Mr. Taylor's politics of misrecognition

The vision of cultural identity put forward by Canada's most prominent political intellectual is everywhere in the ascendancy. Unfortunately, it is marred by a fundamental contradiction

Andy Lamey

National Post
Saturday, August 21, 1999

In 1965, Canada's minority government collapsed, and an election was called for early November. In the country's largest city, two Universite de Montreal faculty members would compete for the riding of Mount Royal. One, a 46-year-old law professor, had been successfully wooed to run for the Liberals. The lawyer's rival, a 34-year-old philosopher, had been nominated for the third time by the New Democratic Party, which had never won a seat in Quebec.

When the philosopher had run in the previous election, in 1963, he had set a riding record for NDP support. Indeed, one of his supporters had been the very Liberal he now found himself campaigning against. "I welcome the chance to challenge him to explain," said the philosopher of the formerly NDP lawyer, "what has changed in this Liberal party since then that has led him to give up the fight and change sides."

This time, the energetic philosopher would go on to perform the phenomenal feat of raising the level of NDP support upward still, winning 175% of the votes he had two years before -- but still not enough. When the returns came in, no one was surprised that the lawyer had won.

Within three years, the lawyer would be prime minister. He would hold power from 1968 to 1984, interrupted for only nine months in 1979-80; long enough to shape the nation -- shape it with his individualism, his liberalism and his unyielding opposition to francophone nationalism. The pragmatic lawyer who had never held office before 1965, who was, up until then, known primarily for his contributions to the small intellectual journal Cite Libre, would go on to become the most influential Canadian politician of his generation, perhaps the most influential ever.

And the philosopher? By the time his old opponent left office, he had written an ambitious and internationally well-received book on Hegel; taught at Oxford as the prestigious Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory; and distinguished himself as one of the most searching and most respected critics of modern liberalism.

In Canada, to which the philosopher returned from Oxford in order to work to preserve the federation, his extensive involvement in political debate would mark him as his generation's most prominent political intellectual -- and as a tireless critic of most of his old election rival's principles. In particular, he would become a champion of the view that Quebec could not be treated as a province just like all the others, that some constitutional recognition of its insurgent nationalism was, ultimately, what justice called for.

The name of the lawyer was Pierre Trudeau; the philosopher was Charles Taylor. Looking back today, their 1965 election contest highlights interesting parallels between their two careers. Both played against type: The bilingual francophone Trudeau was an early, sharp critic of Quebec nationalism, while the bilingual anglophone Taylor became an intelligent and sympathetic voice on its behalf. Both mixed academia with politics: Trudeau's undistinguished involvement in the former (entering PhD programs at the London School of Economics, Harvard and Paris' Ecole libre des sciences politiques, acquiring doctorates from none) and mastery of the latter finds a mirror opposite in Taylor's failed bids for public office, forgotten disappointments now overshadowed by the achievements of his academic career.

Indeed, Taylor's ideas today are everywhere ascendant. He is asked to speak before government commissions on the Constitution and has become a member of Quebec's Conseil de la Langue Francaise. But perhaps nowhere is Taylor's success and influence more evident than in the reception of a short treatise he has written crystallizing his political beliefs, a distillation of his views on liberalism, nationalism and other issues Taylor has been thinking and writing about for almost 40 years.

The Politics of Recognition was originally delivered as the Inaugural Lecture for the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. In 1992, it was published by Princeton University Press as Multiculturalism and The Politics of Recognition. This first edition to Taylor's 48-page essay included a fulsome 21-page introduction by Amy Gutmann, University Center Director, and three further replies to Taylor, including one by Princeton philosophy superstar Michael Walzer.

When the second edition appeared in paperback two years later, responses by German intellectual powerhouse Jurgen Habermas and Harvard philosopher K. Anthony Appiah were also included. There are scattered criticisms of Taylor throughout the work of these critics (particularly in Appiah's closing paragraphs), but when Michael Walzer declares, "I not only admire the historical and philosophical style of Charles Taylor's essay, I am entirely in agreement with the views that he presents," it is in keeping with the dominant tone.

The reaction has been similarly enthusiastic beyond the universities. In the months before the 1995 Quebec referendum, Stan Persky, then a prominent book critic, singled out the second edition of Multiculturalism for its "fresh thinking" on everything from Quebec to "collective identities [and] the question of what we ought to teach in our schools." The collection was, Persky wrote, "one of the liveliest, most readable and sanest debates on multiculturalism that I've seen to date." When The Politics of Recognition was published for a third time in Taylor's Philosophical Arguments, Oxford fellow David Miller reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement. Focusing almost exclusively on Taylor's political writings, Miller termed Taylor one of "the leading philosophers of our time."

