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Callan, Eamonn. (2004). Creating
Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
272 pp.
$27.50 (Paper) ISBN 0-19-927019-8
Feinberg, Walter. (1999).
Common Schools/Uncommon Identities: National
Unity and Cultural Differences. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
280 pp.
$42.50 (Cloth) ISBN 0-300-07422-0
Reviewed by Thomas F. Green
Syracuse University
March 9, 2004
The world is changing. In what ways, we
do not know and cannot clearly see. We have only the faintest
vision, but we harbor nonetheless an accompanying suspicion that
the changes underway are truly foundational. It is as though we
live “between the times,” convinced that is, that the
past offers inadequate guidance and that our visions of the
future are too insubstantial to “bet the farm on.” Is
this anything more than a quite normal situation, something we
see with the passage of every generation? Youth are always
inclined to be too critical of their predecessors and
insufficiently suspicious of their own utopian dreams.
These two books must surely rank among
the best of a growing number concerned with the educational
formation of citizens in a pluralistic or multi-cultural society.
Feinberg proposes to forge what he calls “principled
reasons for a common education,” in an age when our
understanding of cultural differences poses awkward questions as
to whether there is a clear place for “the common
school” and, if there is, then what kind of place and what
kind of school it might be. The question nags as to where, or
even whether, in the face of such multiplicity, we can cultivate
the unity of a multi-cultural nation and whether the school can
be the instrument of that. His eyes are fixed upon a difference,
carefully drawn, between pluralism and multi-culturalism, and
upon the need for unity somewhere as the basis of anything like a
nation or a nation-state.
(Note 1)
What Feinberg means by
“reasons” and by “public” or
“principled” reasons, will be recognized by many as
simply the expansive ideals to which we often appeal in thinking
about the education of a public — such ideals as equal
opportunity, freedom of association, and the mantras of
individual growth. As a way of talking about reasons, this struck
me, at first, as a rather odd usage likely to produce confusion
among readers. Such things as equal opportunity and freedom of
association — whatever one wishes to call
them — are not, by themselves,
reasons in any sense familiar to moral and political
philosophers. They do not have the formal precision of what are
usually called “moral principles.” On the other hand,
there is a certain loose sense in which this way of speaking is
appropriate, especially to the ends that Feinberg has set for
himself, namely to say something sensible about these problems to
school boards, teachers, and parents. Such ideals, or
“ideas,” do provide a kind of matrix for arguments of
educational policy and public participation in a liberal
tradition. They do delimit what will count as relevant in
discussions of policy and practice in the educational enterprise.
Thus, they provide reasons in the same way that “being
competitive in international markets” currently provides
reasons for all kinds of educational sense and nonsense. Such
ideals do not provide “principles” or
“reasons” quite so much as they forge standards of
relevance. One might say that they are “molecular
ideas” to which anyone engaged in rational public
discussion will have to genuflect. To the question “Why
should we do this or that?” in the schools, it is always
relevant, if not always true, to argue that doing this or that
contributes to the personal growth of students, or to more equal
opportunity, or that it preserves our freedom of
association as a people. In that sense, these ideals stand as the
font of reasons of a sort more familiar philosophically.
On the surface at least, the problem that
Callan sets for himself is different. It is to spell out the
principles (in a more conventional sense of
“principles”) needed to vindicate the legitimacy of a
liberal political order existing under conditions of pluralism,
and in particular to spell out what appear to be the elements of
a political morality adequate for the educational formation of
citizens.
Many readers will recognize
Callan’s discussion as belonging to the growing body of
work flowing from John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice
and from his
subsequent Political Liberalism.
As Callan sees it, a major difference between these two volumes
can be found in a contrast between a kind of ethical liberalism,
on the one hand, in which political coercion is legitimated by
some comprehensive moral doctrine universally accepted and a kind
of political liberalism, on the other hand, in which agreement on
some comprehensive moral doctrine is unnecessary. Universal
acceptance of any comprehensive ethical doctrine is an immensely
remote possibility in a pluralistic or multi-cultural society,
and that fact poses a dilemma for any society pretending to be an
association of free, self-governing human beings. In any society
whose legitimate coercive powers rest upon some prevailing moral
doctrine, there will always be persons living under conditions of
felt coercion, because no such “doctrine” will elicit
universal consent. Faced with this reality, Rawls frames a kind
of political liberalism in which coercive legitimacy is derived
from the presence of what might be called “an overlapping
consensus” on principles of justice among adherents to the
variety of ethical views present in a society of reasonable
pluralism.
