‘The idea of a democratic ethos’

Ferrara’s new book ¹ is impressive in both the breadth and the boldness of its engagement with the problems of democracy in the 21st century. He wants to help us – conceptually, normatively and aesthetic-affectively – find our way toward novel responses to the tough challenges faced by whoever is committed to enhancing democracy both within nation-states and globally. There is much in the book that is deeply persuasive; and even when one disagrees, the quality and carefulness of Ferrara’s arguments are such that one is given a real work-out in trying to respond effectively to them.

One way of describing the book is to say that it tries to show how Rawls’ ‘political liberalism’ provides the best general orientation for meeting the challenges of ‘hyperpluralism’ today. That would make it sound as though Ferrara is a practitioner of the ‘normal science’ of Rawlsianism and thus involved primarily with intra-paradigmatic problems. Such a characterization, however, just does not adequately capture the scope and force of Ferrara’s efforts. He is engaging the full range of issues confronting democratic prospects today and seeking to draw upon the commitments of political liberalism as well as boldly extend its insights. In this way, he contends, we can ensure that political liberalism’s ‘full potential is released’ (2014: vii).

Political liberalism famously envisions a democratic politics oriented not around what is rationally or metaphysically valid, but around what is reasonable in the sense of (in Rawls’ words) ‘most reasonable for us’ (2014: vii, 64, 75–6, 219). Ferrara wants us to attend especially to the ‘for us’ part of this phrase, thereby bringing into the foreground the issue of identity, more specifically the capacity to reimagine who ‘we’ are. This concern is intimately entangled with another central issue, namely, a democratic ethos. It is crucial, Ferrara tells us, to elucidate such an ethos, because democratic life may otherwise begin to shrink into a mechanical adherence to procedural norms that can, simultaneously, be effectively undermined by many sorts of undemocratic pressures. The value of such an ethos lies precisely in its capacity to help generate a subtle, but continual, counter-momentum to such pressures.

In what follows, I want to engage Ferrara on these issues of ethos and identity. His position is spelled out through a critique of other theorists, myself included, who posit some idea of a democratic ethos, as well as a constructive proposal of his own centered on the ‘passion for openness’ (2014: 48). The latter is closely related to Ferrara’s earlier work on ‘exemplarity’ and identity. I will argue that this position is flawed in two ways. First, the notion of openness proves to be simply too indeterminate to be of much independent use as the core of a democratic ethos; and thus it does not really constitute a persuasive alternative to other ways of conceiving such a disposition. Second, although Ferrara’s thinking about identity and exemplarity is quite provocative in an overall philosophical sense, it is not brought to bear on the issue of a democratic ethos as effectively as it might be. The aim of my criticisms is not to bring down his overall project with a wrecking ball, but rather to suggest a partial reconfiguration, a move that would enhance the overall power of Ferrara’s contribution to democratic theory.

He defines his ethos of openness as ‘an attitude of receptivity to novelty, of exploration of new possibilities for a form of life, for a historical horizon, for a social configuration’ that, in turn, helps constitute ‘a public culture that orients opinion in the public sphere in the direction of favoring unconventional solutions more often than any nondemocratic public culture does’ (2014: 14, 48). The prevalence of such a ‘passion for openness’ enhances the exploration of collective identity configurations; it encourages us to imagine novel possibilities for how the bounds of mutual reasonableness might be extended.

This idea of identity exploration and enhancement is couched in the language of ‘exemplarity’. In an earlier work, The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment, Ferrara developed what was originally a Kantian idea related to a work of art and how it affects us. ² A powerful work of art has ‘the ability to activate the imagination and set our mental powers in motion, thereby producing an experience linked with the feeling of the promotion, affirmation or furtherance of life’ (2014: 64). There is a ‘family resemblance’, Ferrara tells us, between this idea and the way in which politics is occasionally capable of ‘disclosing a new political world for us’ through the projection of a new way of seeing the ‘self-congruence of [our] identity’ (ibid.: 37–8, 64–5). The passion for openness gains its central role from the way it can foster this process of creative identity expansion. This is crucial for the sort of radical reinvigoration that Ferrara wants to inject into political liberalism’s core notion of expanding the terrain of ‘overlapping consensus’ on what is reasonable for us.

