Cory Booker on tolerance and the problem of using and understanding history

Corporate Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey spoke at the Democratic Convention Monday night, Sen. Cory Booker: 'We are called to be a nation of love' PBS Newshour 07/26/2016:

I was glad to see that he made prominent use of the Declaration of Independence, the proclamation from the Continental Congress formally initiating the American Revolution:

Time has the transcript of Booker's speech (Will Drabold, Read Cory Booker’s Speech at the Democratic Convention 07/26/2016):

Two hundred and forty years ago, our forefathers gathered in this very city and they declared before the world that we would be a free and independent nation. Today, we gather here again in this city, in this city of brotherly love, to reaffirm our values before our nation and the whole world. ...

Now, looking back to our history, looking back to our history, our founding fathers put forth founding documents that were indeed genius. But our founding documents weren’t genius because they were perfect. They were saddled with the imperfections and even the bigotry of the past. Native Americans were referred to as savages. Black Americans were fractions of human beings. And women were not mentioned at all.

But those facts and ugly parts of our history don’t distract from our nation’s greatness. In fact, I believe we are an even greater nation, not because we started perfect, but because every generation has successfully labored to make us a more perfect union. [my emphasis]

I've been disturbed recently at how wiling the Democrats and even the independent left in the US to cede any kind of patriotic imagery from the period prior to 1860 to the Republicans and their favorite pseudohistorians like David Barton. And my perspective is very much like what Cory Bookder expressed there.

Yes, Thomas Jefferson was a slaveowner, he believed black people were biologically inferior to whites, and called Native Americans savages. He was also a key leader of the American Revolution and a cutting-edge philosophical and practical advocate for revolutionary democracy in the 18th and 19th century. And all those things are important to understand if we're trying to have a meaningful grasp of that period in history.

If we think that democracy is a good thing, or that it represents some kind of historical progress, then it's hard to say that events like the American Revolution, the adoption of the Constitution and Jefferson's election as President in 1800 and his subsequent Presidency were all good things insofar as they were advances in democracy. Like all major historical processes, they were also contradictory and had their dark sides. From a democratic perspective, there are advances in human history. And also retrogressions. Both even can and do occur at the same time.

But the American left at the moment seems ready to abandon any positive democratic symbolism from the days of the Revolution until at least 1860 to conservatives. Republicans are actually good at using patriotic symbolic and invoking the Founders. And those symbols resonate with many people, not just conservatives. There's a reason that the organized, well-funded astroturf Republican mobilization that began in 2009 called itself the Tea Party. Instead of, say, Americans for a New Gilded Age. Or, White People for White Power.

We're talking here about that strange conceptual badlands area between history as intellectual discipline and history as politics and ideology. Neither of the two sides of that polarity should determine the other. History needs to be written and understood for what it is. And that task shouldn't be subordinated to passing political fads and current ideologies, though there can never be history written in isolation from the historical context in which the historian lives and writes. On the other hand, it's not necessary for a politician evoking a historical theme in support of a current cause to parse every significant issue debated in the professional historical literature.

I note that Barack Obama in his speech to the Democratic Convention also invoked the most famous document written by the slaveowner and Indian-hater Thomas Jefferson and did so to invoke American tradition and to democratize it further. Hillary Clinton also invoked the American Revolution. Although she evoked it to stress the importance of compromise. (What th ...?!?)

But Booker's invocation of love instead of tolerance strikes me as distinctly strange:

And so this is the high call of patriotism. Patriotism is love of country. But you can’t love your country without loving your countrymen and your countrywomen. Now, we don’t always have to agree, but we must be there for each other, we must empower each other, we must find the common ground, and we must build bridges across our differences to pursue the common good.

Let me tell you, we cannot devolve into our — to a nation where our highest aspirations are that we just tolerate each other. We are not called to be a nation of tolerance. We are called to be a nation of love.

That’s why that last line in the Declaration of Independence says it so clearly. It says that we must — to make this nation work, we must mutually pledge to each other our lives and our fortunes and our sacred honor. Tolerance is the wrong way. Tolerance says I’m just going to stomach your right to be different, that if you disappear from the face of the Earth, I’m no better or worse off.

But love — love knows that every American has worth and value, that no matter what their background, no matter what their race or religion or sexual orientation, love, love recognizes that we need each other, that we as a nation are better together, that when we are divided we are weak, we decline, yet when we are united, we are strong, when we are indivisible, we are invincible. [my emphasis]

This is in line with the Clinton campaign's distinctly non-populist theme of unity, Stronger Together.

But it's worth remembering here that Booker is not only a loyal Wall Street Democrat. He's also kissed up to the Christian Right. So it's worth paying attention to what the implications of his love-not-tolerance rhetoric, which superficially invokes Christian themes of loving your enemies and turning the other cheek.

The Young Turks raise a question about the political effectiveness of Cory Booker's approach, which Cenk Uygur mocks in this context as, "Oh, I'm going to smother the fascists with love." Does Donald Trump Have Dirt On Cory Booker? 07/26/2016:

That report points out how easily Booker's love-not-tolerance slogan can function not just as a willingness to give someone who's wronged you another chance but also as yet another excuse for corporate Democrats to refuse to oppose Republicans or even to offer an alternative framing of political issues.

Here is the full Cory Booker speech, Watch Sen. Cory Booker’s full speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention PBS Newshour 06/25/2016:

That report points out how easily Booker's love-not-tolerance slogan can function not just as a willingness to give someone who's wronged you another chance but also as yet another excuse for corporate Democrats to refuse to oppose Republicans or even to offer an alternative framing of political issues. Bipartisanship!

Returning to Mr. Jefferson, this is the text of the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom of 1786 Whereases) which he considered one of the greatest achievements of his life (Digital History 2016):

Be it enacted by the General Assembly, That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

And though we well know that this assembly elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding assemblies, constituted with powers equal to our own, and that therefore to declare this act to be irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we are free to declare, and do declare, that the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present, or to narrow its operation, such act shall be an infringement of natural right. [my emphasis]

That is one of the great statements of the classical liberal principle of religious tolerance and freedom of religion. It frames religious tolerance in the Enlightenment version of natural rights, which is not so common today.

But the basic democratic principle of religious tolerance and religious freedom is the same today. We also talk about intellectual tolerance in terms of being open to hear other ideas and treating them fairly. But the political/juridical version in the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom and the First Amendment is not about intellectual openness or personal politeness. It’s about the right to not be put in jail or otherwise legally punished for expressing religious beliefs different from those of the party or faction in power.

It’s also about the obligation of the government to prevent people from being physically harmed or persecuted because of their religious beliefs.

Karl Marx gave a rather cynical definition of religious freedom in his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), “Everyone should be able to attend his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their noses in.“ Impious wording aside, there is nothing distinctly Marxist about this definition of religious freedom. On the contrary, Marx there was expressing his own support of classical liberal-democratic, Jeffersonian/Madisonian version of religious tolerance and freedom of worship expressed in the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom.

In other words, the democratic principle of religious tolerance, as well as tolerance for various kinds of non-religious speech, could be characterized this way: "Tolerance says, I’m just going to stomach your right to be different, that if you disappear from the face of the Earth, I’m no better or worse off.“

Fundamentally, that is exactly what tolerance as a historical, democratic, liberal concept is: I may think you’re worthless and your soul will burn in Hail forever because you don’t worship God the way I do and I’m never going to invite you to have dinner with me to discuss your despicable ideas, but I have to respect and defend your right to be as horribly wrong as you are.

The Western democratic concept of tolerance was decisively influenced by the bloody Wars of Religion of the 1500s in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Rainer Forst writes in Toleration and Conflict (2013 English edition, pp. 138-9)

Sixteenth-century France provides the backdrop for the decisive further development in the discourse of toleration as political thought and action became increasingly independent of religious authorities. This development was triggered by fierce religious wars leading to a secular understanding of the state, whose counterpart was the increasing autonomy ofindividuals and their revised self-understanding. '

With increasing religious plurality, followed by the Reformation and the ensuing conflicts, the traditional constellation of church and state collapsed and the political question of how to uphold the unity of the state and, most importantly, to preserve peace acquired central importance. The state- or, more precisely, the sovereign understood as an increasingly neutral authority situated above the religious denominations, was proposed as an answer to this question. Thus, out of the crisis of the Wars of Religion there developed a discourse of sovereignty and toleration in which the latter features as the only rational option for securing peace, a discourse in which a 'secular' legitimation of the state, which enjoys sovereign authority above the parties to the religious confiicti (even though it remains bound to the dominant religious denomination), took shape. This idea was first developed by the politiques, a heterogeneous group of politically minded lawyers in France during the second half of the sixteenth century, and in particular by [Jean] Bodin, and it would acquire a distinctive expression in the seventeenth century in the political philosophy of Hobbes.