Taylor's thinking has had a particularly strong influence on former Globe and Mail Quebec arts correspondent Ray Conlogue. Conlogue's book, Impossible Nations: The Longing for Homeland in Canada and Quebec, is co-dedicated to "Charles Taylor, who has thought it all through." Conlogue's complete acceptance of Taylor's ideas is reflected not only here but in the frequency with which quotations from Taylor appear throughout the book, sometimes two to a page.

That Taylor has played a positive, moderating role in Canada's interminable unity wars is obvious. And yet, if we separate The Politics of Recognition from the many areas where Taylor has earned our admiration, and instead approach it simply as an argument, it becomes clear that Taylor has been left at the end of it all with a political philosophy built on glaring contradictions.

Taylor's essay is sometimes mistaken for a neutral presentation of ideas already in circulation, but it is in fact a work of advocacy, one that tries to convince us to think about politics in a certain way. In particular, Taylor wants to urge two ideas upon us. The first is that many political issues currently in the headlines "turn on the need, sometimes the demand, for recognition." The second is the impressive-sounding notion that our identities are "dialogical." These two ideas are critical to Taylor's overall account. Understanding the force of his argument requires understanding each of them in turn.

Taylor's concept of recognition is based on the premise that a person's identity is partially shaped by the view of him held by other people. Real harm can be inflicted on someone who lives among those who hold a demeaning conception of that person. As an example, Taylor cites feminist concerns about the negative self-understanding women in male-dominated societies internalize, self-understandings that can hinder women's emancipation even after some of the external barriers to their full citizenship are gone. Similar demands for recognition, he writes, are evident in black-white dynamics: White society projected on the black minority a demeaning image, one that some blacks adopted and now need to overcome.

Likewise, objections to Europeans' long-standing view of aboriginal people as savages play out the same pattern. In each case, previously oppressed groups seek to replace the "grievous wound" of misrecognition with the "vital human need" of due recognition.

Much of Taylor's discussion of recognition is devoted to outlining how the idea came about historically, the call for recognition being largely a political phenomenaon of the past two centuries. But only one part of Taylor's historical account needs to be grasped here: how the post-18th-century view of people as being individuals first and foremost contributed to the rise of struggles for recognition.

With a view of ourselves as individuals comes the ideal of being "true" to that individuality, true to that unique way of being a person. Borrowing a term from the literary critic Lionel Trilling, Taylor calls this the ideal of authenticity. It holds that we are being authentically ourselves when we do not allow social pressures to impose an external identity on us, or lead us to copy someone else's. The ideal of authenticity demands that we acknowledge our own originality and look within to determine who we will be: We must cultivate a kind of self-contact in order to achieve genuine self-fulfillment.

Johann Gottfried von Herder, an 18th-century German philosopher, was an early exponent of this ideal. For Herder, authenticity worked on two levels: Not only should individuals be true to themselves, but societies should as well, in that they must each be true to their own culture. Italians should not try to be Germans or vice versa, as that would be to adopt a derivative -- and therefore inauthentic -- cultural identity. Similarly, peoples colonized by European nations should be allowed to find their own measure. In this desire for cultural authenticity, Taylor sees the "seminal idea" of modern nationalism. So much for Taylor's account of recognition. It dictates that the individual can no longer seek after an entirely socially derived identity. But nor can she aspire to one that is purely individually derived either. And the reason for this is the "crucial feature of the human condition" that Taylor thinks modern philosophy overlooks. Just as luck would have it, this feature is also Taylor's second key idea: the dialogical nature of our identity.

According to Taylor, we acquire agency and the ability to understand who we are through the acquisition of languages of expression: language used here to include not only words but also the languages "of art, of gesture, of love and the like." These languages are not something we learn in isolation, but are rather picked up through interaction with our significant others. The languages this interaction imparts to us are crucial to our ability to understand ourselves, crucial to the genesis of mind itself. Taylor is at pains to say that this identity-composing dialogue goes on throughout life, and he expresses some dissatisfaction with the dominant view (what he terms "the monological ideal"), which will at most concede dialogue a place in the early formation of our identity, that is, in childhood alone. Not so, Taylor instructs. Our significant others, our parents especially, are always with us, and we conduct an inner dialogue with them long after speaking face to face. Similarly, some of our most cherished goods are possible only through sharing them with others (marriage, for example), and we are constantly interacting with other people in the political and social sphere. Here, too, dialogue is at work.

