Abstract
Mill is commonly dismissed as being hostile to multiculturalism. A review of some existing interpretations and an exploration of some overlooked aspects of his thought shows this to be a mistake. He is alleged to devalue lives not dedicated to the pursuit of individual autonomy: in fact he is a liberal communitarian. Other, legitimate, critiques point to his cultural imperialism. Many allege, mistakenly, that he is a proponent of national homogeneity. Yet Mill remains largely misunderstood with regard to multiculturalism. His focus on individual self-perfection is a strong aid, not impediment, to a distinctly liberal multiculturalism, because inherently value pluralist. His scepticism about the power of human cognition precludes dogmatism about primary personal values. His alleged support of national homogeneity demonstrates an acknowledgement of individuals’ particularistic attachments without supporting nationalist parochialism. By doing justice both to individuals’ instinct of particularity and their potential for cosmopolitanism, it fosters rather than undermines liberal multiculturalism.
Keywords
Mill is commonly dismissed as a possible friend of multiculturalism. His perfectionist liberalism, said to entail an inflexible insistence upon personal autonomy, is thought to have atomistic implications. He is believed to endorse a national homogeneity inhospitable to difference. He is, in addition, unabashedly imperialist towards ‘backward’ cultures. 1 There is some truth in these critiques, but Mill’s thought has powerful unrecognized affinities with a liberal multiculturalism. His cultural imperialism was tempered by great sympathy for the cultural attachments of vulnerable members of subject cultures. His perfectionism is inherently value-pluralist. It calls for each one to perfect himself in his own way and involves no expectation that Mill’s preferred way should guide others. Sceptical about the human capacity for understanding perspectives not based in personal experience, Mill insists that we hear and heed the ‘neglected interests’ least heard in the ordinary course.
Rich in implication for what justice for vulnerable minority individuals demands, Mill’s thought is altogether inviting in the service of a thoroughly liberal multiculturalism. 2 No community-shunning individualist, he wants society to restrain its power to ostracize non-conformist individuals, but hardly expects or wants a world of egotistical individuals cold to the claims of others. Only a blinkered reading of On Liberty, for example, can zero in on his stress upon freedom for securing individual happiness without capturing his insistence that social progress depends upon it. If individual autonomy and self-perfection had been his sole overarching values, he would indeed be hostile to lives not wholly motivated by these ideals – and to ‘multiculturalism’. 3 But individual self-perfection – so-called positive liberty – is Mill’s primary value as a romantic. 4 As a liberal he is committed first and foremost to non-interference with personal choices and toleration of conduct that does not harm others. His personal and declared preference is indeed for autonomous existence. His purpose however is to urge society to desist from inhibiting individual freedom, not to require individuals to choose autonomy over other values, although he does emphatically admire those who do. The admiration itself springs from a conviction that purposeful autonomy in substantial degree is the rare accomplishment of rare individuals. It cannot be a bottom-line expectation.
Mill does express distaste for mindless conformity, but toleration even for this based on the harm principle remains his first imperative. His romantic emphasis on individual diversity is, in addition, the source of a powerful support for cultural pluralism. Not just personal freedom but a variety of situations, he tells us, is what it takes to achieve self-perfection. The greatest variety of situations, optimized in a flourishing cultural diversity, is central to his story.
Isaiah Berlin has spoken of Mill’s ‘epistemic skepticism’, his view that individual cognition of reality is necessarily partial and shaped by lived experience. 5 In the absence of any authoritative understanding, necessarily divergent subjective perspectives alone are legitimate about personal matters. This precludes dogmatic expectations of any hue, whether of optimal autonomy or the self-effacement most communitarian theories implicitly demand. The liberating aspect of Mill’s thought is that, within our inevitably bounded perspectives, human freedom remains both real and very substantial.
The villain of multiculturalist lore?
Mill does bring baggage to the multiculturalist train, as theorists have been quick to note. Considerations on Representative Government (Considerations) and On Liberty are the most common sources for theoretical arguments to this effect. 6 These works do indeed give pause in some respects, but they offer strong encouragement in other, overlooked ways.
On Liberty is the source of Mill’s notorious observation that backward civilizations are legitimately ruled in their ‘nonage’ by the enlightened, rationalistic civilizations of the West. Yet his simplistic optimism about the purity of the imperialist will and the West’s civilizing mission evolved over time to a growing and dismayed recognition of the injustices imperialism entailed in practice. He gave increasing expression to it in laments about the treatment of subject individuals. 7
Naïve and oppressive as it is in its effects, Mill’s imperialism genuinely is driven by a desire to improve human lives, not oppress them. On Liberty is replete with scathing remarks about abuse of colonial power. Mill speaks of the foolishness of trying to govern India through those who know nothing of it. He thinks ‘Hindoos’ are right to resent state support to schools imparting even spontaneously chosen Christian instruction as a proselytizing ploy. 8 In an extensive footnote, he denounces the British army’s refusal to change rules which forced Indian Muslim soldiers to bite off pig-grease cartridges to fire their guns, a provocation which became a proximate factor in the outbreak of the Indian rebellion of 1857. He deprecates the evangelical party’s demands that public money should be withheld from institutions that did not teach the Bible. 9
On the treatment of Indians, to be distinguished from his justification of colonialism, Mill was no less outraged than Burke. Whereas Burke was provoked, however, by the violation of custom and tradition, Mill deplored the oppression of disempowered individuals even as he sought to impose enlightened progress upon subject cultures.