But what is this “overlapping
consensus”? What does such a metaphor describe? The
idea’s attraction lies in the presumed neutrality of such a
consensus amid contending doctrines, but its difficulty arises
from the fact that at least according to Callan, it can’t
turn out to be neutral, at least among all possible
contending views. Instead of an agreement of sorts, it will turn
out to be simply a modus vivendi, an agreement on a kind
of “no-man’s land” lacking any genuine moral
content of its own. At least that is the claim that Callan and
others have directed against Rawls’ formulation of
political liberalism. And that lack of any moral content of its
own is precisely why such a solution fails, at least as Callan
sees it.
Such a modus vivendi, if that is
what the idea of “overlapping consensus” amounts to,
is forced to carry too heavy a burden. It resembles too much a
simple truce, and when trust among human beings decomposes into
truce, then any remaining ties that might unite are likely to
rest entirely upon the self-interests of the parties to the
truce. In fact, it is unlikely that any ties can survive the
decay of human relations from trust to truce. At best, a truce
offers agreements simply to “cease and desist” for
the moment. It is a fragile agreement among combatants not to be
at each other’s throats, at least for the moment; and such
agreements are unlikely to gain any lofty moral status even
though “for the moment” turns out to be a long time
indeed, reaching even across generations. Truce does not add up
to peace, much less a settled civic order. Or so the argument
goes.
Rawls conjectures that in time a truce
will “morph” into something more lasting because the
force of habit will cover over the fragile tissue of accustomed
practices with something like a layer of enforceable, or if not
enforceable then at least constraining, usage. So he claims, in
effect, that truce is enough to start with. Experience endorses
his expectation, perhaps even more than the contrary conviction
that such long held fragile agreements most certainly will fail.
Yet, even if the expectation could be adequately grounded, that
from a truce will emerge something morally more satisfying, still
it remains unclear what philosophical work, if any, can be made
to rest upon such empirical estimates of probabilities.
Instead of framing the mere grounds of a
truce, the principles of cohabitation, to say nothing of
cooperation, in any “overlapping consensus,” must
somehow take on the force of strong social norms, and strong
norms, wherever acquired, carry with them moral authority of
sufficient strength, even in public deliberation, to outweigh
considerations of mere self interest. So to acquire the norms of
some “overlapping consensus” is to acquire moral
norms of a quite specific sort. That is why such an overlapping
consensus, as it turns out, does and must have particular moral
or ethical content. That it might be neutral as among the
differing conceptions of a good life in a society of reasonable
pluralism, turns out to be an ignis fatuus, a mere
“swamp light” that retreats whenever we approach, and
yet is so beguiling and so successful in fixing our attention
that we fail to note how far astray, in the meantime, we have
been led by it. A mere truce will never develop into a stable
political order with some constitutive political morality if it
rests simply upon the shifting sands of self-interest or group
identity. Can’t you hear Hobbes muttering in the
background?
These inadequacies in the notion of an
“overlapping consensus” at least insofar as they stem
from its presumed moral neutrality, are wonderfully exposed when
Callan turns to map the details of liberal principles. This, he
does again and again by means of narrative and marvelously
sensitive description. In his opening pages, for example, he
draws our attention immediately to the image of a society in
which political life is simply moribund, a society affluent and
just in its distribution of wealth, one in which rights, as we
think of them have the force of law; but in which when it comes
to elections, or, political participation of any sort, even
public debate on the basics of their joint lives, people remain
simply unengaged. Though such a social order resembles our own,
one could hardly describe it as a “civic order.”
Indeed, after reflection, it may be difficult even to imagine
such essentially uninvolved persons as complete human beings.
There is something morally empty in the account of such a
life.
From this example we learn quickly and
vividly that by “citizens” Callan intends not simply
the passive residents of some well-regulated social order.
“Citizen” refers not to a status, but to a way of
life among other citizens, a way of life moreover, of sufficient
clarity and exercised with sufficient skill to offer
adjudication, of a sort, among different ways of life. To be a
citizen, as Callan sees it, is to be engaged with others in a
joint project. He explores this point again and again and others
kin to it through rich, and sensitive descriptive accounts of how
those principles look when incarnate in ourselves and in our
neighbors and in this way he shows us what is lost in their
absence. Indeed, the recurrence of such morally serious and
perceptive writing, in my judgment, is the major strength of
Callan’s book. In this respect, it is a book that, I
believe, is astonishingly successful. He doesn’t stop at
setting out the bare outlines of principles needed to form
citizens as though such a step could provide adequate educational
guidance. Instead, he portrays what it would look like were we
actually to stumble upon a member of the species that we call
“citizen” and know the specimen for what it is.
