{"id":20538,"date":"2015-11-08T06:00:04","date_gmt":"2015-11-08T14:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=20538"},"modified":"2015-11-06T18:19:56","modified_gmt":"2015-11-07T02:19:56","slug":"from-multiculturalism-and-the-politics-of-interest-by-michael-walzer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=20538","title":{"rendered":"from “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Interest,” by Michael Walzer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"51u+2xHneTL._SX329_BO1,204,203,200_\"<\/a><\/em>Reading Walzer’s essay, I\u00a0kept having to remind myself that this book was published nearly twenty years ago. There’s a lot about what he says that makes sense to me,\u00a0but I found myself wondering\u00a0if things have changed.\u00a0Religious community is of course very different than ethnic, racial, or even national community. Religious communities share a culture, in the sense of a set of values, in ways that people of the same ethnicity, race, or nation–despite their many similarities–might not. And it would seem to me that the communal self-interests generated by this commonality, which (in theory anyway) transcends, or at least potentially transcends many other differences, \u00a0makes certain kinds\u00a0of communal organizing much easier. Anyway, here’s an excerpt:<\/p>\n

\n

In multicultural politics it is an advantage to be injured.\u00a0Every injury, every act of discrimination or disrespect, every heedless, invidious, or malicious word is a kind of political entitlement, if not to reparation then at least to recognition. So one has to cultivate, as it were, a thin skin; it is\u00a0important to be sensitive, irritable, touchy. But\u00a0perhaps there is some\u00a0deeper utility here. Thin skins are useful precisely because the cultural identities over which they are stretched don’t have any very definite or substantive character.\u00a0People are right to be worried about cultural loss. And because identity is so precarious in modern or\u00a0postmodern America, because we are so often so uncertain about who we are, we may well fail to register expressions of hostility, prejudice, or disfavor. Thin skin is the best protection: it provides the earliest possible signal of insults delivered and threats on the way. Like other early warning systems, of course, it also transmits false signals–and then a lot of time has to be spent in explanation and reassurance. But this too is part of the process of negotiating a difficult coexistence in a world where difference is\u00a0nervously possessed and therefore often aggressively displayed.<\/p>\n

Despite all the misunderstandings generated by the mix of nervous\u00a0groups and thin-skinned individuals, there is something right about all this. Social\u00a0peace should not be purchased at the\u00a0price of fear, deference, passivity, and self-dislike–the feelings that\u00a0standardly accompanied minority status in the past. The old left wanted to substitute anger at economic injustice for all these, but it is at least\u00a0understandable that\u00a0the\u00a0actual substitute is the resentment of social insult. We want to be able and we ought to be able to live openly\u00a0in the world, as we are, with dignity and\u00a0confidence, without being demeaned or degraded in our everyday encounters. It may even be that dignity and confidence are the preconditions for the fight\u00a0against injustice.<\/p>\n

So it is worth taking offense–I am not sure it is always\u00a0worth feeling hurt–when demeaning and malicious things are said or done. But a\u00a0permanent state of\u00a0suspicion that\u00a0demanding\u00a0and malicious things are about to be said or\u00a0done\u00a0is self-defeating. And it is probably also self-defeating to imagine that the long-term goal of\u00a0recognition and\u00a0respect is best reached directly, by aiming at and insisting on respect itself. (Indeed, the insistence is comic; Rodney Dangerfield has made a career out of it.)….People do not win respect by insisting they\u00a0are not respected enough. (89-90)<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

The experience of American Jews\u00a0may be of some help here,\u00a0though their extraordinary economic success requires me to be very cautious about setting them\u00a0up as a useful example. Certainly, they have been sensitive to\u00a0insult, as the early founding of the Anti-Defamation League (1913) suggests, and they are still quick to feel insulted and injured in cases\u00a0like\u00a0that of the Farrakhan invitation. But they are not today the\u00a0main\u00a0protagonists of identity politics and their history suggests an\u00a0alternative (indirect) political strategy….<\/p>\n