Mill declared in Considerations that a people not held together by a communal glue is ill-equipped to guard its free institutions against a tyrannical state. This has fuelled claims about parochialism. Yet he also has harsh words for exclusive nationalisms.
No one disapproves more, or is in the habit of expressing his disapprobation more strongly than I do of the narrow, exclusive patriotism of former ages which made the good of the whole human race a subordinate consideration to the good, or worse still, to the mere power & external importance, of the country of one’s birth.
10
And, elsewhere:
We need scarcely say that we do not mean ‘nationality’ in the vulgar sense of the term – a senseless antipathy to foreigners; an indifference to the general welfare of the human race, or an unjust preference of the supposed interests of our own country; a cherishing of bad peculiarities because they are national; or a refusal to adopt what has been found good by other countries. We mean a principle of sympathy, not of hostility; of union, not of separation.
11
Fellow-feeling among citizens based in the national sentiment is for Mill a phenomenological rather than a prescriptive observation. He does however attempt to put this ‘natural’ sentiment to use to keep civil society united against an abusive state. The precise reference is instructive. In the event of a conflict between the people and the state, he says, the army is most likely to come to the people’s aid if they are co-nationals.
Soldiers, it should be noted, are an extreme example of those conditioned to view the world as divided between friends and enemies. The notion of justice itself as giving friend and foe his due is articulated as early as Polemarchus in Plato’s Republic. A more recent and notorious example is Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political. 12 Both offer a sharply political view of community, predicated upon the exclusion and, if need be, the persecution of outsiders. These are useful contrasts to what Mill suggests: the desirability of using civil unity to subdue the oppressive power of the state, not to put up walls against national minorities.
What Mill’s remarks about national fellow-feeling do reveal is a sympathetic view of individuals’ communal attachments, without which no liberal should have a reason to engage multiculturalism. He recognizes that such attachments are an important source of self-fulfillment for most individuals. Wishing to enable striving individuals to find resources for their ‘experiments of living’, he wants to guarantee them a variety of cultural resources without prescribing which ones they should find fulfilling.
Mill’s forceful support in Considerations for minority representation – and in On Liberty for airing all, but especially minority, viewpoints – reveal more obvious multiculturalist sympathies. 13 Considerations reflects on why minorities need representation, and how their particular viewpoints and interests can only be represented by themselves. In On Liberty, Mill discusses at length the need for the freest expression of all opinions. Implicated in both arguments is the claim that power relations have something to do with who is heard and who ignored. Cognitive limitations ill equip the powerful, even if goodwill abounds, to intuitively grasp the perspectives of the less fortunate.
A value-pluralist perfectionism
Mill’s perfectionist liberalism, his focus on individual autonomy and self-perfection, has been criticized from several directions. Bhikhu Parekh and John Gray have attacked his philosophy of history for its exclusively western, rationalistic ideal of progress. 14 Both argue that Mill attempts to translate a particular ideal into a universal one. Parekh accuses him of cultural monism. Both charge him with ranking individual autonomy as the highest value. Parekh’s communitarian account insists that one’s own culture is fundamentally constitutive of one’s identity. Gray observes, correctly, that individual autonomy is hardly the singular source of all human flourishing, and that Mill is wrong to see it as such. At this point the two part company. Gray thinks Parekh is as wrong to regard culture and community as the one source of human fulfillment as Mill is to accord the same importance to individual autonomy. Gray’s own answer is ‘value pluralism’. Closer scrutiny reveals, however, his alternative to be relativist rather than merely pluralist, whereas Mill emerges as the real value pluralist.
Parekh and Gray are right that Mill treats a culturally specific ideal of progress as universal, which devalues cultures and societies with differing notions. Yet Parekh, more focused on community than individuals, mistakes Mill’s incompatibility with a communitarian multiculturalism for incompatibility with multiculturalism altogether. He fails, and is hardly alone in failing, to see that multiculturalism is a protean thing – and that Mill’s cultural and value pluralism set us on the path to a liberal multiculturalism.
Gray rightly points out that personal autonomy as the sole overarching value cannot be justified in utilitarian terms. Faith in authority, self-effacement, loyalty and practically any other value might be more important to any number of people. But his recent interpretation of Mill – he has several, varying sharply over time – is unpersuasive. 15 Like Parekh, Gray is right to suggest that Mill’s thought is incompatible with a conservative or communitarian multiculturalism. Implying that Mill is a liberal who accords primacy to individual wellbeing over group integrity is not, however, a startling insight. The real quarrel, it turns out, is with liberalism itself, which Gray labels incoherent.
