A Connected Critic
Can Michael Walzer Connect High-Modernity with Tradition?
Michael Walzer is a true connected social critic, who writes consistently from a Jewish-American perspective. He succeeds not only in criticizing social injustices but also in articulating the deeper aspirations of the people by connecting high-modernity with tradition. He measures up to the critical criteria he himself lays down. Walzer is gifted with a critical power to penetrate social realities. He sees through the mainstream ideas, recognizes some persistent traditional elements in society, and thus tries to incorporate them into the liberal theories. Maybe the liberals recognize these elements too. But they often regard them as relics of the past epoch either to be overcome or to be ignored as meaningless remnants of evolution. This liberal conviction may not be correct. After centuries of extensive demolition programmes, some traditional elements still survive. We have good reason to believe that they are here to stay. Walzer takes them seriously, and attempts to rediscover their values and to delineate their proper functions in a liberal society. His attitude is not nostalgic or conservative. On the contrary, Walzer is more realistic and mature. For he realizes that the liberal ideals cannot be totally implemented. Even if they could, the world would not be made a better world. Liberal society needs communities as the important training grounds for connected and responsible citizens.
Besides reviving the spirit of prophetic criticism, Walzer displays in his style of writing another remarkable Jewish characteristic. Walzer does not write systematically, nor does he intend his theory to be valid for many generations. His argument aims to provoke thought rather than to knockdown his opponents. By forgoing comprehensiveness and eternity, he allows (and invites) others to contribute their own views. Walzer calls this Jewish intellectual practice “the virtue of incompleteness.” He is a genuine practitioner of this virtue, and hence he chooses a non-foundational approach to ethics. This does not mean, however, that he does not have a consistent view of the moral world. It is only that he does not draw the whole picture. Actually he has sketched some important parts and plotted points on the contour. My endeavour is to reveal the overall picture by connecting the parts and points. I have also tried to polish the picture. Enough has been said in all those previous chapters, and there is little need to repeat it, save to highlight two points.
The true intellectual is the conscience of humanity. He is a person haunted by the spark of conscience. The spark inside him is so fierce that he comes to realize that he is in love with the world. Indeed, he loves the world so much that he is grieving over oppression and injustices in the world. He devotes himself to changing the world even to the point of sacrificing his life. He has compassion for the oppressed. However, his compassion may be directed only to his people and translated into zealous nationalism. To avoid falling into the extreme position, some intellectuals choose absolute impartiality. They refuse to give public support to the group they belong, even when their own group is doing justly. Some of them, like the Sartrean absolute oppositionists, go so far as to point their aims of criticism always and only at their own side. In the judgement of Julien Benda, both of them are extremists. They are intoxicated by passion—the former by the passion of nationalism, and the latter by the passion of impartiality. Deliberately shunning passion, Benda treads the path of ascetic monasticism in the hope of gazing and criticizing the world from a transcendent plane. Presumably, his would be the most accurate and just judgement. Walzer, however, raises his objection, for he cannot see any transcendent plane on earth. Benda himself has not transcended his passion for France. Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault did cut themselves loose, but their criticisms are merely curses that can neither change the world nor touch the hearts of the people. It seems that they have not reached the transcendent plane yet, if there is any at all. In the Western tradition, Walzer singles out the Israelite prophets as the model social critics. These prophets are connected both to the place and to the people. To Walzer, topos rather than transcendence is the prerequisite for social criticism. The intellectual is a nationalist and a patriot, who sides with the people but at the same time retreats to the margin, from whence he criticizes the power centre. What is required of the social critic is a very short distance from the mainstream.
The prophets are not merely self-motivated social critics; they claim to be the spokesmen of God, and their proclamations contain some transcendent element. Walzer uses the argument of the sage to invalidate the transcendent element of prophecy. One thing we have to note, however, is that while the rabbis maintain a distinction between the prophet and the sage—some modern rabbis even expect the return of the prophet, Walzer conflates the two roles. In the course of so doing, he collapses the tension between transcendence and topos. His liberal reinterpretation of prophecy, to some theologians, will depreciate prophecy and diminish the sharpness and the fairness of social criticism. Tyler Roberts counteracts Walzer by formulating his argument as cross-cultural social criticism. He argues that religious communities are vital constituents of a liberal society. These communities are sources of human values. If a local critic uses the experience and history of his religious community to criticize the liberal society, he will be able to create a longer critical distance than that of Walzer’s national-popular critic. A connected critic with a longer distance will probably criticize society more justly, if not understand its problems better.
