An Intellectual in Public

by Alan Wolfe

Overview

A new collection of essays from one of the most courageous and honest thinkers writing today

". . . proof that the spirit of the free-ranging public intellectual is still very much alive."
-Newsday

"Alan Wolfe is one of liberalism's last and most loyal sons. His mind is naturally decent and diversified; large enough and fair enough to contain both conviction and doubt. His profound respect for real people does not interfere with his profound respect for real thought. The criticism that he practices is, I fear, a dying art, but it is also one of the glories of American democracy."
-Leon Wieseltier, New Republic

"Alan Wolfe is one of America's indispensable essayists. On a broad range of topics-race, religion, politics, the marketplace, the university, and more-he combines a scholar's erudition with a historian's feel for the past and a journalist's keen attunement to the shifting patterns of the current scene. Above all he is a true writer, graceful but fearless, who ponders the deep questions so often ignored in the clamor of our ongoing civic conversation. Anyone who wonders what the term 'public intellectual' really means will find the answer-in fact many answers-in this scintillating collection."
-Sam Tanenhaus, Vanity Fair

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472024278
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	05/06/2010
Series:	Contemporary Political And Social Issues
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Alan Wolfe is the director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life and also Professor of Political Science at Boston College. He is the author of over a dozen books, including One Nation After All: What Middle Class Americans Really Think About: God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, the Right, the Left and Each Other.

Read an Excerpt

An Intellectual in Public

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By Alan Wolfe

The University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 2003 Alan Wolfe
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-09865-1

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CHAPTER 1

Alien Nation

I

Of all the goods that people value, citizenship has been the most unfairly distributed. Moral philosophers propose various criteria for deciding who should obtain the best that life has to offer. The most just decisions, we are told, are those chosen behind a veil of ignorance, or taken when supply and demand are in equilibrium, or selected to reward the deserving. But citizenship routinely fails all such tests. It is usually conferred at birth, and under most circumstances it stays with you whether or not you lead a meritorious life. Except for the naturalized, and for them only the first generation, citizenship is due not to any decision you made, but to decisions made by your ancestors, up to and including your parents. If you are born in a society for which membership is in high demand, such as the United States, then you are unlikely to give up its associated benefits merely because a Rawlsian could prove to you that, were you to make a choice without knowing where you would end up, you would have opted for a fairer distributive scheme.

It is true that those who are not born American citizens are nonetheless born citizens of some other country. Yet this merely underscores the arbitrariness involved, for not all citizenships are equal. In some cases, citizenship can be a burden, entailing excessive costs in taxation, loss of liberty, or adherence to stifling ethnic obligations. In the United States, citizenship is one of the world's greatest bargains, offering at relatively low cost the freedom to lead a life of one's own choice or the opportunity to keep the bulk of one's own fortune. Not only is the distribution of citizenship unjust, it is also irrational. No transaction that comes with such a cheap price should offer so many rewards. From an economic standpoint as well as a moral standpoint, there can be few more unattractive sights than apathetic Californians born on one side of the border turning their backs on hardworking Mexicans born on the other side.

Intergenerational differences multiply the inequities of citizenship. States grant citizenship, and states are formed through bloodshed: behind every citizen lies a graveyard. The dead of the Revolutionary War made the American state possible; the dead of the Civil War made the American state powerful. World War I was coterminous with women's suffrage. African Americans did not become full legal citizens until the aftermath of World War II. Thus are citizenship and violence inextricably linked. Once citizenship is created, however, subsequent generations treat it as a right, and usually as a rather casual one. Individuals who pay the highest price to make citizenship possible receive few of its benefits; and those for whom it has become banal receive the most. Having the luck to be born a century or two after your nation-state was created is among life's most precious, and most thoroughly arbitrary, advantages.

