Regulating Aversion

"Brown thinks there’s a big problem with the language of toleration. Take something like a particular form of religion that you don’t like: once you’ve identified it as your target, you impose various forms of toleration on it, chopping it up to fit into the various categories by which you organize toleration, and in doing that you change the thing itself. You make something new, that isn’t the thing you were originally averse to. So that religion stops being a comprehensive thing that makes demands on every aspect of your life, and becomes just a set of beliefs that you hold or a set of rituals you choose to perform or a set of tastes in food and dress that you happen to have. The sense of certain ways of life as laying categorical demands on people drops out of sight: the tolerated thing is changed by virtue of being tolerated. Brown thinks that it’s damaging for liberals to adopt the language of tolerance, because it moves them away from higher ideals like equality and justice and reinforces the status quo. That all seems a bit indiscriminate to me, really. Everything criminal or stupid the Bush regime ever did is related to some pervasive problem that comes out of the language of toleration. This strikes me as a bit implausible. But the surpassing thought is just that there’s an imperialist ambition behind liberalism, that’s the basic idea: liberalism wants to colonize the rest of the world, and it does it in a particularly sneaky and surreptitious way in Brown’s view because it uses the language of tolerance and inclusion, while imposing very specific demands on other people and other ways of life. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s important not to impugn her motivations, or the seriousness with which she has thought about these issues. But I think there’s a difficulty with the way she goes about things because there’s a deep vein of self-aversion running through the work – not personal self-aversion, but aversion to American regimes from Reagan onwards. It misses the important truth that, however bad, unjust and intolerant present-day America is, it’s probably better to be a citizen of America than a lot of other countries in the world. I think it’s a bit too easy to turn on America, to see it as an empire of illiberalism, hiding its illiberalism behind the language of tolerance."