http://www.vpro.nl/attachment.db/etzioni.6.pdf?19284253
Interview with Amitai Etzioni.
15 Augustus 2004, San Francisco
Bregtje van der Haak.
How do you explain that almost every opinion poll at the moment shows concern about values?
The reason people feel there is a moral crisis, is because there is a moral crisis. Both the United
States and Europe had a very clear set of values, if you take as a starting point the 1950s. Not
necessarily the right kind of values, but a clear set of values.
Women were second class citizens. Minorities were a second kind of human being at best.
Children were supposed to be silent, father was the authority, in addition to the church, the labor
union , the political boss. It was a very hierarchical, male dominated society were everybody
knew what they were supposed to do. There was a low level of crime. There was little drug
abuse. Most people did not lock the doors or their cars. It was an orderly society which gave
people a sense of comfort. You knew who was going to pick up the check on a date. Most things
were ordered.
These values were destroyed, from my point of view, for good reasons. First of all we had in the
sixties and the seventies the so called ‘wars of liberation’. We had the womens movement, it
challenged their position as second class citizens. The civil rights movement spoke for
minorities. The sexual movement in San Francisco attacked the rigid social norms.
In that struggle for liberation, we destroyed a good part of the social fabric: the celebration of
authority, the family. My colleague Bellah called it ‘expressive individualism’, which means: let it
all hang out, do not control yourself, speak and act at an impulse.
After the seventies come the ‘Reagan and Thatcher Eighties’ in which we got, on top of this
expressive individualism, instrumental individualism: watch out for self interes, happiness,
hedonism. That also attacked the old set of values that said you have to work hard, you should
save. So conservative values where destroyed together with hierarchical values.
All that is basically fine, although here and there we carried it too far, eg. In nearby Berkeley they
insisted on group sex as part of the liberation. But basically the old regime had to go. The
problem is that we have not agreed on any new set of values. We have even some people,
extreme multiculturalists, who think this is how it should be. They that there should be no shared
set of values and that everybody should follow their own light. They assume that we agree on
some minimal norms of behavior or public policies, but not on values.That is intolerable! A
society cannot live in a moral vacuum. We need to find a new set of shared values, and that is
exactly what the debate is all about. There are people who do not want to go there, but we have
no choice, we must go there.
A moral vacuum you said?
Exactly. You can also call it moral anarchy. Vacuums invite something to fill it in. When we do
not provide an answer, we invite fundamentalism to fill the vacuum. You see, I show a particular
interest in my last work in what happens in newly liberated societies. In either the formal
communist societies or a society like Afghanistan, where we removed the Taliban, or Iraq where
we removed Saddam Hussein. There is something all these societies have in common: the
former SU republics, Afghanistan, Iraq, China. You see an explosion of anti-social behavior. You
see more an abandonment of children, more rape, more looting, more kidnapping, more petty
crime, more drug abuse, more HIV.
Why? Because in the old regime, you had an effective police state that kept the lid on. When
you remove the lid and don’t give them anything else, you get a moral vacuum which on the one
hand creates social anarchy and enormously increases anti-social behavior. And on the other
hand invites first the Poetins, relatively moderate autocrats, and then the fundamentalists who
come and say: we can give you all the answers. So what we need is to give people, not just
liberty, not just choices, not just rights - I am all in favor of those -but we need to give them in
addition, some sense of responsibility, some sense of commitment.
A new sense of the common good and obligation, that is the half of the story which is most
missing.
But scientific research has shown that there still is a substantial core of values that we do share.
Well, it gets tricky here. We do share some minimum standards. Though if you get close, it
becomes very controversial.The standard for instance about what we should wear, headscarves
or not, is controversial. Who has to go to the gym is controversial, who opens a door to whom,
what do you call a woman, who pays, who gets the children, gay marriages, death penalty, well I
am afraid that whatever shared values are left is a very thin, certainly insufficient layer.
You think so? Because if you look for example at the declaration for human rights or the
constitution - because who opens the door to whom is pretty minor -, don’t you think that on
major things we do still agree?
But human rights is a very good example. It speaks only about one half of the equation: of that
which I am entitled to. Human rights protect me from the government, that is what they are all
about. Nobody can take away my right to speak, nobody can take away the right to assemble. It
is against totalitarianism, against oppression, which is fine. But we are moving to a 24/7 society
in which people don’t work 24 hours a day yet, but they are moving in that direction. They are
too exhausted to take care of their children. The moral question of what we owe our children has
nothing to do with rights, it is a question of our obligations.
