Religious Intolerance and Liberal Education

by Martha Nussbaum
Commencement Address for the University of North Carolina at Asheville
Saturday, May 14, 2005

Chancellor Mullen, faculty, administrators, alumni and trustees, honored guests and parents, and, above all, students: Congratulations.  You have made it to a great milestone in life.  You have a lot to be proud of.  I’m very moved to be standing here today, in this beautiful place, where long ago, at the age of twelve, I went to summer camp, rode horses, and felt very very homesick. 

On this happy day, I would like to ask you to pause briefly to consider one of the largest problems our world faces today, a problem, I want to suggest, for which the type of liberal education you have received at UNC Asheville provides one of the most hopeful remedies.   The problem is religious intolerance and hatred.  I want to begin with a story from my own experience doing research on this topic in India.

It is a very hot late June day in Gujarat, a state in Western India.  The monsoon is soon to begin, and a terrible combination of extreme heat and humidity hangs over us all.  With my research assistant, I arrive at the home of K. K. Shastri, the President of the state branch of the VHP, the cultural organization of the Hindu right.  I have come to interview him about religious violence in his state, where in March 2002 Hindu mobs, reacting to an event in which it was believed that Muslims had killed fifty-eight Hindus in a train car (although the incident is now believed on the basis of scientific evidence to have been a tragic accident), killed approximately two thousand Muslims, most of them utterly unconnected with the original incident, and most of them elaborately singled out for death on grounds of religion only.  Women were raped and tortured.  Small children were killed and incinerated along with their families.  The local VHP, I know, kept lists of Muslim homes and businesses, the better to assist the mobs.  I have come to interview Shastri about these events for a book I am writing on religious violence and democracy in India.

Imagine seeing Mahatma Gandhi, clad in his usual white loincloth, his skinny torso bare beneath an almost-bald head.   Now imagine this ascetic form joined to a different face, not the kindly childlike face, with its deep laughing eyes, that made strangers so quickly gravitate to Gandhi, but a face something like the one that John Buchan ascribes to his fascist hero in The Thirty-Nine Steps, the face of a man who could “hood his eyes over like a hawk.”   No humor, no warmth, but a piercing intensity.  Now imagine this composite form extending a skinny arm across the table and touching the arm of my research assistant Mona Mehta, a young slender Hindu woman around five feet tall, very vulnerable-looking.   He says to Mona, speaking suddenly in Gujarati, “My dear, I must give you a warning.  These Muslims, they abduct young Hindu women.  They take them away and do terrible things to them.”   I understand what is said only later, when Mona whispers a translation in my ear, but I see how the aged form is galvanized with excitement at the thought of little Mona’s danger and his own role as guardian of her purity. 

We spend an hour discussing religious tensions, and Shastri, who has signed a release for me to use the material I am tape recording, tries to make a good impression on me; he keeps asserting his desire for peace, while at the same time insisting that Muslims and Christians cause trouble wherever they are.  How, then, I ask him finally, can peace be brought to Indian society?  “Peace,” he concludes,  “is impossible while Muslims and Christians are around.  They are not prepared to listen.”  What is the solution to the problem of Muslims and Christians not listening to Hindus?  “The only solution is that [they] should straighten up.”  How can they be straightened up?  ‘We can’t do it.  A certain force will do it… These Muslims are in the business of spreading poison wherever they go.  This is their main occupation all over the world and they can only be taught a lesson through brute force.” 

Sometimes there are new problems in the world.  But in general, the old problems of humanity, deeply rooted in human beings’ relationships to one another and to the world in which they live, are the most painful and the most difficult to solve.  Some of these old problems will never go away: mortality for one, and therefore the grief with which we meet the deaths of those we love, the fear with which we await our own; the frailty of the body, its susceptibility to so many infirmities and diseases; the relative scarcity of things people need to live and live well, food, water, clean air.   Some old problems seem to improve locally and temporarily in one or another place, but they still show no signs of disappearing globally: racism and sexism, for example, sometimes seem to be on the run, but they always reappear somewhere, often accompanied by horrifying violence. 

Certainly one of the worst old problems of our world is religious intolerance and hatred.   Already in the third century B. C., the Indian emperor Ashoka, himself a convert to Buddhism from Hinduism, put forward edicts instituting mutual respect and toleration as official policy.  The nations of Europe lagged behind, but by the seventeenth century they, too, had discovered these useful ideas.  John Locke’s influential A Letter Concerning Toleration set out norms of mutual respect and equal citizenship that were influential not only in Europe but especially in America, where James Madison and Thomas Jefferson built them into the U. S. Constitution.  By our time, the idea of a pluralism that shows respect to all religious groups, protecting religious liberty and promoting equal conditions of citizenship, is a major pillar of virtually all the world’s liberal democracies.  Religious freedom is a major part of all international human rights documents and of constitutions the world over – prominently including the Constitution of India, which has even more elaborate protections for religious freedom than does ours.