Our concept of political and religious tolerance developed out of a context in which people had experienced how massively destructive killing each other over religious beliefs could be. Or to go back to Cory Booker’s contemptuous formulation, it was a big advance in freedom and civilized behavior when Europeans decided it was not a good thing for one kind of Christian to think of another that if you disappear from the face of the Earth, I’ll be better off.

Cory Booker essentially sneered at that notion. But both historically and conceptually, that’s the most essential part of what freedom of speech and religion actually mean!

Bobo on meaning and colleges

The perennially favorite American conservative complaint about allegedly liberal/leftwing domination of academic continued to be aired this year.

Early in January, David "Bobo" Brooks took the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack as an occasion to complain about all the Mean Libruals in US colleges and universities, I Am Not Charlie Hebdo New York Times 01/08/2015. They are setting up "speech codes" and the like that are producing "crude censorship and a strangled conversation," in Bobo's considered opinion.

Another Mr. Brooks, Arthur Brooks, the head of AEI, aka, Neocon Central, is complaining in the Times now in the last quarter of the year about Academia’s Rejection of Diversity 10/30/2015. The AEI Brooks claims to see "discrimination and hostility within academia toward conservative researchers and their viewpoints."

This kind of talk reminds me of one of my favorite stories, about the Rev. Ezekiel Bittery, from Sinclair Lewis' 1943 novel, Gideon Planish. That was pre-Internet times, so news didn't go viral quite as fast as now. The Rev. Bittery was discovered by some leftie newspaper who reported he was preaching hellfire sermons about the virtues of Jesus and fascism. After a while, a regional newspaper picked up the story. Finally, it made its way to a major metropolitan daily. Eventually Congress and others make formal investigations, and there is considerable hand-wringing about this exotic development in the heartland:

And during all this time, the Reverend Ezekiel himself will, as publicly as possible, to as many persons as he can persuade to attend his meetings, have admitted, insisted, bellowed, that he has always been a Ku Kluxer and a Fascist, that he has always hated Jews, colleges and good manners, and that the only thing he has ever disliked about Hitler is that he once tried to paint barns instead of leaving the barns the way God made them.

Conservatives were fretting even then about them thar Islamocommonist tendencies in those colleges that teach all those fancy ideas.

Steve M at No More Mister Nice Bloggrappled with Bobo's January complaint David Brooks Makes A Category Error in 01/09/2015:

Yes, activists fight to block speeches by Ayaan Hirsi Ali [who propagates anti-Muslim propaganda of the most dubious kind] on their campuses, but not only do they not try to kill her, they don't try to prevent her from speaking anywhere else. They don't try to prevent her from publishing. They don't (violently or nonviolently) threaten bookstores and online retailers that sell her books, or periodicals that publish her articles.

To the extent his column was coherent, it sounds like Bobo was more-or-less adopting the same position as the thoroughly obnoxious Bill Donohue, who pretty much validated the French terrorist attack in his own version of using violent Muslim extremism to validate Catholic fundamentalist extremism. (See: Andrew Seidel, Charlie Hebdo, Bill Donohue, and the freedom of thought 01/08/2015) That was too over-the-top for even Megyn Kelly at FOX News, and that's saying a lot! (Arturo Garcia, Megyn Kelly puts Bill Donohue in his place by linking Larry Flynt and Charlie Hebdo Raw Story 01/08/2015)

But still performing the same verbal acrobatics, Bobo doubled down on the colleges-are-like-Islamic-terrorists point in Shields and Brooks on Paris terrorism and tolerance, GOP takeover in Congress PBS Newshour 01/09/2015. And Sleepy Mark Shields, in his characteristic semi-somnolent mode, says Bobo's point is "absolutely legitimate and valid":

This is Bobo's highbrow version of what all the Mississippi segregationists were saying about places like my undergradute alma mater Millsaps College in Jackson MS circa 1965, when they were denounced by segregationists defenders of the White Race because they de-segregated before they were forced to by a court.

And this is now official Pundit Groupthink? I'm sure if Ruth Marcus had been sitting in for Mark in that segment, she would have said, "I agree with David." But then, she tends to say that three or four times whenever she's there. (To be fair, Mark eventually gets around to pointing out that Christian terrorism is also a thing.)

Erik Loomis weighs in on AEI Brooks' recent complaint in Conservatives Want to Bring Politics into Academic Hiring LGM 11/01/2015:

As for the question of why there are more liberals than conservatives in academia–and note the op-ed conveniently leaves out economics and the enormous and growing business schools in this discussion–it’s about two things. First, studying the human past and present in depth tends to challenge the mythology about the world conservatives hold dear. I’ve known many a person who came to graduate school a conservative and came out a liberal. ...

Second, it’s that conservatives are unlikely to take low-paying jobs in professions that have no future. Chalk that up to conservatives being smarter than liberals I guess.

This type of complaint is not an issue on which should be difficult for people, even Bobo, to walk and talk and the same time. Classically "liberal" freedom of speech and freedom of religion mean that people can get to say stupid and ugly things about religion, and that people who are offended can say whatever they think is appropriate in response. It doesn't mean you get to shoot people who insult you. (Except in Stand Your Ground/Kill At Will states in the US, where you can claim you feel threatened and legally murder your critic, especially if you're white and he's black. And those laws are insane.)

And it means the law is required to protect people from violent retaliation on either side of that argument.

Conservatives have been whining about the alleged "political correctness" in campus speech codes since at least the 1980s. And sometimes, they have had a point that civil libertarians can agree with. But neither students in classrooms nor employees in a business get to address each other in formal settings as, say, "stupid n****r" or "worthless c**t." Freedom of speech means you don't go to jail for it. But it doesn't mean that you can still go to class or work at a workplace if you insist on that kind of trash-talking.

At UC-Berkeley a couple of years ago, some white frat boys did one of those "affirmative action bake sales," where white boys pay more than women or minorities. (UCB has the largest College Republican chapter in the country.) Other students did a very effective counter-protest with a "die-in," in which they lay down all over the plaza where the frat-boy twits were doing their bake sale. The frat boys weren't deprived of the option to publicly advertise what jerks they were. And the counter-protesters made sure as many people as possible were paying attention to what jerks the frat-boys were being. Free speech at work.

Dahlia Lithwick on the legal strategy behind Christian Right "religious freedom" laws

Dahlia Lithwick looks at the political/legal strategy behind the Christian Right's new favorite device to promote discrimination, the so-called "religious freedom" laws, in Complicit as Sin Slate 04/09/2015.

She explains laws that respect a person's right to their own religious beliefs are qualitatively different that laws that protect people from doing something that someone else might use to do something that the first party thinks is sinful. Thus, the title of the article.

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence defended his state’s RFRA [religious freedom restoriation act] as recalibrating the balance of civil rights and “religious freedom.” But these are simply not your father’s religious liberty claims. As [Doug] Siegel and [Reva] NeJaime note, the claim here is not that a religious individual is being forced to do something that violates his religion, such as shaving his beard; it is that he must be free from endorsing or enabling the behavior of others who are engaging in what he sees as sinful behavior. This was the central claim of the employers who sued in Hobby Lobby. They argued that it was itself sinful to provide health coverage to employees who might then use those benefits to engage in ostensibly sinful conduct. This is the same argument as the business owner’s claim that frosting a cake or arranging the calla lilies for a same-sex wedding is an act of “complicity” in a union that the business owner deems sinful.

Why does this matter? Because as Siegel and NeJaime argue, the new religious objections affect bystanders, ordinary folks in the greater community. These “third parties” are just people (often marginalized people, like gay couples or women seeking birth control) whose beliefs and values are not shared by the religious claimant. The authors point out that these new complicity-based religious conscience claims may well be authentic and sincere, as were the religious freedom claims originally contemplated by Congress when it drafted and passed the RFRA in response to a Supreme Court decision that declined to protect the religious freedom of Native Americans seeking to use peyote in a religious ceremony. But the new RFRAs may hurt third parties in ways these earlier state and federal RFRAs never quite imagined. The intent of this new article is to consider why. [my emphasis]

The Seigel and NeJaime article she references is Conscience Wars: Complicity-Based Conscience Claims in Religion and Politics Yale Law Journal Vol. 124/2015 (02/08/2015).

