Mutual Benefits in the Open Society
Continuing the Conversation with Eric Schliesser
Before proceeding to the topic of today’s post, I feel the need to refer readers to two more or less old posts of mine:
- The Nobel Prize in economics has been awarded to the Harvard economist Claudia Goldin “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labor market outcomes.” You might be interested however in reading what I think of scientific prizes.
- Arnold Kling has an interesting post about the “trouble with books.” You can read this post to understand why I nonetheless disagree with his claim that writers’ “aspiration should be to condense [their] thoughts into a good substack essay.”
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Let’s move on now to today’s post. A few weeks ago, Eric Schliesser published at Liberal Currents a very interesting piece about laïcité and public reason. I wrote a post commenting on this piece and Eric kindly responded ten days ago. I have provided some brief comments in the comments section below Eric’s post. I will briefly summarize them, but I would also like to expand on a remark that Eric makes in his post that I have left aside in my comments.
Overall, I think Eric and I largely agree on the illiberal nature of French laïcité. The kind of radical secularism it displays is definitely non-compatible with liberal principles, however, the specific form of liberalism you prefer. If we agree that what is common to all forms of liberalism is a commitment to the idea that individuals should be free to live as they wish and that any interference with their choices should be appropriately justified, then laïcité is not liberal. It represents a serious interference with people’s freedom without any obvious justification in terms of the harm that religious practices could cause to other persons.
However, to understand why radical secularism is so well-entrenched in French society (and maybe elsewhere in Europe), you need to take seriously the role of social representations, if not of psychological dispositions, that are prevailing. Referring to Houellebecq’s novel to which I alluded in my initial post, Eric notes:
“In my view this book is systematically misunderstood as a warning against the take-over of political Islam. I view it, rather, as a satire of French academics, and more importantly — and this chimes in with Houellebecq’s wider oeuvre —, also a diagnosis of a kind of spiritual malaise of modern life. In fact, it is not unnatural to read the novel as itself rejecting French radical secularism which facilitates this malaise.”
I don’t dispute this reading. My point however in mentioning Houellebecq’s novel was that, at the time of its publication, virtually all the comments in the mainstream media were focusing on the background of the story, where the French presidency was taken over by a (moderate) Islamist candidate. This reveals the French (or at least, many French people) obsession with the possibility that one day, the French Republic will fall into the hands of religious (non-Catholic) fundamentalists. This should be of no surprise in a country where almost a third of the votes expressed during the first round of the 2022 Presidential elections went to a far-right candidate. This fear (fantasy?) is part of the collective imagination that strengthens French radical secularism… at least when it is directed toward Islam. This is indeed another point that must be acknowledged. While it is true that many French persons are attached to laïcité, for a substantial minority the real motivation is related to a rejection of Islam. This is a full-blown case of intolerance which is obviously incompatible with liberal tenets, though there would be many things to say about the roots of this intolerance.[1]
Another point on which Eric and I essentially agree is the difficulties related to the use of ethnic or religious statistics. I don’t want to expand too much on this point as I’ve no particular expertise on this issue. But at least one remark should be uncontroversial. By forbidding such statistics, we make it very difficult to assert whether the practice of laïcité is beneficial for individuals and for society as a whole. On the other hand, as Eric notes, “states should not be in the business of fixing population categories of its citizenry (including sex, ethnicity, race, etc.) in exclusive and exclusionary fashion.” This is clearly a tricky issue but I think that we can agree that the complete reluctance (in France at least) to use more inclusive data is a big hurdle for the kind of social engineering that may be needed to improve policies in this context.
I’m now coming to the last point developed in Eric’s post that I want to comment on. In my initial post, I noted that tolerance of “unreasonable views” can be justifiably limited in the context of what Eric calls “Platonic skepticism”:
“If you think that, in a democratic context, opinions will systematically overcome truth (or reasonableness), then you’ll be prone to consider that there are strict limits to toleration and that non-regulated diversity is not synonymous with mutual benefits.”
Eric agrees that this view helps to explain how radical secularism can justify its intolerance, but he also argues that this
“points to the error of treating society and political life in terms of mutual benefits or a harmony of interests. That’s an impossible dream… The better liberal position is to treat (irreconcilable) conflicting interests as a means to be made serviceable to a public interest. This requires domesticating and redirecting political conflict, in part, through fracturing representation (by, say, introducing bicameralism, federalism, and temporally and geographically non-overlapping constituencies).”
This echoes Eric’s call for Madisonianism in his original essay. This can also be related to the renewed interest in political philosophy and economy for polycentrism, i.e., the idea that the open society should be organized around partially competing and non-overlapping centers of governance that individuals are free to choose by “voting with their feet.” It would remain to be seen, in detail, which kind of constitutional design could deal with religious diversity. I shall make two more basic points, nonetheless.
First, as Eric seems to admit in another essay he published at Liberal Currents, the notions of mutual benefits and harmony of interests should not be conflated. The latter is stronger as it seems to require – in a Rousseauian fashion – that individuals’ interests are naturally compatible. The notion of mutual benefits is more Humean. What it essentially indicates is that it is possible (and indeed necessary) to some extent to design institutions that work in the interest of all. In my view, contemporary social sciences indicate that (i) liberal accounts that postulate the harmony of interests are implausible and should be rejected but (ii) the aim of establishing institutions meeting the requirement of mutual benefits is not out of reach.
Second, I don’t think that we can dispense with the notion of mutual benefits thus defined. Of course, one’s view about this issue may depend on how we understand the notions of “interests” and “advantage.” My point is less normative than empirical. I tend to accept the view that the justification of normative principles and of the institutions that implement them must be made from the “moral point of view” – a view typical of public reason liberalism. The moral point of view is not a complete abstraction. Most adults equipped with a normal cognitive endowment can understand what that means, for instance, to assess justice principles impartially. If we are optimists, we can even consider that this ability to take the moral point of view drives over the long run moral progress, leading for instance to more moral inclusiveness. But people do not take the moral point of view in a daily fashion. This is especially true when people perceive threats in their economic, social, and cultural environment. Though there is less opportunity to make it change, this applies also to the constitutional design of the society. Ultimately, social cooperation is fostered by norms and rules whose stability depends on their ability to align people’s interests. An open society that disregards this requirement is unlikely to remain open as people will tend to isolate from or even interfere with groups that they perceive as a threat. As I have noted elsewhere, populist politics largely relies on people’s fear in this fashion. Liberals have no choice but to address this issue directly.
[1] In his discussion of the paradox of tolerance, Popper argues that we should not tolerate intolerant doctrines and people. A bit less than three years ago, a French professor was beheaded by an Islamist terrorist for having shown caricatures of Mahomet in class. This event has caused a shock in the population but also signals the more general difficulty of dealing with extremist views that do not tolerate any form of criticism toward them. There may be a liberal case for rejecting such views.