I was going to call this post something like “Taner Edis’ criticisms of free speech,” but then I read a statement by Edis clarifying that he isn’t objecting to a legal right to free speech, he just thinks strong informal sanctions against saying certain things too loudly might (but isn’t necessarily) a good idea. Context: Taner Edis, author of a number of good books on science and religion and one of the main bloggers for the Infidels.org blog, has written a series of four posts trying to say something about something called “liberalism” and something else called “multiculturalism,” but I’m not really sure what those are supposed to be or what Edis is trying to say about them. Edis says he likes liberalism and dislikes what he calls multiculturalism, but he feels compelled to agree that liberalism may be oppressive to some people–but how this oppression is supposed to be happening isn’t clear. I’m inclined to agree with Russell Blackford that Edis should write a book, but mainly because his ideas seem terribly unclear and maybe a book would help him sort them out.
There is one definite claim that seems to drive Edis’ posts, though, stated in the first post:
So, from the perspective of someone trying to keep public order, or someone devising a political philosophy that can smooth interactions between different groups, secular liberalism is hardly the only option. Keeping the peace requires that communities defined by religion and ethnicity have tolerably equal access to resources—not just economic opportunity but also public respect and the means to cultural reproduction. In this context, protection from insult becomes particularly important: whether others can get away with publicly disrespecting a group is an accurate, easily available public signal of the status of a group.
In spite of Edis’ later clarification, the anti-free speech implications of this are obvious, and in spite of Blackford’s attempt to talk Edis down from this kind of thinking by saying it “detracts from what he actually wants to discuss,” it seems fairly central to Edis’ position (indeed, it’s the one part I have a clear grasp on).
Unfortunately, Edis’ statement here seems just obviously false. Yes, humans are naturally status-obsessed and may resort to violence to protect their status or in retaliation for perceived attacks on their status, and yes, part of the motivation for some of the violence done in the name of religion may be the erosion of certain cultural values. But it’s just silly to say that maintaining public order is impossible unless all communities are respected and can keep their culture going. Not every low status individual or group becomes violent. Part of what it means to have law and order is convincing people not to automatically resort to violence over insults, and when they do, the reasonable response is to try to minimize the harm done and punish the perpetrators to discourage others from imitating them in the future. The “cultural replication” stuff is even sillier, since cultures change all the time without breakdowns in public order.
Some of the consequences Edis draws from this aren’t crazy; he gives an example of a Muslim neighborhood banning the sale of alcohol within it. I personally think that allowing such local vice-bans would make small towns less pleasant places to live and amplify the tendency of people who don’t fit in in small towns to move to big cities. But the effects wouldn’t be terrible. On the other hand, at one point he does take it in a really pernicious direction: Ophelia Benson suggests the example of a teenage girl being forced into a marriage she doesn’t want as a potential bad consequence of “community autonomy.” Edis’ reply is just to say that “You’re again arguing as if liberal, individualist assumptions are shared by everybody in the broader political debate”–which is, I’m sorry, idiotic. Her point wasn’t that everyone agrees that forced marriages are bad, her point was that they are bad. Just because some people disagree doesn’t mean we have to seriously consider adjusting our political order to accommodate them. Edis is displaying a very deep confusion that validates the worst stereotypes of multiculturalism, and he should be embarrassed to be doing so.
I don’t entirely understand what he’s talking about, either, but here’s what I gather:
Liberalism = political inclination stressing freedoms of speech/conscience for all, church/state separation, social egalitarianism and the rights of the individual over the collective
Multiculturalism = political inclination favoring some form of accommodation of multiple legal paradigms (based on culture) within a single state and stressing mutual compromise of ideals in order to advance shared social values; and stressing the importance of allowing affiliation groups to maintain practices essential to their identity, to feel tolerated and to be collectively enfranchised
If this is right, his core claim appears to be that, in some situations, setting up a multicultural system — one in which, say, Muslim communities get to internally enforce some form of Sharia law within an otherwise legally secular state — may be a (much) better way to ease broad social tensions than a uniformly liberal system. Indeed, it may be that in some situations, “imposing” a liberalism of the sort you and I (and Taner Edis) favor rather than multiculturalism may be terribly destabilizing to a society and invite all sorts of divisive, negative repercussions. Though, NB, that’s not to say multiculturalism “ought” to be put into place in those situations; the benefits to harmony might not outweigh the cost.
Regarding that remark to Ophelia Benson, I believe it was targeted at the inference she appeared to be making from “some communitarian laws are obviously intolerable” to “all communitarian laws, and therefore multicultural legal systems which would allow for them, are intolerable.”
Your account of Edis’ basic position sounds right, though more details (like the alcohol ban example) would have been nice. My main problem with the position, so stated, is not that such a regime would obviously be a bad thing (you could actually defend it on freedom of contract grounds) but that Edis wants to insist that there might be some very bad consequences of not instituting such a regime, and I don’t have the slightest idea why he thinks that.
As for the part of Edis’ exchange with Benson I described above, you’re certainly right that Edis does make the some vs. all point. But I don’t see how to interpret the particular remark I quoted in those terms–I don’t see how to interpret it in a charitable, non-pernicious way.