The problems of tolerance (6): The need for tolerance, its limits and its "repressive" form

"I never thought I'd live to see the day when old-fashioned journalism would be a form of civil disobedience". - William Sloane Coffin, Oct 2005

I've found taking a new look at A Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965) helpful in thinking about the larger conceptual background of tolerance: a human right; as an essential element of democracy; as a necessary element of scientific research and development of knowledge; and, as a vital part of political and social progress.

The issue of tolerance, in both its formal (legal, human-rights) aspect and in its role of facilitating the search for truth and progress, comes up in many ways these days. I started writing these posts before the Republicans' recent "the New York Times is a traitor" campaign. In some ways it may seem counterintuitive for me as someone who sees the goal of that campaign as being to stifle the press altogether to be posting right now about 40-year-old essays that hold the concept of tolerance up to scrutiny.

But we can't let the Republicans drive what we talk about. They do it far too often already.

Here are a few links that raise different aspects of the issue of tolerance in its formal and qualitative aspects.

David Neiwert in Here comes the flood , Orcinus blog 06/13/06, writes about the punditocracy beginning to freak out over the implications of blogosphere democratizing of information dissemination and political comment and analysis. Using Times columnist Maureen Dowd as an example, he also gives a good commentary on the way that genuine alternatives for policies, not even to speak of different ways of life, get muffled in the corporate media environment:

What sparked the rise of Web-based political communication like the blogosphere was the behavior of people like Dowd. When she was named to one of the Times' cherished columnist slots, she replaced the estimable Anna Quindlen, a dependably thoughtful voice of liberalism. Dowd, in contrast, has operated more in the mode of a gossip columnist with snippy, personality-driven journalism that often becomes simply trite; while the Times' conservative columnists in the late '90s were singleminded in their pursuit of Clinton's impeachment, Dowd chose more often than not to chime in on their side, and likewise was a happy participant in the "Al Gore is a weakminded liar" theme that played out in 2000.

With that kind of voice representing "liberals" in the New York Times - and folks like Joe Klein and Pat Caddell showing up on cable TV to represent the "liberal" side - it's not the least surprising that genuine liberals felt the need to begin speaking up. Otherwise, their voices were not going to be heard. The blogosphere and Webzines became an effective way for that to happen.

Also, in An open letter to my fellow journalists Orcinus blog 06/26/06, Neiwert describes how destructive and partisan the current journalistic practice of "balance" can be. He quotes a favorite saying, "The enemy isn't conservatism. The enemy isn't liberalism. The enemy is b******t."

He then elaborates a bit:

At some point, journalists are going to have to come to terms with the reality that the b******t, in the past 10 years and more, has not been an even-steven thing, where liberals are just as prone to it as conservatives - though most "fair and balanced" journalists like to pretend that this is so.

No, the reality is that in that time, the levels of unmitigated b******t flowing from the many founts of, er, wisdom on the right has been ceaseless, programmatic, and deliberately aimed at overwhelming the press. That's not to say that the left doesn't peddle b******t still, nor that every jot and tittle emanating from the right is a falsehoood. But the proportionate level of b******t from the right is so overwhelming as to render any quibbles almost negligible.

The press is drowning in it, as [the book] Lapdogs [by Eric Boehlert] demonstrates on every page. And the blogosphere, believe it or not, has the potential to be a lifeline.

If reporters can overcome their initial defensiveness, they will discover that bloggers' critiques can actually be helpful and insightful. Perhaps more to the point, they'll discover that there is a wealth of real information available on blogs that often was tucked away into obscure corners, particularly expertise from the likes of Juan Cole and P.Z. Myers.

In other words, the failure of the mainstream media to articulate alternatives and even to present relevant factual material in many cases has created a niche that blog technology allowed thousands of people to step in to begin filling it. I wonder if the people that perfected the software that allows regular updates of text without the author re-writing the code for the Web page realized that they were going to shake the old-line media to the extent that has occurred. Although, as Marcuse would surely remind us if he were around today, the "negative", critical function of blogs can also be absorbed and co-opted by the Establishment.

Jane Hamsher (FDL Book Salon - Lapdogs, Pt. 2 06/25/06) talks about the difference between rightwing and liberal blog approaches to the press:

As [Eric] Boehlert notes, there is great irony in the fact that journalists have been so easily lulled into compliance with right-wing narratives. We on the left may be critical but we’re trying to urge the press into higher standards; the right essentially wants to destroy them.

This is a very good example of how what Sloane Coffin called "old-fashioned journalism", journalism that does more than just type up whatever nonsense some industry lobby puts out in order to show the "other side" of an issue and achieve a phony kind of "balance", has become in itself a kind of dissent from the current order of things.

But there is a difference from the approach of the Republican right, which can sound superficially like what I just said, and criticisms like those Hamsher is making. Wolff, Moore and Marcuse in A Critique of Pure Tolerance all say in various ways that tolerance has a purpose: to separate the accurate from the inaccurate, the scientific from the superstitious, the socially constructive from the destructive. For that to happen, there has to be a genuinely free debate. A kind of debate that is seriously limited in today's American society - limited by extreme government secrecy, by illegal surveillance, by a well-funded rightwing noise machine that intimidates the press, by religious zealots with big bucks at their disposal who want to sabotage any notion of truth and value not stemming from their interpretation of the Christian faith, and more.

Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby provided some interesting comments on class issues and the press in his Howler post of 06/26/06. He quotes David Ehrenstein on why the "press corps" was so hostile to Bill Clinton and Al Gore:

Clinton was all about their class-hatred, Eric. Don’t you remember what “Dean” Broder and Sally “Kneepads” Quinn wrote about him “trashing the place”?

He was Britney Spears to them - pure Trailer Trash. The fact that he was smarter, braver and more tenacious than they were only made it worse for them.

Now, I'm not sure if Ehrenstein meant to imply that he was saying that he sees poor Britney that way. Let's be generous and assume that he was making a more sensible statement, saying that just as the mainstream media can't possibly understand the cutting-edge social criticism and progressive postmodernism that is Little Boo's defining characteristic in her public persona, they were also incapable of seeing why the public elected both Bill Clinton and Al Gore President. Actually, there is a distinct similarity between Clinton and Britney (although I'm pretty sure Boo is a flaming socialist, not a cautious Democrat like Clinton).

The Howler comments on this:

Reading minds is hard to do - but we’d guess that this comment is on the mark. On the other hand, there’s a surface problem with this analysis. By the time of Campaign 2000, the corps hated Gore even more than Clinton - and far from being “trailer trash,” Gore came from the DC/St. Albans class. Yes, he also grew up on the Tennessee farm. But in the most literal sense, Gore was not a class outsider, available for simplistic “class-hatred.”

That said, we’d guess that the press corps’ problem with Dems is, in large part, a matter of class. Human beings have always been tribal, and our modern, tribal national politics is largely a tribalism of class. We haven’t discussed this matter before, and we won’t be skilled in our descriptions. But it’s fairly clear that tribal connections have long defined our two major parties, and have done so more and more since the time of the GOP “Southern Strategy.”

Increasingly, the GOP is the tribe of the upper-class, older American order - and the Democrats are the tribe of everyone else. Everyone who doesn’t fit in the old order has found their way to the Dem coalition. The Dems are the party of The Other - of the “lower-class;” of racial minorities; of gays; of uppity women. The Republicans are the party of the traditional upper-class ideal - and of all those who will swear allegiance to that orders’ values. This does not mean that Dems are always right - or that Reps are always wrong [although obviously they normally are - Bruce] - about issues involving class and race. It does mean that the parties represent two different tribes - and that many people align themselves based on tribal impulses. [my emphasis in bold]

In other words, class considerations matter. And they often exert their force in subtle as well as overt ways.

It's striking how the Howler's description of the mainstream press tends to see the Democrats as the Other - however removed that may be from the very corporate-friendly real existing Democratic Party - sounds remarkably like the Outsiders that Herbert Marcuse identified as being the groups vested in trying to create a genuinely free debate: "The Dems are the party of The Other - of the “lower-class;” of racial minorities; of gays; of uppity women."