This passion for openness is offered, as I noted, as an alternative to other recent efforts to think about a democratic ethos. Specifically, Ferrara finds openness to be superior to Charles Taylor’s appeal to agape, Jacques Derrida’s to ‘hospitality’ and mine to ‘presumptive generosity’ (I would emphasize here that my notion draws heavily on the work of William Connolly ³ ). All of these alternatives are, like Ferrara’s, intended to encourage a more generous engagement with that which is different, other and possibly threatening. They are presented as specific ethical orientations for prosperous, especially western, societies that face hyperpluralism and the associated, recurrent hostility and resentment of dominant cultures to established, but marginal, categories of the population as well as immigrant cultures (2014: 54, 89, 213). The problem with agape, hospitality and presumptive generosity, however, is that they are too indebted to ‘comprehensive’ or ‘general moral notions’, as opposed to being more ‘specifically political’ dispositions (like openness) that could better contribute to the pressing task of imaginatively exploring the bounds of what is reasonable for us (ibid.: 62).

Ferrara is correct to identify these alternative conceptions of ethos as being embedded in comprehensive ontological-ethical frames. But it is important to ask whether the same is actually true for openness as well. Let me now elucidate how this issue of a comprehensive frame applies to my notion of presumptive generosity, before then turning to ask the same question of openness.

Ferrara admits that presumptive generosity is not as tied to a full, comprehensive moral perspective as is agape, but it nevertheless remains deficient in comparison to openness. What are the relevant ontological-ethical sources of presumptive generosity that are problematic? Three are primary. The first involves its understanding of identity. In general terms, this understanding is shared by quite a variety of philosophers and political theorists today. It revolves around the notion of ‘identity/difference’, with the slash mark indicating a mutually constitutive relationship between the two. This problematic of identity has been best elucidated over the last two decades by William Connolly. He argues that each of us must give some coherence to our identity over time, if we are to live a recognizably human life; but doing that requires the simultaneous constitution of a field of contrasting entities. This is a fundamental ontological condition of identity. I can construct my identity only through contrasts with what is different.

But the identity/difference relation gains its full significance for ethical-political life only after we join it to a second source, namely consciousness of our mortality, and the fact that this finitude makes humans anxious creatures. The ontological condition of identity/difference creates a central axis around which such anxiety revolves. The abiding concern to project at least some stability and security into my identity is fundamentally threatened by my constitutive dependence on that which is different from me. As a result, Connolly says, my ontological condition is always haunted by an existential resentment at how deeply difference is implicated in my identity. This resentment rooted in the extent to which my identity is dependent on what is outside of me provokes a continual, compensating urge somehow definitively to control, denigrate, marginalize, or otherwise disempower the ‘who’ that is different. There is no way to eliminate this source of resentment, given that humans have foreknowledge of their mortality. But even if there is no way to be rid of it entirely, one can nevertheless try to dampen this passion and its destructive effects. As Connolly puts it, we may always be insecure in the face of difference, but we can develop individual and political practices that lessen the propensity to express hostility toward ‘the other’. ⁴

The cultivation of presumptive generosity is an effort persistently to slacken my drive to turn ontologically necessary difference into political otherness, a drive that finds a rich outlet today in prosperous liberal democracies in the propensity of those in the cultural center of these societies to denigrate and marginalize categories in the population who seem to unsettle that sense of centrality. The moral source from which the momentum to counter this drive emerges (at least for those who are non-theistic) from an understanding of reality as characterized by ‘being as becoming’ and an affirmation of that quality through a mimetic attitude. I affirm the reality of this third moral source through an initial willingness to be lightly receptive to what challenges the sense of my own being or identity as comfortably fixed. ⁵

So presumptive generosity does indeed draw upon more general moral sources; and thus Ferrara’s criticism seems appropriate. But one cannot really judge the seriousness of this charge in isolation from a fuller account of his alternative notion of a democratic ethos. Ferrara wants us to see the ethos of openness as admirable precisely because it is free from specific and thus contestable moral sources. And the general idea of affirming openness as a virtue in liberal democracy is clearly something hardly anyone would want to contest. But perhaps this is where the problem actually starts. Maybe openness is simply too indeterminate an idea to be of much specific use as the proposed core of a democratic ethos? Ferrara is certainly aware of this potential drawback, and he attempts to deflect it by specifying that his idea of openness is not adequately captured by the mere invocation of the bare concept; for example, he distances himself from those who extol neo-liberalism for its remarkable openness to novel and creative market solutions to every public problem. Ferrara calls this an example of ‘false openness’ (2014: 14). Clearly, this means that he has some criteria with which he wants to qualify the generic value of that disposition. Most notably, as I said above, he aims at a kind of openness that can effectively address issues related to the hostility, close-mindedness and resentment frequently associated with contexts of hyperpluralism.

