Civil Disobedience and the Politics of Identity

When We Should Not Get Along

J. Hill

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137350312
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

CivilDisobedience and the Politics of Identity is an attempt to provide criteria for when it is both morally necessary and politically expedient to break with civic harmony social cohesion in the name of a higher social justice.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Why We Should Try to Get Along Before Not Getting Along—Moral Clarity, Cosmopolitanism and the Nature of Moral Disagreements

Most of us were taught the virtues of getting along at an early age. We were rarely told why we should get along, but along our moral journey as we matriculated into moral agents, we realized that it made life easier. Strife and tension are anathema to physical and emotional health, and we discovered, in the absence of explanations, that we simply felt better when getting along with other people. That there were some people who delighted in not getting along with others struck us, and, perhaps, still strikes us, as unintelligible and irrational. Why would anyone want to live with the physical and psychological disturbances that afflict the soul when he or she aims not to get along with others?

We should have good reason to pause at any suggestion that getting along with others should be taken lightly. This is because getting along is not just a personal affair—it is not just a matter of how it makes us feel as private citizens in a polity populated with compatriots. It is also not just a matter of conflict avoidance for either politically expedient reasons or utilitarian ones. In fact, as I shall argue later on, we can often disagree and have conflicts with others but still essentially get along. Getting along speaks to the heart of learning how to treat others with respect and dignity. We affirm the intrinsic moral value we believe persons have by saying yes to their life plans even when they differ from ours, and even when we do not approve of such life plans. For example, we may privately balk at the decision of a brilliant mathematical genius to spend his life as a street artist, relying for his livelihood on the benevolence or pity of others. We realize that in the absence of infallibility we simply cannot always know what is best for others. Hence we err on the side of their values and the concomitant choices that stem from them—assuming, of course, that such choices are not harmful to self and others. We do more than wish them well. We consciously prevent the differences among competing value judgments from creating the sort of conflicts that prevent us from getting along, that is, from having human relationships marred by rancor, tension, hostility and moral uncooperativeness.¹

Getting along in spite of differences has the quality of being connected in an especially human way to another person. It entails realizing that we are each on a moral journey and that conflict only enhances the commitment to reaching a destination where at least moral clarity can be achieved. This moral clarity brings into sharper relief the fundamental nature of the conflict—the point where cooperation, concession or inevitable conflict will rule the day. Moral clarity allows us to search for and find the properties that shape a moral belief, rule or principle. In finding such properties we come to locate the epistemological foundations of other principles. That is, we come to know properly how we hold our moral beliefs or principles. We distinguish between errors of knowledge and errors of evasion; the former is the result of simply not knowing something, while the latter involves consciously evading knowledge we know we ought to have. Moral clarity brings with it knowledge of the repercussions of applying certain moral principles and a sense for measuring the moral worth of certain acts. One criterion for doing so involves measuring the contribution an act makes against the harm it does.

An economical way of describing what we have been discussing is to state it as follows: it is sometimes advisable to have moral quarrel with others over value conflicts and still maintain social harmony; it is rarely advisable to have said moral quarrel and to sow discord in the process—that is, to exacerbate social tension, undermine social cohesion and pursue protracted moral quarrels where we cannot see by way of reason our way out of the moral conundrums we are enmeshed in—and to harbor moral malice and ill-will toward others. This attitude undoubtedly brings about a suspension of the basic social values that are the linchpin of any decent and well-ordered society. The transactions among people in day-to-day life that require civic trust, cultural understanding and social facility are not undermined to such an extent that civic life is compromised irreparably.²

But what of those cases where our moral sensibilities are so offended not by some moral-political infraction committed by others, but because we think they are nefarious acts in our midst that threaten the basic well-being of persons and cause harm to public and private life? What happens when we cannot live with ourselves unless we make a moral declaration of war upon acts, practices and persons who are perpetrators of gross injustices or contribute to the devolution of the society we live in?