What do we owe environment? I don’t think it is serious to say that trees have rights, but we owe
something to the world we all share. But how? What is the scope of our obligation to the
environment? That is a moral question.
What do we owe our elders? In the US Hispanics and blacks by and large take care of their
parent as long as they possibly can. And then they put them in an institution. But in other parts
of the society, especially in the more affluent middle-class, they are very quick to put their
parents into a nursing home. Then they visit them once a year. And they don’t have a sense
anymore of obligation to the elder generation. What do we owe our friends? What do we owe
our community? What do we owe our nation? What do we owe other people? What do we owe
people in Sudan? These are all questions of moral obligations, of moral responsibility which the
language of rights doesn’t address.
So we don’t have anything in common anymore and people feel confused about that?
No, we do have things in common. Practically everyone agrees that human rights should be
cherished. We also have a sense of some civilities. But when it comes to the language of
responsibility, and when it comes to the question of the common good, what we owe, that is the
language that has been impoverished and needs to be re-discussed. I am not talking about the
old days when the government was waving a finger at you and told you what to do, and I could
spank you if you didn’t. We need a different basis for a sense of responsibility. In the English
language there is an interesting difference between ‘obligation’ and ‘responsibility’. Obligations
are the things you must do whether or not you agreed to them. A responsibility is something you
feel. That is where we need to go.
We don’t have a conversation about what we owe each other as human beings. The question of
foreign aid. How far do we have to go?The question of what do our troops in Kosovo, when
somebody lines up Muslims and kills them. Is our obligation to say: we should not bring back any
soldier in a body bag? That is our obligation? Or do we have an obligation, when we can readily
save people from a genocide, to reach out? So there is a whole list of responsibilities for the
preservation of the common good which we have not addressed.
So it is a moral language that is missing?
A moral language and shared understandings. Above all shared understandings. The first step is
to get a language, a moral language, but the purpose of the language is not to have a language,
the purpose is to get to new shared obligations. And let me go to this next point: how do we get
there? And therefore I am so delighted frankly with what your prime-minister does, both for your
country and for Europe actually, and that is: how do we get to new shared understandings. That
is through something I call ‘moral dialogues’. They are very different from rational deliberations.
They are where people that have different values, or that have none, talk about moral issues for
many many hours.
Moral dialogues, when you are in the middle of them, look very passionate and emotional and
confusing and conflicted, and many people initially shy away from them. But if you stay with
them, you will find surprisingly that after a year or five, it can take longer, the dust settles and
new shared understandings arise.
I will give an example at the moment. But most important at that point is that people change the
way they behave. That is really what you want. You don’t want somebody impose a new value, a
preacher or minister or a head of state, it is also impossible. You want people to have a new
inner sense of their obligation.
Now let me give you an example of something that already happened.
In the nineteen fifties we had no sense of our obligation to the environment. It was not a moral
issue. We threw things in the lake, everybody did it. Then in the US Rachel Carson wrote a book
‘Silent Spring’ which started calling attention to the neglect of the environment. We start talking
to each other about it. On talkshows and in newspapers and in ...
On talkshows and in newspapers and in coffee clubs and so on and on.
And we got what I would call a billion hour buzz, this was the number one issue to talk about.
Not just locally, but also on a national level. We had demonstrations and so on. Slowly out of this
emerged a sense that we have a more obligation to mother earth, that we have a stewardship,
that we should not leave it to our children in less well conditions than we received it. We still
have a lot of debates about the details, about what to do about trees and owls and such. But I
don’t know anybody that says I want to go back to the nineteen fifties. So what we got here, out
of the moral dialogue, is a new shared moral understanding. Then we got Nixon, introducing the
environmental protection agency, the government agency which protects the environment. And
we got environmental laws. But the moral consensus preceded the legislation. It was not
coercion, it was shared understanding embodied in the law.
We also had some very painful conversations about the relationship between blacks and whites.
And out of it did not come a perfect society, but we surely changed compared to the nineteen
fifties. We no longer have legal segregation. We have less factual segregation. We have
thousands of local officials who are black. We have sheriffs in the south who are black. We
changed in the process. We also had the womens movement, which is a very different
conversation. It is not over, we are not there where we should be. But women have a different
place. Now all that is in the past.