Consider, as further illustration, his
approach to the idea of moral autonomy, that flinty, bloodless
rational conception upon which proponents of liberal political
life rely so heavily. Here is an idea that comes laden with
philosophical credentials from almost every liberal tradition.
Even so, one is inclined to think of it as an idea entirely
without any clear exemplars anywhere in the real world. Where is
one to find a truly autonomous person? What does such a person
look like? Are we to search for one whose thinking is genuinely
independent, whose conduct is guided entirely by self-legislated
rational considerations? In the real world, there never was and,
luckily, never will be such a person. Anyone who is only
that kind of independent, rational, self-legislating being, is
unlikely to be a good neighbor, a generous companion, a
compassionate or nurturing parent, a caring mentor. Such an
autonomous being is exceedingly hard to find. In short, the
problem with this central notion of liberal theory — this
idea of moral autonomy — is not its admirable emphasis on
the rational, but its blindness to the human need for dependence
and interdependence, and the prominence of such a need not merely
in the mature being, but, perhaps even essentially, in the
growing infant, child, and youth. Being a teacher, parent, guide
— these are roles that virtually define for us what it
means to intervene in the lives of others in ways that save us
from having to depend upon the frail powers of individuals to
figure out the moral world entirely on their own. No teacher,
certainly no parent, would risk it. None should.
Such an account of “moral
autonomy,” you say, is a caricature. And you are right.
Even so, it is a caricature rooted in reality and raised here for
its own methodological point. About the notion of autonomy, one
wants to ask, as one should ask of any philosophical
construction, just what empirical reality, what aspect of our
moral experience is supposed to be explicated or captured by it?
(Call up the imagine of Henry David Thoreau, that scion of a
pencil-manufacturing-family, to many the model of moral
independence, in his cabin at Walden Pond with his pencils and
paper and his books. Was there ever a person more autonomous yet
more attached more indebted to a tradition and more devoted to
its preservation? Hardly any of us make moral decisions as
autonomous persons and nobody arrives at their moral
understanding entirely on their own. Why then does autonomy
continue to play so large a role in discussions of moral
education? Here is one place (there are others) where
Callan’s capacity for sensitive moral writing comes
marvelously into play.
The idea of autonomy takes on flesh and
blood only when juxtaposed to its intended opposition. To what
condition should we contrast such presumed autonomy? That is the
crucial question. And the answer is that autonomy is to be
understood by its opposition to, among other things, what Callan
calls “moral servility.” What drives the intuition
and hence drives Callan’s argument, I believe, is not that
autonomy is so essential to the moral armament of citizens, but
that moral servility is so offensive to anything that we could
honestly describe as “citizen.” In this way Callan
not only gives concrete meaning to the idea of autonomy, but at
the same time positions us to grasp the larger import of a host
of arguments scattered throughout the text including, for
example, a reconsideration of Mozert v. Hawkins,
for it will be apparent to many that whatever plaintiffs
complaints in that case, their central aim was to validate and
protect their power to shape their children in their own image
with as little outside interference as possible. Their aim, in
short, was to produce what Callan means by “moral
servility,” clearly something to be resisted.
There are other moral ideas that, like
the idea of “autonomy,” gather meaning not in
relation to some good to be promoted, but in opposition to some
condition to be resisted, not in relation to some picture of
justice, but in response to the presence and pain of
injustice. We are creatures that take deep offense, for
example, at the very idea of persons forced to remain captive to
demeaning conditions not of their own making or of their own
election (in slavery for instance), circumstances in which their
powers are stifled. In such settings, human flourishing seems not
merely hindered or simply neglected, but willfully forbidden or
defeated. We are inclined to the view that such persons deserve
to receive, if not some guarantee of exit, then at least some
assistance, in the struggle to escape from their condition, if
they will to do so. This is the sentiment shaping not only
our notion of autonomy, but also our commitment to equality of
educational opportunity generally and to a host of other
moral sentiments that can be fashioned into what Feinberg calls
“principled reasons.”
It will no doubt appear to some that this
emphasis on injustice as opposed to justice, is trivial
since justice and injustice are polar terms of a sort, simple
opposites, each defined by the other. Such a perspective,
however, on the straightforward opposition of justice and
injustice will mislead us, and if carried very far, will mislead
us very far indeed. Justice and injustice are not in simple
opposition, morally speaking. There are relations, like
friendship, and many ties within the family, in which injustice
may be forbidden, but in which any strict adherence to justice
would be declared irrelevant. Insist on receiving justice from
and on giving justice to your friends and soon you will have no
friends. Yet these are the surroundings in which injustice is
most transparently forbidden.
