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ANALYSIS
LIVE AND LET LIVE TX: 9/12/99

PRESENTER: FELIPE FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO
PRODUCER: ANTHONY DWORKIN
EDITOR: NICOLA MEYRICK


Cast in order of appearance:

Ursula Owen Editor, Index on Censorship

Michael Walzer Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

Susan Mendus Professor of Politics, University of York

Rt. Rev. Rowan Williams Bishop of Monmouth

Hans-Joachim Schutz Professor of Constitutional and International Law, Rostock University

Melanie Phillips Columnist, The Sunday Times

Glen Newey School of Advanced Study, University of London

Jacobus Delwaide Professor of Political Science, Catholic University of Brussels



FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO: The British are tolerant. Or so they tell me. Now
Britain has a government with a self-proclaimed `moral cause'. `Social
indifference', which used to be a guarantee of peace, is now an anti-social
activity. A scale of values with liberty on top is, says the PM,
`libertarian nonsense masquerading as freedom'. People who don't belong in
the government's `social fabric' - squeegee-touts, travellers, fox-hunters,
beggars, vagrants - are under threat of `zero-tolerance'.

So maybe this is the time for Britain to start asking the neglected
questions about toleration: what it's for; where its limits should lie; how
the state should fix them. Ursula Owen is the editor and chief executive
of Index on Censorship - a free-speech watchdog. Why does she think
toleration is good?

OWEN: I think toleration is what makes non-murderous argument possible and
that's why I value it.

WALZER: The greater the differences between groups of people, the greater
the suspicion and when political arrangements break down, the greater the
hatred and the violence. There's been so much killing of the "others" or
repression or persecution of the "others" in human history that any regime
of toleration that works has to be respected.

FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO: Michael Walzer, Professor of Social Science at the
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and author of one of the most
influential modern works on toleration.

So toleration does one thing for society: it helps keep the peace. The
trouble is, liberal societies demand more. Susan Mendus, Professor of
Philosophy at York University, is the doyenne of British toleration studies.


MENDUS: It's only really with the rise of liberalism that toleration has
been seen as a virtue rather than simply as a practical necessity to which
we're driven in order to avoid blood on the carpet, so it's a fairly recent
idea that toleration is a good. And if you ask why it's thought to be a
good, that's even more difficult to answer because it's often held to be
built into the concept of toleration that it involves permitting or
refraining from interfering with something which is thought to be wrong.
And it's a paradox on the face of it to suppose that we should allow
something which is wrong and it's an even greater oddity to suppose that it
could in some way be right to allow what is wrong.

FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO: So toleration is a paradox wrapped inside an oddity. If it can deliver freedom, it's the freedom to make choices which other people
think are wrong. That's the virtue of toleration. It's also what helps to
make it impossible in practice. People talk toleration but don't do it. It
only becomes an issue when values and cultures are in conflict. A plural
society makes it both necessary - and elusive. Conflict ignites whenever
one kind of tolerance - in favour of a minority culture - demands the
sacrifice of another such as freedom of speech. Rowan Williams, Bishop of
Monmouth, is prepared to make the sacrifice in at least one case: blasphemy.


WILLIAMS: On balance I think I'm in favour of an extension of the blasphemy
laws. We are at the moment in a situation where, while we like to think of
ourselves as a secular society, we have large groups of people whose sense
of their stake in the society that they're in is very much threatened by
public expressions of contempt, public expressions of hostility to some of
those beliefs which most deeply give them their identity and hold them
together. Therefore I think there is a question about whether, let's say,
laws about incitement to racial hatred should indeed have some element built
into them which would protect the religious sensibilities of such groups.

FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO: This argument is riven with contradictions - but then soare all arguments about toleration. Freedom for one group means frustration
for another. Instead of extending the blasphemy laws we could abolish them:
then all religions would be equally treated and equally exposed. But if you
try to maximise freedom by letting people say what they like, you may
jeopardise autonomy of another kind. Susan Mendus:

MENDUS: If we suppose that free speech should be tolerated in the name of
self-respect, do we allow pornographic literature to be widely available in
a society in which a number of women for instance feel that pornographic
literature is damaging to their self-respect? In those contexts, what tends
to happen is that you have a head-on conflict between people who want to
disseminate and read pornographic material and who claim that that's their
right as free autonomous individuals, and women, some women who claim that
the proliferation of this material damages their fulfilment and autonomy.
So the language of autonomy, individual fulfilment isn't a language which
dispenses with difficulties. It's a language which itself is fraught with
difficulty.

OWEN: The old saying "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will
never hurt me" is clearly not true. There's no doubt that one has to do
something about the fact that words can injure people deeply but I don't
think what one should do is censor them.

FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO: Ursula Owen. She's committed to free speech,
temperamentally and professionally. But what about when it's abused? She
tells a story about Bob Grant, the shock-jock who became famous in America
by airing hatreds on his radio show.

