The Talking Cure
By Jacob Blecher

In the early fall of 1989, three girls in traditional Muslim headscarves entered a small public school in northern France. Innocuous as the garments may have been, the school’s headmaster forbade the girls to enter their classrooms until they removed the scarves. When they refused, he banished them to the school’s library, citing infringement of France’s venerated code of laicité—radical separation of church and state. What ensued was more than half a decade of histrionics and political conflict. The “Affair of the Scarf,” as it became known, implicated everyone from then-President Francois Mitterand to public intellectuals like Regis Debray to the justices of the country’s high court. In question was whether the presence of religious clothing such as the scarves poses a threat to liberal democratic principles. Mainstream feminists said yes, the scarves are symbols of oppression; centrists and right-wingers said yes, they represent a threat to France’s deep-seated secular values; only a few leftists disagreed, arguing that the girls had willfully decided to wear the headgear. But no clear solution emerged: In 1994, the Minister of Education declared that French students could wear discreet religious symbols (such as yarmulkes), but not headscarves, essentially ending the controversy exactly where it had started.

This bitter episode occupies just a few pages of Seyla Benhabib’s latest book, The Claims of Culture, but it neatly represents the
central problem of the work: How can liberal democracy and multiculturalism co-exist? How can we maintain democratic principles
of equality and inclusion, such as those which undergird public schools, when certain individuals and groups, like the three Muslim
girls, actively demand to be recognized as different and excluded on cultural grounds? That may sound like the kind of question that only a political philosopher would ask—Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale—but in the age of the so-called “clash of civilizations,” Benhabib could hardly have picked a better time to turn that issue over in her mind. The Claims of Culture is a sobering assessment of contemporary cultural struggles and an inspiring, though ultimately unsatisfying, attempt to resolve a problem that afflicts democracies today.

Benhabib’s motivation for asking the fundamental question of the book springs from a close look at reality. We live in a globalized world, she observes, in which democratic governments increasingly come into conflict with groups that demand recognition of their different ways of life and values, often at the expense of stability and peace. Cultural groups and separatists movements alike make demands of democracies that often undermine democratic values. “Reflecting a social dynamic we have hardly begun to comprehend,” she writes, “global integration is proceeding alongside sociocultural disintegration, theresurgence of various separatisms, and international terrorism.” The “Affair of the Scarf” is one symptom of this new global condition, as are such
disparate movements as the Tibetan independence struggle, Native American land claims, Taliban fundamentalism, and calls for cultural recognition on college campuses. To dismiss such struggles over identity politics outright, as some cultural conservatives do, or as an invention of elites, as some Marxists do, is “bad sociology.” Theorists of democracy, Benhabib warns, must confront issues of cultural struggle or risk being irrelevant.

Benhabib is a devoted liberal democrat foremost, and she cherishes the belief that human beings are moral and political equals. She believes that all people can communicate with one another and come to a consensus if they devote enough effort to the task. In today’s political climate, however, this is a gutsy claim. One need only look to a democratic country like Spain, where Basque separatists are waging a violent, seemingly unresolvable campaign for secession, for an example in which dialogue seems hopeless. For precisely this reason, Benhabib thinks that democracies must be willing to negotiate alien customs, beliefs, and moral frameworks. Otherwise, they cannot be true to the definition of democracy as she sees it: a state in which “decisions affecting the well-being of a collectivity can be viewed as the outcome of a procedure of free and reasoned deliberation” and in which “the institutions that claim obligatory power do so because their decisions represent [a] standpoint equally in the interests of all.” To deny that it is possible to overcome cultural struggles is to forsake a key democratic tenet: that communication and deliberation are possible among all members of a state.

Conveniently, Benhabib’s radical conception of culture conforms to this “deliberative model” of democracy. Most people tend to consider cultures distinct, stable wholes. For instance, when we talk about the Pequot Indians, we refer to them as a group of people that share certain core practices and beliefs. But Benhabib takes issue with this idea and stresses the instability and fluidity of culture, the moments when cultures are themselves riddled with contradiction. She argues that cultures should be conceived of as unfolding processes, not static wholes. One can think of Judaism, with its myriad denominations, as an example of a culture that is driven by internal divisions. Jews not only argue with one another about their own customs and beliefs; they also consider themselves members of other cultural communities. In more philosophical terms, Benhabib says that the inherent fluidity of
culture depends on two crucial factors: the human abilities to reason critically and to tell stories about oneself. Because we can critically evaluate cultures and identify ourselves through complex “narratives,” Benhabib thinks that cultures continuously undergo
transformations.

