in a renewed faith in human reason. It does not lie
in a revitalized republicanism rooted in civic virtue nor in a
communitarian consensus rooted in a shared view of human nature. The
hope of American democracy lies just where the pre-eminent pragmatist
of our day says it does: in continuing
along the trajectory defined by the Bill of Rights, the
Reconstruction Amendments, the building of the land-grant colleges,
female suffrage, the New Deal, Brown vs. Board of Education, the
building of the community colleges, Lyndon Johnson's civil rights
legislation, the feminist movement, and the gay rights
movement.[3]^1
The hope of democracy, in other words, lies in continuing along
a trajectory of freedom shaped by the conviction that one of the basic
ends of government is still to "secure the blessings of liberty to
ourselves and our posterity," or as Richard Rorty would put it, to
serve the "endless, proliferating realization of Freedom"[4]^2 by
guarding the live and let-live attitudes of bourgeois liberal
democracy.
Rorty is right again when he suggests that the only shared
reason we need for continuing on this trajectory is that when we put
it up against the alternatives, the pursuit of freedom beats the
competition. In other words, our best shared defense of our political
practices is likely to be a pragmatic one. This is not to say that
there is a uniquely pragmatic justification of liberal democracy, but
that we would do well to place our discussion of political theory and
practice within a pragmatic frame. We should begin with the questions
and problems that arise in experience, try on alternative answers and
solutions, and weigh those alternatives against each other by tracing
their consequences back into experience. As Rorty observes, we need
not attach our conviction in favor of political liberalism to "a view
about universally shared human ends, human rights, the nature of
rationality, the Good for Man, nor anything else."[5]^3 To the
contrary, recognizing that "a liberal society is badly served by an
attempt to supply it with `philosophical foundations,'" we can "drop
the idea of such foundations [and] regard the justification of liberal
society simply as a matter of historical comparison with other
attempts at social organization--those of the past and those envisaged
by utopians."[6]^4
While Rorty does us a favor by moving us toward a pragmatic
frame and pointing us in the direction of freedom, his own liberal
vision does not hold up well when placed within this frame. Rorty's
utopian vision leads to just the sort of illiberal consequences that
he and a lot of the rest of us want to avoid. When he tells us that
"the citizens of [his] liberal utopia...would be liberal ironists,"
and that the culture of this utopia would be one "in which no trace of
divinity remained, either in the form of a divinized world or a
divinized self,"[7]^5 Rorty demonstrates that his utopia is an ironist
utopia but not a liberal utopia. His utopia would be a culture of and
for liberal ironists that would have no room for those who do not
share the ironic vision. When, in addition, Rorty asks all of us to
frame our defense of political liberalism in a vocabulary that
privileges the ironic and contingent, he again goes against his own
good advice that we share only a pragmatic defense of freedom. In the
end, Rorty does want to connect the practices of political liberalism
to a particular understanding of the human condition. His
understanding drops terms such as "comprehensive theory" or
"foundations," but it is an understanding nonetheless, and by asking
all of us to see it as offering the one defense of freedom to which we
all must hold, Rorty excludes those who do not share his controversial
and partisan vision. Ironically, the liberal ironist works against the
endless proliferation of freedom. If we are to continue on the
trajectory of freedom, then, we need an alternative hypothesis that
serves the cause of freedom more effectively than Rorty's call for an
ironist utopia.
Cultural Disestablishment
William Galston points us toward such an alternative when he
argues that our "best hope for maximizing opportunities for
individuals and groups to lead lives as they see fit" lies in a
liberalism that applies a strategy of "cultural disestablishment
parallel to religious disestablishment."[8]^6 Galston understands that
while the strategy of disestablishment focused initially on religious
differences, its genius does not lie in anything unique to religion,
but rather in the recognition that where understandings of the human
condition, interpretations of personal experience, and questions of
meaning are in view, it is better for people to live by conviction
than by constraint. Because so many citizens gave religious answers to
questions about meaning in the eighteenth century, the strategy
focused initially on differences drawn along religious lines. From the
outset, however, the strategy not only accommodated those who found
life's meaning in organized religions, it also accommodated those who
constructed answers to their most basic questions in secular terms.
