Jun 19, 2016 03:17 PM
Letter From Austria: Is Europe’s ‘Tolerant Society’ Backfiring?
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/23/opinio...iring.html
EXCERPT: [...] In the United States, the schoolteacher would have no legal grounds to sue. As offensive as it may be to have a man refuse to shake hands with her based on her gender, the First Amendment does not permit mere offensiveness of behavior to override the freedoms of belief and the expression it guarantees. In many European countries, in contrast, the schoolteacher would at least have a case, because their constitutions provide for a far more thorough enumeration of rights. In the Austrian schoolteacher’s case, a Muslim man’s right to follow the teachings of his religion does not automatically trump her right to be treated with the same respect a man could expect.
At its core, the liberalism embodied in both the United States Constitution and its European counterparts expresses the conviction that restrictions on liberty must be justified. Among the liberties protected by both societies is the freedom to practice one’s religious beliefs or express one’s political opinion. The question in both societies then becomes where to set the bar justifying any curtailing of those practices and expressions.
In the United States that bar is set rather high. The First Amendment is a vital bulwark against the majority imposing its values or beliefs on minorities or individuals, and is at least part of the reason Americans have tended to tolerate even extreme expressions of intolerance. In Europe, where Germany’s constitution was written after the horrors of World War II and Austria’s was reinstated in 1945 with many amendments to follow, a justified fear of intolerance in its most extreme form led to the creation of civil societies that more expressly enforce the boundaries of acceptable expression. This is why you can go to jail for denying the Holocaust in Germany and Austria, but are free to peddle the ugliest Nazi ideas in the States.
But this more stringent control of the content of political expression in Europe may lead to unintended consequences. European legal systems are empowered to select for permitted expression on the basis of how liberal or illiberal it is. This leads to the paradox of an institutional intolerance toward beliefs and practices that are seen as intolerant, a conundrum summed up by Stanley Fish when he argued that true multiculturalism is impossible because the mandate to tolerate others’ cultures will always founder on those cultures’ own intolerance....
Clinging to our roots
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/30/opinio...roots.html
EXCERPT: [...] The philosophical novelist and essayist Michel Tournier, who died in January, believed that nearly all human conflicts could be traced to the tensions between rootless and rooted peoples. He offers many examples in an essay called “Nomad and Sedentary” in his book “The Mirror of Ideas”: the fratricide in Genesis involving the sedentary farmer Cain’s murder of his nomadic brother Abel, a shepherd; the invention of barbed wire in America in the 1800s, which marked the sedentarization of pioneers and bloodshed over the rightful ownership of land; the conflicts between the nomadic Tuareg and the settled Saharan peoples; and the Nazis’ demonization of the Jews, imagined as rootless and thus unrighteous transients.
It is often pointed out that tracing our lineage far back enough would show that we all came from the same place. But this primordial root is usually disregarded. For some reason, each collective, whether it be a nation, ethnic group or tribe, adopts a distinct conception of its own roots that tends to ignore this most fundamental idea of human connectedness.
We’ve arrived at a strange juncture in history, one that puts two world systems at odds: the first, an older root system that privileged “vertical” hierarchy, tradition, and national sovereignty; and the second, the “horizontal” globalized latticework of cybernetic information transfer and economic connectivity. Perhaps this is what the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari anticipated in the introduction to their 1980 book “A Thousand Plateaus” when they described the rhizome, a figure for systems that begin in medias res with no discernible beginning or end and that operate on a principle of horizontal, unpredictable proliferation.
The fact that our current moment, with its proliferation of technological networks, is more rhizomatic, doesn’t mean that rootedness no longer appeals to people. On the contrary, perhaps now more than ever, people have legitimate reasons for feeling alienated from the world and from one another — the greater the level of alienation, the more precious roots become....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/23/opinio...iring.html
EXCERPT: [...] In the United States, the schoolteacher would have no legal grounds to sue. As offensive as it may be to have a man refuse to shake hands with her based on her gender, the First Amendment does not permit mere offensiveness of behavior to override the freedoms of belief and the expression it guarantees. In many European countries, in contrast, the schoolteacher would at least have a case, because their constitutions provide for a far more thorough enumeration of rights. In the Austrian schoolteacher’s case, a Muslim man’s right to follow the teachings of his religion does not automatically trump her right to be treated with the same respect a man could expect.
At its core, the liberalism embodied in both the United States Constitution and its European counterparts expresses the conviction that restrictions on liberty must be justified. Among the liberties protected by both societies is the freedom to practice one’s religious beliefs or express one’s political opinion. The question in both societies then becomes where to set the bar justifying any curtailing of those practices and expressions.
In the United States that bar is set rather high. The First Amendment is a vital bulwark against the majority imposing its values or beliefs on minorities or individuals, and is at least part of the reason Americans have tended to tolerate even extreme expressions of intolerance. In Europe, where Germany’s constitution was written after the horrors of World War II and Austria’s was reinstated in 1945 with many amendments to follow, a justified fear of intolerance in its most extreme form led to the creation of civil societies that more expressly enforce the boundaries of acceptable expression. This is why you can go to jail for denying the Holocaust in Germany and Austria, but are free to peddle the ugliest Nazi ideas in the States.
But this more stringent control of the content of political expression in Europe may lead to unintended consequences. European legal systems are empowered to select for permitted expression on the basis of how liberal or illiberal it is. This leads to the paradox of an institutional intolerance toward beliefs and practices that are seen as intolerant, a conundrum summed up by Stanley Fish when he argued that true multiculturalism is impossible because the mandate to tolerate others’ cultures will always founder on those cultures’ own intolerance....
Clinging to our roots
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/30/opinio...roots.html
EXCERPT: [...] The philosophical novelist and essayist Michel Tournier, who died in January, believed that nearly all human conflicts could be traced to the tensions between rootless and rooted peoples. He offers many examples in an essay called “Nomad and Sedentary” in his book “The Mirror of Ideas”: the fratricide in Genesis involving the sedentary farmer Cain’s murder of his nomadic brother Abel, a shepherd; the invention of barbed wire in America in the 1800s, which marked the sedentarization of pioneers and bloodshed over the rightful ownership of land; the conflicts between the nomadic Tuareg and the settled Saharan peoples; and the Nazis’ demonization of the Jews, imagined as rootless and thus unrighteous transients.
It is often pointed out that tracing our lineage far back enough would show that we all came from the same place. But this primordial root is usually disregarded. For some reason, each collective, whether it be a nation, ethnic group or tribe, adopts a distinct conception of its own roots that tends to ignore this most fundamental idea of human connectedness.
We’ve arrived at a strange juncture in history, one that puts two world systems at odds: the first, an older root system that privileged “vertical” hierarchy, tradition, and national sovereignty; and the second, the “horizontal” globalized latticework of cybernetic information transfer and economic connectivity. Perhaps this is what the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari anticipated in the introduction to their 1980 book “A Thousand Plateaus” when they described the rhizome, a figure for systems that begin in medias res with no discernible beginning or end and that operate on a principle of horizontal, unpredictable proliferation.
The fact that our current moment, with its proliferation of technological networks, is more rhizomatic, doesn’t mean that rootedness no longer appeals to people. On the contrary, perhaps now more than ever, people have legitimate reasons for feeling alienated from the world and from one another — the greater the level of alienation, the more precious roots become....