Indeed, of the two — justice and
injustice — injustice is the more fundamental to our moral
reasoning. It might seem too much to say that this lack of
reciprocity in the logical status of justice and injustice awards
priority to injustice. Yet, it does exactly that, and rightly so.
It renders the recognition of injustice prior to the search for
justice, at least in the order of learning and becoming, if not
in the order of being. “Priority” is perhaps too
strong a word. It might be a mistake to use it. Yet it could not
be a large mistake because — to consider a single token of
the notion — the law develops, and always has, by observing
something like the priority of injustice. (Note 2) Action in a court of law, as in a
legislature, begins always with claims of injustice. One must
have not only standing to sue, but cause to sue and this cause to
sue must consist not simply of a defensible complaint but some
actual harm. Even the Norman kings recognized it. One could
appeal to the King’s conscience provided one could shout
within reach of hearing, “A wrong has been done!” The
same reality has long been recognized in the principle that any
society, if it will be a free society, can legitimately control
entrance to it, but not exit from it. “The restraint of
entry serves to protect the liberty and welfare, the politics and
culture, of a group of people committed to one another and to
their common life. But the restraint of exit replaces commitment
with coercion. So far as the coerced members are concerned there
is no longer a community worth defending.” (Michael Walzer,
Spheres of Justice: (Basic Books, NY, 1983) p. 39.)
Immigration and emigration are not morally reciprocal. Neither
are justice and injustice.
It is well to be reminded from time to
time of the circumstances out of which both the idea and the
institutions of a liberal polity emerged. They grew out of the
need to find some exit, some escape from nearly two hundred years
of religious wars. The need was to escape from a world in which
pious certainties on all sides led only to combat. (Note 3) The aspiration was for
something much more modest than justice. The point to note in
this experience is that our principles of association are
fashioned and defended not out of a quest — or even a need
— for positive philosophical constructions of justice so
much as in response to known and transparent evils and to our
estimates of the probable risks that such evils as may once have
been surmount-ed will return to plague us. The condition of
justice is likely to remain obscure despite all our efforts at
reaching clarity and however rich the collection of precedent.
Injustice, on the other hand, will announce its presence with
utter transparency. Justice is embodied in principles and thus is
general, but injustice is felt in pain, and is thus particular.
It is from our sense of injustice that we come to forge
our standards of justice. Says the judgment of conscience,
“I may not know what justice is, but I know that
cannot be it.” Such a judgment is more easily delivered by
ordinary men and women than will be any appeal to some positive
principle of justice to be taught and designed to govern in some
class of cases.
The idea at hand, is that our moral
concepts, insofar as they have to do with the education of
citizens, are derived less from applying the rules of justice or
fairness and more from confronting specific cases of
injustice. It is the look, the taste, the smell of
injustice that sends us on the unending task of forging
arrangements of a free and democratic society and of educating a
people to assume the authentic office of citizen in such an
order. Nor is this perspective rooted in some Manichean nightmare
of eternal conflict between good and evil. It is rooted simply in
an attentive account of how human affairs actually proceed under
arrangements appropriate to a liberal social order.
By his attention to the details of cases
and to the boundaries of complaint, Callan positions us well to
reconsider not only the details of Mozert, but a large
range of other cases including, for example, the complaints of
the dissenters in Yoder that children of the Amish were
given no voice before the court. It seemed to those dissenters
more than a tad unjust not even to have asked what they think or
what may be their aspirations. On the whole, should parents be
left at liberty to shape the education of their children? Of
course they should. But that liberty is not without limit. Nor
should anyone suppose that simply because parental powers are
justly constrained by the collective, it follows that the powers
of the collective are unlimited. Injustices arise from both
sides. If we can deny parents the right to educate their children
in moral servitude, then we can also guard against them
providing an education in sedition. From the fact that parents do
not have sole authority in the education of their children, it
does not follow that they have none at all nor does it follow
that we must tolerate their inclination to neglect the education
of their children even if it turns to total neglect. The
education of his children may either be neglected by one’s
neighbor or become his sole concern, but, in neither case,
can it ever be solely his concern.
