The endless debates about values and laws may well be interesting, but they do not help us to resolve the real problems of everyday life. Theoretical –and idealist—philosophies can, with the best intentions in the world, become real diversionary tactics. Core issues, practices and real life are avoided. We therefore have to promote a ‘philosophy of everyday life’, or in other words an applied philosophy that can evaluate both the content of the law and its psychological and symbolic projections. We need a philosophy of an ‘active we’. The picture then becomes less edifying. The colours fade, and countless contradictions and inconsistencies appear. Nelson Mandela quite rightly remarked one day that the way it treats its ‘minorities’ is the standard by which a democracy should be judged. In doing so, he immediately posed the debate in practical, political concrete and everyday terms. The concept of a minority then becomes both legal and psychological: ‘minority’ status is usually given to those who, in legal, psychological and even symbolic terms, are regarded, either formally or informally, as not being part of the original society, its culture or its ‘collective psyche’. A cultural community whose small numbers make it a minority may also be seen as such in the eyes of the law.
As sociologists from Weber to Bourdieu remind us, we also have to remember that outdated economic and social categories can determine the way individuals are treated in both modern and traditional societies. Discrimination and injustice are primarily, and above all, a matter of ‘social class’, even though discourse now tends to ‘culturalize’ the debates and to turn them into religious issues. Social exclusion, unemployment and the marginalization of the poor, and women, are still the main evils of contemporary societies. There is obviously nothing new about this phenomenon, but the way we approach these questions turns socio-economic and political power relations into the so-called ‘new’ problem of cultural or ‘civilizational’ differentiation. The most disturbing thing is that the unemployed concur with this new reading of social problems and, rather then emphasizing that they all share the same fate of exploitation and poverty, are tempted to invoke the cultural and religious differences between their own marginalization and that of others. Psychology and social and media representations have an unrivalled ability to split the ranks of any potential resistance movement. Religious and cultural factors may well be grafted on to socio-economic realities, but they can never totally replace them: they are aggravating factors in the sense that cultural and religious discrimination can compound social exclusion and make it even more complex. The economic, political and sociological theories that try to explain the mechanisms of exclusion still provide our initial and objective analytic framework. We are still talking about classic relations of domination.
Armed with these tools, we can begin to study the new phenomenon of discrimination on the basis of culture and religion. Anyone who is now poor, ‘African, Arab or Asian’ (or perceived as such) and ‘Muslim’ (or perceived as such) is disadvantaged in more than one sense. In day to day life, this may means that he or she faces spontaneous and/or institutional racism in the form of bad treatment, and may find that access to jobs and upward social mobility is blocked (representatives of cultural diversity who have reached a certain level are assumed to have reached the natural limits of their competence). The letter of the law says otherwise, but practices are, as we have said, bound up with representations, projections and fears. Structural racism and institutional discrimination set in insidiously, but in the long term they result in a very negative twofold phenomenon. On the one hand, they have an effect on their victims –and they really are the victims of discrimination and injustice on a daily basis –who develop a very negative ‘victim’ attitude. Everything is explained and justified in terms of racism, and not in terms of their lack of competence or their failure to understand institutions and codes. The ‘symbolic majority’, on the other hand, comes to justify unequal treatment in terms of a difference of origins. The result is the normalization, on a large scale, of the stigmatization of the other and a mass racism that recalls the darkest hours of History.
Women and men may well have internalized the four ‘Ls’ principles that should grant them recognition as citizens (respect for the law, knowledge of the language, critical loyalty and a sense of liberty), but they still have to justify themselves and prove that they are not dangerous and are assets to the society in which they live. Citizens ‘of immigrant origin’ who look like Arabs, Africans or Asians are not faced with these problems so often if they are wealthy, musicians or high-level sportspersons . The application of the law and collective representations give them a very different welcome: ‘they belong with us’, and represent us if we like their music and if their talents help ‘us’ to win in sporting contests. Here, we are in the realm of psychology and representations, which is not really surprising given that we live in the era of global communications, of media supremacy and perpetual migrations. We now have to get used to the idea that values and laws do not protect us from anything unless we make the effort to educate ourselves, critically evaluate the information we are given, and learn to understand representations. The means of mass persuasion are so powerful that anything is possible: even the most educated people and the masses are increasingly vulnerable and are potential objects of the most hateful populist campaigns and media manipulations. Sixty years after the ratification of the Declaration of Human Rights, nothing can be taken for granted, and everything is possible. As former Prime Minister Tony Blair once said, ‘The rules of the game have changed.’ That was an understatement. Surveillance, the loss of the right to privacy, summary extraditions, ‘civilized’ torture camps all over the world, places where the writ of law does not run. The normalization of violence appears to have desensitized us, and we are more and more indifferent to the inhuman treatment we see all around us. It is true that we have often lost the ability to marvel at the simple things in life, as a result of either pessimism or lassitude, but we can only conclude that we have also –and to a dangerous extent – lost our capacity for outrage and revolt. Our representations are becoming standardized just as our intellect and sensibilities are atrophying. Our fine laws may still delude us, but they will do nothing to protect us or to promote respect for human dignity unless our conscience does not imbue them with substance, meaning and humanity.
‘WE’?