Modern nations have found only one way to eliminate some of the injustices of citizenship: immigration. It does not matter that immigration is sometimes motivated by fears of demographic decline, or a need for more workers, or a desire to increase the tax base to pay for future governmental benefits. When compared to arbitrary criteria based on blood — such as the one that gives people of German descent a greater claim to German citizenship, even if they live outside Germany, than people of Turkish descent who live inside Germany — the relatively open admissions policy that the United States has followed since 1965 is unusually fair. Legally, your chances of becoming an American citizen are by and large independent of the society from which you emigrated. When illegal immigration — which is repeatedly denounced and widely welcomed — is added to the picture, anyone who has the means and the desire has a decent shot at American citizenship, and an excellent chance of American citizenship for their children.

Immigration cannot eliminate all the unfairness of citizenship. Naturalized citizens pay a price not unlike the one paid by the generation that created citizenship through bloodshed. In Canada, the price can be explicitly monetary. In America, the price has usually been cultural: in return for relatively open borders, Americans have usually insisted on rapid and thorough assimilation. It is not just that one has to learn enough history to pass an exam — in itself not a bad idea, and one that ought to be applied to birthright citizens. It is that one inevitably leaves behind the culture of one's upbringing and loses control over the loyalties of one's own children.

Assimilation is a form of symbolic violence. Like the actual violence of war, assimilation is disruptive and heartless, the stuff of tragedy. Old ways of life are allowed to endure as sentimental memories, but as guides for conduct in the new world they are ruthlessly suppressed if they stand in the way of cultural integration. People with faint hearts who do not like hard choices ought not to consider immigration and assimilation.

Still, for all its associated pain and even violence, immigration underscores the value of citizenship, for the native-born and the immigrant alike. By risking life and limb to obtain this dispensation, immigrants remind the native-born why what they take for granted is priceless. And by granting citizenship to people from cultures radically different from their own, the native-born acknowledge that citizenship is too precious to be distributed solely on the basis of luck.

Conceptions of citizenship are changing as the more or less ethnically homogeneous welfare states of North America and Western Europe face ever higher levels of immigrants within their borders. And those borders have become increasingly tenuous as technologies of communication refuse to recognize their existence. Minority groups that once tried to live quietly now demand recognition, if not autonomy. Yet whatever the results of this period of ferment, the lesson is unlikely to be lost that citizenship is one of life's great gifts — unless, that is, one listens to a group of political theorists who, in defense of what they call multiculturalism, would redefine citizenship to the point where it would not be worth much of anything.

II

These political theorists begin not with a question to be explored, but with a proposition to be defended. When it comes to citizenship, the basic proposition holds that states ought to respect the minority cultures within their borders. Depending on the theorist, different criteria of justice will be advanced, different minority groups will be considered, and different policies will be advocated. Still, in consonance with an academic discipline strongly influenced by the priorities of the 1960s, the presumption in nearly all of this literature is that an emphasis on patriotism, assimilation, and unity is unjust, and that a celebration of diversity is gloriously the opposite.

Will Kymlicka, a Canadian, is among the most prolific of these political theorists. Since Mill, if not earlier, liberals have worried that attempts to attach rights to groups — particularly ethnic, religious, or linguistic groups who stand for the particular against the universal — would restrict the rights of individuals to shape their lives as they choose. In his writings in recent years, Kymlicka has tried to show that such fears are misplaced. Liberals, he maintains, have long recognized that individuals are formed by their group attachments. Moreover, groups want recognition for the same reason that individuals want dignity. Cultural membership, Kymlicka wrote in 1989, "is important in pursuing our essential interests in leading a good life, and so consideration of that membership is an important part of having equal consideration for the interests of each member of the community."

In his book Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship, as in his previous work, Kymlicka distinguishes between the claims of indigenous people and the claims of immigrants, but he defends the appeals to diversity made by both. Indigenous people — Catalans, Quebecois, Puerto Ricans, Scots — constitute stateless nations. Since they lost out when the European state system came into existence, their desire to strengthen their national identity is at least as just as the desire of any existing state to strengthen its own. Kymlicka does not yet have a theory of how the claims of indigenous minorities ought to be judged, but he does believe that "the burden of proof surely rests on those who would deny national minorities the same powers of nation-building as those which the national majority take for granted."