What is it that gave the Jews place and standing in American society? First, a strong internal organizational life,\u00a0communal solidarity reflected in institutions: synagogues, schools, welfare and mutual aid associations, defense leagues,\u00a0fraternal and sororal societies, a great variety of cultural and political organizations,\u00a0Yiddishism, Zionist,\u00a0laborite, and so on. But an intensively organized Jewry can along,\u00a0historically has gone along, with isolation and fear vis-a-vis the larger non-Jewish community. It has coexisted with the politics of deference, passivity, and\u00a0accommodation which is suggested by the image of the “court Jew,” an ambassador from the weak to the powerful, who often found\u00a0himself begging for favors. Something more is needed if Jews are to live with confidence among the “others.”<\/p>\n

So, second, Jews sought and won legal protections in the form\u00a0anti discrimination laws (the end of restrictive covenants and quota systems) and political protection in the form of friendly politicians and “balanced tickets” and equal\u00a0access\u00a0to public funds–which allows, in turn, for the strengthening of Jewish\u00a0organizational life. Winning these protections required a\u00a0politics of interest rather than a politics of identity, even though the interests at stake were those of\u00a0men and women who were\u00a0similar identified (rather than similar\u00a0situated, say, vis-a-vis the means of production). The leaders of this politics of interest spoke from positions of strength–from a mobilized electoral base and a mobilized socioeconomic base–and their “demands” were highly specific and detailed. Dignity and confidence were achieved not by pursuing them directly\u00a0but by acting in the\u00a0world in pursuit of individual rights and collective advance.<\/p>\n

The result provides a model of what I will call “meat and potatoes multiculturalism.”\u00a0This Jewish achievement is paralleled by that of other religious groups, Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, and Baptists among others (who mostly didn’t need to win the same kind of\u00a0political battles). Thus far, only\u00a0religious groups have been able to deliver the\u00a0meat and potatoes,\u00a0although these groups often have ethnic subsets: Irish Catholics, German\u00a0Lutherans, black Baptists. These are the chief protagonists of a concrete multiculturalism. Purely ethnic and racial groups, by contrast, though some of their representatives are leading defenders of the multicultural idea, have had\u00a0greater difficulty putting it into practice–or at least into the specific kind of practice that I now want to describe. They don’t have organizational histories\u00a0comparable to those of the mainstream\u00a0religions. (91-92)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

One more thing: When I finished reading Walzer’s essay, I started thinking about my son, whom we sent on the weekends to a Persian language school\u00a0until he was in\u00a0fifth or sixth grade. I know he is glad to speak Persian as well as he does, if only because it allows him to speak to relatives and acquaintances who either don’t speak English or whose English is not so great; and I know that he proud of the Persian part of his heritage. I am sure, in other words, that, in the long run, he does not regret having given up his Saturday mornings to\u00a0learn\u00a0Persian. Nonetheless, I doubt very much,\u00a0should he have children, that he will send his children to learn the language; and I doubt as well that any of his cousins, who have two parents from Iran, will be sending their kids to that school either. Then I contrast that with my experience in the Jewish\u00a0community, where people have been sending their kids for however minimal a Jewish education\u00a0for generations. My son’s\u00a0Jewish education, for example, is partial and fragmentary. Nonetheless,\u00a0I can see him sending his children to the same Jewish sleep away camp we have sent him to, in part so that they would get the kind of identity-building experience that he had there.<\/p>\n

I could, of course, be wrong, and I’m not really trying to make an argument here. It just seems to me, though I’m not entirely sure how, that this example speaks to the politics of interest Welzer is talking about, and the way religious groups seem to have\u00a0developed this kind of politics far more effectively than most racial,\u00a0ethnic, or national-origin groups.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Walzer’s essay, I\u00a0kept having to remind myself that this book was published nearly twenty years ago. There’s a lot about what he says that makes sense to me,\u00a0but I found myself wondering\u00a0if things have changed.\u00a0Religious community is of course … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jews-and-judaism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20538"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20538\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20540,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20538\/revisions\/20540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}