It is in exploring the collisions of
these intersecting claims, I believe, that Callan’s
discussion is strongest, whether in exploring, as he does,
the limits of parental interests, the boundaries of State
interests, the limits of religious toleration, or the moral
boundaries of civic participation. The arrangements essential to
a civic order in a liberal society, whether multi-cultural or
not, are simply those offering assurance that the cries of
injustice are never stifled, the search for remedies never
aborted. And about those arrangements, two things must be evident
— first that really fundamental issues cannot be
permanently resolved. Every resolution frames the terms of the
next distress and thus initiates the quest for the next
adjustment. And secondly, the arrangements essential for
such temporary adjustments are simply those under which a
constantly changing political life might be carried on. They are
the arrangements, in short, of a polity, not a morality. And that
being so, we find ourselves oddly enough, back in the
neighborhood of a truce.
It is important to our grasp of these two
books to note that neither contains any sustained discussion of
the nature of politics. One needn’t count this fact as
defect. Yet, one will surely find in it a powerful clue to what
these books are about. Insofar as politics is aimed at framing
policy, it could be viewed merely as a people’s way
of changing their minds, their accustomed way of saying of some
familiar social practices “Oh no! We didn’t mean
that.” Insofar as a polity is the structure by which
we aim to tame internecine conflict converting it into family
squabbles, then politics can be viewed as the periodic renewal of
a familiar truce. And finally, insofar as politics is an activity
turned upon itself, that is, aimed at reformulating the terms of
its own conduct, then it can be understood as an effort to
reframe the polity itself.
These formulations raise difficult
questions as to what relation there can be between being a good
citizen and being a good man or woman. Formulate your list of
civic virtues and the question may remain whether they include
any moral or intellectual virtues at all. I think it practically
certain that some of the moral and many of the civic virtues will
have to be included. The crucial point, however, is to note that
the list will differ depending on whether you start with an image
of politics or whether you start with an image of morality. I
suspect that both of these authors begin with a vision of a
morally good community instead of a vision rooted in the nature
of democratic politics. Hence, they risk advancing goals for
civic education more lofty than a good political order requires
and perhaps even in excess of what a decent moral view of life
can legitimately be expected to recommend. But ponder the matter
with care.
Set these books side by side and
one’s first impression may be that Feinberg’s is by
far the more “densely textured.” On second or third
inspection, however, that reaction must be tempered. It arises,
initially I think, from Feinberg’s central concern that
schools not merely accommodate cultural and ethnic diversity or
merely allow it as plain fact, but that schooling be aimed at
developing a mutuality among persons of diverse origins and
differing dimensions of self-identity at the same time rejecting
the dominance of any one cultural group. That is why his
discussion seems to confront problems of the educational process
more than Callan’s. This impression, however, is
misleading. It is created because of his focus on the formation
or preservation of self-identity, group identity, and national
membership. But when, he turns to consider the details of this
education, in the chapter on “Citizenship Education and the
Multi-Cultural Ideal,” detail is pretty much neglected and
the discussion is conducted at a fairly high level of
abstraction.
In that Chapter, Feinberg is prompted to
raise the question whether “the liberal multi-cultural
nation can be an ethical community?” and he observes, that
such a community requires more than simply an understanding of
abstract rules. (Pg. 209) He says that “citizenship
education in a multicultural society must have a specific
moral content, and it must require complex conceptual skills and
concrete moral commitments” of a sort that parents and
local communities alone may not have sufficient reason to develop
and hence argues strongly for the existence of a public school
system that attends to their development.” (206-7) (So much
for the adequacy of a mere modus vivendi.) It is these
skills and commitments that provide the content for a common
education. Central among them, according to Feinberg, are the
skills of cultural respect and more than that, cultural
competence and cultural understanding.
At this point — the ultimate point
in Feinberg’s analysis — several doubts need to be
voiced as caution against any too facile adoption of these
analytic terms. First, the idea of a political community as a
moral community is among the most dangerous aspirations of any
people and especially when that political association is
constituted and acts in response to cultural and ethnic
identities. These are terms that sound very like those that
produced the vicious divisions from which the very idea of a
liberal order was meant to offer rescue. For more recent
versions, one need only recall such names as Bosnia and Kosovo
and, to another generation, “The Third Reich.” One
should not suppose for a moment that Feinberg has any such thing
in mind. Indeed, he is quite clear-headed that “in a
multicultural society, one goal of citizenship education is to
stabilize a personal, social, and political
habitat…conducive to the maintenance and reproduction of a
variety of group and cultural formations,” a habitat that
supports “many different conceptions of the good
life”(p. 203-4). That is simply part of what we mean
by the phrase “multi-cultural.” No such society can
be unitary in the sense in which Bosnia, Kosovo, The Third Reich
aimed to become. Then too, it is important for Feinberg’s
case to note that what he calls “cultural respect,”
much more even than “cultural competence” is
precisely what seems always to be the first thing overwhelmed
when the search is on for a polity that is also a moral
community. The fact seems to offer historical vindication of
Feinberg‘s claim that advancing something like
“cultural respect” is an essential of civic
education.