That doesn't mean the Democratic Party is necessarily more representative of the real needs and concerns of all those groups than it was in 1965. It just means that the Establishment press is that much further removed from focusing on many of the real problems of American society.

Next, I have an excerpt from Cyber-Mobilization: The New Levée en Masse by Audrey Kurth Cronin Parameters (US Army War College) Summer 2006.

This excerpt raises some disturbing questions. But I should also say, after having complained about the general lack of understanding in America about the revolutionary past of democracy, Cronin's article draws on that tradition to frame her article. For example, referring to the French Revolution, she writes:

The role of the poor French peasant in particular, supporting the revolution and fighting its wars, was central to the power of the popular army. The passionate participation of the working-class Frenchman, who previously would not have been granted the right of citizenship, was a vital evolution in the organization for war. The unprecedented range of communications effected a transformation of individuals in the lower strata of French society into the “People,” the holders of popular sovereignty. They also enabled the quite conscious building of a national identity: from a focus on warfare in the service of local nobility, those on French territory drew themselves into one focused and motivated fighting unit. The French people believed that they were fighting a war for freedom and against tyranny, for their revolution and against monarchical power, and the bombardment of information from above and within consolidated those beliefs. In this culmination of social, political, and military change, the French nation and the army were as one. [my emphasis]

The disturbing part comes later in the article. She is discussing the implications of cyber-mobilization, which is being used not only by democratic movements but also by violent Salifist jihadist groups. She defines the problem this way:

In democratizing global communications, the West’s initial assumption was that the natural outcome would be the spread of democratic concepts. And to some extent, that did happen. The combination of cell phones and the Internet has facilitated a variety of democratic movements, including the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the sweeping of Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo into power, anti-globalization protests by groups like Direct Action, and many other types of grass-roots campaigns. Another powerful motivator in the post-Cold War years was the conviction that democracies do not fight each other: with the spread of connectivity would come increasing access to the ideals of the liberal state, an undermining of authoritarian regimes, and a natural reduction in war. Sadly, however, democratic means did not guarantee democratic ends. Like the printing press, television, or radio, these new tools were just as capable of advocating repression and violence as democratic change. The new age of communications has proven to be a double-edged sword.

Like the levée en masse, the evolving character of communications today is altering the patterns of popular mobilization, including both the means of participation and the ends for which wars are fought. Most important, it is enabling the recruiting, training, convincing, and motivating of individuals who are driven to engage not primarily in the high-tech cyber-attacks that many US policymakers are focused upon, but in old-fashioned violence in the physical world. Today’s mobilization may not be producing masses of soldiers, sweeping across the European continent, but it is effecting an underground uprising whose remarkable effects are being played out on the battlefield every day.

And she discusses the solution:

Just as the telephone, telegraph, and radio eventually engendered countervailing technologies in code-breaking, monitoring, intercepting, and wire-tapping, the United States is gradually recognizing the strategic potential of these means and just beginning to effectively react. Most of the United States’ efforts have been focused on counteracting their practical, logistical effects, including terrorist fund-raising on the web, preventing the use of the Internet for logistical coordination, intervening in communications, and tracking statements and websites. These activities are imperative, demanding intelligence collection, monitoring, disinformation, and disruption, but they are embryonic and limited in their scope. The intelligence community’s relatively narrow remit cannot cover the full implications of the physical and ideological mobilization that is currently taking place. The parallels drawn here with the levée en masse should give us pause.

The good news, however, is that this connectivity can also provide the means to counter the use of these tools to mobilize for radical causes, if the United States will consciously engage in a wide-ranging counter-mobilization. Overall connectivity is far higher in countries that represent more open, democratic societies.

This should be a tool that greatly advantages the United States,one that Western military organizations are adept at using themselves. But currently the security implications of connectivity are too controversial to analyze seriously. Americans are too busy worrying about the economic benefits of the web and who is to control it, arguing about impositions on freedom of speech and who is to determine them, willing to neglect the impact of what appears on the web even as it translates into killing people in the real world. The Internet is vital to US security, not only because of its obvious centrality to the American economy, but also because of its less-obvious role in animating our friends and enemies. The state can reclaim the tools of popular mobilization, but only if it will more seriously address the need to understand, react to, and employ them. [my emphasis]

"The state can reclaim the tools of popular mobilization". No one quarrels with the need to intervene in terrorist plots, online or off. But when we see the ways in which the most rabid Republicans identify Democrats, liberals, blacks and so forth as The Enemy even more than The Terrorists, its a reminder that keeping the public debate open and not under the thumbnail of corporate conformity of government disinformation operations is a real problem.

Finally, Duncan Black (Atrios), in Stand Up 06/27/06 gives a good, brief statement of how a false form of "tolerance" can actually lead to less freedom and more domination - and worse:

Torturing people, jailing journalists for treason, the president being allowed to disobey the law at whim... The mainstream media has made all of these things a part of the normal conversation. They've allowed "two sides" to all of these things to be debated on equal footing. Left wing bloggers on the internets complain about the media and they get ignored and accused of "blogofascism." Conservatives call for the New York Times to be blown up and their reporters and editors jailed and they get treated seriously on MSNBC's flagship political talk show. [my emphasis]

The United States is not East Germany yet. It's not even like the segregated South yet, even though the neosegregationist Republican Party today is far closer to the spirit of Theodore Bilbo than of Theodore Roosevelt.

But can we say that we see "repressive tolerance" at work? I think we can.

Other posts in the series:

1. Are there problems with tolerance?
2. Robert Paul Wolff on going "Beyond Tolerance"
3. Barrington Moore, Jr., on science and tolerance
4. Tolerance, social analysis and radical democracy
5. Herbert Marcuse on repressive tolerance
6. The need for tolerance, its limits and its "repressive" form (current post)

Tags: tolerance, repressive tolerance

The problems of tolerance (5): Herbert Marcuse on repressive tolerance

This post is on the third and most famous essay in A Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965), Herbert Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance"; the full essay in the English original is available at that link, and also a German translation. This post can stand on its own. But my previous post was also meant as an introduction to this one. It explains more about two aspects of Marcuse's approach that are important in "Repressive Tolerance": Hegelian dialectical social analysis and a radical democratic perspective.

Marcuse's argument assumes that people in advanced industrial societies, including the United States, are in basic ways unfree. A key part of that unfreedom is a widespread lack of key knowledge about public affairs and a false consciousness that prevents people from making truly free decisions. That would require a genuinely informed citizenry.

I'm not sure it can be counted as progress, but the meaning and implication of "false consciousness" is very easy to understand today. The lead up to the Iraq War, with manufactured evidence that was pimped not only by an obedient Republican Party and its vast echo chamber. It was also facilitated by the Establishment press - the name Judith Miller summarizes that aspect of it - and by a prewar debate that, in its official aspects, was little more than a Potemkin debate. That's not to say that there weren't real opposition voices heard. It means that between the White House misuse of secrecy and fraudulent evidence, the mainstream media's misconduct and the President's decision at least as early as June 2002 to go to war regardless of what Iraq did, the official debate meant little more than the deliberations of the old East Germany Parliament.

Marcuse writes:

But with the concentration of economic and political power and the integration of opposites in a society which uses technology as an instrument of domination, effective dissent is blocked where it could freely emerge; in the formation of opinion, in information and communication, in speech and assembly. Under the rule of monopolistic media - themselves the mere instruments of economic and political power - a mentality is created for which right and wrong, true and false are predefined wherever they affect the vital interests of the society. This is, prior to all expression and communication, a matter of semantics: the blocking of effective dissent, of the recognition of that which is not of the Establishment which begins in the language that is publicized and administered. The meaning of words is rigidly stabilized. Rational persuasion, persuasion to the opposite is all but precluded. The avenues of entrance are closed to the meaning of words and ideas other than the established one - established by the publicity of the powers that be, and verified in their practices. Other words can be spoken and heard, other ideas can be expressed, but, at the massive scale of the conservative majority (outside such enclaves as the intelligentsia), they are immediately "evaluated" (i.e. automatically understood) in terms of the public language - a language which determines "a priori" the direction in which the thought process moves. [my emphasis]

The volumes that have already been written about the prewar fraud about Iraq's non-existent "weapons of mass destruction" could be seen as an extended commentary on that quotation.

