What remains of toleration?

Public Interest, Wntr, 1999 by Adam Wolfson

Intolerant relativism

So it seems clear to me anyway that the partisans of multiculturalism have overstated their case: Multiculturalism is less a fact than a wish. But it would be amiss for me not to point out that Walzer's take on the modern condition is quite nuanced. His claim that the world is highly differentiated is tempered, as it happens, by some sobering fears regarding his own country. These fears are not so unlike those voiced by Tocqueville, Mill, and Riesman before him. Riesman's "other-directed" individual and Tocqueville's individual "thrown back on himself alone" find their counterparts in Walzer's dark ruminations on postmodern individualism.

Walzer warns of the emergence of a regime of postmodern toleration, in which "people have begun to experience what we might think of as a life without clear boundaries and without secure or singular identities." And he fully grasps the dangers inherent in this new phenomenon.

Imagine now, some generations down the postmodern road, men and women entirely cut off from any such ties, fashioning their own 'selves' out of the fragmentary remains of old cultures and religions (and anything else that may be available). The associations that these self-made and self-making individuals form are likely to be little more than temporary alliances that can be easily broken off when something more promising presents itself. Won't tolerance and intolerance in such a setting be replaced by mere personal liking and disliking? Won't the old public arguments and political conflicts about who to tolerate and how far to tolerate them be replaced by private melodramas?

The postmodern project, Walzer continues, "undercuts every sort of common identity and standard behavior." He worries "about the processes that produce dissociation and are its products," including, the high divorce and illegitimacy rates, the increase in reports of child abuse, the decline in voting rates and associational activity, and the rising tide of random violence. Ultimately, the postmodern project creates what he calls "postmodern vagabonds" who, Walzer notes, "may not be the most tolerant fellow citizens." This should remind us of the old fears of the fifties social theorists that a "mass society" is a breeding ground for the "authoritarian personality." Toleration's terminus becomes indistinguishable from a belligerent, intolerant relativism.

Walzer sincerely wishes to avoid such an end. He offers various ways of finding homes for his postmodern vagabonds of the future, including democratic politics, civil religion, and, most emphatically, multiculturalism. His hope is that the "pluralism of groups [can be brought] to the rescue of the pluralism of dissociated individuals." "We need to sustain and enhance association ties," he writes, "even if these ties connect some of us to some others and not everyone to everyone else." His advocacy of multiculturalism is then less an accommodation of existing difference than an activist political program for reintroducing lost differences. (What home there might be for the family-values crowd is unclear since Walzer seems to have already excluded them from toleration on the ground that they are themselves supposedly intolerant,)