Communitarianism as a Threat to Individual Freedom and Diversity

Lgbti Liberals of Europe annual Congress, Bratislava (remote connetion), in coincidence with the annual ALDE (European liberal party) Congress, December 3^rd 2022

Thank you very much for the invitation, I think this is for many reasons a particularly appropriate instance to discuss these issues.

The purpose of this contribution is to discuss the dilemmas arising, from a liberal point of view, from the segmentation of our societies into self-referential communities, each developing their own subcultures.

Our societies are growing more and more culturally diverse and the expression of these diversities is to be appreciated as a value, and beneficial to a free society, as long as cultural diversity does not reject or affect the respect for the basic principles of liberal democracy, individual rights and the rule of law.

Individual freedom to form and join associations is a cornerstone of a liberal society, and the condition for a vibrant and diverse civil society to flourish. The segmentation of societies into “communities” based upon ascribed identities of whatever kind, to which groups of individuals are supposed to “belong” regardless of their actual and free personal choice – a model unfortunately popular among many lgbt+ organisations, too – is, I think, a totally different matter.

All the claims of political, religious or community leaders, who expect that individuals who are part of a particular nation, or members of a specific ethnic, religious or linguistic group, or the offspring of a particular descent, or carry certain ascribed characters, should be negatively or positively discriminated in their rights on those basis, should be flatly rejected. Identical individual legal positions should be treated identically; differentiated individual legal positions should be treated in a correspondingly differentiated manner.

This implies that individuals should always be legally treated as individuals, not as individual members of typified groups; that cultural diversity can never justify any compression of individuals’ rights within minority communities, or minority families, or those of minorities within minorities; that faith, ideas, traditions and practices of their elders should never be forcefully imposed, especially on minors who are «capable of forming their own views» (as provided for by the New York 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of Children).

freedom of religion versus individual freedom and versus freedom from social, community and family coercion;

freedom of religion versus free development of the personality of minors and their own freedom from social, community and family coercion;

market freedom in education services and free choice of parents versus freedom of minors from indoctrination and free development of their own personalities.

Lgbt+ persons are clearly directly affected, but also other minorities, especially apostates, women and minors in general. The most obvious area of interest for these dilemmas is that of religion and religious communities, but the same problems may involve extremist illiberal political positions: should nazi, stalinist or populist parents be allowed to indoctrinate their children into their views, and should this power over their offspring be free from any checks and balances?

My idea is that all powers over individuals in an open society – not just state or public powers – should be limited and subject to a system of checks and balances. As lord Acton said, «liberty consists in the division of power». To an extent, almost everybody would agree in principle: parents are not allowed to sexually abuse of their children, and abuse of chastisement is also considered nowadays a crime, almost everywhere. But the scope of these limits is a matter for debate.

And it is a matter for debate for liberals in particular, as 1) freedom of religion has been at the origin of all liberal freedoms; and 2) societal pluralism and an articulated and autonomous civil society has also been recognised as a value by liberal thinkers, sometimes even a precondition for liberal institutions.

Things are even more complicated, as I believe that after the age of majority was lowered to 18 in all Western countries half a century ago, one unintended consequence has been a sort of generalised infantilisation of adolescence, consistent with the more general ever lower social propensity to accept risks. But minors should be considered citizens and individuals and not just as a property of their parents, even though their legal capacity is limited.

Therefore, I personally think that, especially whenever there is widespread evidence of a societal coercion by communities or families to force individuals to comply with traditional behaviours, a liberal society should provide a serious protection to all individuals that can be victims of such a coercion.

I would not recommend that this principle is entirely enforced from one day to the other: although I think that choices in the domain of religious belief should not be made by parents, maybe it would be too much to suddenly introduce legislation forbidding Muslim or Jewish parents to circumcise their children, or Christians to baptise them (Baptists are actually much wiser than other Christians on this point). Yet, questions like these should be put on the agenda for public debate, in order to promote a clearer awareness of the problem and an evolution of behaviours in society. Law enforcement is probably to follow when the issue is mature enough, or, better said, when a final decisive push is required.