If I just may quickly mention two current conversations, just to show you. It feels different when
we make some progress. We are now having our conversation about the death penalty. In part
because we are embarrassed, because we now have global moral conversations. We were
embarrassed by other societies telling us death penalty is wrong. And we are beginning to
change, we are not there yet. And secondly, we have a conversation now about gay marriages. I
make the flat prediction that ten years from now this will not be an issue. There will be gay
marriages all over the United States, maybe not in all states, but we will not discuss it. What
happens is we have a conversation, a very painful and emotionally conflicted one, but at the end
of the day, it does not end with a screaming match. It ends with new shared moral
understandings. Which affect behavior, not just thinking.
So there is no role for the government in this? This is something society does all by itself?
No the government does have a role, a very special role and that is: it can help start a
conversation. It can trigger the conversation and can help other people to gain the hearing of the
public. I served a year in the White House and the head of the state has a very special
opportunity no one else has. He can cast limelight on a person or a conversation or an issue.
And that is something nobody else can do.
Carter gave this ‘malaise speech’, in which he said there was something wrong with our spirit. It
became a very intensive debate. Nobody else could have pushed this debate as quickly forward.
Now we have a debate about should we or shouldn’t we have gone into Iraq. It is part of our
presidential campaign.
So politicians can not and should not settle the debates, they cannot dominate debates, but they
can help since they are especially equipped to call attention to something as we need moral
dialogues. I thought it is impressive that your prime-ministers office can engage in a
conversation. That is what we need most. We must not only focus in our debates on technical
matters. I wrote another book called The Moral Dimension, in which I am happy to show that it is
impossible to discuss any public policy issue without a moral dimension to it. So if you are
talking about the deficit for instance, it sounds like an economic issue, but it really is about what
burden are we going to take and what burden are we going to give to our children? And what
burden are we going to give to future generations. Clearly an issue which has a moral
dimension. Or when we talk about how to deal with criminals, the whole criminal code is full of
moral judgment. When we ask how much foreign aid to give, it is not a technical question. It is a
moral issue. So every issue of public policy is only one step away from a moral debate.
Do you think it is a good idea that the government opens a website were people can discuss
morality?
I think it is one of its duties to help these conversations take place. If you go back to my idea that
we live largely in a moral vacuum and if it is not filled, either you will get more anarchy or more
fundamentalism or both, you see that if you are in charge of the ship of state, you want to do
something about it.
Now let me get this straight: there is a moral crisis because we as individuals are not sufficiently
concerned with morality and we don’t share a moral base anymore, and if we just talk to each
other, it will come back to us?
That sounds like a good caricature but it is exactly the way it works. If you just start with any
family. A teenager misbehaves and the parents try to convince him to change his behavior. So
what happens? They can spank him, they can ground him. Or they can say: let’s talk about it. In
fact, we run advertising campaigns encouraging parents to talk to their children about smoking
and drugs and such.
It is not a talk about facts, if you come only with facts it will take you only part of the way, but it is
also a question of what is the responsibility of the teenager. The teenager might say: I don’t
have to be home by nine o’clock. And so there is a conversation here of what is expected and
from him as a member of this little community. The same thing happens in the public space, if
people feel that society has become less civil and it troubles them, it troubles them that people
do all kind of things which offend their sensibilities, what can you do about it? One thing is to
ignore it, which will make people ever more alienated. The other is for the government to pass a
bunch of laws, fining people, jailing people. And there is no third option but the option of saying,
look let’s just be all a big family and let’s talk about it. Talk about it in a long and complicated
way. Because we don’t share a simple moral language anymore. We can no longer say: well
that is what they say in the bible. But the empirical fact is, when you do that, a new shared
understanding does arise, which has a very special quality. It is not just in your heads and in
your hearts, it actually changes the way people behave. If I would go on my bike out on the
street in most parts of Holland and I have a candy wrapper and I just throw the garbage on the
side, people may stare at me or say ‘excuse me’ but in one way or another I would definitely feel
social encouragement to not to do that.If I ever cut in front of somebody with my car, again road
rage is one of the problems, and I later run into the person in a church, in a mini hall, again I
would sense that I did something wrong, because we have some remaining shared
understandings of how a civil person behaves.