Gray’s account implies that all multiculturalist sensibility must be relativistic – a mistaken view that the ever-multiplying liberal opponents of multiculturalism share. Viewing ‘multiculturalism’ as essentially relativistic, conservative or illiberal is an error that pervades contemporary western European societies, and one speedily gaining ground in the United States. Such essentialism, inattentive to the varieties of multiculturalism in different places and contexts, itself fuels illiberal multiculturalisms.
Understanding multiculturalism in exclusively communitarian and relativistic terms, albeit sympathetically, Gray misreads both Mill’s and liberalism’s affinities with it. Distinguishing between liberal toleration and value pluralism, he says that toleration used to exist between people who disagreed within the comforting confines of a broadly shared moral framework: the rationalistic cultures of the West. Such toleration, he notes, was not available to Mill’s ‘backward’ cultures. In the current age, when non-western culture groups have travelled en masse to western shores, the shared moral language, and the toleration based upon it, has broken down. The time is now ripe for value pluralism, he says, which acknowledges radical difference and disagreement amounting to the impossibility of mutual comprehension.
Gray’s account represents, correctly, toleration and value pluralism as distinct concepts. But he implicitly conflates pluralism with outright relativism, while explicitly denying it. Value pluralism in general, and Mill’s value pluralism in particular, is conceptually close to toleration, not relativism. The distinction between Mill and Gray’s multiculturalism is precisely that between value pluralism and cultural relativism. Mill recognizes legitimately plural standards without abandoning his own hierarchy of values or the notion of right and wrong altogether. People can and do maintain a hierarchy of personal values while accepting different hierarchies preferred by others as a matter of choice. Mill is emphatic that our own certainty does not amount to absolute certainty. This is why neither paternalism nor persecution has any principled legs to stand upon. A limited humility, not a morally disorienting relativism, is all that is required for value pluralism and for tolerating that which we do not necessarily like. That leaves us free, Mill says, to judge someone else’s way to be mistaken, and attempt to persuade him. It does not entitle us to force him, absent harm to another. This possibility of persuasion depends, of course, upon the possibility of successful communication, which Gray denies for the allegedly worlds-apart value systems of ‘our time’. This claim about our solipsistic fate is hardly self-evident, but Gray does not justify it.
Mill appreciated different value hierarchies precisely in terms of the value he prized so highly – self-perfection pursued by each one in his own way. Gray asserts however that value pluralism is incompatible with perfectionism. Recognition that values are legitimately multiple and often irreconcilable in the same life dictates abandoning perfectionism. Against this, Mill manages to show that self-development pursued by each in his own way renders value pluralism compatible with perfectionism. Berlin, the most important theorist of value pluralism and an influence on Gray’s work, was neither relativist nor believed in cultural solipsism. Gray, however, appears to be convinced that value pluralism rules out any value hierarchy. 16
Gray is relativistic because he implicitly condones cultural groups’ oppression of their members on the plea that no universally acceptable standards are available. Mill on the other hand would oppose a cultural integrity that gave the group licence to oppress its own members. In the event of a contradiction between the wellbeing of individual members and entire cultures, he would put the individual’s preference first because the one is less powerful than the many even when the group itself may be weak in relation to other groups.
Mill, not Kant
Gray questions Mill’s preoccupation with individual autonomy. The world, after all, abounds in cultures that accord the individual no privileged place, and in individuals who eschew autonomy for all sorts of reasons. But can Mill really not live with non-autonomous conduct? Personal autonomy signifies for him the opposite of mindless conformity and unconsidered conventionality. He admires individuals in direct proportion to their ability to break free of the hold of custom and received opinion on their minds. Yet autonomy need not preclude thoughtful conformity. What Mill dislikes is the substitution of reflection by reflex. A self-conscious endorsement of customs and practices is not problematic, for Mill is not after the wholesale invention of a lifestyle. What he desires is imaginative and thoughtful existence. Autonomy means choosing, thoughtfully, from the limited world in which we find ourselves, the world which inevitably shapes us and our choices. This is profoundly different from Kantian autonomy, which springs from universal a priori reason independent of context. Mill’s autonomous individual picks and chooses, mixes and combines, from what she observes in the social world, through a rationality that is itself socially shaped.
More importantly, even reflexively conformist individuals are fully tolerated by Mill the liberal, if hardly admired by Mill the romantic. He yearns romantically for eccentricity, signifying escape from society’s cloying grasp, but neither seeks nor expects to cleanse us of all socialization. His realistic ideal is a socially engaged individual who thinks for himself – critic, reformer or simply active and engaged member of society. The problem he battles is not the profusion of wildly eccentric or unconventional individuals, but the opposite of that. His expectation about who will dare to be unconventional, even in a propitious environment, is extremely modest.
