By Tony Curzon Price
openDemocracy organised a 9/11 memorial discussion, with several of our leader writers invited, chaired by Isabel, our editor.
As you would expect, there was a ton of acute perception - ranging from weary idealists like Paul Rogers to weary realists like Nadim Shehadi.
Julia Pascal (not an oD author yet) was there representing, I suppose, 9/11 viewed from "the arts". She made her argument strongly: "I believe in choice. Religion destroys choice. Children should be protected from fundamentalisms that take their choices away. Teach them religion like Shakespeare or Homer, not as a way of life that imprisons."
The retort to this "supermarket-shelf" view of life seems almost too obvious: the choice that no one can be given is the choice not to choose. If a valuable - maybe traditionalist and religious - way of life requires submission, it cannot be freely chosen. The supermarket mentality, once entered, may infect whole swathes of possible lives. That is exactly the defense of the militant traditionalist against the modern.
This is a real Achilles' heel in the defense of Enlightenment values through choice: it is totally unanswerable from within. I imagine that Julia would say that it is just a small niggle - who cares about that tiny subset of lives that cannot be chosen when the set of lives to choose from is so huge, varied, exciting and attractive.
Maybe so - except that an Achilles' heel always selects your successful opponents. The only way to deny the value of choice is to celebrate those lives that are without it. Opposition creates its own ideologies.
There is an Enlightenment alternative to Choice as the basic political value: Tolerance. There is no affirmation of the self in tolerance, as there is in choice - there is an affirmation of the choice of others. What is the Achilles’ heel here? We can still be tolerant of the intolerant, even when the intolerant are intolerant of tolerance. Better to base our politics on the virtue of tolerance than the luxury of choice.
Funnily enough, Julia had a retort from Fareena Alam, in the front row and wearing a head-scarf. "I have chosen my religion and my garb ..." she started. It was clear that we were already in the supermarket. The exercise of tolerance was not going to strain anybody tonight.