The problem is that on many issues we no longer share these things. And definitely the social,
the informal social controls are in the end the best way to undergird shared moral
understandings. We don’t want the police to do it, we don’t want accountants to do it, because
the moment a society has to rely on the police and inspectors and agents to enforce a norm, we
are in trouble.You want most of the times people to do what they need to do, because it feels as
the right thing to do. Then the police will come in for the few that don’t, that is the good society.
The only way that freedom will come to a society is when we ask eachother what
The only way that freedom will come to a society is when we ask eachother what our obligations
are.
But don’t you think that most people already know, they so share the moral consciousness that
they shouldn’t throw away a cola-can. But yet some people do.
That’s right, you know, I used that example because on the environment, we already got a
shared understanding. And we are not clear exactly of what it entails, but I’m sure that in your
country, in my country little children in kindergarten, surely in primary school it gets drilled into
them. We theoretically say we don’t teach values in public schools. But not when it comes to the
environment, children are very much taught that you have to be respectful of the environment.
They grow up with that sense. By the way we also teach them it is wrong to discriminate
minorities, to discriminate women. So these are things we agree on, but now there are things we
no longer agree on.How much welfare should a person be entitled to? In some countries they
say that a refugee who worked for six months can then collect welfare for the next twenty years
and then go on to pension. There are many issues on which we no longer have that sense we
do have about candy wrappers. So what are we going to do about the issues that we don’t
share? How much migration from countries with a different culture are we going to tolerate?
What are we going to do about the Moroccans? A whole set of questions like that. So that’s a
whole bunch of questions on which we need to have moral conversations.
I’m just wondering what precedes that moral conversation. What is the source of morality in this
time? Since many modern societies are secular societies, America a little less so than Europe,
but in the Netherlands most people don’t go to church, they don’t believe. Where do they get
their morals from before they participate in any conversation?
First of all, I couldn’t care less if they get it from Kant or Locke or if they get it from the Bible or
from the Koran. In fact, they often get it from both, a complicated mix of humanism and some
kind of religious values, of which they often don’t know that they are religious. It doesn’t really
matter, what matters is that we have an inner sense, a moral sense, that some things are
morally unacceptable. And it is hidden by this anarchy and all the dialogue does is bring it up to
the surface.
So let me give you an example. I tried it in 400 different groups all over the world, and I asked
people a question: Assume you are on a curriculum committee for nine year olds and the
question is: should you teach them that lying is better than truth telling or truth telling is better
than lying? And without exception, in all of the 400 cases, I got exactly the same response. They
said: Where is the question, I don’t understand it. I don’t see a question. Because they all said
obviously you are going to teach your child that truth telling is better than lying. Then you ask
me: where did they get the notion that truth telling is better than lying? Did they do an
econometric analysis, as some people say, that if I lie somebody else will lie and that creates a
society in which all people lie, which is not going to be efficient? Nobody does that. First of all it
is not true, if you lie there is often a reason. But more important is: we have an inner sense and
it comes to us when you ask that question.
If you want to use religious language: they have a revelation, that truth is better than lying. Just
one more example to show you that we have an inner moral sense, but it has been suppressed
and we need to bring it up by having more moral dialogues: I have a friend who was teaching a
university class and he asked the students if they could tell him which student was more moral.
And they all said was: no no no! Everybody has his own moral standards.
And he said: well okay, I am going to give a bad grade to any student who takes this position.
And all these students said: it is unfair, it’s unfair! And this is how they suddenly discovered that
they had shared moral standards.
In effect beginning with small children, we have a very strong sense of what is fair and what is
unfair. You take a pie and you have three siblings and you give one a larger piece and they will
all scream there heads off. Why? Where does it come from? It can come from the Bible or from
Koran, I don’t care. All I say is: we do have an inner moral sense which either gets suppressed
because of multiculturalism or because we don’t use it. All the moral dialogue does is: it brings it
to the surface and guides us.
But if I look at the amount of talkshows and newsroom debates and chat rooms on the internet,
how come that moral sense hasn’t translated into a more civil society than? We are dialogueing
ourselves to pieces.
Let me say first of all, certainly we are not going to use the term civil society. Because a civil
society is a very narrow idea.
A good society?