Yet I don't want to push the point too far. Despite the intensity of the war propaganda and the massive use of government secrecy to cover the fraud, large numbers of Americans still opposed the war. False consciousness even in that extreme case was less than pervasive.

Where Marcuse's point remains particularly relevant in this case is that even now, despite the far-reaching nature of the WMD fraud(s) and the extensive consequences of the Iraq War, most people do not take it as reflecting a fundamental flaw in our political and social system. (I'll leave aside for the moment whether that would be an accurate conclusion.)

What is central to Marcuse's idea of repressive tolerance is that, in a society dominated by great wealth, or by Big Capital as his German fans would be more likely to term it, the formal practice of democratic tolerance effectively obscures the fact for most people that their choices and their freedom are in fact severely limited. Marcuse writes:

These background limitations of tolerance are normally prior to the explicit and judicial limitations as defined by the courts, custom, governments, etc. (for example, "clear and present danger", threat to national security, heresy). Within the framework of such a social structure, tolerance can be safely practiced and proclaimed. It is of two kinds: (i) the passive toleration of entrenched and established attitudes and ideas even if their damaging effect on man and nature is evident, and (2) the active, official tolerance granted to the Right as well as to the Left, to movements of aggression as well as to movements of peace, to the party of hate as well as to that of humanity. I call this non-partisan tolerance "abstract" or "pure" inasmuch as it refrains from taking sides - but in doing so it actually protects the already established machinery of discrimination.

Like Wolff and Moore in their essays, Marcuse emphasizes that tolerance has a purpose:

The telos [goal] of tolerance is truth. It is clear from the historical record that the authentic spokesmen of tolerance had more and other truth in mind than that of propositional logic and academic theory. John Stuart Mill speaks of the truth which is persecuted in history and which does not triumph over persecution by virtue of its "inherent power", which in fact has no inherent power "against the dungeon and the stake". And he enumerates the "truths" which were cruelly and successfully liquidated in the dungeons and at the stake: that of Arnold of Brescia, of Fra Dolcino, of Savonarola, of the Albigensians, Waldensians, Lollards, and Hussites. Tolerance is first and foremost for the sake of the heretics - the historical road toward humanitas appears as heresy: target of persecution by the powers that be. Heresy by itself, however, is no token of truth. [my emphasis]

For tolerance to play its role of exposing falsehood and enhancing the well-being of humanity, it must be real. In other words, the kind of dissent that leads to that goal must have a real chance to be turned into policies and reality.

Wolff and Moore are more clear in their essays about the distinction between tolerance as a political-legal process, on the one hand, and the limits of tolerance in decision-making, on the other.

But, like Wolff and Moore, Marcuse discusses two kinds of tolerance. He sees tolerance as involving basic democratic and human rights. "Tolerance is an end in itself," he says.

And he also sees tolerance as a necessary condition for decision-making on political and social questions. His focus is on this aspect. Just as in science (both "hard" and "social"), which was Moore's focus in his essay, decision-making in political and social matters involves some accepted criteria of decision-making. Some choices involve more urgent matters than others. Some competing options must be judged as relevant and meaningful to the choice, and others excluded. And eventually a decision has to be made, a judgment established, among the competing legitimate priorities.

That may seem to be a far too dignified way to describe the decision-making process of Congressional Republicans under Tom DeLay and his K-Street Project. But it applies even in that situation. The real questions is whether it's legitimate for, say, a defense-contractor lobbyist's bribes to a Congressman Duke Cunningham should be a factor in important policy decisions.

Marcuse argues that some alternatives considered normal, respectable, mainstream in American political discourse should in fact be considered inappropriate for establishing policies. If this seems to be an odd argument for someone to have been making in 1965, at the height of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" in the US, consider other aspects of the historical context. The Goldwater Presidential campaign of 1964, though a landslide loss, showed what a Republican Party aggressively defending segregation and militarism might become. And Johnson "Americanized" the Vietnam War in 1965, relying on deceit and threat-inflation that was bad enough in itself, despite the fact that it looks almost like saintly honesty compared to the pre-Iraq War marketing job by the Bush administration.

A lot of what Marcuse has to say about the right of resistance and the role of violence, both official and unsanctioned, will strike many American readers as jarring. That's mainly because of what I discussed in my last post, the general lack of awareness of the revolutionary aspects of our own national history. But anyone who admires the sentiments of the Declaration of Independence and is not a pacifist should actually find most of those passages uncontroversial.

On of his comments is a reminder that political "terror" until relatively recently meant mostly terror by the state:

Robespierre's distinction [in the French Revolution] between the terror of liberty and the terror of despotism, and his moral glorification of the former belongs to the most convincingly condemned aberrations [of political violence], even if the white terror was more bloody than the red terror.

In these times where "red" is the commonly-used color for Bush's Republican Party, I should mention that in the French Revolution, "red" meant the revolutionaries, "white" the counterrevolutionaries.

But even for those more familiar with the Thomas Jeffersons and Harriet Tubmans and John Browns of American democratic history, some of Marcuse' arguments in this regard will be disturbing:

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: ... it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word. The traditional criterion of clear and present danger seems no longer adequate to a stage where the whole society is in the situation of the theater audience when somebody cries: "fire". It is a situation in which the total catastrophe could be triggered off any moment, not only by a technical error, but also by a rational miscalculation of risks, or by a rash speech of one of the leaders. In past and different circumstances, the speeches of the Fascist and Nazi leaders were the immediate prologue to the massacre. The distance between the propaganda and the action, between the organization and its release on the people had become too short. But the spreading of the word could have been stopped before it was too late: if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn when the future leaders started their campaign, mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.

The whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger. Consequently, true pacification requires the withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture. Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger. I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs. [my emphasis]

Yow! You can practically hear the OxyContin crowd screaming, "See! That's what The Liberals are after!" That Marcuse considered himself a Marxist and not a liberal wouldn't make any difference, since in FOXLand there is no difference. They would go into spasms at the amplification on this idea that he made in his 1968 Postscript to the essay:

Given this situation, I suggested in "Repressive Tolerance" the practice of discriminating tolerance in an inverse direction, as a means of shifting the balance between Right and Left by restraining the liberty of the Right, thus counteracting the pervasive inequality of freedom (unequal opportunity of access to the means of democratic persuasion) and strengthening the oppressed against the oppressed. Tolerance would be restricted with respect to movements of a demonstrably aggressive or destructive character (destructive of the prospects for peace, justice, and freedom for all). Such discrimination would also be applied to movements opposing the extension of social legislation to the poor, weak, disabled. As against the virulent denunciations that such a policy would do away with the sacred liberalistic principle of equality for "the other side", I maintain that there are issues where either there is no "other side" in any more than a formalistic sense, or where "the other side" is demonstrably "regressive" and impedes possible improvement of the human condition. To tolerate propaganda for inhumanity vitiates the goals not only of liberalism but of every progressive political philosophy.

If the choice were between genuine democracy and dictatorship, democracy would certainly be preferable. But democracy does not prevail. The radical critics of the existing political process are thus readily denounced as advocating an "elitism", a dictatorship of intellectuals as an alternative. What we have in fact is government, representative government by a non-intellectual minority of politicians, generals, and businessmen. The record of this "elite" is not very promising, and political prerogatives for the intelligentsia may not necessarily be worse for the society as a whole. [my emphasis]

It's not clear where these notions of Marcuse's owe more to Lenin's State and Revolution or to Plato's Republic. But here, he is directly advocating and justifying the suppression of democratic freedoms.

It's true that in historical revolutions, the opponents of the victorious side have generally found it necessary to withdraw freedoms from at least some of their opponents. British supporters were suppressed during the American Revolution and many dispossessed afterward. Abraham Lincoln found it desirable to suppress the speech and printing presses of the "Copperheads", Northerners who actively sympathized with the Confederacy. Andrew Johnson's rush to restore full democratic rights to former Confederates after the Civil War was a key factor setting the state for decades of racial segregation in the South. The long-term interests of democracy and Constitutional government were not well-served by Johnson's actions.

But this portion of Marcuse's essay I find less than appealing or persuasive. It seems in this regard to be a general restatement of a conventional Marxist understanding of the revolutionary process in history. And I would argue that it doesn't follow from the arguments he makes here and elsewhere. (See the concluding quotation below.)