In order for openness to play this role, we have to grasp it as one part of a broader set of democratic virtues. The list Ferrara gives us includes an orientation to the common good; a passion for equality and individuality; tolerance; and a sense of fairness and civility (2014: 46–8, 213). Such virtues are, of course, admirable supports for any democratic ethos. My only question would be: once we have all these others in harness, what actually is achieved by adding an affirmation of openness to them? If I am trying to address some challenge of hyperpluralism in my society in a way that admirably and affirmatively manifests my embodiment of these other virtues, what added value do I get from a generic reminder that I should ‘be open’? If I am really committed to those other values, wouldn’t any good faith attempt to apply them to challenging situations of conflicting claims imply my making creative efforts to bring them to bear in novel ways? My point is that openness seems to function here as something like a cheerleader passion. It might help to enhance the enthusiasm with which we express the other democratic virtues, but it does not really add anything distinctive to one’s cognitive, normative and aesthetic-affective bearing.

The reason openness seems a bit superficial to me, and something like presumptive generosity does not, is that the latter’s place and added value are conceived, as I have said, in relation to the dynamics of identity/difference. For those like Connolly and myself, the existential dynamics of intersubjectivity presents a continual psychological-political threat to the efforts of a late-modern society to open those in hegemonic cultural positions to the claims of others who are in more marginal positions. It is the latent propensity of the former to denigrate, distance, or become hostile to the latter that is the problem. When this propensity manifests itself without operative ways of recognizing and resisting it, then all the other admirable democratic virtues that Ferrara references are at risk of becoming tone-deaf to many of the real challenges of hyperpluralism. Imagine that I am someone who proudly affirms a deontological, liberal democratic proceduralism. For me, due respect for the rule of law may easily be interpreted as demanding that a given group of migrants should be returned whence they came or be denied welfare, because their entry into my country was in clear violation of that very rule of law as it applies to state boundaries. What worries me here is that a citizen in the hegemonic culture can rightly, and self-righteously, affirm that upholding the rule of law – which encompasses admirable democratic values like the common good, fairness, civility and equal treatment – requires him to categorically reject any claims on the part of undocumented immigrants. One can, to my mind, plausibly suspect that this citizen’s stance may be deeply, though unobtrusively, rooted in the dynamics of identity. Clearly a person’s adopting this kind of stance would work against Ferrara’s hopes for a more expansive political liberalism. Of course, such a person might be ‘open’ to some novel solutions to the immigrant problem like giving the illegals free flights back to their home country. He would be comfortable seeing that as a course of public action that is perfectly ‘reasonable for us’. Ferrara would no doubt condemn this as ‘false openness’; but the question is whether the criteria of his notion of openness would actually be able to pick it out as problematic.

In order for Ferrara to get out of this bind, it is necessary for openness itself to be embedded in some sort of comprehensive ontological-ethical source; and it is. But before I sketch the character of the relationship, let me return briefly to his reason for being so resistant to presumptive generosity. He worries that such views are dependent on a ‘philosophy of subjectivity’, that is, a ‘general account of how the subject comes into being’; and that constitutes a comprehensive foundation (2014: 174). But, in fact, Ferrara himself is able to avoid the problems with openness that I noted above only by affirming something that looks rather like such an account. Perhaps his ideas about an exemplary identity do not constitute a full ‘philosophy of identity’, but they do infuse his notion of openness with its ontological-ethical content.

Speaking in the Taylorian language of ‘moral sources’, Ferrara explains that the most ‘upstream’ of the sources of his thinking is the value of exemplarity (2014: 62). Exemplarity involves imaginatively seeing the possibility of expanding the bounds within which one can experience a sense of the congruence of one’s identity. What is exemplary has the capacity to produce, as I noted before, ‘the feeling of the promotion, affirmation or furtherance of … our political life’ (ibid.: 64). When he speaks here of a furtherance of life, Ferrara clearly does not mean an exemplarity that could be realized by just any new enhancement of collective life – say, for example, by some novel expression of a fascist national identity. As he says, exemplarity is not just about what can ‘move the imagination’, but what can move it with ‘good reasons’, thus in a sense making it possible ‘to reconcile “is” and “ought”‘ (ibid.: 13, 38). It would appear to follow from this that exemplarity functions as a significant moral source. It is certainly not as extensive in character as, say, Christianity; rather, its degree of comprehensiveness seems reasonably close to that of the ontological-ethical sources of presumptive generosity.