Gray really wants to suggest that Mill cannot qualify as a genuine value pluralist because he cannot accept the opposite of his own cherished ideal of personal autonomy – the value of self-subjection, self-effacement. That is simply not true. Mill handles uncoerced self-effacement perfectly well. It is rank paternalism, authoritarianism and society’s insidious ostracism of non-conformity that he has in his sights. Gray’s critique of Mill – and Berlin – suggests that the alternative to outright relativism can only be a bigoted outlook. He appears to think that to believe strongly must involve a willingness to defend the belief with vehemence, perhaps even violence. If one values individual autonomy, the only honest thing in this view seems to be to persecute those who do not care to be autonomous, so that liberalism must itself end up resembling a bigoted tyranny.
This argument just might be persuasive as an abstract intellectual exercise positing bigotry at one end, Pyrrhonic paralysis at the other – and nothing between. Gray, though, asserts that he offers the only pragmatic solution to our predicament, a modus vivendi. Lapsing into relativism as the only alternative to bigotry is nihilistic, and such a posture does not characterize either Mill or Berlin. Gray himself, in his intellectual biography of Berlin, notes Berlin’s views:
At this point in the argument it is worth emphasizing that, though the forms of life human beings invent for themselves are immensely diverse, they are not in Berlin’s account of them for that reason inaccessible or incommunicable to one another. On the contrary, these practices are, according to Berlin, mutually intelligible to a high degree: they are not the self-enclosed weltanshauungen or ideologies of relativism, hermetically sealed off from one another.
17
Gray dismisses Berlin’s value-pluralist liberalism as incoherent in later work. Yet he fails to explain what it is, if not relativism, that distinguishes his own ‘value pluralism’ from Berlin’s – and Mill’s. Gray writes:
If value-pluralism is true then this kind of conflict between ways of life is unnecessary. It always depends on mistaken beliefs. Strong pluralism does not reject all universal moral claims. It does not deny that there are universal, pan-cultural goods and bads – it affirms their reality. It sees such universal values as marking boundaries beyond which worthwhile human lives cannot be lived. For those who are subject to them the practices of slavery and genocide are insuperable obstacles to a worthwhile human life; but there are indefinitely many ways of life that lack these and other practices precluded by the universal minimum of generically human values.
18
This seems at first to be a reasonable, middle-of-the-road outlook. Yet all it tells us is that the value pluralist-but-not-relativist view finds genocide unacceptable. Genocide precludes the possibility, however, not only of a worthwhile life for those subject to it, as Gray puts it, but of life itself. Gray objects, in addition, to slavery – opposition to slavery being an allegedly ‘universal’ value for which he offers no ‘pan-cultural’ explanation. What, one wonders, would he say to the Greek or Roman slave who saw value in his life as a slave which, even in retrospect, might appear preferable to a woman’s life in ancient Greece or Rome?
Value pluralism entails the recognition that, given infinite empirical, situational, temperamental differences, there probably are many ways to be right. This belief that there is more than one good way to live does not equal the notion that nothing is wrong. Mill and Berlin’s pluralism will draw the line at many things that do not give Gray pause.
Mill the sceptic
Mill’s strongest affinity to a liberal multiculturalism arises from a direction which has not been explored by theorists of multiculturalism – his ‘epistemic skepticism’. 19 His view about the limited nature of human cognition is intertwined with, and partly the source of, his value pluralism. If all viewpoints are necessarily partial and inadequate to understand the mindset of those who are differently situated, there is no justice in laying down the law to another. Entrusting her good to fallible others is inherently unjust and fraught with potential for cruelty.
Mill, the ‘cultural monist’, turns out to be saved for a liberal multiculturalism by sceptical value pluralism. It is the self-avowed cultural pluralist, Bhikhu Parekh, who turns out ironically to be insufficiently sceptical about the sources of human fulfillment. By insisting that one’s own culture is singularly constitutive of one’s identity, Parekh unwittingly abandons individuals to the whims of their community. Individuals who stray from their cultural moorings are condemned in his outlook to live shallow, vacant, disoriented lives. His becomes a dogmatic denial of the evolution of individual identities in all sorts of possible directions over a lifetime – even if one’s own cultural group is disproportionately important at the outset. Mill, on the other hand, believes that the wellsprings of individual sustenance vary, and may or may not include one’s own and other cultures. Parekh’s view denies human agency, Mill’s speaks to human freedom within the constraints of the human condition.
That Mill’s thought is sympathetic to liberal multiculturalism should accord with the intuitions at least of those not steeped in multiculturalist theory. It does surprise however in proving to be more liberal upon scrutiny than that of Will Kymlicka, perhaps the best known contemporary theorist of liberal multiculturalism. Kymlicka believes that individuals need a particular culture – their native or another, but one culture – to make meaningful life choices. Mill is both more sceptical and pluralist. Some will find them in one particular culture, native to them or not, but others will need a variety. On the one hand, Kymlicka’s Kantian bent is simply less realistic than Mill’s: culture, he thinks, only provides a framework for choice-making. The implication is that one’s thought processes are autonomous in the Kantian, noumenal sense: a view Mill does not share. On the other hand, Kymlicka’s perspective is more nationalistic than the allegedly parochial Mill’s in insisting that individuals need a particular culture. Mill remains firmly pluralist about this, without quarrelling with those who do indeed find sustenance from a single culture.
