Preface
for the Iranian edition of Thick and Thin
By: Michael Walzer
The introduction to this little book explains why it was written and how its different pieces fit together. I won’t repeat any of that now. I want instead to describe, very briefly, the political values that underpin both my arguments here and the positions that I have continued to defend in everything that I have written since.
The first of these is a commitment to human freedom--which has to be realized, however, at two levels that are sometimes in tension with each other: the level of the individual and of the group. So I am an advocate (it isn’t always easy) of self-determination in the literal sense, where each self is free, and also of collective self-determination, so that nations and peoples can find their own way. When these two conflict, there is room for, and need for, negotiation and struggle. We must defend individuals against all the forms of repression and subordination that arise within national and religious communities, and we must defend those communities against external coercion. But there are limits to this double defense: just as we don’t defend murderers at the individual level, so we don’t defend murderous regimes at the collective level.
The second value is equality—though of the “complex” sort that I first described in Spheres of Justice and that I argue for again in the second chapter of this book. What is hateful to me is not the simple inequality of wealth or power, which is sure to arise in any free society, but rather all the hierarchical systems within which people are ranked and ordered and taught the postures of pride and deference. As I wrote in Spheres, the goals that I aim at are best expressed negatively: “No more bowing and scraping, fawning and toadying; no more fearful trembling; no more high-and-mightiness; no more masters, no more slaves.” The value of equality is best expressed politically when men and women recognize each other as citizens in a community where no-one is dominant, where there is no Maximal Leader, where everyone has the same entitlement to argue about the common life. So equality presses us toward democracy.
The third value is pluralism—which I take to mean the acceptance and accommodation of difference in all its forms, cultural, religious, and ethnic. In this globalist age, no human society is fully homogeneous (I suspect that’s been true for a long time, even before globalization); diversity is a universal condition. Of course, we all prefer our own culture, religion, and ethnic group, and the preference is deeply rooted in our ideas about what is good and bad, right and wrong, not only for ourselves but for humankind. But those ideas do not justify the domination or persecution of the “others.” Human beings are culture-creating creatures, and we should respect (and even celebrate) the multitude of their creations. Respect will sometimes require criticism—which is one way of taking seriously the views of people different from ourselves. Pluralism is not the same as an easy relativism—“they do things that way; we do things this way.” It can be and should be a form of engagement. We can argue with the people who do things “that way.” What we can’t do is kill them, or forcibly convert them, or drive them out of our country.
This third value follows from the first two. Freedom and equality will make for pluralism, simply because free and equal individuals and groups of individuals will think differently about the meaning of human life. The last chapter of this book is an effort to argue that the resulting differences are not only manifest in society but also, so to speak, in personality. A pluralist society reflects our divided selves. Some religious doctrines and some political doctrines, some theologies and some ideologies, aim to produce undivided selves for an undivided society. But this is a totalizing project, and I don’t think that it will work in the modern world. In any case, the three principles that guide my own project work against it, and I strongly believe that these are, in one version or another, universal principles—for home and abroad.
March 2010