However, the conceptual and human
boundaries of anything we call “respect” are terribly
obscure. Just as the principles of a liberal order offered
response to the need for something short of justice, so also the
conditions of a multicultural society must rest upon a standard
that falls considerably short of mutual respect. The fact is that
any political order of a multicultural society, must be able to
hold among persons when mutual respect does not abound. It
must hold not just between friends, but also where enmity exists.
Respect, in one sense of the term, is too high a standard. One is
entitled to suppose that even in the Biblical Peaceable Kingdom
when lion and lamb lie down together — even there —
no doubt the lion will retain his conviction that all that regal
demeanor is justly bestowed right where it is, and thus, will
continue to look upon the lamb not with respect, but with plain
contempt, at most, with carefully measured restraint. And on his
side, the lamb will no doubt remain resolute in his suspicion of
any neighbor harboring so natural an inclination to rule, a
suspicion triggered especially by the approach of dinner time.
What is needed, even in the peaceable kingdom, is not respect,
much less mutual respect, but simply that, come morning, the lamb
is able to rise again.
As far as I can tell, the only exegesis
of “respect” that Feinberg offers is the claim that
we must “respect the rights of those who are different from
ourselves”(212). This is a standard of respect as
forbearance. It certainly falls short of anything we could call
respect in the sense of esteem. Respect as forbearance is a mere
pittance of what a moral community requires for its foundations.
Yet, it may be just the thing for the formation of a viable
polity. It does not mean that I must esteem those who are
different, or be fond of them. Nor does it even imply that I
should respect the difference in the sense of valuing it.
To respect the rights of those who are different from
ourselves does not imply that I must like the ways in
which they are different, or admire them, or even that I must
approve of their being different. To say that I respect my
neighbor’s property means simply that I will do it no harm,
will not invade it, not intrude upon it unless invited. Respect
of this sort is simply the same asured restraint that the lion
offers to the lamb. Add up the circumstances included in this
description and respect comes precious close to being little more
than “indifference.” Respect is reached under
circumstances where the difference simply doesn’t matter.
Such respect falls far short of any positive social tie or moral
or civic virtue. It is merely a rule of forbearance.
“Respect” understood in this way, is not a term of
trust, but of truce. Respect as forbearance is too low a standard
to provide moral foundations, and “respect” as
esteem, though of solid moral pedigree, is a standard far too
lofty to expect of human beings as human beings are known to us,
and a standard much higher than any polity requires. And so we
find ourselves once more back in the neighborhood of a truce.
It’s enough to make one wonder
again, What’s so wrong with a truce? We do well to recall
Cicero’s claim in his sequel to Plato’s Republic,
that the Republic rests upon a common agree-ment concerning what
is good, and James Madison’s contrasting claim that the
problem is to devise of way of deciding what to do in the midst
of the undoubted fact that we do not agree on what is
good. The main objection of those who criticize liberalism for
its presumed moral neutrality, boils down, it seems to me, to the
simple complaint that liberalism is a view about polity (not
morality) according to which no single view of the good life will
be allowed to work its way unhindered. The righteous, in
particular, will take offense at the notion of a polity in which
their undoubted wisdom is hindered in its march toward the moral
reform of the world. Yet, instead of saying, “Let us do as
much good as we can imagine” principles of a liberal order
say simply, “Do as little harm as you can manage.” It
is the most fundamental ethical demand of medical practice.