The upshot of all this dialogue? We don't forge an identity by ourselves, but rather "negotiate it, through dialogue, partly overt, partly internal, with others." And this fact about us, when combined with the ideal of authenticity, grants a vital importance to recognition. Who I am crucially depends on what other people think of me, and so a demeaning view of my identity held by the people who shape me can be deeply damaging. Thus "the importance of recognition is now universally acknowledged." People understand its significance on an intimate plane, in the central role played by our significant others. On a public level, meanwhile, our democratic culture espouses a politics of equal recognition, as is evident in the many calls for recognition made by feminists, multiculturalists and anti-racism activists.

Taylor's main concern is with recognition in the public sphere. Here, a politics of equal recognition has come to mean two things. The first is best typified by the American civil rights movement, where equality takes the form of uniform rights for all, regardless of race, gender and the rest. On this view, the point is to avoid different classes of citizenship, to prevent the political sphere from resembling a train with a first-class cabin reserved strictly for the majority. Taylor refers to this view as the politics of equal dignity.

But, he is quick to point out, another view of equality is also at large. And this one has given rise to demands for a different kind of equality. Taylor calls this second view the politics of difference. What it asks us to recognize is "the unique identity of this individual or group, their distinctness from everyone else." Why? "It is precisely this distinctness that has been ignored, glossed over, assimilated to a dominant or majority identity. And this assimilation is the cardinal sin against the ideal of authenticity." Here the move to equality is slightly more complicated, involving a two-step manoeuvre. The first step is to note that, even though everyone has an equal right to their cultural identity, majorities often enjoy an unfair advantage, in that the minorities who live in their shadow are forced into alien form, due to the pressures of assimilation and other unwanted forces. But if we incorporate a recognition of minority identities into our laws, those pressures can be relieved, and minorities will finally achieve an equal footing with the majority. The point here is not to elevate one (minority) identity above all others, but rather to ensure that all identities are treated as first-class models of citizenship. The politics of difference therefore, through an acknowledgement of particularity, works towards this universal end.

Each in their own way then, upholders of the politics of equal dignity and of recognition are both concerned with equality. They also have in common a tendency to take a dim view of the aims of the other. The equal-dignity crowd often feels betrayed by measures that take difference into account, particularly those measures that seek to make recognition of a minority identity a permanent fact of public life, not merely a temporary measure to be abolished once the playing field is levelled. And just such a belief in the importance of permanent recognition is what animates some of the measures taken in the name of the politics of recognition. "After all," Taylor writes, "if we're concerned with identity, then what is more legitimate than one's aspiration that it never be lost?"

To the "universalist" upholders of equal dignity, the outcome of all this "recognition" often appears to be discrimination, period. Advocates of difference, in turn, have their own ugly allegation to make. It is that the "blind" liberalism universalists favour negates minority identities by assimilating them into a mold not their own.

What's more, the mold is not merely a neutral one, but that of the society's dominant or majority culture: Minorities alone are forced into an inauthentic cultural existence. The result is that, despite all the talk about equality for everyone on the part of the universalists, "the supposedly fair and difference-blind society is not only inhumane (because suppressing identities) but also, in a subtle and unconscious way, itself highly discriminatory." And this, it turns out, is the criticism that Taylor himself subscribes to. He writes that the version of liberalism that is blind to the cultural identities of its citizens is "guilty as charged by the proponents of a politics of difference."

A concrete example is perhaps the best way to make sense of these two abstract notions of equality, the accusations and counter-accusations that fly back and forth. Taylor provides one, in the form of a long discussion of Quebec's language laws. Briefly, the language laws ( "Bill 101") legislate three things: Francophone and immigrant parents cannot enroll their children in non-French schools; businesses with more than 50 employees must operate in French; English-only commercial signs are not allowed. The goal of the laws is of course to ensure that French remains the language of public life in the province, and their effect in this regard has been rightly described as spectacular. (Introduced in the late '70s, by 1990 Bill 101 had resulted in 90.2% of Quebec students below the university level attending French schools. Among students whose first language was neither French nor English, the rate increased to 72.7% from 38.7% between 1980 and 1989.) But it is the philosophical underpinning of the language laws that Taylor is most concerned with. In his own words:

"It is axiomatic for Quebec governments that the survival and flourishing of French culture in Quebec is a good. Political society is not neutral between those who value remaining true to the culture of our ancestors and those who might want to cut loose in the name of some individual goal of self-development . . . It also involves making sure that there is a community of people here in the future that will want to avail itself of the opportunity to use the French language. Policies aimed at survival actively seek to create members of the community."