The First Amendment granted freedom to specific religions across the
spectrum of religious pluralism, and it granted freedom across the
line between religious and secular understandings of life as well. As
Jefferson put it, the American experiment provided a place not only
for a range of religious orthodoxies, but also for the belief in
twenty gods or in no god at all.
Having identified this strategy as central to the genius of
political liberalism, Galston also notes that modern liberalism has
lost its way by taking sides where it ought to have guaranteed
freedom. Instead of applying a strategy of cultural disestablishment
to the deep difference between autonomy and tradition that runs
through American society, Galston argues, modern liberalism has come
down on the side of autonomy and made the problem of deep difference
even more troubling than it needs to be. By imposing a high valuation
of individual autonomy on groups and individuals who do not share that
value in the same way, liberalism has fallen into an establishment
stance that favors autonomy over its alternatives. As a result,
freedom has been restricted and democracy is in trouble. Galston
argues that liberalism should be "about the protection of diversity,
not the valorization of choice." Therefore, "to place an ideal of
autonomous choice...at the core of liberalism is in fact to narrow the
range of possibilities available within liberal societies." The
autonomy principle has come to represent "a kind of uniformity that
exerts a pressure on ways of life that do not embrace autonomy."[9]^7
In the end, therefore, by marginalizing or excluding those who cannot
embrace autonomy as the highest good, modern liberalism works against
freedom rather than for it.
Whereas some of Galston's peers want to solve this problem by
freeing liberalism from its ties to autonomy and then linking
liberalism to a traditionalist framework, or by establishing a
communitarian or republican alternative in its place, Galston wants to
address the problem by employing the strategy of cultural
disestablishment. By utilizing this strategy Galston hopes to provide
a place for those who value autonomy above all and for individuals and
associations that do not value autonomy in the same way. "A liberal
state need not and should not take sides on issues such as purity
versus mixture or reason versus tradition," Galston writes.[10]^8
"Rather than taking autonomy or critical reflection as our points of
departure, what we need instead is an account of liberalism that gives
diversity its due." We need a "`Diversity State'...that afford[s]
maximum feasible space for the enactment of individual and group
differences, constrained only by the requirements of liberal social
utility."[11]^9 To his credit Galston does not want to drive devotees
of autonomy from the field. Instead, while practicing disestablishment
across a variety of traditions, he also wants to practice
disestablishment between autonomy and its alternatives. Autonomy
should be disestablished, but devotees of autonomy should be granted
free exercise, along with all who hold competing views of the highest
good, within a diversity state.
By taking this approach to lines of deep difference, Galston
captures the genius of the First Amendment's disestablishment
strategy. First, he affirms the view that it is good for people to be
free to live by conviction rather than constraint when answering
life's deepest questions. Second, he demonstrates that the genius of
the disestablishment strategy does not lie in anything unique to
religion but in its ability to deal effectively with deep cultural
differences that can take a number of forms. Third, he reminds us that
a disestablishment strategy often has to work on more than one level
of difference at a time so as not to fall unwittingly into
establishment patterns. Galston recognizes that while granting free
exercise to a variety of traditions, we fell unwittingly into
establishing a comprehensive doctrine of autonomy. He refuses,
however, to react against autonomy by attempting to drive it from the
field. Instead, he argues that what we should have been doing all
along, and need to do now, is practice disestablishment with regard to
specific traditions and also practice it across the line between
traditionalism and autonomy, just as the founders did when they
brought the strategy to bear not only on religious differences but
also on the difference between religious and secular ways of thinking.
