My July Fourth post on the burqa prompted thoughtful responses, one of which, from Anthony, I reproduce in full here, in order to try to respond to it in full.

As always, my comments are bracketed, and in blue.

Agreed on the duty of the state.  [UD wrote, in answer to Dance, another commenter, that “The state is under no compulsion to uncover the true feelings of every covered woman in its borders. It has a duty, rather, to understand its own founding principles, and to recognize and protect itself from gross insults to them.”]   France’s action, however, does nothing to accomplish that goal.  [Au contraire:  If the goal is for a state, and for citizens of a state, to understand more fully that state’s founding principles, then the French action so far — which involves strong statements against the burqa by the leader of the country, NOT its outlawing.  Yet. — has, it seems to me, done wonders to energize and clarify the state’s efforts, and its citizens’ efforts, to recognize what it means to live in a secular democratic republic.  If the burqa lies, as I believe it does, on the cutting edge of civic life; if it represents a line you do not cross if you are a democracy, then it’s very much to the good, very much accomplishing a great deal, that many people in France are talking about and taking negative positions on the burqa.] I’m not particularly persuaded by dueling NY Times op-ed pieces on the subject. Rather, I’d look to France’s own statements on what it stands for, and the effects of this policy on it, to determine how the current government is doing living up to the duty you correctly identify.  [The commenter will now analyze various founding statements having to do with French political identity.  This is an important feature of arguments about the burqa, but I would caution that much in global responses, not merely French, to the burqa, has to do with unwritten customs.  Allow me to quote from an opinion piece in Forbes:

“What if we were confronted, in our cities, by a neo-pagan cult with passionately held views that required all their votaries to walk around naked in our streets? No doubt after a hubbub of debate, largely stoked by loony freedom-of-speechers, we would soon arrest the cultists, wrap them in blankets and throw them in jail for indecent exposure.

But the questions will remain: Where do we get these notions of decency? With what right do we impose them on others? Why should our standards of dress trump those of the cultists? We may not resolve the matter intellectually, but this much, we will conclude, is clear: We do espouse a coherent set of rules about such things–at least we consider them coherent–and we are prepared to support them with legal sanctions. They may not be written into the Constitution, being largely a matter of self-evident cultural or civic or even moral norms, but we do stand by them.

… Yes our political traditions allow all manner of variegated freedoms of speech and action, but we do differentiate between the barbaric and the civilized. We are not only political animals. Our values do not end with those laid out in constitutions and bills of rights. In fact, one can argue that the U.S. Constitution does not comprise a morality in itself but rather lays down a framework that allows our actual code of values to operate, whether it’s one based on the Bible or Cartesian empiricism or a host of inherited cultural traditions.”]

[Back to the commenter now, and to my responses.]

For starters, France’s motto is “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. This policy would seem in conflict with Liberty (as you’re removing the choice from the woman) and Equality (who else will be subject to similar attire-based restrictions?).  [On liberty:  I, and many people, believe that it is intellectually impossible to accept, outside of assuming a person is perverted, that the burqa is something a rational person, a citizen rather than a slave, freely chooses.   So I believe that there is no choice, outside of a preference for perverting oneself, in the wearing of a burqa.]   Fraternity (as long as we forgive the implicitly gendered language) is trickier. It will probably be a net win (greater sense of inclusion in the surrounding society), but don’t discount the effects of isolating the woman in question from her existing local/familial/religious community.  [One of strongest arguments against the burqa points to the fact that all democracies are open societies, in which freedom of assembly, and freedom to speak and act in conditions of human equality, are profoundly engrained, the very substance of our daily lives.  Total anonymity makes engagement in the civic realm largely impossible.  Not entirely, of course.  But largely.  And if a woman (recall that only women wear burqas) lives in a community that shuns her because she will not wear a burqa (by the way, the burqa has no religious grounding, so we cannot describe her shunning community as shunning her on the basis of religious grounds that the state must respect),  then she is in the unfortunate situation of living in a cult.  Plenty of people in democracies live in cults of various sorts, and we respect all sorts of anti-democratic behaviors from them within their cults.  We have, however, a lot to say about how they behave when they leave the compound gates.]