What is more appealing and persuasive is his discussion of how people can free their own minds from the false consciousness of what he calls administered opinion:

This means that previously neutral, value-free, formal aspects of learning and teaching now become, on their own grounds and in their own right, political: learning to know the facts, the whole truth, and to comprehend it is radical criticism throughout, intellectual subversion. In a world in which the human faculties and needs are arrested or perverted, autonomous thinking leads into a "perverted world": contradiction and counter-image of the established world of repression. And this contradiction is not simply stipulated, is not simply the product of confused thinking or fantasy, but is the logical development of the given, the existing world. To the degree to which this development is actually impeded by the sheer weight of a repressive society and the necessity of making a living in it, repression invades the academic enterprise itself, even prior to all restrictions on academic freedom. The pre-empting of the mind vitiates impartiality and objectivity: unless the student learns to think in the opposite direction, he will be inclined to place the facts into the predominant framework of values. Scholarship, i.e., the acquisition and communication of knowledge, prohibits the purification and isolation of facts from the context of the whole truth. An essential part of the latter is recognition of the frightening extent to which history is made and recorded by and for the victors, that is, the extent to which history was the development of oppression. And this oppression is in the facts themselves which it establishes; thus they themselves carry a negative value as part and aspect of their facticity. To treat the great crusades against humanity (like that against the Albigensians) with the same impartiality as the desperate struggles for humanity means neutralizing their opposite historical function, reconciling the executioners with their victims, distorting the record. Such spurious neutrality serves to reproduce acceptance of the dominion of the victors in the consciousness of man. Here, too, in the education of those who are not yet maturely integrated, in the mind of the young, the ground for liberating tolerance is still to be created. [my emphasis]

But he also reminds us that if such an approach remains limited to individual self-development, its liberating potential will be limited. Humans are social creatures, and freedom has objective as well as subjective meaning. Freedom cannot be fully realized in self-knowledge:

The publicity of self-actualization promotes the removal of the one and the other, it promotes existence in that immediacy which, in a repressive society, is (to use another Hegelian term) bad immediacy (schlechte Unmittelbarkeit). It isolates the individual from the one dimension where he could "find himself": from his political existence, which is at the core of his entire existence. Instead, it encourages non-conformity and letting-go in ways which leave the real engines of repression in the society entirely intact, which even strengthen these engines by substituting the satisfactions of private, and personal rebellion for a more than private and personal, and therefore more authentic, opposition. The desublimation involved in this sort of self-actualization is itself repressive inasmuch as it weakens the necessity and the power of the intellect, the catalytic force of that unhappy consciousness which does not revel in the archetypal personal release of frustration - hopeless resurgence of the Id which will sooner or later succumb to the omnipresent rationality of the administered world - but which recognizes the horror of the whole in the most private frustration and actualizes itself in this recognition. [my emphasis in bold]

In the 1968 Postscript, Marcuse makes an important point. No doubt, it brought little comfort to suburban white folks freaking out over urban riots in predominantly black neighborhoods. But in the year that Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, and after years in which civil rights demonstrators and antiwar protesters had all-too-often been the victims of official violence, he made an essential and democratic point:

Under the conditions prevailing in this country, tolerance does not, and cannot, fulfill the civilizing function attributed to it by the liberal protagonists of democracy, namely, protection of dissent. The progressive historical force of tolerance lies in its extension to those modes and forms of dissent which are not committed to the status quo of society, and not confined to the institutional framework of the established society. Consequently, the idea of tolerance implies the necessity, for the dissenting group or individuals, to become illegitimate if and when the established legitimacy prevents and counteracts the development of dissent. This would be the case not only in a totalitarian society, under a dictatorship, in one-party states, but also in a democracy (representative, parliamentary, or "direct") where the majority does not result from the development of independent thought and opinion but rather from the monopolistic or oligopolistic administration of public opinion, without terror and (normally) without censorship. ... The ideology of democracy hides its lack of substance. [my emphasis]

In the final paragraph of the 1968 Postscript, he describes again in radical-democratic terms how the ideology of tolerance can disguise a reality of unfreedom. And he seems to suggest that his suggestion for a dictatorship of intellectuals was meant as a provocative paradox - or maybe an Hegelian "contradiction":

However, the alternative to the established semi-democratic process is not a dictatorship or elite, no matter how intellectual and intelligent, but the struggle for a real democracy. Part of this struggle is the fight against an ideology of tolerance which, in reality, favors and fortifies the conservation of the status quo of inequality and discrimination. For this struggle, I proposed the practice of discriminating tolerance. To be sure, this practice already presupposes the radical goal which it seeks to achieve. I committed this petitio principii in order to combat the pernicious ideology that tolerance is already institutionalized in this society. The tolerance which is the life element, the token of a free society, will never be the gift of the powers that be; it can, under the prevailing conditions of tyranny by the majority, only be won in the sustained effort of radical minorities, willing to break this tyranny and to work for the emergence of a free and sovereign majority - minorities intolerant, militantly intolerant and disobedient to the rules of behavior which tolerate destruction and suppression.

Other posts in the series:

1. Are there problems with tolerance?
2. Robert Paul Wolff on going "Beyond Tolerance"
3. Barrington Moore, Jr., on science and tolerance
4. Tolerance, social analysis and radical democracy
5. Herbert Marcuse on repressive tolerance (current post)
6. The need for tolerance, its limits and its "repressive" form

Tags: herbert marcuse, repressive tolerance, tolerance

The problems of tolerance (4): Tolerance, social analysis and radical democracy

The third and final essay in A Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965) is by far the most fam ous, "Repressive Tolerance" by Herbert Marcuse. It occurred to me that an introduction would help before I discuss the essay directly, because the essay is written in philosophical language that, it's fair to say, is not so easily accessible.

There are biographical sketches of Marcuse online, especially at this Website: Herbert Marcuse Official Homepage. I've also done a brief biographical post on him: Herbert Marcuse Web site 07/11/04.

Here it's important to note that Marcuse was known as someone who synthesized the theories of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud into social criticism. He was part of the Frankfurt School who practiced what they called "critical theory". Marcuse was also a specialist in the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel, and Hegelian dialectics and historical philosophy are very evident in "Repressive Tolerance".

Marcuse could be accurately described as a utopian socialist, and even in "Repressive Tolerance" he talks about the role of utopian thought. His utopian bent was one reason more traditional Marxists criticized him for philosophical "idealism" (which is not the same as the colloquial meaning of "idealism"). But he did not lay out visions of what his kind of model society would look like. He concentrated on analysis of existing societies, mostly the highly-developed Western capitalism societies. He also wrote a book on Soviet Marxism (1958).

During most of his career, I don't believe the term "thinking outside the box" had become an everyday part of American English yet. But Marcuse, for better or worse, thought outside the box. And he looked outside the expected channels to understand society and its transformations.

So, for him, the civil rights and Black Power movements, the student and antiwar movements, the beatniks and the hippies, raised vital issues about the fundamental conditions of society. He did not believe those movements could bring about fundamental transformation in the short term. (Marxists, somewhat like American generals predicting troop withdrawals from Iraq, are good at pushing out the time horizon for The Revolution.)

His willingness to think outside the proverbial box meant that he also saw great potential in the feminist movement. And he understood the necessity and transformational potential of focusing on ecological issues, long before the emergence of the German Green Party or the scientific consensus on global warming having formed.

I'm making this a long introduction because "Repressive Tolerance" employs a couple of concepts that are essentially unknow to the American punditocracy: dialectical social analysis and radical democratic theory.

The Hegelian concept of negation is key to Marcuse's Critical Theory. Negation in the Hegelian dialectic is the normal process of transformation, which involves preserving the original but also cancelling it and lifting it up. The seed is "negated" by the tree. The grown tree preserves the essence of the seed. But it is not the seed, it is something else: a higher development of the seed.

(Sorry, that formula that seemingly every American who's heard of "dialectics" has been taught at some point, thesis-synthesis-antithesis, is Kantian dialectics, not Hegelian.)