Differences That Make a Difference
Perhaps the reason we have not built on the precedent of
cultural disestablishment as well as we might have is that the lines
of deep cultural difference that divide us most have become more
complex and difficult to identify than they were two hundred years
ago. In the late eighteenth century one could visit the places of
worship located within a few blocks of Independence Hall in
Philadelphia and, at least with regard to religious pluralism, come
away with a pretty good understanding of the lines that marked the
major differences. If the name on the outside of the building and the
furnishings inside did not tell you everything you needed to know, you
could visit with a congregant, rector, priest, or pastor of the
church, or with the lay president of the synagogue, and fill in the
missing information readily enough. This is no longer the case, and
with every passing year the task of identifying the lines of cultural
difference that make a difference only becomes more complicated.
Diversity gives birth to diversity, not only multiplying lines of
division but weaving them together in multi-dimensional complexity. As
a result the significant lines of difference are continually shifting
and constantly challenging our intention to continue on the trajectory
of freedom.
Today, the lines of cultural difference that come most readily
to mind are probably those that center on the body. Lines of
difference defined by gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, age, and
disabilities stand alongside differences of class and religion as
lines that mark just the sort of deep cultural differences to which
the only adequate response is the strategy of cultural
disestablishment. If we are to enjoy freedom, those of us who think of
ourselves primarily along these lines of difference need to be able to
do so without fear that the government or public institutions are
going to attempt to coerce us to do otherwise. Indeed, we need to know
that public institutions will be there to assure us of our freedom to
live according to our own understandings, convictions, and designs.
Recognizing that these lines identify deep cultural differences that
parallel eighteenth-century lines of religious pluralism constitutes
an important step in the trajectory of freedom, and we would do well
to continue to guard against the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in
which one group, or overlapping solidarity of groups, becomes
established at the expense of others.
What William Simon has written about sexuality, however, one
could also write about race, gender, ethnicity, disability, class,
age, and religion: "For all the significance we attach to it," he
writes, "sexual behavior does little to signify by itself....It
becomes articulate by being transformed into sexual conduct--that is,
behavior given meaning, evaluated." Sexual behavior is
meaning-dependent and "in its very meaning-dependency, sexuality must
reflect the broad changes taking place at both cultural and individual
levels."[12]^10 Otherwise, "to know about an individual's sexual
history--even to know it in great detail--is to know very little, to
have little understanding of why it occurred or the meaning it will
have for that person."[13]^11 We must be careful, therefore, not to
assume that there is a single homosexual culture or a single
heterosexual culture, and we must guard against thinking that by
categorizing people with regard to sexual practice we have thereby
understood them. The same applies to other lines of division as well.
To identify someone as being a member of some specific category
(woman, black, Asian, gay, retired, Jewish, or working class) is not
necessarily to have identified the core of that person's self
understanding, and where that identity is central to the individual,
it still needs to be given its meaning. While we do well to continue
to work hard to guard freedom across all of these lines of identity,
therefore, we also need to be sensitive to the fact that there are
other lines of difference that inform our identities and beliefs and
give meaning to them.
One such line of deep cultural difference lies between
essentialist and non-essentialist understandings of human experience.
On the essentialist side of the line, one finds a variety of
ahistoricist understandings of the human condition that make claims to
universality. On the non-essentialist side of the line, one finds
understandings of human experience that are historicized and
contingent. On the essentialist side, one finds stories about what we
humans share with each other that are long and detailed and have lots
to say on the subject. On the non-essentialist side one finds rather
brief narratives whose main point is that there is not much to say
about what human beings share and that we would do well not to put too
much emphasis on the question. Essentialist stories are deep and
binding, and flow from the authority of reason, science, or religion.
Non-essentialist stories emphasize self-creation and lead to ways of
thinking about experience because they are possible. The one sort of
story sees the self as a work of discovery, the other holds that the
self is a work of imagination, and both stories say of the true, the
good, and the beautiful what they say of the self. For the one these
are notions of depth whose essences are to be discovered, and for the
other they are notions that will run only as deep as whatever we put
into them.