Immigrants, having voluntarily chosen to move to a new society, have no such presupposition in favor of national identity. But, Kymlicka adds, this is not something they seek. He argues that nearly all the policies demanded by immigrants — from affirmative action to official recognition of religious holidays and customs to laws against hate crimes — "are intended precisely to make it easier for the members of immigrant groups to participate within the mainstream institutions of the existing society." Those who worry about balkanization — in an unfortunate choice of words, Kymlicka calls such distinguished worriers as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Robert Hughes "incomprehensibly paranoid" — are on the wrong track. It is the rejection of multiculturalist demands for justice that causes balkanization, not the acceptance of them.

By insisting upon a distinction between indigenous minorities and immigrant minorities, Kymlicka adds one more criterion of arbitrariness to the ways in which citizenship is distributed. National minorities have more extensive claims than immigrants, and their claims, in Kymlicka's scheme, supersede those of nonnational minorities. That is an odd conclusion. One could make a plausible case that immigrants, because they actively choose to become members of a new society, have a higher claim to justice than those who, born into a national minority, are more passive in their status. But such an argument would base justice on individuals and their actions, not on groups and their characteristics; and so Kymlicka will have none of it.

Kymlicka's distinction is founded on a desire for justice, but it accomplishes something altogether different. Consider the case of Quebec. It is not enough to let indigenous peoples keep their language among themselves, Kymlicka writes about the demands of the Quebecois for the official recognition of French, for "it is very difficult for languages to survive in modern industrialized societies unless they are used in public life." Since culture empowers individuals, the Quebecois can rightfully "use the same tools that the majority nation uses in its program of nation-building, i.e., standardized public education, official languages, including language requirements for citizenship and government employment." To meet the standard of what Kymlicka calls "ethnocultural justice," Quebec, an indigenous nation, must be allowed to fashion itself as a French society within the rest of Canada.

Since Quebec is a minority nation, it has the right, under Kymlicka's guidelines, to impose its way of life on those who live within its borders in a way that Canada, because it is a majority nation, cannot. To be sure, both are constrained by internal national minorities: Canada by the Quebecois, and the Quebecois by indigenous people. Yet each may pursue quite different policies with respect to immigrants. When Kymlicka writes of Canada in general, he speaks of the need for "services that are available in the immigrant's mother tongue" and asks that the host society provide "the same degree of respect and accommodation ... that have been traditionally accorded to the majority group's identity." But those are not the kinds of provisions for which the Quebecois have shown much sympathy. The province follows a restrictive policy that gives priority to French-speaking immigrants. Those who do not speak French were once forbidden from advertising ethnic goods in the languages of the ethnic groups seeking to buy them, though now the use of ethnic languages is permitted so long as French is given pride of place. Anglophone Quebeckers can attend English-language schools, but immigrant Quebeckers, including those from the former colonies of the British empire, cannot attend them. If Kymlicka is correct to assert that only public languages can flourish, then non-French-speaking immigrants to Quebec are second-class citizens. Compared to Quebec, Pete Wilson and Ron Unz would have to be classified as soft on multiculturalism.

None of this ought to be surprising, for Quebec vehemently rejects the multiculturalist label. French culture, in the Quebecois view of these matters, is not one culture among many; it is one of the two founding cultures of Canada. For this reason, Quebec tries to assert its cultural hegemony over immigrants in much the same ways that English-speaking Canada once tried to assert its hegemony over Quebec. Assimilationists, who believe that justice is best served by making immigrants full members of their new societies as rapidly as possible, ought to appreciate Quebec's policies; but it is odd that Kymlicka, the defender of minority cultures, appreciates them as much as he does.

Kymlicka, a self-described liberal, proclaims that "illiberal policies may be required if national minorities are to successfully integrate immigrants." What he says may well be true, but he ought to emphasize, as he does not, the injustices that follow from his prescriptions. If you are a Muslim and can find your way to Toronto or Detroit, your chances of maintaining crucial aspects of your culture — which is essential to your rights, in Kymlicka's opinion — are stronger than if you happen to find your way to Montreal.