Roberts has formulated a forceful argument. In contrast, Walzer’s response is ambiguous. On the one hand, Walzer does not deny Roberts’s cross-cultural criticism, on the other, he insists that his national-popular criticism is an adequate model, and that effective criticism must be couched in the popular language. Perhaps Walzer is right: the national-popular criticism is an adequate model. But he is inconsistent in his practice. For instance, Walzer’s ideal critic George Orwell is doubly connected. He criticizes the English class system and the totalitarian socialism, and both criticisms contain cross-cultural elements. Moreover, Walzer himself is a cross-cultural social critic; his critical works manifest unmistakable Jewish tendencies. In reality, Walzer is doing what Roberts says, but he does not conceptualize this practice in his own theory of social criticism.
The omission of the cross-cultural dimension in the theoretical formulation of the social critic makes Walzer’s topic intellectual look more nationalistic than he could be. One may question if the topic intellectual would ultimately become an extreme nationalist who weighs his national interests before anything else. Obviously, Walzer is not a self-aggrandizing national intellectual. His theory of supreme emergency nonetheless betrays his nationalist baseline: in most cases, he would consider other nations fairly, but in supreme emergency, when he feels that national survival is being threatened, he will permit the sacrifice of innocent people. Another manifestation of Walzer’s nationalist tendency can be found in his early writings, where he emphasizes the morality of war in international relations but disregards the potential of international organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank, international courts, and NGOs. It is not until recently that he mentions the names of these international organizations and gives his appreciation and recommendation.
In the current development of the world system, Walzer advocates three dimensions of global pluralism. In order for these international organizations to be successfully organized and to function properly, it is necessary that their leaders or activists should transcend their own national interests. One would query if the topic intellectual could have a role to play in these three international planes. It seems to me that the national-popular standpoint is insufficient to match up to the increasingly complicated international relations. It would be a definite advantage if the intellectual could stand on a transcendent plane. Is there really no transcendent plane on earth as Walzer would have retorted? While it is difficult to pinpoint the physical location of transcendence on earth, it is also not easy to deny its presence in some communities. Christianity, Buddhism, Kant’s philosophy, Confucianism and so forth, all these preach a universal love of humanity. This kind of communities may foster a general love for every man and woman. An intellectual brought up in any of these traditions might possess a certain degree of transcendence, and he is in a better position to act in the international arena. If the international society is taken into consideration, Roberts’s bi-communal model will have an advantage over Walzer’s national-popular model, for it is able to erect the two poles of topos and transcendence and to create a tension between them. The ideal intellectual can thus be at once transcendent and topic, and if he can balance the tension well, he may become a good international and domestic social critic.
Some modern intellectuals, in their self-understanding, are a new species detached from the rest of humanity. “They are,” in Walzer’s words, “not only modern but also modernist: self-conscious, oppositional, and alienated.” Their ambition is to transform their ethic into a self-created, rational framework with universal pretensions. They are especially hostile towards tradition which they deem to be decadent and irrational, and which they regard as the very fetter that prevents humanity from developing to its full potential. Hence they strive to demolish the tower of tradition and the traditional society, and to rebuild a better new world. In the course of reforming the old world, they take inspiration from natural science. If the scientists can reform the physical world with a formula, why can’t they also reform the social world with a formula? They then proceed to look for the formula. The German finds it in the categorical imperative, while the Englishman identifies it as the utilitarian calculus. Each of the formulae is then used by its advocates as a universal corrective to reform all kinds of societies.
The modern intellectuals have overcome the traditional ones, and become the helmsman of society. Their achievements in social reform are noticeable. No one can deny their contribution. Nonetheless, the reform has also brought adverse effects on modern men and women: deracination, romanticization of progress, and one-sided conception of reality. These characters have corrupted modernization. An obvious example is the Marxist social reform. Because of deracination, the Marxist intellectuals were unable to develop a concrete social programme, hence they gave free rein to their romanticism and pursued in vain a utopia. The consequence is disastrous. The liberal project is more successful. This is due partly to the restrained strategy the liberals have taken: they do not aim to change the world instantly or entirely; they only fight for the kinds of liberty they desire. Their strategy has proved to be a prudent one, and the liberals have become the master of the modern world. But the world they help fashion is infected with pressing problems: social disintegration, pollution, depletion of environment, North-South disparities, racial and cultural conflict, to name a few. Although these problems are serious, modern society has the resources to put them under control. The question is: do the deracinated, shallow, individualistic, liberal selves have the determination, strength, quality, and wisdom to tackle them?