OWEN: I don't know if you remember that Clinton's commerce secretary, Ron
Brown, who was black was flying in a plane to former Yugoslavia and the
plane crashed and Bob Grant reported this on his radio programme and said:
"I think Ron Brown will be the only survivor" - small pause - "because I'm a
pessimist." And they actually sacked him. He got another job within about
two weeks. An ABC producer, it was on ABC, was asked afterwards whether
they thought that Bob Grant was just defending his First Amendment rights or
whether he was spewing out verbal pollution. What he said was "A radio
station always fights for a host's constitutional rights if the show is
profitable enough and Grant had high ratings because he kept beating up on
minorities. If his audience had been small, the managers would forget the
constitution and declare him a bigot."

FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO: America licences a right to live and let loathe. In
Britain, the culture of self-regulation controls offensive speech on the
air. Where there are no alternative voices, during the massacres in Bosnia
or Rwanda say, hate speech may have to be stopped by force. There's no
universal rule. If you can have different standards of toleration in
different countries, it's in part because of the force of history. Germany,
for instance, has constitutionally-prescribed limits on freedom, designed to
prevent Nazi revanche and a throwback to the thirties. Hans-Joachim Schutz
is professor of constitutional and international law at Rostock University.

SCHUTZ: A relatively and good liberal political system and constitutional
system, which was maybe too liberal and too tolerant at that time, was
destroyed by political forces which used the opportunities, the principle of
tolerance, which were built into the constitution offered them, and this is
the major explanation of this maybe contradictory system of the German
constitution. It's on the one hand a liberal constitution but on the other
hand it has some devices built in which fight intolerant illiberal
undemocratic political forces.

FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO: The paradox of the German constitution, which tolerates everything except intolerance, is widely imitated in countries with recent experience of an intolerant state. It is exemplary in some ways - a kind of
beacon of public education. A standard-setter in a country determined to
repudiate past evils. But does it work in practice? Hans-Joachim Schutz
cites a test case about Auschwitzluge or holocaust denial, provoked by the
historian David Irving.

SCHUTZ: He held speeches in front of German audiences and these gatherings
were closed by the police and the constitutional court had to decide if the
fundamental rights of freedom of expression and of freedom of association
were violated. The constitutional court turned down the complaint of Irving
and his followers. According to the well-established practice of the
constitutional court, only the expression of opinions is protected, however
obnoxious this opinion may be, whereas the expression of facts is only
protected under the freedom of expression clause if those facts are correct.
And in the Auschwitzluge case, the constitutional court held that of course
the denial that there existed something like the gas chambers in Auschwitz
is simply not true, and therefore this expression of effect doesn't fall
under the freedom of expression clause.

FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO: So in practice, the system doesn't really work at all.
The distinction between a fact and an opinion is problematic: it's too easy
to represent each as the other. Constitutional restrictions are easy to
evade. Mein Kampf is banned in the bookshops but available via the web.
The German model can be understood against the background of German history but it seems to be of limited help in a different cultural environment. If
we can't successfully imitate Germany by codifying the threshold of
toleration, can we identify abuses of freedom so harmful that toleration is
simply out of the question? Children, for instance, are commonly regarded
as a special case. But where cultures conflict, their cases can be among
the hardest of all. Professor Michael Walzer.

WALZER: The most difficult accommodations have to do with children, with
education, with cultural reproduction and the hardest question for citizens
of a liberal democracy is to what extent they are prepared to recognise the
right of parents, especially parents who share a culture hostile to liberal
democracy, to reproduce that culture in their own children.

FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO: Don't you think that our societies are now our societies in a broader sense of the word "ours", and that we now share them with other cultures?

WALZER: Yes we share them but we also share a common life and children born
in these societies have to be fitted for that common life. If the children
of the minority are going to grow up to vote in national elections and to
decide together with the children of the majority questions that deal with
the common fate of the country as a whole, then these children - minority
and majority - have to share some reference points. They have to have some
knowledge of the history of the country, of the problems it faces, of the
values of democratic politics, the right of opposition, the right of free
press and free speech and so on.

FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO: Clearly, we can offer children education in the
opportunities and responsibilities of democratic citizenship, even when
their parents are repelled by the message. But if we want to relish the
full richness and diversity of a plural society, we have to recognise
parents' rights to bring up their children in their own cultural traditions.
Protecting children is therefore an aim more easily agreed in principle than
pursued in practice.

Suppose then we leave the hard cases on one side and try to establish a
general criterion for deciding the limits of tolerance: for instance, the
protection of society as a whole - the defence of `the social fabric'.
Melanie Phillips, Sunday Times columnist, is one of the most trenchant
voices for this view.