This deep line of difference between essentialism and
non-essentialism informs and cuts across lines drawn by the body,
class, and religion. It separates those for whom racial or sexual
identities are central to their understanding of human nature from
those for whom these identities provide alternative descriptions of
non-essentialist solidarities. In a similar way the essentialist vs.
non-essentialist line separates those for whom sexual orientation is a
given that defines who they are from those for whom sexuality
identifies a domain of self-creativity and imagination. The line also
runs through religious discourse and belief, demonstrating that the
deeper religious differences at work today are not among Catholic,
Protestant, and Jew, but between those believers who view "the various
truths and practices of a religion as socially constructed" and those
believers "who are desperately striving to keep the old faith" as the
ahistorical and absolute faith that they consider it to be.[14]^12 In
short, a line of deep division between those who see their identities
and beliefs as contingent and created, on the one side, and those who
see their identities and beliefs as deeply enduring and discovered, on
the other, informs and cuts across other lines of deep division drawn
by differences of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, disability,
class, age, and religion. The question is: how shall we respond to
this line of deep difference?
The answer is that we should employ the strategy of cultural
disestablishment that Galston finds in the First Amendment. Rather
than committing liberalism, on the one hand, to "curing us of our
`deep metaphysical need,'"[15]^13 or, on the other hand, to unifying
us around transcendence or tradition, we can grant free exercise to
both essentialist and non-essentialist understandings of human
experience and refuse to establish either one over the other. As the
writers of the First Amendment guaranteed freedom among religions and
between religious and secular understandings of life, and as Galston
preserves a place for specific traditions without establishing either
autonomy or traditionalism in the process, so we can grant freedom
across a variety of beliefs and identities without falling unwittingly
into rendering all our identities and beliefs either essentialist or
non-essentialist in the process. The strategy of disestablishment
often needs to function on more than one level at a time, and it can
do so here once again. If freedom is to go all the way down to what
matters most to us, then it must extend across differences drawn by
lines of identity, without establishing essentialism at the expense of
those who see their identities as contingent and created or
establishing non-essentialism at the expense of those who see their
identities as absolute and discovered. The line of difference between
essentialists and non-essentialists can and must stand alongside
differences of religion, class, age, disability, race, gender, and
sexuality without either overshadowing those differences or being
obscured by them. These are all lines of deep difference that make a
difference, and we will continue on the trajectory of freedom only if
we apply the strategy of cultural disestablishment to this line of
difference as we have to the other lines of difference that have
divided us most deeply.
The Free Defense of Freedom
If freedom is to be genuine, furthermore, we will need to apply
the strategy of cultural disestablishment particularly when our deep
differences emerge in the defense of freedom. The stories that give us
our best arguments in support of the principles and strategies of
political liberalism are also the stories by which we make sense of
our lives. If there is to be freedom regarding the stories by which we
make sense of life, then there must also be freedom with regard to the
ways that these stories lead us to support the ideals and strategies
of political liberalism. Where the justification of political
liberalism is at issue, we are still dealing with deep differences to
which the only adequate response is a strategy of cultural
disestablishment that allows no single line of defense to be
established at the expense of others. When we do allow any single line
of reasoning, whether based in tradition or autonomy, orthodoxy or
irony, to be elevated above its alternatives, we cut into the very
freedom we hope to secure. If the desired consequence is freedom, and
if freedom is to be genuine, it must go all the way down to the
differences that divide us most deeply and extend all the way out to
the reasons we give for preserving the freedom that we cherish.
Freedom, furthermore, is not the only thing at stake. Extending
freedom all the way out to our defense of freedom would not only
enlarge the experience of freedom, it would also lend broader support
to the liberal regime that grants that freedom. If people are free to
defend freedom in ways that flow from the stories that matter most to
them, freedom will flourish and so will support for the liberal regime
that provides that freedom. If, to the contrary, faithful supporters
of political liberalism must share a particular justification, then
political liberalism deprives itself of the support of all who do not
come to its defense by means of this justification. Despite their
desire to be seen as good political liberals and to lend their support
to the regime, potential supporters find themselves excluded, and
their resistance to the party line with regard to justifying
liberalism comes to be seen as resistance to liberalism itself. As the
misunderstandings deepen, the rhetoric sharpens, and both insiders and
outsiders forget how much of political liberalism they genuinely
share. As a result, individual freedom suffers, and the liberal regime
undermines its own support.