Okay, let’s set the catchy motto aside and look for something a bit more substantial. The relevant sections from Article 1 of France’s current constitution, as revised, read:

“[France] shall ensure the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race or religion. It shall respect all beliefs.”

This seems a pretty clear violation of respecting all beliefs, unless you’re going to assert that *no* woman wears the burqa by choice, which seems pretty bold. [I’ve always been bold.  Note that the language says we must respect all beliefs.  Not that we must respect all actions.]  I think we’re also looking at a pretty pronounced violation of the equality of religion; are we going to look at Christian nun’s habits? Is it just the veil that matters? It’s noteworthy that culture is not explicitly protected; I’m not sure if the authors made the common mistake of equating race with culture (hey, it was 1958) or made a more conscious decision; either way, trying to squeeze this into a cultural determinant with no religious component seems pretty sleazy.  [Once again, the full burqa has no religious component except perhaps in the minds of the people trying to enforce it.  Here we must make a distinction, as all states must, between moral relativism and tolerance.]

We can find similar problems in Article 5.

In the United States, when evaluating laws that potentially run afoul of things like First Amendment protections, the courts use the Least Restrictive Means test: assuming the desired goal is valid (in this case, presumably, “liberating” women forced to wear the burqa, which I’d certainly agree is a valid goal), is the proposed law the least restrictive means of arriving at that goal? Yes, that’s US not French law, and I’m [not] fluent enough with French constitutional law to know if they have anything equivalent, but the idea holds up well: faced with conflicting principles, are we doing the least damage to them possible?

I think it’s clear that in this case the answer is a resounding “no”. The problem here is not the garment, it’s the culture of forced anonymity that frequently accompanies it. No woman should be forced to wear a burqa, but it’s the forcing, not the burqa, that’s the problem. A solution which targeted the correct half of the situation – the verb, not the noun – would be both less restrictive and more effective.   [This would be very difficult to do, if I understand what the writer’s suggesting, since virtually all women in burqas will, when asked, assure an interviewer that they couldn’t be happier.]

I have absolutely no objection to the idea that many women are forced into clothing and lifestyle choices against their will. But where are the restrictions on stilettos and minis? I’ve heard more men tell their partners something akin to “wear something tight” than “wear this bed sheet”. Whereas the burqa can be (mis)used to anonymize, generalize, and neutralize a woman’s appearance and thus (arguably) a portion of her identity, the over-simplifying and hyper-sexualizing of her image caused by all manner of other fashion choices is no less damaging (arguably to herself and her peers).  [Here we really part ways.  Laws exist against nudity and offense to community values, etc.  The idea that there could be any equivalence in terms of self-degradation between tight clothes that reveal a good deal and the burqa, explicitly designed to annihilate a person, is unpersuasive.]

Do you really want the state getting into those decisions?  [Not necessarily.  I agree that laws banning the burqa are not such a great idea.  I do see  them in play, however, in countries like Turkey, and they seem to work just fine.  Yes, I’m aware Turkey has its traditions that make this law more easily assimilated into the population, perhaps.  Yet as with many laws that people have argued against on the basis of the horrid things they’ll bring about — Plenty of people anticipated fatal mayhem on airplanes when frantic smokers went mad after three hours without nicotine. — it’s usually the case that the laws settle in pretty smoothly.]

So. I’ve done anonymity and perversion. Why death? Because I’ve noticed, reading through scads of opinion pieces and comments about the burqa, that people keep referring to it as a death shroud.

I think there are many reasons why people like me respond very strongly to the burqa — why the leader of France, when he announces it’s not welcome on French soil, gets almost total and enthusiastic approbation from the French people. The burqa disturbs us very, very deeply, and we shouldn’t shrink away from the fact of that deep disturbance to some bogus neutral statecrafty attitude. We should, as Michael Sandel urges, feel that emotion, experience that moral outrage, take it seriously, consider it from all sides. The burqa is appalling because it is a pall. Because it carries among us the animated corpses of women who deserved a life. That is extremely demoralizing to have around, especially to have around young women just beginning to get a sense of their own power and possibilities in a democratic society.