In such cases it is necessary to go to moral war with each other. Sometimes it is not right to get along, and sometimes in the declaration of this moral war we break with social cohesion, civic trust and harmony and question the coherence on which our society seems to find its foundational moral bedrock. Sometimes we trump civic harmony and social cohesion for the sake of higher moral rights and social justice. We do this because we know that some wrongs are so wrong that when they are perpetrated we commit an egregious moral transgression in not registering our moral and political protest. We violate our own moral excellence in not registering our protest.

Sometimes these wrongs eviscerate us of our dignity and bring about a form of humiliation that shocks us. We didn’t know that such seemingly innocuous practices or issues could leave us bereft of a response. But this is what is often accomplished by moral transgressions. Rather than leaving us filled with righteous indignation, they leave us feeling evacuated, as if the transgression has already evacuated the self of its capacity to morally respond. We feel like our moral vocabularies and their attendant relationship to our moral sensibilities have failed us.

Largely, of course, this is a phenomenon of the contemporary world. We live morally fragmented lives that are challenged by competing moral candidates that vie for our attention. But if we may describe our era as the age of the moral energy crisis, it is not at all hard to understand why. People don’t want to have moral quarrels either because they are too mentally exhausted from the trivia of daily life or because they give scant attention to the disturbing headlines and do not feel that they are well-informed enough to make legitimate moral and political judgments. They have an opinion but it is not suffused with the requisite evidence, moral reasoning, deliberation and attendant ethical verdict. People who hold moral judgments often fall along two lines: first, there are those who have a very uninformed but powerful visceral response to a practice, issue or dilemma. Their bodies tell them that they find something repugnant. This is a good sign, they believe. It implies that their, moral intuitions are correct and need no further investigation or be subjected to any rigorous philosophical meaning tests. Such persons often, unknowingly, rely on customs, traditions and ordinary moral conventions and norms to gauge their moral conscience. Reasoning with such people often proves to be difficult since they hold their moral convictions like articles of faith that are not open to revision and contestation.

Second, there are people who are real moral participants in their own lives and in the universe around them. They, in turn, fall into two groups. The first make it their business to learn the moral facts, weigh the consequences of an action against the harm it does and then come out with well-formed moral positions about a phenomenon few may have taken the time to think deeply about. Such persons, I believe, know when it is time to have moral quarrel with a practice or issue and even with the defenders of what their consulted conscience tells them is wrong. They know full well when it is appropriate to have moral quarrel but to still try to get along with a view toward reconciling seemingly irreconcilable differences. Not all wrongs are qualitatively equal and a good moral reasoner will learn how to judge which wrongful acts are worse than others. He or she will do so not only by virtue of the consequences an act has on a person, but also by the intentions of the perpetrator of wrong. It is worse to intend the slaughter of 20 people than it is to break all their arms. Some wrongs, though, are so wrong that when they are committed or practiced in the name of culture, tribe and morality, our conscience assumes the default job of implacably denouncing them. We know, in other words, when to do something about the wrongs we encounter.³

The members of the second group are close to the first group except that they feel a sense of moral impotence that undermines their moral ambition in their own eyes. They think, What can I do? How can I change anything at all? How am I to move moral civilization forward? When I can barely achieve moral maturity in my own soul, how am I to effect any meaningful change in society? I simply am one among millions and, by myself, how can my actions change anything? Caught in the midst of a mind/body dilemma, they still know that sometimes we have to not get along.

To judge a wrong to be egregious and to be willing to undermine social cohesion in a society for its amelioration or its entire elimination is to function as a sovereign moral agent. It is to work on behalf of humanity’s moral improvement.

We live in a world where many of the cultural spheres are still at war with each other. Cultures clash, and civilizations, notwithstanding the viewpoint of liberal or progressive social democrats (a group to which I belong), collide in their irreconcilable perspectival differences. They cannot seem to see eye to eye.