And yet, intolerance flourishes in virtually every nation.  In 2002, India saw the hideous Gujarat riots, in which public officials and the police actively collaborated.   By now the Indian Supreme Court has condemned the government of the state for its role, and the national government that passively aided the violence has gone to electoral defeat; and yet violence remains a looming possibility, and victims who try to bring the perpetrators to account in court have faced an uphill battle.  Europe has recently seen a frightening rebirth of anti-Semitism and also of anti-Muslim feeling.  In Holland, in Germany, in France, ugly violent incidents are becoming more common.  Prejudice against Muslims and a tendency to equate Islam with terrorism are all too prominent in the U. S., a nation of immigrants that ought to know better, since so many of our citizens, early and late, arrived her in flight from religious persecution.   Every member of the Hindu right whom I have interviewed for my book has assumed that I, as an American, will already be on their side when they say that Muslims cannot be good citizens, when they assert that Muslims are a danger wherever they are.   And of course Hindus too have been victims of violence and intolerance throughout the ages, and even today in some parts of the world.   And Muslims have themselves been perpetrators of violence in the name of religion, as well as its victims. 

Why is religious intolerance so persistent?  And what can modern democracies do about it?  The desire to assert supremacy over others is a deeply rooted tendency in human beings.  Immanuel Kant called this tendency “radical evil,” and he thought that people were just born that way: put them together in a group, and they will immediately begin to vie for domination.  I myself would prefer to connect this tendency to a deeper human insecurity about frailty and helplessness.  We are intelligent creatures who, from an extremely early age, are aware of an extremely great weakness and helplessness toward things of the highest importance, such as food, love, and life itself.  It is not surprising if ambitious intelligent beings, in a situation of helplessness, should react by striking back at the world, so to speak, attempting to create security in the midst of insecurity.   Forming a dominant group that controls the course of life in your region is one very good way to create at least temporary security, all the more if that group can define itself as good, and its opponents as inferior or even evil.  By subordinating others, people can forget for a time the weakness and mortality that they share with those they oppress.

Religion has many roles in human life, many of them extremely valuable.  Religions help people cope with loss and the fear of death; they teach moral principles and give motivation to follow those.  They are sources of community in a world of loneliness and alienation.  But just because religions are such powerful sources of morality and community, they can all too easily become vehicles for the desire to create security that Kant called “radical evil” and that I might call the flight from helplessness, so often bound up with oppression and hierarchy.   When people bond together in a religious group, the very religious nature of the bond makes it all the easier for them to represent outsiders as evil.  And the fact that religions usually teach that only one religion is helpful for salvation, perhaps even for overcoming death, suggests that those who don’t believe are damned, and maybe evil, in the sense that allowing them to go free in society is to threaten the salvation of others.   It is impossible to live at peace with those whom you believe to be damned, said Rousseau.  Well, it may not be impossible, but it is surely very difficult. 

Rousseau’s own solution to this problem was to promulgate a “civil religion” in his imaginary republic, which included the idea of theological toleration: everyone is saved, so long as they also accept the other patriotic views that Rousseau added to his civil religion.  People who wouldn’t accept these beliefs could be banished or even executed.  He was well aware that in his ideal republic all Roman Catholics and most Protestants would not be able to live, but he thought that it is “impossible to live at peace with those whom you believe to be damned,” so he felt that his coercive vigilance was worth its price. 

Rousseau was wrong.  His cure is as bad as the disease of intolerance.  Modern liberal-democratic states rightly prize religious liberty and freedoms of speech and association.   Even when people are religiously intolerant, so long as they do not actually harm others (or, perhaps, threaten imminent harm), the state should protect their freedom, as well as that of the tolerant.    But is there, then, nothing to be done about “radical evil” and the intolerance to which it so frequently leads? 

One big part of combating religious intolerance is good laws.   Most modern democracies give minority religions strong legal and constitutional protection.  The part of the U. S. Constitution that tells us that all citizens have the right to the “free exercise of religion” has operated over the years to protect Quakers, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslims, and many other minorities from laws that would require them to violate their consciences, for example by serving in the military when their religion is pacifist, or by working on Saturday when that is their religion’s holy day.  This part of the Constitution has not always worked well: judges are afraid of what is new and strange, and Mormonism and native American religion, in particular, have been given very unfair treatment in our nation’s history, as have the claims of Jehovah’s Witnesses to be free from imposed ceremonies that they regard as idolatrous, such as the compulsory flag salute.  Much of the time, however, something works: minority groups eventually achieve the protections that the Constitution promises them. 

Equally important is the clause in the Constitution that says that Congress shall make “no law respecting an Establishment of religion.”  People today sometimes have the idea that our traditional separation of church and state expresses hostility to religion, or is a way of marginalizing religion, even expressing the view that religion is not important. Nothing could be further from the truth.  The Founders of the United States believe that religion was extremely important.   They also believed that allowing government to take a stand in religious matters would prove very damaging: it would corrupt religion by making it a part of state bureaucracy; it would corrupt government by making religious animosities part of daily political life.  Above all, a point James Madison stressed most vigorously, it would turn the equality of citizens into hierarchy.  When the government makes statements expressing the thought that ours is a Christian nation, for example, non-Christians are cast as unequal players in the civic drama.  They do not enter the polity “on equal conditions,” to use Madison’s words.  That is the very shift that the Hindu right in India would like to see: they would like to define India as essentially a Hindu nation, and minorities feel, rightly, that this would cast them as unequal citizens.