No wonder that Kymlicka has been criticized by other political theorists for stressing the differences between national minorities and immigrants. Joseph H. Carens, a Canadian who migrated from the United States in 1985, is such a critic. Kymlicka, he writes in Culture, Citizenship, and Community: A Contextual Exploration of Justice as Even-handedness, "has fatally undermined the principled case for policies designed to take the cultural concerns of immigrants (and their descendants) into account." The problem, in Carens's view, is that Kymlicka remains too much of a liberal. His argument that immigrants have chosen to come to a new country, and in that way waived some of their cultural rights, smacks of social contract theory. His insistence that the culture of dominant nations and the culture of indigenous nations are equal owes too much to liberal notions of neutrality between competing conceptions of the good life. Just as liberals in the nineteenth century were often hostile to the claims of particular groups, Kymlicka's lingering liberalism, according to Carens, blinds him to the needs of immigrants to maintain their own culture in the host society.

If both immigrant minorities and indigenous minorities have the right to have their culture respected, Carens ought to be critical of the strong assimilationist policies of the Quebecois. But it seems to be characteristic of this type of political theory always to take the side of the underdogs, and from the perspective of an English-speaking Canadian the underdogs are by definition the Quebecois. And so Carens simply joins Kymlicka in double standards by shifting the discussion away from any discussion of principles of justice and toward an argument rooted in the empirical realities of the day. "What is surprising," he writes, "is how little adaptation Quebec expects of immigrants," for although Quebec does insist that they speak French, it is pluralistic with respect to all other aspects of culture. (Even if Carens is right about culture, Quebec's approach to language renders its immigration policy both more restrictive and less universal than that of the United States, a society usually held up in Canada as the very model of injustice.) And, Carens continues, bilingualism may seem in theory to be just, but if it were permitted in Quebec it "would lead to the erosion and eventual demise of French." Justice, it would seem, all depends on context: "A language policy that might be unjust in one set of circumstances might be morally permissible in another and even morally required in a third."

(Continues...)

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All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

rhp\n

\lrrh: Contents\n

\1h\ Contents \xt\n

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I. Country

Alien Nation

Strangled by Roots

Anti-American Studies

Part II. God

The Return of Evil

The Hermeneutic Hole

White Magic in America

Faith and Diversity in American Religion

Higher Learning

Part III. Race

Climbing the Mountain

The Facts and the Feelings

Margaret Mead Goes to Harlem

Affirmative Action, Inc.

Part IV. Schools

The Jeremiah Racket

Subject Matter Matters

Part V. Sex

The Mystique of Betty Friedan

The Professor of Desire

Up from Scientism

Part VI. Consumption

Undialectical Materialism

Buying Alone

The Greening of Conservatism

Part VII. Left and Right

The Snake

The Revolution That Never Was

Idiot Time

Conclusion

The Fame Game

The Calling of the Public Intellectual

Books Discussed

Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication:

Editorial Reviews

". . . proof that the spirit of the free-ranging public intellectual is still very much alive."

-Newsday

— -

"Alan Wolfe is one of America's indispensable essayists. On a broad range of topics-race, religion, politics, the marketplace, the university, and more-he combines a scholar's erudition with a historian's feel for the past and a journalist's keen attunement to the shifting patterns of the current scene. Above all he is a true writer, graceful but fearless, who ponders the deep questions so often ignored in the clamor of our ongoing civic conversation. Anyone who wonders what the term 'public intellectual' really means will find the answer-in fact many answers-in this scintillating collection."

-Sam Tanenhaus, Vanity Fair

— -

"Alan Wolfe is one of liberalism's last and most loyal sons. His mind is naturally decent and diversified; large enough and fair enough to contain both conviction and doubt. His profound respect for real people does not interfere with his profound respect for real thought. The criticism that he practices is, I fear, a dying art, but it is also one of the glories of American democracy."

-Leon Wieseltier, New Republic

— -

From the Publisher