We may reasonably doubt it. Walzer is one of those profound thinkers who dare to challenge the liberal project. The liberals, or more broadly the modern intellectuals, are immature in his eyes. They claim to offer an alternative personality, but in reality their construction is not as special as they would like it to be. The ancient Israelite prophets were also self-conscious, oppositional, independent-minded social reformers, whose social criticism was more successful than their modern counterparts. If the social critics want to improve their art, they have to study and learn from the prophets. In general, a society is a continuous project, impossible to be completed in a single or even in a few generations’ time. Our ideas, customs, habits, and social institutions are (almost without exception) in one way or another connected with the past. If we want to find out the best reform now, we have to look back first into the past. Thus we need interpretation more than discovery or invention. The three temporal interpretive principles, which I have systematically formulated, provide a useful means to understand the big picture of the present situation in a continuum. The deficiency of this temporal interpretive methodology is its determinacy. So we have to supplement it by adding tradition reflexivity as the fourth principle. These four interpretive principles can help analyse the moral culture, but they do not dictate the position we should take in response to the mainstream culture. We are at liberty to choose the kind of response we deem fit.
There are three common approaches to cultural confrontation. The first is self-assertion. People who take this position are called traditionalists or conservatists. Their reaction is defensive. They see other cultures as an intrusion, and aim to conserve their traditional way of life in the face of foreign influence. In order to achieve this aim, they assert their own traditional values and exploit the weaknesses of other cultures. The second approach is inculturalization. The word “inculturalization” in its broadest sense means the mixing of two or more cultures. Cultural amalgamation is a neutral process. No nation on earth can avoid foreign cultural influence. However, inculturalization here is not meant to describe this natural process. Rather it refers to a conscientious grand project intended to implant one culture into another in such a way that the receiver nation will widely accept the resultant culture as their own. The usual way to achieve this is to extract the kernel from the giver culture and implant it in the host culture. As a result, the inculturalized culture may become significantly different from the giver culture. Successful examples can be found in the inculturalization of Christianity in the ancient Greek world, liberation theology in Latin America, or Buddhism in China. The third approach is what Walzer is doing, we may call it connected reinterpretation. This approach recognizes that the mainstream culture by its nature is recalcitrant to inculturalization. As it is, it would be better to reinterpret culture by choosing the tendencies closest to one’s communal ideals and elaborating them into a new culture. This method may seem to be more natural and less disruptive, and it can bring about radical change. Walzer’s argument for the transition from liberalism to democratic socialism has shown us how radical reinterpretation can be. Moreover, since modern culture is at least partly a disconnected reinterpretation of the Western society, a connected reinterpretation may provide the timely corrections that are badly needed by modern society. This methodology has hardly been exploited by theologians, though it can be used to connect modern society with tradition. Theologians are connected intellectuals, and they profess a genuine concern for the well-being of humanity. If they employ their expertise to the construction of social theory, they may make some fresh contributions to the ongoing discussion of building a better society.
In a multicultural liberal setting, partisans of the three approaches often quarrel with each other. One group attacks the other groups by disparaging their methods as inadequate or ineffective. Each argues as if its own approach were the only viable means to cope with the undesirable consequences of modernization. It seems to me, however, that this is not an either-or issue, for no one can deal with the problems alone. Liberalism has created in society a tension between individuals and communities. Some people like to become free floating individuals and enjoy maximum freedom, while some aspire to a substantial communal life. A liberal society permits both choices, and it is a good thing that people could have the freedom to choose their own way of life. Under the liberal setting, we have to guarantee individual rights as well as the survival of communities. Liberalism protects individuals, and communal values safeguard communities. Perhaps it is for practical reason that the three groups need to defend their positions assertively, to maintain internal cohesion or to recruit adherents, for example. In reality, the three approaches do not necessarily counteract each other. On the contrary, they may even complement one another’s work and make the liberal society function more healthily. Self-assertion strengthens a community and gives its weaker members identity and confidence; inculturalization allows the more ambitious members to spread communal influence in the society; reinterpretation offers a practical way of active participation in the mainstream society. Each of them functions differently, and each of them draws its own like-minded followers. Maybe in some situations we have to lay more emphasis on a particular approach, but really it is unnecessary and indeed harmful to exalt one at the expense of the others.