A holistic approach to these realities require us to rediscover, respectively, together and in practical terms, some basic principles and values. Education, everyday life and interaction with fellow citizens of different origins, cultures and religions are the things that will allow us to apprehend our common humanity in concrete terms, and to understand that it is, by its very essence, made up of diversity and of many different identities and traditions. Our fellow human beings act as mirrors, and they allow us to understand that we too have multiple identities, and that we are not reducible to one origin, one religion, one colour or one nationality. This education and these relations forge knowledge and shape a psychology. It takes time, patience and commitment: changing mentalities and transforming perceptions and representations means that we have to work with our fellow human beings at both the local and the national level. We have to give a ‘philosophy of pluralism’ substance through our practical commitment, and through the projects of actors who represent a diversity of cultures and religions but who are also inspired by their common willingness to take up the same challenges. We can thus create a collective psyche, a common sensibility and a mutual feeling of belonging.
None of this can be done at the legal level; we have to begin long before the law intervenes. How and why, at a given moment in history or life, does a group acquire the ability to say ‘we’, and to allow its members to feel at ease with themselves, to feel that they are recognized and that they are at home? A group or a society … regulated and organized by legislation, and cemented and unified by a common sensibility. This is not a matter of recognizing the formal limitations of the law, but of coming into contact with the other’s sensibility, values, doubts and quest. We encounter new trajectories, and the efforts others are making to belong, and to find their equilibrium and peace. We learn to empathize, as we have already said, and to identify the sacred spaces of the ‘other’ who is our neighbour. We learn to understand the importance of our neighbour’s values, loves and convictions, and even the geography of his or her psychology and sensibility. As Mircea Eliade points out, even the most modern amongst us have their personal maps of their sacred and profane spaces and elements. We become a society when two, three, thousands or millions of us learn to decipher the main lines of our respective routes and to respect them because we understand their general meaning.
As we have said again and again, we need the law. But building a society means going beyond the legislative level and entering the realm of civility. At this level, it is not a matter of using the law in order to know the extent to which I can exercise my rights to impose my will or to attack the other who stands in my way (or whom I mistrust), but it is important to concern ourselves with conviviality, to adopt the welcome vocabulary and aspirations of the political ecologist Ivan Illich. There are, as we have said, some things that are legal but that we shun because of our sense of dignity and decency. Knowing how to make use of our rights is indeed important, but we also have to some sense of our common humanity, a concern for the others, a shared sensibility, and a shared emotional life. We are talking about an ethics and a humanism that precedes (and succeeds) the law. Illich was hostile to schools, to that ‘new church’ that promised ‘salvation’ in the light of an economic order that oriented knowledge and shaped behaviours in such a way as to make them competitive and profitable. Taking his inspiration from the Biblical parables, he adopted the adage ‘the corruption of the best becomes the worst’, and tried to think about the future of our modern societies. And our desire for speed, profit and social success, together with our fear of the other, of difference and insecurity are indeed turning the best into the worst. Our constitutional states are becoming fortresses within which we defend our interests, and a lot of our selfishness. Our rights, the most important of which is the right to self-expression, are being used to delineate territories and to provoke –for no good reason –the anger and reactions of those we distrust, or simply those whose presence and beliefs offend us. Our democracies used ‘legal’ mass persuasion and manipulation to justify –with or without the approval of the masses –new wars between civilizations in the name of civilization and democratization. These perversions stir up fears and distrust, and block the development, at both the local and the international level, of the conviviality that gives individuals a sense of belonging. We have become the creators of ghettoes at both the international and the national level . Our affiliations are becoming more and more narrowly defined, our humanism is becoming a matter of tribal instincts, and our universalism is not very generous.
We must learn to say ‘We’ again. Just as I can say ‘I’ and still belong to myself, we must be able to say ‘We’ whilst acknowledging our common sense of belonging. Some would like us to sit down at a table and discuss the best way of saying ‘we’ and of respecting ‘one another’. And yet it is quite possible that the method itself is what is preventing us from getting the results we want. The same applies to the concept of integration: the best way to prevent ‘integration’ from becoming a reality is to go on talking about it so obsessively. A common sense of belonging is not something that can be willed into existence: it is born of day to day life in the street, at school and in the face of the challenges we all face. Theories and debates about ‘the sense of belonging’ actually make it impossible for us to feel that we belong. We are talking about a feeling: we come to feel that we belong because we live that feeling, because we experience it. The common law protects us, but it is common causes that allow us to respect and love one another (by acting together ‘for’ some cause and not just ‘against’ a threat). A common commitment to respect for human dignity and saving the planet, or to the struggle against poverty, discrimination, every type of racism, and to promote the arts, the sciences, sports and culture, responsibility and creativity: these are, as we have already said, the best ways of developing a real conviviality that is both lived and effective. When we trust one another, we now longer attack our neighbours in order to test their reactions without reason, and we can keep our critical intellectual distance from their ill temper or provocations. We become subjects who can say ‘I’ when we have discovered the meaning of our personal projects: we become a ‘We’, a community or a society when we can decide upon a common collective project. In most circumstance, it is not dialogue between human subjects that changes the way they see others; it is the awareness that they are on the same path, the same road and have the same aspirations (and their interminable dialogue sometimes blinds them to this). When our consciousness acknowledges that we are travelling the same road, it has already half-opened the door to the heart: we always have a little love for those who share our hopes. ‘We’ exist by the sides of roads that lead to the same goals.
Excerpt from the forthcoming book : The Quest For Meaning : Developing a Philosophy of Pluralism, Penguin, 2010