PHILLIPS: I think there is such a thing as the common good. I think that
there are aspects of collective life which simply break down if individuals
pursue their own selfish desires. To argue that a social fabric doesn't
exist and that therefore individuals can just get on and do their own thing
is I think a recipe for a kind of law of the jungle to operate in which the
strong will survive and the weak will go to the wall. I think the paradox
of freedom and tolerance is that they can only be sustained within a set of
laws, both informal and formal laws, which regulate behaviour.

FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO: But what about bad laws or intrusive tyrannical states?
Is there any reason to suppose that appeals to the common good or the social
consensus are more than the manipulable rhetoric of intolerant majorities?
How does Melanie Phillips reconcile toleration with the kind of judgmental
state she wants?

PHILLIPS: I think the essence of toleration is that it implies that there is
a norm, a values norm, from which deviation is then tolerated and I think
the problem with our society now is that we've got ourselves into a way of
thinking that says we don't approve of any norms at all. We think the whole
idea of normative behaviour is somehow illegitimate and an offence against
people's freedom to make up the rules for themselves as they go along. What
we've substituted for toleration it seems to me is indifference, by which I
mean this: that we don't think there is any harm that people can do that we
can be judgmental about, and so we no longer criticise harm. We instead
criticise people who do criticise the harm. I'm thinking for example of
people who commit adultery, who lead irregular family lifestyles of one kind
or another which may involve harm.

FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO: Melanie Phillips's standards may seem a bit exacting
especially in her strictures on adultery; but she is surely right to say,
logically, that toleration is meaningless unless we have norms from which to
tolerate departures. Can we get closer to agreement about what those norms
should be? One difficulty is that while we have our own norms and can agree
on some of them with like-minded people, our societies are intractable and
we seem unable to establish generally accepted values. Here's the Bishop of
Monmouth, Rowan Williams.

WILLIAMS: Quite a lot of religious people might well say I'm not going to
say that I approve of or wish to encourage certain forms of sexual behaviour
but I don't see that it is possible or even right to ban them by law because
the reasons for disapproving of or not encouraging certain forms of sexual
behaviour would be rooted in a philosophy, a picture of human nature, which
is not accepted by society as a whole. In other words, making adultery
illegal is - to quote something David Lodge said in one of his novels - a
great idea but it's not going to catch on. And it's not going to catch on
because the model of sexual fidelity presupposed by myself as a Christian is
not shared by the entire society. So what can be done legally seems to me
rather limited in this area. What can be done in terms of participating in
a vigorous cultural argument about it is another matter.

FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO: One way round the problem might be Tony Blair's way: you assign a positive moral role to the state. But until now, in the modern
West, we've demanded moral impartiality from government and we expect the
state to be secular and pragmatic. Even supporters of Tony Blair's line
recognise its limits - and its dangers. Rowan Williams again.

WILLIAMS: Political institutions will always appeal to moral principles
beyond the purely managerial and pragmatic. A state which is purely holding
the corner between different views is almost unimaginable. Therefore I
think that the introduction by the Prime Minister or the Archbishop of
Canterbury or whoever of issues about the moral foundation of the state into
public discussion is to be welcomed. The problem is of course that we don't
have an absolute agreement about what's good for human beings. That's where
debate is essential. A society can swing behind a view on some particular
point for which not everyone would accept the religious or ideological
foundation, but which would nonetheless command a wide enough support for it to be felt to be proper for the state to act.

FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO: Underlying confidence in the morality of the state and the reliability of the social consensus is a dogma of democracy: when the
majority speaks, collective wisdom prevails. But for those of us who belong
to minorities, the right of the majority to fix the limits of toleration is
chilling. Sometimes, democracies install tyrannies. We can't appeal to
democracy for a solution. Democracy is a part of the problem. Glen Newey,
a philosopher at the School of Advanced Study of the University of London.

NEWEY: There's a way I think in which modern democratic politics is itself
liable to subvert a political culture of toleration, in a way that I think
was not the case during the early modern period. The central difference in
my view being that we do have now a very entrenched political discourse of
popular sovereignty, a democratic conception of what political legitimacy
consists in, and that creates strong pressures on democratic politicians to
be basically subservient to the popular will. In what is essentially a more
prerogative or personal mode in which politics are conducted in the early
modern period - one thinks of Louis XIV's "l'etat c'est moi" - one has the
situation rather in which an individual can exercise toleration on their own
account.

FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO: When we get desperate about the present, we turn to
history for lessons. Surprisingly, pre-democratic societies frequently had
workable regimes of toleration, in which mutually irreconcilable cultures
were allowed considerable autonomy in separate, discrete spheres. Each
culture-group enforced its own code on its own people, but without impinging
on others. For an example of an historic regime of toleration that has
evolved successfully into a modern society renowned for tolerance, we could
hardly do better than look to the Netherlands, under the guidance of Jacobus
Delwaide, Professor of Political Science at the Catholic University of
Brussels.