So no. I’m not at all sure about the idea of outlawing the burqa. But I am sure that we should, when confronted with it, understand that it is an obscenity.

… to conclude my comments on Michael Sandel’s Reith Lectures. The final lecture took place on UD‘s campus, the immensely well-located George Washington University.

I found the lectures disappointing, pitched at too high a level of generality — almost at the level, at times, of platitudes. Sandel comes across as a careful, well-meaning, bland person; there’s no passion in his delivery, and no real effort to engage his audience polemically by saying things sharply, or in a way that deepens their controversial nature.

And in fact Sandel’s content is controversial, having at its core an attack on the still-dominant public policy regime in American and other governments, a regime in which the moral and spiritual questions inherent in complex and contested public issues (health care, the environment) are put aside in favor of bloodless technocratic solutions.

“The attempt to empty politics of moral controversy may seem to be a way of respecting our differences, but it is actually corrosive of democratic life.” The attempt to come up with morally neutral, cost/benefit responses to civic problems, Sandel insists, fails to solve them, because these are issues that transcend consumer preferences. Governments that treat us all simply like consumers with preferences fail to appeal to our civic instincts; yet without awakening those instincts, governments will never draw from us the sense of solidarity and urgency which alone can resolve these problems.

“Monetizing moves decisions from democratic politics to technicians… [The] spurious science of cost/benefit analysis … elevates technocratic decision making at the expense of democratic deliberation.”

[D]emocracy is about more than tweaking incentives in order to make markets work better… or maximizing GDP, or satisfying consumer preferences … [It’s] also about distributive justice; [and other values at the heart of democracy] … Why then have we drifted… away from older traditions of solidarity and civic virtue? …

Sandel concludes:

Think of the self not as a consumer but as a citizen…

[D]eliberation is about changing our ways of thinking, [not merely satisfying static desires.]… To get important things like health care for all, you need solidarity — a sense of the mutual responsibilities of citizenship… [To get environmental change, you] need to change people’s attitudes toward nature… [This is a] moral and spiritual project, not only an economic one…

On the question of distributive justice, Sandel notes the extreme income and wealth inequalities in the United States at the moment, and the attendant deterioration of public services (the very wealthy withdraw from these services socially and ultimately economically), as well as the disappearance of public places where Americans of very different backgrounds can mix as equals.

(On a parochial note, allow UD to say that the university fulfills two of Sandel’s requirements in a very important way: It provides a public space for the civic and civil deliberation that can change the way people think, or that can allow people to understand why they continue to think in the way they do; it also creates one of those public places Sandel has in mind, where economically and socially diverse people can come together and deliberate in a setting not about money, but, in this case, about quality of thought. It goes without saying that the online university can in no way be this public place.)

Sandel’s is an important argument that needs to be made as strongly as possible; yet his lectures, as I say, don’t seem adequate to the urgency of the matter.

***********************

A final thought:

Why not talk about Michael Jackson, or Bernard Madoff, or any of the money-grotesques that the very rich, hyper-privatized, morally neutral culture Sandel evokes has spawned? Jackson in particular embodies with chilling exactitude the withdrawn, opulent, heavily drugged life which might be seen as one endpoint of the civic regression Sandel’s worried about.

Jackson had in his house an anesthetic, propofol, so powerful and dangerous it’s only used in operating rooms. It doesn’t calm you and relieve pain; it puts you into a coma. It probably killed him. How did he get it?

Well, with enough money, you can get anything. And for whatever reason, in many cases, the more money people have, the more their desire is to withdraw. From civic and social life. From life itself, I guess. At five million dollars or so of wealth you’re comfortably numb; in the Jackson stratosphere, you’re – day after day – comfortably dead.

Sandel needs to grapple with the fact that Michael Jackson is an American hero.

 Never take freedom for granted.