A moral, a good society. No, I am not trying to give you a hard time. I am just using your
question to make a point. A lot of people talk about a civil society, I think a civil society is not
good enough. We need a good society, the question is what is a good society? Well it is a very
interesting question you ask. And I have to examine those shows, Jerry Springer, he doesn’t
give moral dialogues, he deals with expressive individualism. He wants to encourage ‘let it all
hang out’. He gives every exhibitionist his fifteen minutes in the sun. Many of that is deliberately
provocative because that is what gets an audience there. So that is not a basis for a moral
dialogue. In fact one of the issues we are going to have to raise as we are moving to privatize
the media is: who will protect a form in which we can have serious responsible moral dialogues?
Can you describe the good society to me?
Yes. A good society has two attributes, it needs at least two. It has a carefully crafted balance
between economy and social order, individual rights and social responsibilities. It can fall off in
both directions, too much individualism or too much collectivism. And second that the social
order is based as much as possible on moral persuasion and not on coercion. So that is what
my new golden rule is all about: balance, not too much autonomy, not everybody can do what
they want, throw things out of the window and so on. And not too much demand for the common
good so there is no room for any individuality, for differences.
A balance between common good and autonomy or liberty. And a regime which is as much as
possible based on people believing in what they need to do rather to invade with the police.
We have studies upon studies show the number one reason people vote is because they
believe it is a civil duty to do so, not because they have to. The number one reason for which
people respect the environment, save energy and recycle is because they believe it is the right
thing to do. Increasing prices has an effect, but it is much more effective when people believe in
it. When we see people who pay their taxes, we think people pay their taxes because otherwise
they will end up in jail. But there are very good studies to show that if you believe that the money
is fairly used, people will pay their taxes.
But I still wonder, if we do have that sense, how come we don’t have that society?
Because that sense can be suppressed. First of all, since the 1950s, it has been distorted
through cultural and historical forces. We then retreated into it and we have not come together
applying that innate sense to the new postmodern conditions.
Now as a sociologist/activist, what’s been your answer to that? What is communitarianism?
You can not register terms or names.There are people who are socialist, you know the Soviet
Union talked about socialist, socialism. The nazis talked about socialism. And some people in
Scandinavia call themselves socialist. Something like that happens with communitarianism.
There are Asian communitarians who believe that the individual should be wiped out, that he
should be no more than a cell for the common good. But the communitarianism I talk about is
defined by a group which seeks a careful balance between liberty and the common good.
Between individual and social responsibilities. And promotes a society which is based largely on
moral persuasion and minimizes coercion. These are the true defining characteristics. The good
society is a communitarian society, the communitarian society is a good society.
But for you it is not just a theory, it is also a movement. What does it entail?
Well it entails to try and convince opinion makers and elected officials to try to encourage moral
dialogues to build that society.
Let me just give one example. I don’t know how it applies in your country. In the United States
we have people dying every day because there aren’t enough organ donations. It is a really
terrible thing because as they say here: you cannot take it with you. You cannot take your
money with you and you certainly cannot take your organs with you. So not giving them, a gift of
life.... Some people have religious objections, fine. Some people have psychological objections.
Fine. But about fifty percent of the public, which does not mark on the driver’s license they are
willing to donat, they just don’t do it because they are almost never encouraged. The only time in
the US you have a chance to say you are willing to donate your organs is when you get a new
drivers license. And then you are not asked to do it, you are not encouraged. Now the
economists want to solve it by creating a market in organs. Because they believe that when
people are paid a lot of money, they will leave their organs. But that means that the rich people
will get all the organs they want and as you have seen in India and in other places, the poor
people will sell their organs and that is the last thing we want. We argue that every time you go
to a doctor or to a hospital, you are going to get a form prepared. We are going to say: look, we
think that you are a human being and you know that the community expects you to do what is
right. If you have religious beliefs to the contrary, we will understand, but otherwise you should
really consider donating your organs, please do sign this. What is that? That is creating informal
social pressure. We are not going to do what they do in China, just grab you organs, but we
want to convince people to do what is right. And I am absolutely convinced that if it would be
done that way, not just one advertising, one public service announcement, but if you would be
sure that in every place you turn for medical help you are being encouraged to do what is right,
many more people would do that and we wouldn’t have that problem. And I am just convinced
there are many social issues you can at least alleviate and which can even be solved by sharing
with people that we have obligations to one another.
Can you mention some of the politicians and policy makers, whom you have actually influenced
with your beliefs?
Well, the one thing I learnt in the White House that the last thing you want to do if you want to
get your ideas considered is to say that you influenced anybody.....
Between you and me?