In any case I don’t think that religious or politically militant parents should have the right to prevent their children from coming into contact with teachers or peers with totally different views than their own (for example, allowing home and non-professional education as a replacement for attending schools).

Of course, anti-gay pseudo therapy must be strictly forbidden. But parents should also not be allowed to have the final say on their children’s gender, which is less obvious for many. Sexual mutilation is obviously a crime, but I also think that the so-called “reasonable arrangements”, such as “symbolic” cuts, even with no pain or permanent consequences, should not be allowed, even less provided in public hospitals.

And parents should not be allowed to force children, at least those children «capable of forming their own views», to attend any sort of religious rite or political demonstration against or without their cognisant will.

Parents and pupils should not be allowed to impose on schools and teachers any compulsory consistency with their family or communitarian views on issues as sexual education, gender, the Shoah, evolutionism, etc.

Schools and hospitals should never accept gender discrimination or other kinds of discrimination in their staff based upon the ideological or communitarian preferences of parents, pupils or patients.

Perhaps the most telling example of how delicate and almost intractable these questions may prove is that of the “islamic veil”. In a secular state, neutrality should be demanded of public institutions, and probably also of the individuals who act on their behalf. In theory, in the French interpretation of laïcité, it is sometimes also required of individuals who enter the public sphere – even of those individuals who are compelled to enter it. But if one listened to the hearings of the French presidential commission of inquiry on the subject, as I did, one would understand that the real point was not there. I admit that, after listening to these hearings transmitted at the time by the French Parliament Tv channel, I completely changed my initial position: at the beginning, I was opposed to any ban, in the name of individual freedom. I thought schools should be religiously neutral and secular, not necessarily schoolchildren. But during the hearings, the real point no longer seemed to me to be the defence of the neutrality of the public sphere, and not even the question of “religious signs” in general (that was the utterly misleading official French narrative), but the protection of the free development of the individual personalities of minors in face of an imposition by families and/or religious communities much more widespread than imaginable, which appeared to have been established in vast areas of French territory. This imposition had as its object, more than a religious sign, an archaic symbol of female submission, not exclusively typical of the Islamic religious tradition. The choice of the French legislator, tragic in any case in my opinion, was between prohibiting the use of the veil even to schoolgirls who really wanted to wear it, or accepting its imposition on those who were victims of a silent violence that was very difficult to be detected in most cases, except in extreme situations and only in case of a stubborn and almost heroic resistance on the part of the girl. In any case, it seemed to me that such an imposition from the age of puberty onwards would inevitably result in a lifelong conditioning, because everyone understands that over the years a garment that must be constantly worn in public can be felt as a second skin. I understand all the possible objections, some of them very reasonable, I understand the political stakes, the implications, the possible and even inevitable manipulations, in particular by xenophobes and racists. But in any case the real, and, it seems to me, convincing, justification, the reason for the prohibition of the veil in the French public schools, a few hours each day in the lives of these young girls, is to be found in the respect for the free development of the personality of minors and not, as the French authorities and politicians officially said, in the simple protection of the almost sacred neutrality of the public sphere: a motivation that would be insufficient in my opinion to justify a significant limitation of individual freedom. And a motivation that is also falsified by the absence of a similar prohibition in French universities.

In any case, as you see, many of the consequences derived from principles we can easily share in theory are very controversial and open to different considerations and conclusions in terms of opportunity, different social or historical situations, balance between different constitutional (and liberal) values, etc.

My personal views are quite radical and inclined to embrace many of the practical solutions provided for within the French idea of laïcité, even if I don’t accept the ideological state-centred (and sometimes also slightly nationalist) framework often proposed in the French political and cultural debate.

After all, those solutions were largely the outcome of our own successful liberal tradition of religious and ideological neutrality of public powers; and separation – as large as practically feasible – between religion and political power. The «wall of separation between church and state» (Thomas Jefferson, 1802) is even today the most secure and effective tool to protect the freedom of conscience of each single individual and peaceful coexistence and integration in our inherently and irreversibly plural societies.