A post by Marc Mulholland at Daily Moiders has prompted a spirited response from Ophelia Benson at Butterflies and Wheels (and see the comments threads to both). This book review by, and via, Jonathan Derbyshire is also relevant. (Update: Ophelia now has a follow-up post.)
There's a central point in what Marc is saying which I would not contest, and this is that in the tense political climate we all now inhabit, it is important to avoid doing anything to feed ethnic or religious prejudices and hatreds. In so far as Muslims are on the receiving end of these, they must be defended - as would go for any other group. But in arguing the point, and in indicating the kinds of mistakes he thinks liberals are prone to in this regard, Marc does lay himself open, it seems to me, to the criticisms he has met at Butterflies and Wheels. I want to make two observations of my own in support of them.
First, Marc's characterization of liberalism is subject to an internal tension. On the one hand, he says:
It's worth recalling that liberal modernity is itself a historic and contested construction, not a revelation of reason and human essence.Again:
Liberals have a tendency to treat their own norms as self-evident and, as [an] expression of ahistorical 'rights', not only universally applicable but necessary components of full human morality.We can read these statements in two ways. They could just be saying what can be said of any cultural or political outlook: that it has a historical genesis and grounding, a social milieu, and so on. It's not pre-given; it's not written in the stars. Or Marc's two quoted statements could be intended as saying, more strongly: (and therefore) liberalism, like every other outlook, is just an outlook, no better or no worse than other outlooks. On the other hand, however, Marc also writes:
This is not to say that one cannot argue that it [liberalism] generally accords with universal values - much of it does accord with the drive towards human self-realisation which in turn is a reasonably [word missing: 'good'?] basis for morality...Well, 'generally accords with universal values'... It is important to know what the force of this is for Marc, and for the rest of us. The fact that every outlook is an outlook, has a genesis and a social and cultural milieu, no more means that all such outlooks should be taken as equivalently valuable, than does the fact that different explanations of empirical phenomena (like the movement of heavenly bodies or the causes of illnesses) have a genesis and a 'sociology' mean that all of these, these would-be explanations, are equivalently valuable. Marc needs to resolve for himself the tension between his seemingly pejorative 'ahistorical "rights"' (with the rights in scare-quotes) and his more favourable 'generally accords with universal values'. Meanwhile, there are many who will feel that, however the conception of universal rights has made its way in the world historically, it's a damn sight better as the basis of a political order than are alternative conceptions of things which allow for brutal invasions and oppressions of the human person. So good is this conception in fact that it's a powerful weapon of criticism not only of openly illiberal societies but of would-be liberal ones as well (since these fall far short of liberal ideals), and it has come to form the basis of internationally recognized norms of law. Avoiding Islamophobia and every other kind of such phobia has got to be consistent with criticizing various cultural and religious outlooks for the ways in which they victimize or oppress human individuals.
The other point on which I would take issue with Marc is this. He says:
Minority communities must be granted autonomy, in which liberals treat with due regard their representatives. Ken Livingstone was quite right to greet diplomatically Yussef al-Qaradawi for this reason.I leave to one side whether Livingstone was right to greet Yussef al-Qaradawi. But if the reports I've read are accurate, then Livingstone not only greeted him, he also spoke of him as a man of 'moderation and tolerance'. And, (again) if those reports are accurate, Yussef al-Qaradawi is a man - a man of God - who believes that it is morally acceptable to plant bombs on buses and in other such venues, in which people, people at random, will be killed or else horribly maimed for life. Moderation? For my part, I see Ken Livingstone's statement as just the latest in a growing line of these statements by prominent figures - the 'saluting', the fawning interview, the explicit solidarizing with terrorist murder - that show how badly a sector of the Western left has lost its way.