You and me and the television camera! Here is what other people will say, because people have
written books about it : I believe that Tony Blair in his first campaign was very openly taking text
from the communitarian league. I may not have influenced him. He took some of it from his
Christian upbringing, from Catholic social thought, he took some of it from Fabian socialism. He
may or may not have read one of my books, so he got his communitarianism from many
sources. But there was a very clear test to this and it is clearly documented: his first step was to
move the Labour Party from a socialist party to a more centrist party. Once he got the Labour
Party to move from a socialist party to a centrist party, the rest was easy. He ran his campaign
he runs on three terms. Community, responsibility, opportunity. Community and responsibility
are key communitarian terms I don’t care where he got them from. They worked for him, they
worked very well. One of his best campaign slogans was ‘responsibility for all, responsibility from
all’.So in his first term he ran on very strong communitarian ideas and they worked very well.
Then he got occupied with other things, he wanted Britain to be cool, he built a billion dollar
dome and he got into all kind of other things with a different agenda. That was my experience in
Britain.
Did you ever meet Tony Blair?
Oh yes. And Clinton in fact has a similar history. Clinton moved the Democratic Party from the
left to the center. And he had a similarly communitarian campaign, and during his years in office,
where one of my colleagues was one of his major domestic advisers, he ran back and forth like
a football player, the one day to the left the next day back to the center. He followed some
communitarian ideas, some liberal ideas. And part of his political genius was that he worked on
both sides at the same time.
In Germany, oddly enough, the first one to introduce communitarian ideas was Joschka Fischer,
who invited me to Bonn in the Reichstag for twohundred and fifty people when he was still a
representative of the state. And he talked to me about Kindergarten and things like that and he
was very receptive to communitarian ideas, again not because I happened to visit with him, but
because I think he is a very vivid and good social mind.
Then Scharping, who became defense minister, has written a public document in which he
called as a social democrat to meet us half the way with the communitarian movement. And
oddly enough on the conservative side Biedenkopf, who later became the governor of Lower
Saksen, it is a kind of... half the time he talks communitarianism, half the time he still talks....
I can go on and on country by country in Australia.
I think Kohl was also interested?
Kohl had us visit. And so there are many people who discussed ideas, used ideas, but not
because any professor wrote a book or visited...
[/i]Kohl invited you?[/i]
Kohl invited ten Americans as his personal guests because he wanted to be sure that as he got
Germany more integrated into the European Union, he would not loose his Atlantic bridge. So he
wants to make sure that the people he thought were shaping American public opinion would
understand his loyalty to two different communities. And you see, here is another moral
dialogue: how are you going to change sovereignty from a national issue to a European issue?
And how does that fit into the relationship with the United States? These are not just political
issues, that is also a question of who is our family, our community? The question now is: what is
our moral scope? Is it Holland or is it France? Is it Europe? Is it the Atlantic Alliance? Is it the
United Nations family? These questions of layered loyalties all have a moral dimension. And we
are in the middle of discussing them and it is very appropriate for the Dutch prime-minister or
anybody else, to say: let’s talk about it! And not: here are the answers!
Did you meet Bill Clinton?
Oh sure yes.
To talk about policy matters?
Oh yes we used to see him quite regularly and what is now senator Hillary Clinton and Al Gore.
There is no secret, all of it has been reported. He used to have small dinners in the White House
for which he would invite half a dozen of us. So that is one way we saw him. He, Al Gore and
Hillary each came on separate points to communitarian meetings and met with us. I used to go
to the Renaissance Weekends with him. Hillary once a year invited - as we jokingly said - 500 of
his best friends to spend newyear with him. So there were numerous occasions and some of my
colleagues worked for him so yes... Actually there is one interesting thing about Washington
D.C. now, that there is much more interaction - at least before the current administration -
between what we call public intellectuals and the White House.
Also with this administration?
No this administration doesn’t feel that need.
Balkenende is a Christian Democrat. How do you explain the appeal of communitarism for
politicians from the whole political spectrum from left to right?
Except the extremes. The right wing doesn’t want it, or the fundamentalists, because they can’t
find the answers in the interpretation of a text. And the left, some of the extreme left have their
own opinion, they think it is all economic or whatever. But I don’t see how anybody who is right
thinking and open minded can refuse to see that we need a shared fabric and that it is at least
thinned out and that we need to strengthen it. And we should strengthen it not by coercing but
by fostering shared understandings. And there is no other way of getting there than through
moral dialogues. How can anybody not see that? Haha.