I argued earlier that the notion of openness is too indeterminate to be of much independent use as the core of a democratic ethos. If it does have a use, that emerges only through its dependence on the source of exemplarity; and that frame has an implicit comprehensive moral cast (although the exact character of this is not developed to any degree). These lines of criticism hopefully cast presumptive generosity in a comparatively better light. And I think this sense can be strengthened further if I am right in my suspicion that this notion of ethos might, when correctly understood, be warmly embraced by Ferrara as making a potentially significant contribution to the broad claims he wishes to make about exemplarity and hyperpluralism. Let me explain what I have in mind.

Although Ferrara wants to focus specifically on collective political identity and its openness to reform and critical imagination, the notion of exemplarity applies as well at the level of the individual subject. In the latter domain, it refers, as Ferrara notes in passing, to ‘the existential openness of a creative life course’ (2014: 65). But if this is so, it is somewhat puzzling that he does not reflect further on the interaction between exemplarity at the two levels. Here is where I think Ferrara could have both enhanced his contribution generally and shown a greater appreciation of presumptive generosity. Instead, he focuses entirely on the collective political level and those major political events, such as a shift in constitutional arrangements, that seem to capture ‘the public imagination’, thereby allowing a population to see and recognize itself in a way that encompasses something that is both novel and yet also feels somehow authentic. Such ‘truly transformative’ events are ‘experienced only a few times in a lifetime’ (ibid.: 39–40, 212). They display ‘democratic politics at its best’ (ibid.: 212). These moments are at the core of the idea of an enhanced political liberalism that is capable of expanding the degree of inclusiveness of a democratic order.

Ferrara’s engagement with the concept of exemplarity on the collective level is fascinating and insightful. But he offers no reason why one cannot both embrace this contribution and yet also ask for a better exploration at the level of the individual subject. One of his comments about the latter contains what is perhaps a further clue (beyond the worry about getting entangled with comprehensive moral sources) as to why he does not engage this question. When he couches the issue of individual exemplarity in terms of ‘the existential openness of a creative life course’, it sounds as though the subject matter is being conceived as something like the familiar idea of ‘a life as a work of art’; in short, a kind of self-sculpting. This can be taken as an inwardly focused, self-formative activity, exploring what is truly authentic to me in a way that remains essentially remote from political life. Perhaps that is the way Ferrara means the phrase he employs, and that would accordingly explain why he does not reflect further on individual level exemplarity and its possible relation to political life. If so, I would suggest that he misses thereby an opportunity to consider how individual self-formation might actively confront identity/difference dynamics, becoming thereby more proto-political or, as Connolly has felicitously put it, ‘micro-political’. ⁶

What this means is that the ongoing process of an exemplary identity formation might be seen as crucially involving a citizen’s actively seeking to slacken the persistent propensity to turn difference into otherness. This requires a kind of willingness to listen and be receptive that goes beyond merely hearing out the claims of the other (in an imagined realm of autonomous actors engaged in challenging and justifying) to include an engagement of her or him as an embodied, vulnerable and mortal self like me. I have tried elsewhere to flesh out the idea of such presumptive generosity as taking the form of ‘attentive traveling-hosting’. ⁷ This involves being willing to ‘travel’ outside one’s sphere of comfort (mental, physical and geographical) into the ‘neighborhood’ of the other; and, alternatively, playing the role of host to the other with a kind of generosity that exceeds normal, reciprocal expectations and commitments (of the sort autonomous creatures would demand). Think, for example, of an Austrian citizen in 2015 who is, perhaps, deeply worried about the influx of foreigners into her country, but who, nevertheless, upon seeing a video of distressed immigrant families in her town, makes the small decision to take a basket of sandwiches to the place where these people are being detained. This is no great existential decision about her identity, but rather just a small act of generosity that is at the same time a slight exploratory opening into a very different world. And yet that minor act may set off further trains of thought, affect and action bearing on how her life is configured. And thus it may become part of exemplary reflection about a renewed sense of that woman’s identity.

This way of thinking about identity and exemplarity at the level of the individual subject seems to be congruent with what Ferrara wants to encourage at the collective level of political identity. He hopes for psychological investment in political initiatives that diverse segments of a population can see as an enhancement of the congruence of their identity, thus expanding the range of matters over which they can say, ‘Yes, this is reasonable for us.’ It is not hard to imagine the reflections of the woman above about her personal stance bleeding into questions of what it means to be an Austrian, a European, a human being in the midst of the challenges of the 21st century. In short, something like an ethos of presumptive generosity among those at the cultural center of prosperous liberal democracies could plausibly count as an individual level, facilitating precondition for embracing just the sort of creative political exemplarity that Ferrara seeks. It is only if we explore both levels adequately that we can hope to ‘make sens[e] of the complex interplay of democracy and … the normativity of identity’ in our hyperpluralist world (2014: vii).