Mill’s scepticism is most clearly on display in the second chapter of On Liberty, ‘Of Thought and Discussion’.
20
Here he gives four main reasons why the free exchange of ideas is vital. First, the ‘received opinion’ may be false and, ‘consequently’, some other opinion true. Second, if the received opinion is in fact true, it takes a conflict with ‘the opposite error’ for us to fully appreciate its truth. But a third situation is far more common: that conflicting opinions ‘share the truth between them’:
The latter case is hitherto the most frequent, as, in the human mind, one-sidedness has always been the rule, and many-sidedness the exception. Hence even in revolutions of opinion, one part of the truth usually sets while another rises. Even progress, which ought to super-add, for the most part only substitutes one partial and incomplete truth for another; improvement consisting chiefly in this, that the new fragment of truth is more wanted, more adapted to the needs of the time than that which it displaces.
21
Here is a nuanced view of epistemological progress not always seen in Mill. 22 Even if the received opinion is in fact the whole truth, he tells us, it will be held in the manner of a ‘prejudice’ and not reasoned fact unless suffered to be vigorously contested. Finally, the meaning of this, albeit true, received majority opinion will be ‘in danger of being lost or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good’. 23 The closest approximation of the truth is to be accomplished through the freest possible airing of all views in the marketplace of ideas.
Mill probably is a believer in a progressive increase in objective knowledge, but he is both positivist and sceptical. He might have thought that something approaching the whole truth was, in the fullness of human progress, empirically ascertainable – although On Liberty certainly gives us pause. But if so, it was only attainable over a long period of time, through free discussion and empirical observation, not through deductive logic, and never all at once. One of the more interesting things to emerge from this is that Mill regards the striving for truth as a collective, social, rather than individual enterprise. This seems odd in the writer of On Liberty, with his ideal of the ceaselessly striving and critically thinking individual. It sits well, however, with his sceptical sensibility. The truth is neither simple nor simply there to be grasped. For one’s own, practical purposes, it is indeed best grasped and represented by oneself, but social progress demands a diversity of necessarily partial viewpoints:
Truth, in the great practical concerns of life, is so much a question of the reconciling and combining of opposites that very few have minds sufficiently capacious and impartial to make the adjustment with an approach to correctness, and it has to be made by the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners. On any of the great open questions just enumerated, if either of the two opinions has a better claim than the other, not merely to be tolerated, but to be encouraged and countenanced, it is the one which happens at the particular time and place to be in a minority. That is the opinion, which for the time being represents the neglected interests, the side of human well-being which is in danger of obtaining less than its share.
24
This passage marks a transition from the claim that truth itself is indeterminate at any point in time to a claim about truth and justice: the argument that the minority viewpoint has the strongest claim on our attention. Mill says in On Liberty that the perspective of Mormon women justifies the toleration of polygamous Mormon marriages. If they have no problem with it, neither should we, as odious as he personally thinks the practice is. Negative liberty and toleration take precedence over autonomy, if in fact these women’s lives are less ‘autonomous’ than anyone else’s: Mill might disagree with that idea, because their choices are as free as their lives and experience permit.
Mill’s perfectionism is not tyrannical, damning those who fail to be, do not wish to be, or seem to others not to be, autonomous. It is flexible, mediated by toleration and value pluralism. Disconcerting uses of our freedom, choosing self-effacement over self-assertion, are not rejected. Indeed, it is well to remember his claim in Utilitarianism that the morally superior individual puts others before himself and makes sacrifices for them.
What sort of liberal toleration would it be, in any event, which only tolerated that which it actively admired? How is that different from zealotry – even bigotry? Toleration involves, by definition, accepting that which we do not like. Value pluralism likewise means being able to live peaceably with those who do not share our most cherished values. It rejects both paternalism and relativism. We may not patronize the disempowered. Nor – if they make it clear that they do not wish to subjugate themselves to communal purposes – may we nonchalantly abandon them to the community’s whims.
Living with situated autonomy
Antony Appiah’s unconventional discussion of Mr Stevens, the butler in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, addresses Mill and the question of situated autonomy in a fascinating way. 25 Appiah turns the portrayal of Mr Stevens by the author on its head. Ishiguro wants us to see pathos in this character who has decided, in Aristotelian fashion, to be trenchantly faithful to his place in the order of things. In his case, this is to be the best butler possible. He is obsessed by duty to his employer, who is a well-intentioned fool, blind to the real nature of Nazism because tormented by the vengeful treatment of Germany at Versailles. Misguided and wasted devotion! Stevens will not go to his dead father’s bedside until his duties for the day are done. Ishiguro wants us to see the poverty of this non-autonomous life. He drives the point home with Stevens’s failure to grasp the love offered by a good woman, imbuing her, and his own, life with heartbreaking melancholy.