So in fact this is a message which everybody agrees with?
Everybody should follow up on it, it is not enough to sign on a piece of paper:’agreed’. It is a lot
of work if somebody engages in a moral conversation about our obligations to each other. Let
me make it a little more concrete. One of the issues Europe faces now is that you have a very
rich fabric of benefits. And you can no longer pay for them. So now what? Some people don’t
want to accept that as a conversation. They say: next year the economy is going to do better. Or
let’s just sell off some things and pay for it you know.
Well that is not... that is escaping the conversation. So it is not enough to say: I am in favor of
moral dialogues. The question is to kneel into this issue and ask, you know, how far are we
willing to cut? Are we willing to be inefficient? How many vacation days? I mean, it is not about
the days, but there is an issue, a moral issue behind it. It is a question of how you distribute the
work that is there. These are not conversations that come easy, it is not a conversation in which
everybody is willing to engage. On the contrary, people find all kind of excuses to avoid these
conversations.
What do you think is the main challenge facing Europe at the moment?
The issue of immigration and the question of how to deal with...
What do you think is the main challenge facing Europe at the moment?
The issue of immigration and the question of how to deal with demographic implications, how to
deal with people of different cultures in ever greater numbers, poses a very serious cultural
challenge. On this one I will claim some credit: I often go to Europe and I became increasingly
alarmed about the hatred of immigrants, it takes different forms, race riots in Britain, a racist
party in Denmark, I don’t need to go on. They are not all the same thing but they are all
troublesome, so I invited 80 European public intellectuals and few elected officials to a meeting
in Brussels and we talked about that around the clock for two days. Out of that came a
statement which we called Diversity within Unity which a much larger number endorsed including
elected officials and public intellectuals and the essence of it is to reject two positions: one is the
assimilationist position which states that we should erase all differences. It is important there are
some differences which are enriching. It is also unfair to people who come from different
backgrounds
But we also rejected the opposite position of extreme multiculturalism. In Britain it is almost a
caricature, where a commission has said that if we stop talking about ‘Britishness’ the Pakistanis
and the West Indians will be happy. But first of all, politically speaking it is inconceivable to erase
our identity to make the immigrants happy and secondly, the majority has some rights too. So
we argued that you need to acknowledge that people are concerned about immigrants. As
Clinton would say: we feel your pain. It is really understandable that people feel they are being
challenged because they are being challenged – instead of saying they are fascist pigs. So we
are going to reassure you that there are some basics which all immigrants will have to accept,
but if you can be absolutely confident that all immigrants will accept the democratic way of life,
women’s rights, we can argue exactly which elements, responsibility for our shared history and
shared future, would you then mind if they eat different food, sing different songs, go visit the
country of origin more often. Could you make this distinction between what is unity and what is
perfectly fine diversity? And we have argued that that is the way to conduct the dialogue: where
is the line? What is fine to be diverse and what is not?
That was our basic position. Then we went area by area to see what it means, and the easiest
way to illustrate for me what it means is with schools, which is not necessarily acceptable to your
audience...
We feel that in the best of all worlds, all children will go to public schools, so they will mix with
other children. There will be no Koran schools or Catholic schools or Jewish schools, because
they live a segregated life, in the schools they can take electives, so they all take history,
geography etc, but if they want to learn extra about Koran or Turkish History, about Indonesia,
that would be perfectly fine. So we go on and mix them both socially and they are all going to get
a large amount of shared curriculum at the same time. The teachers who teach the electives are
going to be chosen on a professional basis and not nominated by the respective religious
communities, which may turn them into fundamentalists. That illustrates the unity: everybody in
the same schools, same curricula. Now again, this is not practical, private schools are so
entrenched that we can not do it that way. The second best to do, but not ideal, is then that the
private schools are inspected to insure they offer the shared curriculum, that the teachers are
professional and such. They still need to worry about mixing children. If they go to Koran school I
would like to see them at least once a week playing soccer with children from a different
background, it is not good for children to grow up from Kindergarten to high school to university,
without ever having to mix with children from a different religion or from a different background.
But you do know that The Netherlands has the most segregated schooling system of entire
Europe?
Indeed, I say no more. But I used this as an example of how you can have unity in diversity
without going to extremes.
Can you describe the visit of Prime Minister Balkenende to you, in Washington D.C.?