Measures such as Quebec's language laws, then, are not strictly neutral in their treatment of different cultural identities. In this case one particular identity -- that of French Quebecers -- and its corresponding aspiration for survival through future generations is recognized by the state and legally acted upon. Thus are Quebec politics an example of the politics of difference and recognition in action.

Taylor describes what he sees going on in Quebec using the terminology of liberalism: "a society can be organized around a model of the good life" when it is the nature of that good that it must be sought in common. Liberal theory has traditionally held that no version of the good life is to be favoured by the state. But Taylor stresses that the model he endorses need not compromise liberalism's ultimate goals: the fundamental liberties it has fought to establish -- habeas corpus, freedom of speech, religion and assembly, etc. -- can be distinguished from less fundamental "privileges and immunities" that can be restricted when strong reasons are presented. A society animated by strong collective goals, therefore, can still be liberal if it protects the essential liberties of all. To Taylor's mind, this is the singular achievement that Quebec represents.

The ramifications of this are international in scope. An ever-increasing number of countries are becoming multicultural: In our age of immigration, more and more members of Western societies "live the life of diaspora, whose center is elsewhere." The immigrant, too, has her culture, and if her aspirations for its survival are to be respected, as Taylor feels they should, then this fact "calls into question our philosophical boundaries." Compared to traditional liberalism therefore, the Quebec model is a better guide to dealing with tomorrow's new multicultural world order, as only it can meet the increasing demands for cultural recognition.

Taylor does not outline in detail how this would work out in practice. Instead, he concludes The Politics of Recognition with some guiding principles to employ when interacting with cultures not our own. We must be open to what Taylor, borrowing a phrase from the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, calls a "fusion of horizons": Rather than using our own culturally specific standards and values to judge the other culture, we should cultivate an inner transformation allowing that culture's standards to mingle with our own. In this way will we forge a new, truly inter-cultural perspective, a deep openness that is, ultimately, edifying. Other cultures that have provided contexts of meaning for a substantial number of people, through long periods of time, "that have, in other words, articulated their sense of the good, the holy, the admirable -- are almost certain to have something that deserves our admiration and respect." In the end, cultivating openness to a fusion of horizons has the power to take us beyond "our own limited part in the whole human story."

This, then, is the argument. One can't help but have sympathy for Taylor's concern that minorities be treated fairly. But insofaras we value an argument in defense of multiculturalism that is consistent and well-informed, the more we are compelled to recognize that Taylor's isn't it. Recall Taylor's description of why he supports measures such as Quebec's language laws: It is because, as a member of the minority culture at hand might put it, they preserve and perpetuate "the culture of our ancestors." This strikes Taylor as quite a fine idea, one that even heralds a bold new variant of liberalism. And yet, he is equally emphatic that we should be welcoming, in a deep sense, to the changes that can result from contact with a culture not our own. But how so? If a culture passes laws designed to preserve the culture of its ancestors, a "fusion of horizons" with other cultures is precisely what it is trying to prevent. A judgment has been made, and the ancestral culture is deemed to take priority.

Two problems would seem to stem from this. First, Taylor's endorsement of measures that seek to ensure cultural homogeneity across generations overlooks the possibility of misrecognition occurring through one generation imprisoning the next in a false vision of itself. Quebec, for example, was once a deeply Catholic society. Would it have been fair for the old Catholic establishment to have used public policy to ensure the church a permanent position of power? A culture's self-understanding can change, and efforts to force a contemporary understanding on the future seem hardly immune to the problems around imposed identities Taylor seeks to avoid.

Second, consider how things would play out if an individual francophone Quebecer were to take one of Taylor's central conclusions to heart. In his discussion of intercultural penetration and fused horizons, Taylor writes that the "main locus of this debate is the world of education." And Taylor characterizes the fusion of horizons he is in favour of in linguistic terms: It operates "through our developing new vocabularies of comparison." Reading this, and acting on the common-sense belief that we can't really know a culture without learning its language, a French Quebecer could not be faulted for wanting to send her child to a school where the language of instruction was something other than French. But Taylor, as a supporter of Law 101, believes the government should forbid this. Similarly, an immigrant to Quebec who wanted to send her child to an English school to "fuse" with that culture would seem to get an equally mixed message from Taylor: By all means, open yourself to another culture -- but do try and make sure that it happens to be French.