Appiah sees something else here. Stevens is actively fashioning a life, choosing as freely as anyone, by cutting selectively from the fabric of his experience. Appiah’s point is an excellent one. Still, one could legitimately argue that a character such as Mr Stevens displays far more than simply a choice-making capacity. In putting work before a parent’s death, he takes brutal licence with convention in something as final as death. This eccentricity may be viewed as not just individual and unconventional but cruelly egocentric, narcissistic, breathtakingly self-absorbed. This would seem to fit with the way Stevens blinks at the housekeeper’s love, fully cognizant of her torment and himself loving her. A distasteful, perverse self-indulgence run riot!
The merely individual mutates into the individualistic in this reading. 26 What would Mill say? Certainly Stevens is not his ideal individual. To the extent that he up-ends tradition, he does so in a paradoxical departure from convention that is itself deeply conventional. On the other hand, this man, with all his surprising choices, could hardly be more individual. Mill, when all was said and done, would have to shrug and accept Stevens’s seemingly perverse, albeit free and earnest, choices. That they are earnest might heighten their pathos in Mill’s eyes, without inclining him to concede that others had licence to dictate differently to the man.
Mill was no stranger to the devastating unhappiness of emotionally arid lives. 27 He would be alert to and saddened by the misery Stevens visits upon himself and others. He probably would deplore the way Stevens torments those who love him. Mill is not just romantic or liberal, after all, but also utilitarian. Yet when it came to the bottom line, he would have no alternative but to accept Stevens’s choices. Mill reserves admiration for those whose chosen life brings both themselves and others joy, or those who sacrifice themselves for others. Yet he could not but admit that this too is an exercise of freedom, an experiment of living.
If there is one thing we learn from Mill about freedom, it is that the possibility of happiness is predicated upon the freedom to make ourselves – and, by implication, those who love us – unhappy. In a conflict between freedom and happiness, freedom wins hands down. This makes him a failure as a utilitarian, but it is a tribute to his liberalism. Our extensive freedoms extend also to the pursuit of lives that might appear ‘non-autonomous’ to some others. Mill accepts, although he can hardly exult in, people’s choice – especially the choice of put-upon individuals – to subjugate themselves to country, custom, tradition, religion or duty, provided there is no visible external coercion at work.
Individual and community
Worried that socialization and ‘collective mediocrity’ was choking individuality, Mill considered this tragic not just for individuals. Societies comprised of seemingly interchangeable human units were, to his mind, as good as dead. Overlooking the connection between individual and social progress makes for a peculiar reading of Mill. If everyone, or a majority of us, was to become utterly original, questioning, even maladjusted, communal existence might indeed be jeopardized. The social glue, product of a degree of ordinariness, habitual conventionality, would come unstuck. As it is, custom and social opinion make a gooey mix almost impossibly difficult to wash one’s hands of, the accomplishment of extraordinary individuals. Mill believed that society would be good for these and other individuals, if only it could see what was good for itself. Their interests corresponded.
Mill did view the individual good as being often subverted by society, but he also considered the good of the individual a necessary precondition for the social good. Society’s misguided enforcement of conformity hardly meant that the conflict between individual and social wellbeing was inevitable. The whole burden of the argument of On Liberty is that, in the not-too-distant past, European civilization had been great because of its flourishing diversity, its marked individuality.
Mill certainly does not view individual development and wellbeing as merely instrumental. It matters in its own right, for the happiness it affords individuals. The reason he emphasizes this disproportionately, though, is that in relation to society, the individual constitutes the ‘neglected interest’, not that communal wellbeing is a matter of no concern. The needs of the less powerful always have first claim on our attention for the obvious reason that the powerful can look after themselves. Even in On Liberty, where he appears to come closest to suggesting that individual wellbeing might sometimes be simply irreconcilable with social wellbeing, the other half of his argument remains that dwarfed and pinched individual characters kill social vitality. It is a vicious circle, one failure feeding another.
The want of variety and diversity is lamentable not for aesthetic reasons alone. Pervasive conformity damages our collective striving for the truth and is implicated in halting progress, no less. There is indeed a tension in his account between the flowering of the individual and social expectations and pressures. The argument, though, is precisely that it does not have to be so. At least one prominent variety of the well-formed individual – Mill’s hoped-for ideal – will be committed alike to care of the self and service of the community. He cites Pericles, in opposition to John Knox and the self-abnegating individual as well as the egotistical Alcibiades, as his preferred model.
Mill’s focus on individual self-development can make us too enamoured – or too appalled, if we fear the antisocial individualism it might unleash – to observe his nuance. He seeks characters that experiment, yes, but also characters formed by education so that they will both flower themselves and engage actively with their community. 28 It seems uncontroversial enough to suggest that personal accomplishment, conventionally recognized or subjective, tends to correspond to an individual’s capacity to benefit society. Capacity does not equal the desire to contribute, of course, but the desire would not succeed without the capacity. Individuals are social assets due to their sheer individuality, yes, but also very often because earnestly and actively engaged with society in their exhilaratingly diverse ways. Mill is a liberal communitarian. He considers individual freedom the first priority but sees a fundamental unity of interest between individual and society.
