But as you may have guessed from the title of this post, I'm not writing about burqa bans or islamophobia today - at least not directly. Rather I wanted to build off of one paragraph in the second Nussbaum article. Here's Nussbaum's point: "I am not saying that all religious activities ought to be respected. Equal respect, in my view, is rightly directed at the person, and the core of human dignity in the person, which I hope Amy will agree all these people still have. Respecting their equal human dignity and equal human rights means giving them space to carry out their conscientious observances, even if we think that those are silly or even disgusting. Their human dignity gives them the right to be wrong, we might say." (Amy is a commenter on Nussbaum's article.) Her point here highlights a key problem with contemporary American society: our belief that acceptance must be non-normative.
Nussbaum is responding to critical comments about her first article arguing that defending the veil is a pardoning oppressive religious practices. This is a logical misnomer that is ubiquitous in our constant self-esteem-boosting society. People make the mistake of seeing cultural relativism and cultural realism as a two-sided question. If I believe that people should be able to engage in whatever religious practices they desire (with the typical qualifications such as that they in no way harm other people) then I am saying that all religious practices are equal. And the reverse, that if I practice one set of religious practices, I am condemning all others as foolish superstition. The first of these is obviously ludicrous. Certainly, we do not believe all religious practices to be equal. We do not sometimes pray to Allah and other times pray to a Christian God or a Jewish God. We do not partake in African tribal rituals and Amerindian tribal rituals intermittently. The reality of the situation is that the latter of the two beliefs I presented is much closer to the truth. We all believe our particular religious to be much closer to the Truth than those of others, and this is natural. If we didn't think our own practices were the most sensible, we'd change them. Our actions indicate a normative judgment on our part. The problem is that an explicit verbal statement of said normative non-verbal action is now taboo in our society.
Unfortunately, this plague of anti-normativism has reached such depths as to be readily apparent in the mind of 8 year-olds. My wonderful cousin, when I tell her "ewwww, you like broccoli" responds, "Alex, that's just your opinion!" She's right, it is just my opinion. That's not necessarily the issue. The real issue is the significance of it being "just my opinion." Since it's just my opinion it can be treated dismissively. This is not a castigation of my cousin. She's wonderful. And I was similar at that age. Rather, it's an indicator of how far society has moved towards full acceptance of passive totally non-normative interaction.
The real issue with this mode of thinking is that it represents an extremism of egalitarian attitudes towards ideas. You have an idea. He has an idea. We all have ideas. Some of these ideas are totally aesthetic, such as the aforementioned gastronomic example, but others are very much based on evidence of one variety or another. It may come as a surprise to those of you long removed from academic circles, but a strong egalitarian non-normative streak is impeding the thoughtful expression of ideas so essential to educative environments of all varieties. I remember quite frequently in high school students who complain about teachers and insist that a teacher had "given" them a bad grade because she didn't agree with them. While this still happens occasionally at college, it is limited to a smaller group of students.
The rational explication of any opinion (expressed in opposition to the opinion of someone else) is greeted (outside of the most cordial of relationships) as a personal affront. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that I believe that joining the military is morally wrong because it is an institution that takes people's lives. (This is totally hypothetical.) It might be appropriate for me to discuss it among my close friends, but the expression of such an opinion in a public setting would be seen as potentially offensive to military personnel and their families. But why?
This is where I return to Nussbaum's beautifully articulated point about respecting the human dignity of others. In no way does my argument that joining the military is morally wrong attack the human dignity of soldiers. I am not saying that they are inferior human beings. We are all human, and insofar as we are human, we are all equal. (Here one could make an animal rights argument if desired. I'm not attempting to make a statement one way or another about animal rights.) But society views normative statements that are critical of someone present as a personal attack when alternatively, they should viewed as windows to debating the relative merits of the various ideas. And isn't this supposed to be the environment of a college campus after all - one in which the free expression of ideas can take place unimpeded? That it has invaded college campuses reveals just how far this non-normative streak in American culture has come. It's time we took our own normative stand against non-normative extremist egalitarianism.
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