Michael Walzer on Identity and Cultural Subjectivity

Description: How does one judge other cultures?

Question: How do we identify ourselves?

Transcript: Well, we are complicated people, so, in no particular order, I am an American and a Jew and a professor and in Easterner and a fan of the New York Mets, and I had many, and very committed family man. I have many identities, and the United States has been for most of its inhabitants, a place where multiple identities are accepted and even accommodated, with some exceptions for race, I think most crucially. But for the immigrants it has been a place where you could be hyphenated American, so you could be Italian in many aspects of your cultural life; you could be an American in your citizenship and in your economic life, and the same thing is being true for Slavs and Jews and even those greater difficulty for Asian immigrants. So you want that we need a society--this is why I think of myself is a soft multi-culturist--we need a society that accommodates difference, without drawing hard boundaries for all of the different groups, so we don’t carry identity cards and the government doesn’t decide whether you are an Italian American either or Sicilian or something more complicated, because your mother was Italian American and your father was Polish American and then… The boundaries are fluid; these different identities are sustained by a core of--think of them as the core of activists, of committed people--and then there is a spreading periphery of people who identify more or less with the core and the periphery has no boundaries and it overlaps with other peripheries of other cores and that’s the way I think a decent society ought to function. And so we don’t have corporate identities and we don’t we aren’t represented exclusively as Jews or Italians or Swedes or Catholics or protestants or whatever. We don’t have corporate identities, but we can when we decide on how to vote. We can vote for a fellow Protestant if we want to or a fellow Catholic or the Italian American or not, or we can vote our ideology rather than our ethnicity or our religion and we have those options and nothing is required of us by the state.

Question: What are the standards for judging morality in different cultures?

Transcript: I defended the idea of thinking of morality in minimalist and maximalist terms. The minimalist morality is universal in character and it’s created by all of the interactions of people across cultural boundaries, so the moral theory of war has to be universal, because wars are fought across cultural boundaries and people have to be able to understand what they ought to do across those boundaries. And the laws of commerce have to be universal. We have to have some common understanding of theft and fraud if we are to trade across boarders which people have been doing for thousands of years. We need, because there are political interactions across borders, we need some kind of minimal political morality, whether it’s--increasingly now it is a morality of democracy-- but you can imagine something more minimal in which they were certain just simply certain rights that a government should not violate. And then when you try to design, say, a welfare system or an educational system, you find yourself having to attend much more closely to the cultural and religious commitments of the people who are going to be living in those schools or in that welfare system. And so there you need a maximalist conception of morality which will also be particularist. It will be particular to a place. That doesn’t--you can still stand outside and criticize it--and we know that sometimes that criticism is useful, and people will kind of think about it and maybe naturalize the criticism within their own system of belief. But I’ve argued, I have written a couple of books on social criticism that the best social critics are insiders.

Recorded on: 2/27/08