This liberal perspective can be
discovered in Feinberg’s treatment. However, he frames the
problems of preserving a “common” education in a
multicultural nation by terms that seem to me not altogether
helpful. He aims to confront the facts of cultural and ethnic
identity, and in that respect offers a helpful, balanced, and
calmly reasoned account. Such terms, however, are in other
respects inappropriate for making explicit the needs of a liberal
polity for the education of citizens. The focus on identity is
sometimes important, but more often, I think, it is not. There
are enormous numbers of persons even in multicultural America who
could not claim any identity expressed in such cultural or ethnic
terms. Others will claim that whatever their identity, it became
apparent to them only after having encountered “the
other,” that is, only after having discovered that they are
American, for example, because of some incidental habits or marks
of demeanor that surfaced only by living among the French, for
example or among the “Anglos” in Quebec, or the
“Hispanics” in Texas and California. That is when one
is likely to discover one’s national identify in the sense
of acquired habits and dispositions of conduct, thought, and
mannerisms. I have my Irish and English ancestry, but “the
Irish” remain a source of endless amazement and wonder to
me as do many other peculiar and strange peoples, and the English
figure in my make-up — if that is what identity is —
mostly as the source of wit, law, and great literature. Neither,
I think, figure at all in anything I would call cultural
identity, much less my “identity.”
That is my ancestry, but it is no part of
my memory or identity. On the other hand a peculiar frontier
ethos rooted in the prairie is another story I could tell
stemming partly from life among the Amerind — mostly
Lakota, Oglala, and Omaha. It constitutes none of my ancestry but
much of my social memory and thus some part of my identity. Life
on the prairie instills deep respect for the modest life and for
the transience of achievement together with a deep suspicion of
pretence of all sorts, but especially the pretence of a
“city critter” (a phrase in those quarters uttered
always with a sneer) or anyone stemming from “beyond the
Mississippi,” i.e., “the East.” Identity
matters educationally primarily in respect to groups, and
primarily groups that are marginalized and suffering the
injustice of some oppression. If we search for principles engaged
in the educational formation of citizens for a multicultural
society and if we seek to unfold their pedagogical consequences,
then surely we need to look elsewhere than to
“identity” for the formation of a viable public,
national or otherwise. Three quick points are worthy of note.
The first is to note that there are at
least two ways in which law can be construed as valid in guiding
the limits of public action and defining the boundaries of what
can be admitted to public debate within a liberal order. The
first is that if law in general is to be regarded as valid, i.e.,
as binding, then it must be properly, that is, legally enacted.
The second is that law, so enacted, be framed so as to allow a
plausible story to be told about it within each of the various
groups of a multicultural society. That is to say, law is not
valid simply because it is validly made and made at the center of
such a society. It must also be interpretable in a local story
about our common life in communities of belief and custom at some
distance from the center. Law is not only nomos, but also
narrative. (Note 4) The need
for a suitable narrative is one expression of historical
consciousness, but it need not be ethnic or cultural. The law
must enable a story that can be told by the Pennsylvania Dutch as
well as the Philadelphia Quaker, the New England mechanic and so
forth. This is the political equivalent of the old insight that a
political order, if it is genuinely political and not simply
tyrannical, must aspire to gain the consent of the governed.
Secondly, we are unlikely to find
principles to guide the conduct of education in a multicultural
society without a developed view of politics that enables us to
mark a difference between the requirements of morality and the
requirements of being a political actor. It should not take as
given the claim that only a good man or woman can be a good
citizen much less a good leader of a free people.
So what are those essential dispositions
needed to exercise the office of citizen? I have tried to set
them forth elsewhere
(Note 5) and so will not elaborate here. They can be gathered
briefly in two clusters; (1) The skills of public speech, and (2)
the dispositions of a political actor.
First among the skills of public speech
is the capacity to hear the speech of “the other” as
candidate for one’s own; and companion to this, the
capacity to tell one’s own story in ways that can be heard
by others. And, of course, if this is to happen, then the polity
must include the means for persons of one self-consciousness to
speak to others of another consciousness. Feinberg is well aware
of this requirement for public speech, or at least, one side of
it. He says, “The way to teach students to engage in public
discourse is not to require them to mute their own unique
cultural voice but to teach them how to have that voice heard by
others who may not agree with it.” (p 225).
Second among the skills of public speech
must be the ability to go beyond the level of wants and desires
to advance public claims about public affairs. That people want a
certain thing, a certain liberty, a certain program of education,
a certain tax benefit, does not in itself place any claim upon
the rest of us to grant it. The distance between “I want
X” and “X is a good thing for us to do”
is the distance between the pleadings of petulant children and
the discussions of adult citizens. That members of my
“group” see things this way rather than that, is
something that ought to be said and heard. But because some
ethnic or cultural group sees things this way or that creates no
claim for special attention upon others in the society. There is
no legitimacy in the mere fact of difference. The skills of
public speech include the capacity to speak of the world as one
knows it and to hear the voice of the other as candidate for
one’s own speech
Here there is implicit already an
extensive educational agenda for education in a
multicultural society. Especially when added to the
dispositions of a political actor in such a polity, these
dispositions do not differ much from those that are essential in
any liberal polity. Those added virtues or dispositions of the
political actor would have to include the difficulty of acquiring
a kind of rational patience and forbearance, by which I mean,
enough sense of prudence not to act foolishly, the modesty to
suppose that in all likelihood one may be wrong in one’s
favored course of action recommended for others, and a reluctance
to impose one’s own sense of the good life on anyone else.