The inspiring vision of being inwardly transformed by other cultures that Taylor holds out at the end of his essay seems to exist, then, in a room with no connecting corridor to the one where, mere moments before, Taylor held forth on the need to legally prohibit certain forms of cultural horizon-fusing. As it stands, the students who would seem most able to enjoy the edifying experience of being transformed by another culture are the members of the cultural majority -- in the Quebec case, English speakers most like Taylor himself. It's hard not to see in this a silent privileging of the majority culture. The English can be pushed to arrive at a mind-expanding overcoming of their "own limited part in the whole human story." But the French? Ah, yes, well. The French. Best not to expect too much from them, you know. Not everyone can be expected to meet standards of self-development as exacting as our own.

Taylor might try to get around this by making the argument (which does not appear in The Politics of Recognition) that a person can profit most from other cultures if she is first relieved of the worry that her own culture is about to disappear. This, however, would only bring Taylor in contact with a still larger problem he sets for himself. It concerns the two irreconcilable views of cultural assimilation he wants to support. Most of the time, Taylor is adamantly opposed to minorities being homogenized into majorities, as this results in a "grievous wound" of misrecognition, a harm on the level of "inequality, exploitation and injustice," and one that occurs even when it is not explicitly sought after by the majority culture. And yet, in his defence of Quebec's language laws, Taylor comes out emphatically for "policies which actively seek to create members of the community."

In other words, were Quebec's francophones to be subsumed into Canada's English majority, the result would be a serious injustice. But the French goal of culturally assimilating other minorities is perfectly laudable. Strangely, Taylor's concern over unwanted assimilation leads him to endorse government measures the explicit aim of which is ... unwanted assimilation. This would seem to make inevitable the very type of misrecognition Taylor is at pains to avoid, the only difference in the Quebec case being that the burden of having an external culture inflicted upon them is shifted to cultures with less power than the French: the immigrants'.

Taylor could have avoided this problem had he allowed for some distinction between groups such as the Quebecois and immigrants. This distinction is usually made in common-sense discussions of Quebec politics, just as it is in more credible theoretical examinations of the topic, such as Will Kymlicka's "Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights." But Taylor, bizarrely, goes out of his way to deny it, by arguing that Quebec's language laws hold the answer for countries that are becoming increasingly multicultural through immigration, "multicultural in the sense of including more than one cultural community that wants to survive." That he is in effect here arguing that immigrant desires for cultural survival are best served by using the law to assimilate them into a majority language and culture -- what Bill 101 does on his own account -- seems an enormous difficulty, yet one to which Taylor is somehow cheerfully oblivious.

One can argue that the law should push immigrants into the dominant culture in places like Quebec, or one can argue that the law should prevent them from ever being pushed because their cultures also deserve recognition; but one cannot simultaneously argue, as Taylor does, for both positions. This is quite a serious problem for Taylor's theory, so much so that it is hard to imagine things getting any worse. And yet, this is precisely what happens when Taylor's view of immigrants is examined alongside his other foundational idea, his dialogical view of human identity. The problem stems from Taylor's claim that immigrants "live the life of diaspora, whose center is elsewhere." To describe someone's cultural identity in this way means you don't really see it as being composed by much of a dialogue at all: The immigrant, rather, is shaped by the old country alone, and the dialogue that shapes her ends when she leaves it. Hence her centre, her identity, are being left behind.

If anything, this is a "monological" understanding, of just the sort Taylor criticized for not acknowledging that dialogue is a lifelong process. Turning to immigrants however, it turns out Taylor believes dialogue is present only in the genesis of their cultural identity after all.

Taylor is resolutely opposed to unwanted assimilation and very much in favour of it; Quebecers must fuse with other cultures and not fuse with them; immigrants' cultures must be recognized by the law and immigrants' cultures must be swept away by the law; our identities are formed in dialogues and our identities are formed in monologues. Over and over again, Taylor nimbly pulls together the most powerful ideas from a dazzling array of sources -- Rousseau and Herder, Trilling and Gadamer -- only to harness them in service of practical measures that do total violence to the very ideals he stands for. The overall effect is similar to that of seeing someone display great ingenuity and presence of mind in leading a bull through the door of his own china shop: utter bewilderment, yet tinged with a strange sort of admiration.

Why has Taylor's theory, despite its debilitating defects, proven to be so popular? Precisely because his essay treats a topic that so many of us -- particularly we liberals -- have a deep intuitive attachment to, our critical faculties are somewhat disarmed by The Politics of Recognition. We want there to be a profound philosophical argument that lends support to our intuitions about how minorities ought to be treated. And we want Charles Taylor to be the one who delivers it. For many people, his gentle, decent manner sets the standard to be aspired to in scholarly and political debate. But the effect of this and Taylor's other winning qualities has been to obscure the fact that, philosophically speaking, his argument is a mess.