Once again, Galston's analysis of the marriage between
liberalism and autonomy is helpful. Galston argues that it was when
political liberals began to see an autonomy philosophy as offering the
one legitimate justification of the ideals and strategies of political
liberalism that political liberalism got into trouble. Galston
understands that:
Autonomy-based arguments are bound to marginalize those individuals
and groups who cannot conscientiously embrace the Enlightenment
Project. To the extent that many liberals identify liberalism with
the Enlightenment Project, they limit support for their cause and
drive many citizens of good will--indeed, many potential
allies--into opposition.[16]^14
By demanding that we all hold to a justification of liberalism
that is based in giving priority to autonomy, and thereby driving
would-be supporters into an antagonistic stance, the supposed devotees
of liberal ism turn out to be liberalism's own worst enemies As a
result, the friends of liberalism do a disservice not only to freedom
and to their fellow citizens, but also to the liberal regime they hope
to support. As Galston observes, "It would not be difficult to explain
the disasters of recent American progressive politics along these
lines."[17]^15
To continue on the trajectory of freedom, then, parties on both
sides of the lines of deep difference that divide us most would do
well to allow the justification of freedom to reflect these deep
differences. The liberal ironist need not enlist us all in the "cause
of providing contemporary liberal culture with a vocabulary which is
all its own, cleansing it of the residues of a vocabulary which was
suited to the needs of former days."[18]^16 He need not supply
liberalism with a single vocabulary "which revolves around notions of
metaphor and self-creation rather than around notions of truth,
rationality, and moral obligation."[19]^17 In a similar manner, the
liberal essentialist, and her republican and communitarian allies,
need not unite us all around a single essentialist justification,
whether rooted in higher-level intersubjectivity or autonomy, in
theistic faith or republican virtue. There is no more virtue in
driving non-essentialists to the margins than there is in excluding
essentialists, and a political liberalism that insists on doing so
only undermines itself and opposes the cause of freedom. Whether we
are making a case for the strategy of disestablishment, arguing for
the ideal of individual liberty, or justifying political liberalism
more broadly, we need not view either a non-essentialist vocabulary or
an essentialist line of argument as providing the one justification to
which all political liberals of good faith must subscribe. We can,
instead, welcome the justifications of liberal freedom that both
essentialists and non-essentialists bring and guard the freedom by
which both parties bring those justifications.
Conclusion
The good news in all of this is that so many of us, coming from
such deeply rivalrous cultural traditions, have agreed in affirming
liberal freedoms when allowed to do so on our own terms. Over the past
couple of centuries presbyterians, congregationalists, anabaptists,
and Quakers have concurred. Catholics, Protestants, Jews and other
religious communities have agreed. The religiously inclined and the
secular-minded have agreed. People from across the racial and ethnic
spectrum, men and women, young and old, heterosexuals and homosexuals,
and a whole range of social classes have agreed. Advocates for
autonomy and adherents to tradition have lent their support, and now
we find that essentialists and non-essentialists concur. Richard
Rorty, on the one side, assures us that seeing "one's language, one's
conscience, one's morality, and one's highest hopes as contingent
products, as literalizations of what once were accidentally produced
metaphors, is to adopt a self-identity which suits one for citizenship
in such an ideally liberal state."[20]^18 Richard Neuhaus, on the
other side, assures us that the Catholic church is "intellectually and
institutionally, the world's most influential champion of human
freedom," and even that "the principles and practices of the free
society are made necessary by Catholic teaching."[21]^19 This
consensus is good news, and we would do well to make the most of it
both for the sake of freedom and for the sake of the liberal regime
that secures that freedom.