I can think of no better summation of these requirements, nor can
I imagine that there can be a better summary formulation than to
be found in the concluding remarks of Abraham Lincoln’s
Second Inaugural:
"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with
firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us
strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's
wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for
his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish
a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all
nations."
Notes
1. And a good
thing it is to mark these distinctions. Feinberg is very
clear-headed that talk of a multicultural nation and a
multicultural state presupposes a strong unity of a sort that
talk of a multicultural society does not. “To neglect the
nation as a bridge between different cutural groups,” he
says, “divorces the state from its communal base and leaves
the idea of the nation inchoate and impotent.” (p. 212)
2. Indeed, this
presumed priority of injustice has been developed into a
comprehensive approach to jurisprudence. Professor Edmund Cahn
made it the central theme of his account of the structure of law.
See The Sense of Injustice (New York, New York University
Press, 1949), The Moral Decision (Bloomington, University
of Indiana Press, 1955), The Predicament of Democratic
Man, (New York, The MacMillan Company 1961).
This apparent “priority” may also be a peculiar
mark of Anglo-American legal traditions. Continental law tends to
specify what is required in conduct, thus taking form in legal
codes, saying, in effect, “You must do this.”
Anglo-American law, however, tends to spell out what is
forbidden, thus avoiding codes and turning to a more fluid path
of statute and custom, saying in effect, “Beyond these
things that are forbidden, you may do whatever you wish.”
The one says, “You must do what is required”;
the other, “You may do whatever is not
forbidden.”
3. See
Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, edited by
Edmund Leites, (Cambridge University Press, 1988); the opening
essay is "Governing Conduct" by James Tully pp. 12-71.
“Therefore, how does one distinguish an erring conscience
from a true one? The radical puritan's answer is that those with
a regenerate conscience do not err because the grace or spirit of
God moves their assent from within and secondly, they know that
they are regenerate or elect by virtue of an inner assurance or
grace. The conscience is thus sovereign and cannot be
subordinated to any authority or authoritative external criteria.
As Catholic opponents were inclined to say, these radical
Protestants had set up their conscience as a new pope,” in
every little soul a little pope installed. (p. 19)
4. See Robert M.
Cover, “Nomos and Narrative, The Supreme Court, 1982
Term” (Harvard Law Review, 1983, 97,
p. 4) for a detailed exploration of the virtues and liabilities
of such a perspective. I am not so much concerned here with the
adequacy of such a view, but with the necessity of allowing it to
appear in discussions of most of the legal controversies that
figure in the conflicts that Callan so ably pursues.
5. See Thomas F.
Green, Voices: The Educational Formation of Conscience,
(Notre Dame, Notre Dame University Press, 1999) esp. Chapters 7
and 8.
About the Reviewer
Thomas F. Green
Philosopher in Residence on Pompey Hill
Box 100 Pompey Hill, New York 13138
Emeritus Professor, Syracuse University
Tom Green is Professor Emeritus, Philosophy and Education,
Syracuse University.
From 1980 until his retirement in 1993, he was Margaret
Slocum Professor of Education. He was a faculty member in
the School of Education from 1964. He has earned degrees
from the University of Nebraska and a PhD in philosophy
from Cornell University.
He is author of six books—one more than Moses—and
nearly a hundred articles on teaching, educational policy,
school finance, moral and theological education and
educational and social forecasting.
From 1967-73, he was founding Director or Co-Director
of the Educational Policy Research Center at Syracuse,
a federally funded center for the study of education
policy and social forecasting.
He was President of the Philosophy of Education Society,
1975-76. Since, 1979, he has been officer or member
of the National Academy of Education, an elected body
of outstanding American scholars and educational leaders.
His books include
Predicting the Behavior of the Educational System,
(Syracuse University Press, 1980);
Work, Leisure, and the American Schools, (New York, Random House, 1970);
The Activities of Teaching, (New York, McGraw Hill, 1971);
Voices: The Educational Formation of Consicence
(Notre Dame University Press, 1999.
He is currently engaged in work on a companion volume in
philosophy of education and pedagogy:
Walls: Education in Communities of Text and Liturgy.
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