He certainly did not visit with me. He visited the United States and he was a guest of the White
House and he generously asked me to come and spend some time with him and we had an
unusually good conversation. I must tell you in all sincerity, I am not a voter, but I can tell you I
find him a person who can listen first of all. I met with many politicians and their capacity to listen
is between half a minute, 30 seconds, and then their eyes get over and start to wander, they
look at their watch. In that sense, he reminded me of Blair, he really listens, which is a joy for a
professor who goes on and on, and secondly he asked some very informed penetrating
questions. What more can you ask for?
What did you talk about?
We talked about what he wanted me to talk about. I am not going to quote him because that
would be inappropriate. We talked about general issues of values and communitarian thinking.
Did you have the impression that he had read your work?
I have no way of telling.
Did he tell you why he wanted to meet with you? Did he have any special interest?
I can assure you, you are doing your job, you can ask all the questions you want, and I will not in
any way reflect on that. That you will have to ask him. But I am flattered to be invited to be in
The Hague on September 7 and to join the former president of France as one of the speakers. I
am very flattered by that and I will talk about the same communitarian ideas.
Would one way to define communitarianism be also to say: keep looking for a common middle
ground?
Middle ground sounds like such a dull little thing. We are leapfrogging the whole left right
debate, because it is a debate about the state and the market. Our point is that aside from the
state and the market, there is a society, which does not fit into left or right. So when we talk
about moral dialogues and a careful balance between autonomy and social order, we do not talk
about the market or the state, we talk about the society.
From a sociologist’s point of view, what is the significance of a prime minister on a crusade for
norms and values, as he calls it?
Well the word ‘crusade’ is one which makes us very nervous, but I think providing the
opportunity to talk about norms and values is exactly what a head of state should do. He has a
special opportunity to allow us to talk about values.
He combines norms and value, always when he talks about it, he doesn’t talk just about
values...what does that mean from a sociologist’s point of view?
That is very straight forward sociology. Values are the more abstract principles and norms are
the specific behavioral implications of the values, so they really go together. I know some of my
Dutch colleagues want to talk about norms without talking about values, but that is sociologically
impossible.
Why?
Because the norms find the justification in the values. When I ask you; why shouldn’t I spit on
the street? Because it is civil, so you have and idea of what is civil and then that leads to an
enormous list of specific behavioral implications, so the norms are just derivatives of values. You
can not separate them.
In your new book ’From Empire to Community’ you write about globally shared values. Can we
arrive at a global ethic you think?
Yes, there are global moral conversations leading to globally shared moral understandings.
You are optimistic about that?
I am empirical about it, it is happening, yes! When you say ‘optimistic’ it sounds like somebody
daydreaming, but look at landmines, invasion by the US, antiques, white slavery, these are all
things on which we have global moral understandings. I better go prepare my talk for tonight...
P. Nowell-Smith:
"This, I suggest, is how we, as adults, should regard moral rules. They are necessary, in the first place, because one man's aim in life often conflicts with the aims of others and because most of our aims involve the cooperation of others, so that, even for purely selfish reasons, we must conform to rules to which others also conform. Most moral rules, from that prohibiting murder to that enjoining punctuality, exist for this purpose. But morality is not wholly an affair of regulating our dealings with others; each man has within himself desires of many different kinds which cannot all be fully satisfied; he must establish an order of priorities....I do not happen to enjoy lying naked on the grass; but I should not wish to force my preference for intellectual endeavor on anyone who did. Why should we not, within the framework of uniformity require for any life to be satisfactory to anyone at all, seek satisfaction in our own different ways?..."
Thanks for that article, ivanhoe. I think it makes some good points. Unfortunately, one reason why so many moral dialogues are needed to facilitate "shared understanding" is that it is necessary to break down many of the ill-conceived foundations of religious morality. For example, he mentioned in there gays/gay marriage: why in the world is that even a topic that engenders discussion? Oh right, because there is a hard-water stain religious mentality that undergirds such resistance.
Concerning the idea that we have some innate moral compass, or some such, I'm not so sure about any of that. There is a clear moral development that takes place in persons (e.g., the studies of Piaget), and many do not fully develop; but nearly all can adopt heteronomous standards, particularly when those standards facilitate primary tasks. That there are some moral rules that are adopted across any and all cultural boundaries does not strike me as all that revealing or interesting, since we are all tossed into conscious existence and there are obvious things that promote the act of existing and perpetuating.