If liberals have given up on toleration in favour of the adjudication of rights, it is probably because history has not turned out as they expected. Most have held to a teleological view of human development, believing that in the long run a society of the sort they wanted would come into being as a by-product of the free expression of ideas. The actual course of events has come as a terrible shock. Even in societies where expression is most free, there is nothing resembling agreement. Religion — which many contemporary liberals have come to see as an evil — has not disappeared, but grown stronger. There has been no movement towards consensus — liberal or otherwise. The idea that the practice of toleration leads to a convergence of values seems more and more like whistling in the dark. This may be the source of the strident, bullying tone many secular liberals adopt when they address religious believers. Their own faith in progress is on the line, and they are afraid of losing their nerve.
The radically plural society we find ourselves in today is not a transitional phase leading to a point, some time in the future, when we will have the same fundamental values. It is the way we can expect to live from now onwards. There may be nothing intrinsically good about this sort of diversity but it is a fact, and teleological liberalism is a poor guide to negotiating the difficulties it brings. Luckily there is another liberal tradition in which the goal of toleration is not agreement, still less truth, but peace. It may sound odd to describe Thomas Hobbes as a liberal, but he had a better grasp of how freedom can be maintained than most of the liberal thinkers who came after him. Hobbes wrote at a time when religious wars were living memories, and understood the destructive potential of faith. Belief may be beyond regulation, but for the sake of public order its expression must be controlled. Here Hobbes agreed with his contemporary Spinoza, an ardent defender of freedom of conscience who never doubted that in the end it must yield to the need for peace.
These early modern thinkers have more to offer than the doctrinaire liberals and secular fundamentalists who make so much noise today. The lesson they teach us, I believe, is that trying to curb differences in belief and lifestyle is a recipe for chronic conflict. While it may seem that social cohesion and the pursuit of peace go together, the insistent demand for integration can be highly divisive. Crowd-pleasing comments by senior politicians that suggest wearing the hijab signals a refusal to join the British mainstream do nothing to create a climate of tolerance. By strengthening Islamist ideologues who claim Muslims are outsiders in Western societies, they speed the process of radicalisation. As things stand, Islamist terror has inflicted much less loss of life and limb in the UK than the IRA did. Unlike the IRA, it may be acquiring a mass base here and in other countries which makes it a more intractable problem. Rather than raking over the ashes of multiculturalism, political leaders should focus on genuine obstacles to peaceful co-existence between Britain’s communities. This means being ready to shut down organisations that preach hate. The closure of the Jameah Islamiyah school, which was raided last year by police as part of an anti-terror operation, seems to have been for educational rather than security reasons. But it should be part of the terms of peaceful co-existence in this country which schools that teach hatred of Jews or Christians, or which make any religious or ethnic group a potential target of violence, should be put out of business. There can be no question of tolerating such institutions, which threaten the very possibility of peace.
One wonders sometimes whether the elusive “moderate Muslim” in the West is hesitant to speak out because of an abiding suspicion the secular establishment is as determined to impose its beliefs on him or her as the Islamists.
3 comments:
He's an incoherent whiner. He writes
— Belief may be beyond regulation, but for the sake of public order its expression must be controlled. —
yet goes on about politicians doing exactly that with respect to Islam, against the polices of the "doctrinaire liberals and secular fundamentalists" which he denigrates.
Does the author make a case for why he thinks we should have group think? I don't have the brain cells available to decode articles this.
But the issue he picks is an attempt at proscription at something that is a specific action and, in the current situation, a potential threat. The use of the face for identification is strongly embedded in the West and use of the hijab in public is a threat to that. There have already been cases where the hijab was used to support terrorism. His example is not about " the assumption that different beliefs/worldviews will automatically lead to those".
I don't mean to harp on the hijab point, but it's the only one offered up by the author who otherwise fills his space with various amorphous platitudes.
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