There is another type that Mill also eulogizes, of course: the individual who rejects society and its norms, views it with contempt and disengages. This type is precious for holding up a mirror to society in which to see its flaws, to challenge its smugness. Those who swim against the tide, even the cantankerous and the maladjusted, are not simply models of personal triumph. They can turn the waters in very rewarding directions for us all. Between the two contrasting types, Mill does not view the one as more valuable than the other. Each serves himself and his community well, but in ways so different that trying to rank them makes little sense.
Some individuality might indeed express itself in unsociability, but all is hardly expressed in opposition to community. The same goes for personal autonomy. 29 The possibility exists in principle that the pursuit of personal autonomy will produce unsocial individuals, but Mill regards it as a practical impossibility for large numbers.
Diversity and multiculturalism
The cultural ‘border-crossing’ by individuals that liberals seek in order to widen their life choices necessarily depends on a degree of cultural ‘border-guarding’. Minority groups and individuals, in order to engage in Mill’s ‘experiments in living’, must feel secure beforehand that their identity – identities – however they understand it, is not in danger of being submerged or brutally undermined. His project of the greatest possible individual diversity is crucially dependent for its fulfillment on cultural diversity. It demands individuals who feel their identity to be securely acknowledged, which means cultural pluralism, as well as affording the greatest possible variety of situations.
A well-known passage from On Liberty is worth revisiting:
The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement, being in unceasing antagonism to that disposition to aim at something better than customary, which is called, according to circumstances, the spirit of liberty, or that of progress or improvement. But the only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty, since by it there are as many possible centers of improvement as there are individuals. The progressive principle, however, in either shape, whether as the love of liberty or of improvement, is antagonistic to the sway of custom, involving at least emancipation from that yoke; and the contest between the two constitutes the chief interest of the history of mankind …
30
This passage is characteristically – and correctly, so far as it goes – identified with Mill’s cultural imperialism and his vexation with the despotism of custom. Its first half seems to provide incontrovertible evidence that custom is Mill’s bugbear, a formidable hindrance to progress. It only proves, however, that Mill is no supporter of guarding cultural boundaries for their own sake. That is not yet an end of the matter. Thus far, he is speaking of individual progress, to be achieved through liberty from the stifling yoke of custom and tradition. Immediately thereafter, he refers to cultures and communities in a way that is analogous to the improvement – progress – of individual character.
Societies progress by questioning their customs no less than individuals do: … The greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of Custom is complete. This is the case over the whole East. Custom is there, in all things, the final appeal; justice and right mean conformity to custom … Those nations must once have had originality … A people, it appears, may be progressive for a certain length of time, and then stop: when does it stop? When it ceases to possess individuality … (Emphasis added.)
Custom must be questioned, not followed in sheep-like conformity. More interesting is the play here between ‘a people’ and ‘its individuality’. Nations, cultures, societies are – and need to be – individual in the same way as their individual members. The people is described in individual terms. Mill immediately swings back, emphasizing the analogy between individual persons and peoples, to the need for individual distinction in each. Peoples no less than individuals have characteristics that set them apart from others. Self-perfection only becomes possible through the opportunity for creative eclecticism, both for a person and for a people:
It is not progress that we object to; on the contrary, we flatter ourselves that we are the most progressive people who ever lived. It is individuality that we war against: we should think we had done wonders if we had made ourselves all alike, forgetting that the unlikeness of one person to another is generally the best thing which draws the attention of one either to the imperfection of his own type and the superiority of another, or the possibility, by combining the advantages of both, of producing something better than either. We have a warning example in China – a nation of much talent … they have become stationary … and if they are ever to be further improved, it must be by foreigners. They have succeeded beyond all hope in what English philanthropists are so industriously working at – in making a people all alike … (Emphasis added.)
Finally, and most interestingly, the passage concludes:
… unless individuality shall be able successfully to assert itself against this yoke, Europe, notwithstanding its antecedents and its professed Christianity, will tend to become another China. What has hitherto preserved Europe from this lot? … their remarkable diversity of character and culture. Individuals, classes, nations, have been extremely unlike one another: they have struck out a great variety of paths … Europe is, in my judgment, wholly indebted to this plurality of paths for its progressive and many-sided development. (Emphasis added.)
Homogeneity, singularity of custom is stultifying, because it imposes uniformity. Individuals must be free to observe the differing perfections of others and effect creative combinations of different virtues to create unique selves. Cultures and civilizations similarly progress through diversity of individual character and culture. The argument has evolved, in one and the same passage, from the indispensability of liberty for social progress to the necessity of individual diversity – and culminated in the necessity of cultural diversity. Individuality in persons is the condition of individual happiness, individuality in cultures the condition of social progress. Absent either, the Chinese fate awaits Europe.