But law is only one part of the solution to the problem I have described.  An even more crucial part is education, which forms the hearts and minds of young citizens, and thus provides law with essential support and life.  I now want to argue that our traditional concept of liberal education is well placed to advance religious respect and equality.  I’ll focus only on the college and university part, but of course these elements of learning have essential roots in earlier years.

Here at UNC Asheville, you have not only prepared yourselves for jobs, you have also received a liberal education.  What does that mean? Well, in its most general form, it means an education for freedom, an education that “liberates” your minds so that you can take charge of your own thinking and become people who stand for something, not passive mouthpieces for tradition and habit. 

Three capacities, above all, are essential to a liberal education in today's world, and they are all, I believe, built into the structure of your education at UNC Asheville.  First is the capacity for critical examination of oneself and one's traditions -- for living what, following Socrates, we may call "the examined life."   This means a life that accepts no belief as authoritative simply because it has been handed down by tradition or become familiar through habit, a life that questions all beliefs and accepts only those that survive reason's demand for consistency and for justification.  Training this capacity requires developing the capacity to reason logically, to test what one reads or says for consistency of reasoning, correctness of fact, and accuracy of judgment.  Testing of this sort frequently produces challenges to tradition, as Socrates knew well when he defended himself against the charge of "corrupting the young."  But he defended his activity on the grounds that democracy needs citizens who can think for themselves rather than simply deferring to authority, who can reason together about their choices rather than just trading claims and counter-claims.  Like a gadfly on the back of a noble but sluggish horse, he said, he was waking democracy up so that it could conduct its business in a more reflective and reasonable way.   Our democracy, like ancient Athens, is prone to hasty and sloppy reasoning, and to the substitution of invective for real deliberation.  We need Socratic teaching to fulfill the promise of democratic citizenship.   Your courses in critical thinking and in other related areas, Philosophy above all, fulfill this promise.

Citizens who cultivate their humanity need, further, an ability to see themselves as not simply citizens of some local region or group but also, and above all, as human beings bound to all other human beings by ties of recognition and concern. We very easily think of ourselves in group terms -- as Americans first and foremost, as human beings second -- or, even more narrowly, as Protestants or Catholics or Hindus or Muslims first, Americans second, and human beings third if at all.  We neglect needs and capacities that link us to fellow citizens who live at a distance, or who look different from ourselves.  This means that we are unaware of many prospects of communication and fellowship with them, and also of responsibilities we may have to them. Cultivating our humanity in a complex interlocking world involves understanding the ways in which common needs and aims are differently realized in different circumstances.  This requires a great deal of knowledge that American college students rarely got in previous eras, knowledge of non-Western cultures, and also of minorities within their own, of differences of gender and sexuality.  I would emphasize particularly the importance of having an adequate knowledge of all the major world religions, so that simplistic stereotypes of Islam, or any other religion, would be subjected to the full complexity of history and the nuances of internal debate.  Your diversity courses, your emphasis on foreign languages, and your other international offerings fulfill this part of my proposal.

But citizens cannot think well on the basis of factual knowledge alone.  The third ability of the citizen, closely related to the first two, can be called the narrative imagination.   This means the ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of that person's story, and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone so placed might have.   The narrative imagination is not uncritical: for we always bring ourselves and our own judgments to the encounter with another, and when we identify with a character in a novel, or a distant person whose life story we imagine, we inevitably will not merely identify, we will also judge that story in the light of our own goals and aspirations.  But the first step of understanding the world from the point of view of the other is essential to any responsible act of judgment, since we do not know what we are judging until we see the meaning of an action as the person intends it, the meaning of a speech as it expresses something of importance in the context of that person's history and social world.  The third ability you have attained in your education here – through integrative liberal studies, interdisciplinary courses, and the strong emphasis on the role of the arts -- is the ability to decipher such meanings through the use of the imagination. And I think it is in some ways the most essential of all, if we are to work toward a world in which we see distant lives as spacious and deep, rather than simply as occasions for enrichment.

How might someone like Mr. Shastri have been changed by an education of this sort?  Well, of course there will always be bad people in the world, and no education can completely remove the propensity to lord it over others, or even to use violence in the service of one’s own ends.  But so much of what Mr. Shastri said to me shows a complete absence of critical reflection.  A paranoid view of society was expressed and not tested.  Nor did he have a deep or adequate knowledge of Islam and Christianity: that is why he could demonize them so easily.  Finally, what he most especially seemed to me to lack was the ability to imagine the pain of another person, an ability that would have made it far more difficult for him to accept with equanimity acts of violence, rape, and torture.   

Modern societies need all the help they can get if they are going to combat the religious tensions that are such a painful part of our current situation, as they have been of humanity’s entire history.  We need the help of good laws. But also, and above all, we need the active minds of young people, informed and stimulated by a liberal education, if we are ever to live in a world in which we confront the tendencies to humiliation, oppression, and hatred that will always be with us, in the name of a future of equal respect and brotherhood.   Congratulations.  May you take what you have learned into the world, and create that future.