DELWAIDE: In the Netherlands, there is much to their benefit more of an
historical tradition of dealing with different cultures and by that I mean
with different religious subcultures. And tolerating people and the
activities of people who are different and then it was left basically to the
elites to manage the accommodation among these different pillars or groups.
There was even talk in the late 19th century of sovereignty in your own
circle and where religious groups tried to provide a whole array of services
from daycare centres up to universities in their own religious pillar. It
was also a history, we may not forget, of extreme federalism. The Dutch
Republic was extremely federal so what could not be printed in Amsterdam
could always be printed in Haarlem.

FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO: So does this mean that nowadays, for us, the limits of toleration can be fixed by a form of subsidiarity - letting local
communities or neighbourhoods decide what is acceptable to them in the way
we currently let different districts limit licensing laws or cinema
programmes? Can we have one regime of toleration in Notting Hill and
another in Muswell Hill? There are two objections. First, as we've already
heard, we'd still have problems with areas of universal value and state
responsibility - over, for instance, the abuse or indoctrination of
children. Secondly, mutually intolerant groups aren't that easy to
separate. They invade each other's territory in uncontainable rage. Glen
Newey.

NEWEY: There's only a political question on the agenda to start with if
people have already decided in effect not to act tolerantly. Northern
Ireland would be one good illustration of that or indeed the recent debate
over banning fox hunting. Fox hunting only becomes a live political issue
when there's one group of people - the hunters - who are implacably
convinced that they ought to be able to pursue this form of pastime and on
the other side you have a no less implacable group of hunt-protesters who
are equally persuaded that the hunters should not be allowed to have their
way. It's then that the authorities have to wade in and decide what has to
be done in this situation. But the political resolution is likely to be one
which doesn't appeal to the tolerant dispositions of the parties involved
because of necessity the situation has only arisen in circumstances where
those dispositions are not engaged, and the political resolution which then
results is liable to be one which adverts to other kinds of political
interest than that of acting tolerantly, such as maintaining public order.

FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO: Every intervention by the state creates dissatisfied
constituencies. In Northern Ireland, tolerating traditional marches or
paramilitary displays isn't neutral. Nor is toleration of racist posters on
our streets or gay broadsheets in our schools. Just by being tolerant, the
state seems to take sides. And frustrating as it may seem, it is
practically impossible to convince intolerant groups of the virtues of
toleration. Logically, everyone should want maximum toleration because
everyone can benefit from it. But, as Ursula Owen says, `You can't make
them understand that if they can ban you, someone else can ban them'.

Maybe social change will eventually take care of the practical problems. Is
there any chance that the increasing diversity - indeed, the atomisation of
society - will eventually detach people from their traditional tribal
loyalties and mutual hatreds and actually make them more tolerant? I asked
Michael Walzer.

WALZER: Yes, I suppose that is the utopia of, but perhaps also the reductio
ad absurdum of liberal individualism. Every human being completely
autonomous, inventing himself,herself, every individual an entrepreneur of
the self, every life the personal project of some individual. I think that
works for a while, when these individuals wander around a collapsed world of
coherent cultures and live parasitically off of elements of the collapsed
cultures, but I don't think that a society of that sort can reproduce
itself, because I don't think individuals can in fact make themselves by
themselves.

FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO: The individual liberated for misery isn't what
toleration's all about. It's not just for the individuals or minorities who
are outside the social mainstream. It's good for society. It liberates
individual potential, enables citizens to feel fulfilled, heads off
alienation and frustration. I want us to be endlessly generous with
toleration, to set limits no stricter than are genuinely necessary for
social peace. If at the end of this enquiry, I am right to think that there
really is no political solution to the problem of toleration, maybe it's
because it's not really a political problem, but a problem of human
psychology - even of human nature. We should look for a solution not in the
realm of the state but of human relationships. Ursula Owen.

OWEN: I think the difficulty about living with other people, and living with
people with other views than oneself, which is almost everyone at one level,
is when and because people feel so strongly about what they feel, and that
the notion of the sort of Western liberal tolerance in which you know you
walk along the street thinking - well I believe what I believe and he has
the right to believe what he believes - is not the reality. The reality is
that most of us feel very passionately about things and when we bump up
against opposition to it, what we have to do if we're to survive is to
negotiate. So I've never really liked the Voltaire position, you know I
totally disagree but I defend your right to say it because that isn't what
people's lives are like.

FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO: Toleration is theory. Human nature is real life. The
limits of toleration are better negotiated in freedom than imposed by law.
We may want to try to educate people into tolerance - but we shouldn't hope
for too much. Human history has few examples of moral indoctrination which
works for the good. Meanwhile, let's not privilege intolerance - not from
any minority, but not from the majority, either. Not from dissidents, nor
deviants, nor conformists.