Marcuse's Critical Theory applies this dialectical approach. In the 1960 additional preface to his 1941 Reason and Revolution, he explained:

Dialectical logic is critical logic: it reveals modes and contents of thought which transcend the codified pattern of use and validation. Dialectical thought does not invent these contents; they have accrued to the notions in the long tradition of thought and action. Dialectical analysis merely assembles and reactivates them; it recovers tabooed meanings and thus appears almost as a return, or rather a conscious liberation, of the repressed! Since the established universe of discourse is that of an unfree world, dialectical thought is necessarily destructive, and whatever liberation it may bring is a liberation in thought, in theory. However, the divorce of thought from action, of theory from practice, is itself part of the unfree world. No thought and no theory can undo it; but theory may help to prepare the ground for their possible reunion, and the ability of thought to develop a logic and language of contradiction is a prerequisite for this task. (my emphasis)

In other words, Marcuse applies critical thinking to social analysis using this concept of dialectical negation. This approach largely eliminated the possibility of his work being turned into a set of guiding principles for a political party or group. And while he did have some definite influence on activists and militants in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in Europe, I don't recall ever hearing of any group trying to organize a "Marcusian" political party.

And it also means that his approach is not something that is necessarily intuitive in the language of political consultants and Big Pundits. It would be both entertaining and painful to see David "Bobo" Brooks go about describing Herbert Marcuse.

I would say that the emergence of the blogosphere as a tool for activism and a significant factor in politics could be seen as a "Marcusian" event, producing challenges to the established institutions of politics and the press.

The same goes for the current immigrant-rights movement. Perhaps even more so, because in addition to being a movement of "outsiders" involving Latinos, non-citizens and poor people, it is also a heavily workingclass movement.

All of which is another major element that, sad to say, makes Marcuse's thought especially challenging for readers today. And that is, however many philosophical approaches he incorporated, Marcuse was working from a radical democratic perspective.

That means words like "repression: and "revolution" were normal for him to use. The observation was often made during and after the Vietnam War, and is at least as relevant today, that a lack of widespread understanding of our own American revolutionary history was one of the United States' beigggest problems in trying to comprehend revolutionary movements in the underdeveloped world. Celebrating the Fourth of July with fireworks displays is fun, but it doesn't teach anyone much about the history of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence.

So, for any trolls who identify the world "revolution" exclusively with Sunni Salafist suicide car bombers, I'll quote a sample of Marcuse's approach to the issue from a time that was far more tumultuous in the US and western Europe than 1965. This is from Counter-Revolution and Revolt (1972):

Distinction must be made between violence and revolutionary force. In the counterrevolutionary situation of today [1972] , violence is the weapon of the Establishment; it operates everywhere, in the institutions and organizations, in work and fun, on the streets and highways, and in the air. In contrast, the revolutionary force which is destined to terminate this violence does not exist today. Revolutionary force would be the action of masses or classes capable of subverting the established system in order to build a socialist society. Examples would be the unlimited general strike, the occupation and taking over of factories, government buildings, centers of communication and trasnportation, in coordinated action.

For good white suburbanites today, this may invoke images of swarthy men with Taliban beards swarming into the Pentagon and seizing it. But in the peaceful revolutions after the fall of the Berlin Wall in eastern Europe and in the USSR, something like this actually happened not so long ago. And many of those same surburbanites were thrilled to hear about it.

It's worth quoting something else he said about the distinction he makes in the quotation just given between "violence and revolutionary force". In "Repressive Tolerance", he wrote:

In terms of historical function, there is a difference between revolutionary and reactionary violence, between violence practiced by the oppressed and by the oppressors. In terms of ethics, both forms of violence are inhuman and evil - but since when is history made in accordance with ethical standards? To start applying them at the point where the oppressed rebel against the oppressors, the have-nots against the haves is serving the cause of actual violence by weakening the protest against it.(my emphasis)

Again, enough to send a good Republican gasping for breath worded that way. But the ethical point is one typically made in war. What's unethical and evil in itself - systematically killing people - is heldby every country on earth to be sometimes a necessity of state, where the alternative would have worse consequences from their viewpoint.

I would stress, though, that it's vital to distinguish between necessary violence and unnecessary, between just wars and unjust ones. But violence is violence. A Russian bomb dropped on a Afghan village in the 1980s in the name of Communism and international solidarity is the same kind of violence as an American bomb dropped on a Afghan village in 2006 in the name of democracy and Global War on Terrorism. It's the same kind. Whether one is necessary and the other not is a different question. It might be objected that even talking in terms of the right of revolution or similar things in today's environment will only give encouragement to militia nuts, to Christian terrorists like Timmy McVeigh, and to fans of Mad Annie Coulter. Yeah, right, like they need any encouragement from me or anyone else in Left Blogostan.

But whether we're tlaking about the American Civil War or the fall of the Communist governments in easter Europe or the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, some basic knowledge of the role of revolution in our own American history would broaden the discussion in a beneficial way.

Finally, a related impoverishment of the political language in America obscures the distinction between formal liberalism and social rights. Historically, this division came into clear sight in the European Revolutions of 1848, something else rarely mentioned in America. It wouldn't be far off to say they are virtually unknown in America. But they were a world-historical event, to use a good Hegelian/Marcusian term.

Briefly, in 1848 democratic revolutionary movements broke out all over Europe. In Germany, a democratically elected parliament met in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, which today is a virtual monument to this key event in the development of democratic institutions in Germany. In Vienna, the Emperor Franz Joseph was obliged to depart the city, which was held for a time by democratic rebels.

In those revolutions, the parties known as "liberal" parties represented capitalists big and small as well as other "respectable" professionals. They supporteddemocracy but also opposed unions, workers' economic rights and radical property reforms The socialist groups representing workers as well as some militant farmers' groups supported democratic rights, but looked much more favorably on the social goals, as well.

It's not that this distinction is unknown to Americans. Voting is a "liberal democratic" right; Social Security involves a social right. When Bush and the Republicans floated a radical Social Security phase-out plan in early 2005, the harshly negative public reaction showed that most people understood the social right to minima economic security in old age.

But the Big Pundits don't often talk in these terms. So when someone makes an argument, as Marcuse does in "Repressive Tolerance", that draws a distinction between formal democratic rights and the substantive social realities imposed by income, wealth and class, it doesn't necessarily sound clear to American readers.

So, in the next post, we'll look at how Marcuse actually applies dialectical social analysis and radical democratic theory to the question of "pure tolerance".

1. Are there problems with tolerance?
2. Robert Paul Wolff on going "Beyond Tolerance"
3. Barrington Moore, Jr., on science and tolerance
4. Tolerance, social analysis and radical democracy (current post)
5. Herbert Marcuse on repressive tolerance
6. The need for tolerance, its limits and its "repressive" form

Tags: herbert marcuse, tolerance

The problems of tolerance (3): Barrington Moore, Jr., on science and tolerance

Michael Shermer gives a great brief summary of how the process of science sifts information to arrive at conclusions of increasing accuracy in "The Political Brain" Scientific American July 2006. He writes:

In science we have built-in self-correcting machinery. Strict double-blind controls are required in experiments, in which neither the subjects nor the experimenters know the experimental conditions during the data-collection phase. Results are vetted at professional conferences and in peer-reviewed journals. Research must be replicated in other laboratories unaffiliated with the original researcher. Disconfirmatory evidence, as well as contradictory interpretations of the data, must be included in the paper. Colleagues are rewarded for being skeptical. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

For the scientific process to work to produce adequate scientific results, professional standards have to be observed and findings have to be available to enough independent scrutiny to validate or disconfirm the results.

The scientific process does not and cannot rely on some vague concept of every opinion being equally valid, or "we create our own reality" (the latter a favorite of New Age/esoteric thinking). The late Carl Sagan wrote in his 1995 book, The Demon-Haunted World, that the famed physicist Robert E. Wood was once asked at a dinner to respond to the toast, "To physics and metaphysics". Sagan relates the conclusion of Wood's response as follows:

The different between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded as he raised his glass high, is not that the practitioners of one are smarter than the practitioners of the other. The difference is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.

The second of the three essays in A Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965) is by sociologist Barrington Moore, Jr., "Tolerance and the Scientific Outlook". In 2006, we have many challenges to science and scientific thinking. Christian fundamentalists raise issues from to the morality of a vaccine to prevent cervical cancer. Concern about the implications of cloning is carcely restricted to Christian fundamentalists. Greens opposing genetically-engineered crops, advocates of alternative medicine and/or quackery attacking "allopathic" or "school" medicine, industry lobbyists "debunking" (in a fake way) global warming to oppose stronger environmental regulations - the list is a long one.