Appeals to cultural relativism mean little to Benhabib. Whether we admit it or not, human beings share a basic standard of communication. The “clash of civilizations” is just a myth, and theories popular among postmodernists of “untranslatability” and “incommensurability” between certain cultures are “impatient.” How else, she asks, can we explain the fact that other cultures are even intelligible to us? As long as two people sit down and try to communicate long enough, she argues, they can eventually succeed in having a meaningful conversation. This sounds a bit like what Benhabib is herself paid to do, so couldn’t this just be a self-righteous philosopher myopically privileging her own profession as the basic mode of social interaction? No, she counters, “all moral beings capable of sentience, speech, and action are potential moral conversation partners.” This leads Benhabib to sum up this process of universal human communication in one deliciously ironic piece of jargon: “pluralistically enlightened ethical universalism on a global scale.”

With this complicated argument under her belt, Benhabib undertakes the central task of the book: to formulate an ideal conception of democracy in which identity politics have a place but do not undermine the integrity of the whole. Her tone here is not so much that of a didactic philosopher, but of a conversation partner. She casually weaves her model out of comparisons and contrasts with more than half a dozen other contemporary theories of democracy. According to Benhabib, there are three necessary conditions for her brand of multicultural democracy to take root: “egalitarian reciprocity,” “voluntary self-ascription,” and “freedom of exit and association.” The first means that minority groups must possess the same civil, political, and economic rights as the majority; the second refers to an individual’s right to assign his or her own identity; and the third indicates a person’s right to enter or leave a cultural group at will. On their own, these “normative conditions” seem like common sense—who today does not subscribe to these beliefs?—but Benhabib radicalizes them by establishing them as basic rights of a democraticsystem that permits “maximum cultural contestation within the public sphere.” In other words, she constructs a model of democracy in which all citizens can freely and continuously debate any kind of question—be it cultural, political, or economic—in public. The idea is that if it is possible for everyone to voice critical concerns and to participate equally in political and moral conversations, questions of multiculturalism can be resolved in such a way that leaves democratic principles of inclusion intact and also respects an individual’s right to cultural distinctiveness—sort of a college campus built on a national scale.

Under Benhabib’s system of democracy, the “Affair of the Scarf” would not have been an instance of “clash of civilizations,” but an opportunity for critical debate and exploration of “otherness.” Her system would have allowed the three girls to participate in a
continuous, free, and open conversation about the scarves and negotiate a solution to the problem beneficial to all. They could have expressed their reasons for wearing the headscarves and thus legitimated their cultural practices through democratic means. Benhabib admits that there may be some extreme cases where consensus may be so difficult to reach that secession may be warranted, but those exceptions would be few and far between. In theory, ethnic wars and terrorism would be things of the past.

Benhabib is aware of the rosiness of her model. But, she contends, “The fact that a normative model does not correspond to reality is no reason to dismiss it:” Ideal models of government can, at the very least, help us to evaluate our current circumstances more effectively. Yet Benhabib is ultimately unclear about why she has bothered to construct an ideal democratic model at all. Is it to serve merely as a critical tool? Or can it actually pave the way for concrete socio-political change? Near the end of the book, she hints that her model exists neither for criticism nor for socio-political change, but rather for the sake of transforming assumptions. As she writes, “A great deal of contemporary debate on these [cultural] issues has been bogged down by false epistemological assumptions. Once these assumptions are rejected, new modalities of pluralist cultural coexistence can be reimagined.”

I cannot help but conclude, however, that Benhabib’s vision— commonsensical as it may seem—demands nothing short of all-out revolution. Her model of democracy requires a levelling of power in society, and that can only be accomplished by actively taking power away from those who have it. Yet what corporate ceo would agree to rational deliberation with protesters who believe that private companies have too much control over politics? What headmaster would willingly agree that 15-year-old girls should have just as much a say in the management of a school as he does? Benhabib, unfortunately, supplies no guidelines for actually bringing about her vision, despite prescribing it as normative—the way things should be. Would she support a revolution? It is hard to say, though it seems unlikely considering that the most famous revolutions of the past century resulted in the utter disregard of culture and the deaths of millions. In this hesitation lies the most frustrating turn of The Claims of Culture. After grounding so much of her careful, and often illuminating, argumentation in the concrete realities of the world, Benhabib seeks the clouds just when we need her most.

Jacob Blecher, a junior in Davenport College, is associate editor for TNJ.