One of the worst institutions in today’s world is gender apartheid, practiced most virulently and heinously in Saudi Arabia. It is a practice that not only separates the sexes but is closely analogous to the racial practices of apartheid when it was the ruling social code in South Africa. Women in many Islamic socities are subservient and must camouflage their identities by wearing an unbearable uncomfortable burka. It conceals their faces and entire bodies and is associated with several health problems, from vitamin D deficiency to being twice or more likely to develop osteoporosis. Their movements are restricted and monitored, and they cannot travel unless in the presence of a male relative. The normal day-to-day interaction between the sexes that we take for granted in the West is denied them. Even in their own homes, they dine separately from their male relatives, including husbands and sons. In the chapter on the burka I make a case that one of the reasons that the burka should be banned is because it is a hate symbol. It is, I argue, misanthropy masquerading as religious piety. In its concealment of the face and in the message it sends to secular citizens of a society, the burka assaults our ethical sensibilities and traumatizes us—the spectators. As an ideological as opposed to religious garment, the burka diffuses one of the moral axioms of contemporary life in the civilized West: gender and sex equality. Since the burka is not a neutral piece of clothing but a normative ensemble of political dressage that tells every other woman what she should be and look like it should not, as some misguided progressives have stated, be viewed as a site of contestation against Western hegemony—whatever that means. Rather, the burka represents a form of religious, social and political conservatism that harkens back to a nostalgic Golden Age where women were real women and men were real men, meaning, when the asymmetry between the sexes and the resultant roles each assumed formed an essentialist clone that men and women inherited and regenerated.

The burka and its very real meaning promote the political and social regression of women wherever it is worn. It is not a site of contestation. It is a war symbol, and the declaration of war it makes upon modernity is atavistic. It starts with the obliteration of the human face, which is our first introduction to the humanity of another human being, our first entrée into the intimate world of mutual creative social intercourse. I look at you, you look at me and, except in those rare instances where a face evokes overt hostility, we affirm the other as a member of the human race. This obliteration of identity occasioned by the burka is an ominous warning to not dare to look at the swathed figure—she is off-limits because she is outside the human imaginary where most of us live. The woman in burka is a premodern, prehumanistic figure. Aside from taking herself outside the humanistic domain of the human condition, she posits a premodern sensibility and way of life as the appropriate normative standard to which pious women ought to aspire. The mise-en-scène in which this psychodrama is enacted is one that ceases to recognize the face as a face.

Far from recognizing the face as the seat of humanity, as the transparent mode in which we stave off the illusion of death by affirming it with a gaze, a smile, a look of curiosity—anything that functions as an acknowledgement of its existence (even hatred)—the burka’s obliteration of the face is an act of ideological propaganda. It denotes that women are congenitally inferior to men and simply not worth taking notice of as members of the human community.

I will not write about female genital mutilation, child slavery, sex trafficking and mass rape in the form of child betrothal. These are obvious human rights violations that we should not allow. And I take it as part of the moral sophistication of the civilized West that most of its inhabitants regard the immoral practices I have listed as just that—immoral, evil and tragic. I leave it to others (as they have admirably done) to take up these evils and to continue exposing them as the atrocities they are.

What I wish to do, instead, is to pursue issues that are not self-evidently clear as practices we should not get along with. I want to discuss why antigay marriage sentiments, and those who block the right to marriage which gays ought to have—such as is had by their heterosexual counterparts—constitute a violation of human dignity and undermine the intrinsic moral worth of gays who wish to marry. I want to explore and reveal how antiassimilationism and fear of foreigners along with the politics of the multicultural left and the wearing of the burka all constitute modern-day evils not at all evident in the repertoire of our moral value systems. Most people would consider, then, this project highly idiosyncratic. But it is often the least regarded social ills and evils of our age that wreak the most havoc. Operating far removed from the moral scrutiny of most people, they spawn a bevy of social ills and attitudes that lead to moral relativism at best and moral collusion with immorality at worst.