The bad news is that the lines of deep difference that make a
difference are drawn most clearly by our fears. Whether they focus on
the body, class, and religion, or on the lines of thought that inform
these differences, the lines of deep difference that matter most are
also lines of fear. They are marked, for instance, by homophobia and
the fear of fundamentalism, by the fear of feminism and the fear of
populist masculinities. They are marked by racial and ethnic fears and
by fears across classes and generations. They are marked by the fear
that open-minded, autonomous individualists have of narrow-minded
traditionalists and by the fear that community-minded traditionalists
have of self-centered individualists. Now, increasingly, they are
marked by the fear that makes good-hearted, freedom-loving
essentialists question whether democracy can survive the dissolvents
of smirking ironists, and good-hearted, freedom-loving ironists
question whether democracy can survive the dogmatisms of blinkered
essentialists.
These fears, however, need not lead us to despair. As John Gray
observes, it was in the context of fear that the liberal strategy of
granting freedom across lines of deep difference first proved to be
such a good idea.[22]^20
Yes, the founders were sadly inconsistent in applying this
strategy, but they did at least teach us that the strength of
political liberalism lies in its ability to see our fears not as
marking the limits of freedom, but as marking the points at which
freedom matters most. Unfortunately, over the past two centuries too
many of us have come to think that the strength of liberalism lies in
its ability to overcome our fears by unifying all of us around a
single understanding of life, or a single vocabulary, or a single line
of justification of liberalism itself. We have forgotten that
liberalism's strength does not lie in its ability to impose a common
way of thinking about life or even about liberalism, but in its
willingness to respond to lines of deep difference and fear by
refusing to establish one party to difference over another. As
unnerving as our fears may be, therefore, we do well to take note of
them, for if we will allow them to, they will identify the lines of
difference that make a difference. They will identify the deep
differences we cherish most and out of which liberalism's best
justifications flow. Our fears, in short, will identify the places
where freedom matters most, and if we will face our fears both
honestly and liberally, they will plot the course of the trajectory of
freedom.
________________________
[23]^1 Richard Rorty, "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids," Common Knowledge
1 (Winter, 1992): 150. ] [24]^2 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and
Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989) xvi. ] [25]^3
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 84. ] [26]^4 Rorty,
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 52, 53. ] [27]^5 Rorty,
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 61, 45. ] [28]^6 William Galston,
"Two Concepts of Liberalism," Ethics 105 (April, 1995): 527, 528. ]
[29]^7 Galston, "Two Concepts of Liberalism," 523. ] [30]^8 Galston,
"Two Concepts of Liberalism," 523. ] [31]^9 Galston, "Two Concepts of
Liberalism," 524. ] [32]^10 William Simon, "The Postmodernization of
Sex and Gender," The Truth About the Truth: De-confusing and
Re-constructing the Postmodern World, ed. Walter Truett Anderson (New
York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1995) 158. ] [33]^11 Simon, "The
Postmodernization of Sex and Gender," 159. ] [34]^12 Walter Truett
Anderson, "Introduction: What's Going On Here?" The Truth About the
Truth, 9,10. ] [35]^13 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 46.
] [36]^14 Galston, "Two Concepts of Liberalism," 526. ] [37]^15
Galston, "Two Concepts of Liberalism," 526. ] [38]^16 Rorty,
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 55. ] [39]^17 Rorty, Contingency,
Irony, and Solidarity, 44. ] [40]^18 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and
Solidarity, 61. ] [41]^19 Richard John Neuhaus, "Forward,"
Catholicism, Liberalism, and Communitarianism: The Catholic
Intellectual Tradition and the Moral Foundations of Democracy, eds.
Kenneth L. Grasso, Gerard V. Bradley, and Robert P. Hunt (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1995) ix, xi. ] [42]^20 See John Gray's "Two
Liberalisms of Fear" in this issue of The Hedgehog Review. ]
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