The prominent questions raised about science and it apllications in the US in 1965 tended to focus more on questions like the morality of the arms race, or whether a scientist could morally participated in the development of nuclear weapons. Such questions are by no means obsolete, obviously. The participation of physicists and psychologists in torturing people in the Bush Gulag has raised very similar kinds of questions in an even more pointed way.

Moore's essay addresses some of those concerns by focusing on some notions that raise the question of how values come into play in the scientific field. In the social sciences, is it possible to objectively and accurately analyze a particular political system, for instance, without applying some framework of values? He describes the value-free position as follows:

If the purpose of the state is eliminating Jews, there is nothing more to be said from this conception of a scientific standpoint [in the value-free approach]. The goals of the state are for the political scientist brute facts to be entered in his calculations the way a physicist enters gravity, friction, and the character of metals in his computations. According to this viewpoint, the moment the political scientist steps out of his professional role to assert that killing Jews is morally bad, he enters the realm of "values," loses his aura of professional competence, and becomes no more qualified to give authoritative guidance than any of the rest of us. For one set of "values" is supposedly as valid as any other.

It's tempting to dismiss this concept out of hand. But that is easy only on a abstract level. Every regime in the present-day world - with the possible exception of "failed states" like Iraq and Afghanistan at the moment - performs certain functions like picking up garbage and running sewage plants. If Iran comes up with some innovative sewage-treatment technique, should no one else use it because the practice is tainted by having been developed and applied under a Shi'a Muslim fundamentalist regime?

Moore is a partisan of the scientific method. With the current Republican Party's intellectual and practical jihad against science, in the US adherence to science is becoming more and more a partisan position in the narrowest sense of the term. Moore writes:

[N]o part of science, no conception of science and its methods, and least of all the present one, is permanently above and beyond investigation, criticism, and if need be, fundamental change. Science is tolerant of reason; relentlessly intolerant of unreason and sham. A flickering light in our darkness it is, as Morris Cohen once said, but the only one we have, and woe to him who would put it out. (my emphasis)

In regard to that last observation, we should remember the debt we owe to industry lobbyists and to the Republican Presidency and Congress for years of delay on dealing with the global warming problem.

The distinction Moore makes there is critical to the end goal of tolerance in the exchange of ideas. People need to be able make good judgments about issues like global warming. Freedom of speech and the press necessary to allow the maximum exchange of ideas that will optimize the process of testing ideas that leads to better knowledge and understanding.

Freedom has other intrinsic value in the sense of the "inalienable rights" in our Declaration of Independence. But in the process of science in particular, in determining what is accurate and effective, we have to be "tolerant of reason; relentlessly intolerant of unreason and sham." It's one thing to say that anyone is free to say any dang fool thing they want to without being put in jail for it. But for science to have integrity, the scientists have to observe some basic standards of conduct and procedure. And tolerance as a social value doesn't mean that science should treat any dang fool idea as though it were "science".

But Moore doesn't believe that the allegedly value-free approach as described above to analyzing political and social systems is entirely adequate, even as a scientific approach. To pretend there is no "objective" difference between a state that aims at genocide and ones that aims to enhance the human well-being and freedom of all is not only ridiculous on the face of it. It's ridiculous underneath the surface, as well:

To at least a minority of contemporary thinkers the result [of the value-free approach to social and political analysis] the result seems both paradoxical and monstrous. Detachment and tolerance seem to have run riot and turned upside down.

Yet he rejects attempts to get around the problem by rejecting the possibility of any kind of objectively scientific approach to social phenonema. Marxists have been known to argue that a class perspective is necessary even in the most objective scientific endeavor. Greens, esoterics and religious fundamentalists may insist on some kind of overriding spiritual/supernatural consideration that should simply overrule the scientific perspective.

Moore's suggestion is that all religious and metaphysical considerations be discarded altogether. He argues for a secular, philosophically materialist outlooks as the basis for addressing the "values" issue:

The attempt to derive legitimacy for any set of values from some source external to living humans - and history is external insofar as the past confronts us with a world we never made—seems to me both doomed to frustration and unnecessary.

It is doomed to frustration because no alternative to rationality, no call to faith no matter how disguised, can in the end withstand the corrosive effects of rational inquiry. This is true even if the secular outlook suffers a more than partial eclipse for many long years to come. Furthermore is it not time to throw away the metaphysical crutch and walk on our own two legs? Rather than attempt to revive a dubious ontology and epistemology I would urge that we recognize that God and his metaphysical surrogates are dead, and learn to take the consequences.

If men wish to make others suffer or even to destroy civilization itself, there is nothing outside of man himself to which one can appeal in order to assert that such actions deserve condemnation.

You can almost hear the screeches from the Christian Right just reading such an appeal to a non-religious viewpoint. Even the less strictly devout may freak out at the suggestion, put in that way.

But Moore puts his finger here on the bridge between the strictly secular and the more metaphysical or spiritual outlooks. Everyone needs to be occasionally reminded, it seems, that religion is by no means necessary for values, ethics and standards of personality morality. If that seems to religious believers like a terribly insecure basis for such things, it's worth remembering that basing common values on a supernatural God is a frightening prospect to nonbelievers. For that matters, for Presbyterians or Episcopalians, it might seem even more frightening to have to rely on the "values" outlook of Southern Baptists or Pentecostals, and vice versa. The same goes for Protestants and Catholics.

Moore discusses ways in which a particular kind of government and social structure can be evaluated in terms of the degree to which they promote the well-being of humanity. And, in fact, he emphasizes that the materialist-realist approach to social values eliminates any argument that differing religious or philosophical bases for values can't be used as an excuse that there is no objective, secular basis for recognizing such values:

A real distinction exists ... between scientific humility and the vageness that coms from moral and intellectual cowardice. There are situtions ... where judiciousness become the last refuge of the scoundrel.

In considering whether there are objective standards of social and political truth, Moore makes a vital distinction between significant truths and trivial ones. One way of distinguishing between the two, he writes, is:

... simultaneously pragmatic and political. Men seek truths that will contribute to their own advantage in the contest with nature and other men. There is often a strong destructive component in this search. Let those who urge that "the truth" or "true" philosophy is always life-enhancing, in order to criticize the destructive consequences of modern physical science, recall that even Archimedes worked for the war industry of his day. This destructive component may or may not be unavoidable, a situation that varies from case to case. We must not allow it to disappear from sight simply because of alleged or even real benefits. One criterion for distinguishing significant from trivial truth is therefore the amount of benefit or harm that comes from its discovery.

He also argues for an "aesthetic" criterion, by which he seems to refer to whether or not a new piece of knowledge fits sensibly and rationally into well-established frameworks.

Moore believes that critical thinking is a vital and central part of scientific thinking, including thinking about political and social questions:

Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner [To understand everything is to pardon everything] is one of those catchy phrases that often enough turn out to be sloppy half-truths. For a clear understanding of how any society really works is likely to be the first step toward condemnation because it enables men to see not only the seamy side, to penetrate behind the glorifications and equivocations, but also to realize possibilities for improvement. The notion that a scientific attitude toward human society necessarily induces a conservative tolerance of the existing order, or that it deprives thinkers of insight into the important issues of the past and the present seems to me totally absurd. These things do happen and on a very wide scale, but constitute a failure to live up to the requirements and implications of the scientific outlook. (my emphasis in bold)

I find several things in Moore's essay especially relevant to our current situation. A wide-ranging debate is necessary to determine what is right and wrong in political and social questions. And an intellectual attitude of tolerance for new ideas, including and especially discordant ones, is vital.

At the same time, sensible judgments have to applied. The importance of this becomes stronger all the time as the Information Revolution bombards us with more and more information all the time. Critical thinking and judgment to distinguish the sensible and worthwhile from the trivial and the false are indispensable skills.

Finally, a rational and sensible approach to political and social questions requires some sense of humility. But at the same time, the limits of knowledge and understanding should never become an alibi for failing to deal with important problems, e.g., global warming. Or, as the popular saying goes, we should always be open-minded; but being open-minded is not the same as letting your brain roll out onto the floor.

Other posts in the series:

1. Are there problems with tolerance?
2. Robert Paul Wolff on going "Beyond Tolerance"
3. Barrington Moore, Jr., on science and tolerance (current post)
4. Tolerance, social analysis and radical democracy
5. Herbert Marcuse on repressive tolerance
6. The need for tolerance, its limits and its "repressive" form

Tags: barrington moore jr., tolerance