I want, in short, to deal with certain problems resulting from a divisive politics of identity that I believe are destroying Western civilization from within. These problems are pulling us into a regressive state of affairs that is going unnoticed because most people have never considered the ideological underpinnings of the practices that I claim are abhorrent. The politics of identity I challenge here are not to be regarded as phenomena associated with leftist politics. My arguments in the following chapters show that identity politics often transcend right- or left-wing maneuverings. In point of fact, I will argue that as far as gay liberation is concerned the identity politics at work is manufactured largely by the religious right that has essentialized sexual orientation into a species type, turning gays into nonprocreative and, therefore, socially nonuseful specimens. Gay identity, I argue somewhat controversially, is made externally. Gay liberation is an ethical response to the dehumanizing reduction of gays to their genitalia.

This leads us to ponder why I have chosen to give a cosmopolitan response to the moral maladies outlined. Cosmopolitanism is not just a sentiment or a perspective as many thinkers have made it out to be.⁴ It is both a moral system and a theory of the self that provides authentic answers to probing issues in the contemporary era. Cosmopolitanism in its weak form is a variant of multiculturalism, but in its radical and strong form it becomes a moral and intellectual system to contend with. It debunks the shibboleths of group solidarity by demystifying the selective and arbitrary criteria on which group identity rests. It is highly individualistic in form, and argues that only individual persons—not cultures, or races or ethnic groups—are the bearers of rights and the possessors of an inviolable status worthy of respect.⁵

Cosmopolitanism as a philosophical movement with historical roots in the Cynic and Stoic philosophical traditions has championed the inviolable dignity of each individual and posited that each person (not groups) be a unit of ethical concern. In the realm of sexuality it deems multiple sexual types and practices as irrelevant to the state of affairs of a society or a culture’s moral status and, in fact, an authentic cosmopolitan sexuality would render so-called sexual prototypes as fluid, indeterminate and sexual orientation as existing on a vast continuum that should allow us to give pause when attempting to assign gender as the definitive criterion for permitting marriage between two people of the opposite sex.

Cosmopolitanism is the notion that one’s identity is not determined solely or primarily by any racial, national or ethnic background.⁶ A cosmopolitan is an individual who disavows all partisanship and parochial commitments of localities, city-states and principalities. Diogenes and the ancient Cynics began the cosmopolitan tradition by forming the notion that an individual could have a primary identity apart from the one he or she inherited from the polis. In deemphasizing the value of class, status, national origin and gender, the Cynics simultaneously placed great emphasis on the value of reason and moral purpose. Here is the revolutionary idea that the Cynics achieved, which is a given in the Western concept of personality and its concomitant dependence on dignity: regardless of how much one is deprived of the concrete goods that are constitutive of social identity, one possesses a larger universal identity grounded in reason, moral purpose and, above all, human dignity. Today, when contemporary cosmopolitans speak in terms of a universal human identity that they share with others, they are invoking concepts bequeathed to them by the ancient Cynics.

The concept of world citizenship in the sense of belonging to all of humankind gained ascendancy in the Hellenistic era. It is among the core features of Stoic thought, which, along with its great rival Epicureanism, were reactions to the gradual disappearance of the small city-state in an ag...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Why We Should Try to Get Along Before Not Getting Along—Moral Clarity, Cosmopolitanism and the Nature of Moral Disagreements
• 2. Leave My Genitals Alone: Same-Sex Marriage and the Nature of Moral Values
• 3. Hiding from Humanity: The Burka, the Face and the Annihilation of Human Identity
• 4. Anti-Assimilationism, Xenophobia, Misanthropy and the Logic of Contagion
• 5. Multiculturalism and Its Collusion with Racial and Ethnic Apartheid
• 6. Educational Multiculturalism and Epistemological Counterculturalism: Toward a Moral Deratification of Their Agenda (Part II)
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index