Custom, hateful when transferred as a rigid yoke to reverential shoulders, becomes liberating when used creatively. Mill is not romantic enough to think that individuals’ life plans are conjured from thin air. Creativity, originality, individuality consist in forging different combinations and hierarchies of values and virtues from what we observe in our world. The possibility of dipping into the most extensive variety is all-important. When we are free to create an infinite variety of bouquets of customs and values, the rigidity and stultification of custom lived without examination mutates into exhilarating liberation and creativity – perfection! Here, at last, the argument is complete: individual diversity and perfection are effected by drawing upon cultural diversity; both sorts of diversity are essential, the first for individual happiness, the second for progress. The outlook is remarkable for the synchronicity between individual and communal progress under conditions of liberty combined with diversity.
Unity and multiculturalism
The time was not ripe for doing effectually any other work than that of destruction. But the work of the day should have been so performed as not to impede that of the morrow. No one can calculate what struggles, which the cause of improvement has yet to undergo, might have been spared if the philosophers of the eighteenth century had done anything like justice to the Past. Their mistake was that they did not acknowledge the historical value of much which had ceased to be useful, nor saw that institutions and creeds, now effete, had rendered essential services to civilization, and still filled a place in the human mind, which could not without great peril be left vacant … They threw away the shell without preserving the kernel; and attempting to new-model society without the binding forces which hold society together, met with such success as might have been anticipated. 31
‘Rooted cosmopolitanism’ is the phrase Antony Appiah uses to describe the ideal condition of creatures both situated and self-created in the Millian sense. 32 Far from eschewing their particular identity, they use it for self-creation as well as engagement with a larger world beyond their little platoon. A remarkably similar description – ‘cosmopolitan patriotism’ – is employed of Mill’s conception of nationality by Georgios Varouxakis. Between the two there is a world of difference.
Appiah wants to suggest, correctly, Mill as an inspiration for a liberal fashioning of identities simultaneously rooted and cosmopolitan. But his account demonstrates, contrary to his intention, what Mill did not think. A rooted cosmopolitanism, Appiah suggests, is ‘more easily done than said’. It is the condition of maintaining a spontaneous balance between parochial attachments of nation and tribe and connection to the wider world. Appiah cites his father as an example: Ghanaian and pan-African nationalist, as well as an internationalist who pinned strong hopes on the UN for bringing justice to all humanity. His sisters in Ghana and Nigeria, and himself in the US, are offered as more examples.
The problem with this ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ is that the ‘cosmopolitan’ implicitly eclipses the ‘rooted’. The easy, effortless, urbane mobility across cultures and places Appiah assumes is not the condition of most humanity, although he is right that a globalized existence in greater or smaller measure has ever been the human story. Appiah’s account characterizes a privileged and cultivated few, conversant with many languages, raised in many different worlds, physically and metaphysically.
The Mill Appiah conjures is Mill Lite. There is nothing Mill would like better to see than the individuals Appiah proclaims are more easily found than conceptualized. Appiah makes it too easy, however. It is Varouxakis who gets Mill exactly right:
What makes Mill’s `cosmopolitan patriotism’ more interesting and more down to earth than other attempts to promote cosmopolitanism is that it does not shun more particularistic attachments such as nations or fatherlands, love of country, and the feelings of pride or shame most people feel on behalf of their respective countries in their relations with other countries. Instead, Mill tried to utilize those feelings of pride or shame and the mobilizing power they generated in the service of cosmopolitan ultimate goals.
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Mill believes that the parochial instinct is among us the primary one, chronologically and in intensity, but that it can be enlarged through education to embrace all humanity and so become cosmopolitan. To feel in their little platoons seems for humans to be a precondition for feeling on a larger scale. Cosmopolitanism comes to some of us. It is a becoming, not a being.
Why should this matter, for Mill or for multiculturalism? First, individuals vary greatly in their capacity and preference for cultivating cosmopolitan over parochial attachments – as they do in their capacity and preference for personal autonomy. The choice-making and experimentation liberal multiculturalism hopes for is predicated upon the security of recognition of identity. And even then, only some will become rooted cosmopolitans while others will remain more rooted than cosmopolitan. This is something that Mill sees much more clearly than Appiah. Diversity of cultures may be a necessary, but is not a sufficient, condition of individual flourishing. That requires in addition the nourishment of particular cultural resources as well for most individuals.
This is an insight that seems peculiarly unavailable to many contemporary liberals. The acknowledgement of particularistic, conditioned, habitual needs, as well as of adventurous proclivities, far from making Mill an advocate of parochial nationalism, produces a multiculturalism more comprehensively liberal than theirs. It is certainly one based on a more astute reading of the full range of individuals’ needs and aspirations. Unlike his contemporary heirs, Mill’s liberal multiculturalism is the one that enables the satisfaction of the widest variety of needs and choices, without presuming to narrow these down to his own preferred scale.