Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (review)

This is a remarkable book, a sustained skepticism about a practice held to be meritorious, made attractive by its passion, the lucidity of its negative critique, and its intelligence. The argument is complex, so all this review can do is to highlight Brown's position, before endorsing some of its points and disputing others.

Toleration is held to have changed character. It was initially progressive, the introduction of freedom of conscience so as to end the religious wars of early modern Europe. As multiculturalism gained salience in the 1980s, toleration came to be linked to the politics of identity. Brown questions this. First, the cultures in question are reified, each presumed to have an essence all its own. Second, toleration is snooty, something given by the powerful to those they dislike. Third, current demands to tolerate lack self-consciousness. Others are accused of being trapped by culture, we are presumed to be independent – led to a profound "misrecognition" of its target population able to choose, free to move between civil society groupings as we wish. Of course, behind this stands an assumption – led to a profound "misrecognition" of its target population that choice is good, that individualism trumps all other values. Fourth, the contemporary discourse of tolerance is by no means all sweetness and light. The internal snootiness amounts to not taking others seriously, let alone providing them with substantively equal life chances, whilst nothing less that imperialism is justified against those held to be intolerant. All of this amounts to a Foucauldian analysis of governmentality, that is, a description of the genealogy and hidden character of assumptions that both control us and guide the ways in which we act upon the world. If the argument is abstract for the most part, two chapters have empirical content. The first contrasts the fates of Jews and women, the former tolerated but then not "let in," the latter allowed equality only because the deep structure of liberalism is held to permanently consign women to a non-threatening private realm. The second analyzes at length and with subtlety the hidden codes of the Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. Brown is good at pointing out how toleration is reduced to an attitude, that is, to a moral commitment bereft of any sociological understanding of structures of power.

One can agree on many points. Liberalism is not, to use a different but related set of concepts, neutral whilst others are ideological: to the contrary it is an ideology, and should be discussed as such (and in my view, given Kantian preferences and continuing belief in the political benefits of "le doux commerce,") and defended as such. Then it is very refreshing to have someone on the left say very clearly that the politics of identity can be regressive, questionable culturalism rather than the redressing of class wrongs. Finally, Brown is quite right to stress that the erection of cultural silos may create rather than break down such differences as there are. A good deal more could be said at this point. Many of those who praised difference, at least in Canada, had no experience of living in deeply divided societies, and were so astonished when the slightest difference did emerge that toleration was all-too-quickly abandoned.

Nonetheless, the author is open to severe criticism. Those who tolerate do not always feel themselves to be right. Montesquieu's Persian Letters, for example, mocks the universal pretensions of the Occident as well as of his purported Orient. He argued for absolute intolerance on a very few matters (no fear, no slavery) in combination with relativism elsewhere. Surely the latter point is right: sex is ridiculous which ever way you do it. More importantly, too much guilt at our own failings is expressed; for all that this is a proper corrective. It is not always we who cage others. Quite often the attempt to capture and to mold people is the work of political...