Simon Rabinovitch on Tolerance vs Cuddling

Is this the most foolish assertion ever made by a History Professor?

'The purpose of religious tolerance has always been, and remains, to maintain the power and purity of the dominant religion in a given state.'

I know what you are thinking.
You are wrong.
The Professor in question is not Indian and, moreover, hasn't even attended JNU. 

His name is Simon Rabinovitch- which, let's face it, is a high IQ type name. Perhaps, young Simon is pretending to be stupid and ignorant so as not to be lynched by his Departmental colleagues.

The fact is, no state has ever sought to maintain 'the power and purity of the dominant religion' by tolerating- as opposed to persecuting- other faiths. However, in order for the State, not the official Church, to hold or increase its power and wealth, it has often been necessary to tolerate other faiths more or less grudgingly. There has always been a tradeoff between 'God & Mammon'. The Old Testament chronicles the manner in which Kings of Israel might whore after false Gods so as to increase their wealth and power. The path of Religious persecution and intolerance, however, could weaken a country from the economic and military point of view.

The canonical examples of Religious toleration- that of Fredrick the Great, of Emperor Akbar, or that of the American Founding Fathers- was wholly unconcerned with the 'purity' of the dominant religion in their respective states.

Akbar actively diluted Hanafi Islam- introducing practices like prostration to the throne and encouraging a 'sulh e kul' ecumenism- so as to reduce the countervailing power of the Clergy.
Fredrick the Great was not concerned with religion at all. Religious toleration was good for the economy. The American Founding Fathers did not all belong to the same sect. As Jefferson said, they chose the path of tolerance because 'in matters of Religion, divided we stand, united we fall'. Rabinovitch, knows this very well- indeed, he could probably tell us a great deal about the Rabbis to whom Jefferson addressed this remark.

Most dominant religions in most states today profess tolerance, but they also seem to feel especially threatened.

Catholicism and Anglicanism have declined greatly in their heartlands but neither Catholics nor Anglicians seem particularly exercised about it. Even the Irish Republic has voted for abortion. It doesn't look as though any State, except perhaps Iran and one or two such outliers, is going use its coercive machinery to protect the power, or purity, of the established or traditional religion in their country.

Religious nationalist movements in the United States, Europe, India, Turkey and Israel all want to strengthen the relationship between state identity and the dominant religion.

Where is the 'religious nationalist movement' in the U.K? It doesn't exist. What about France? Most would agree that there is no such thing as a 'Catholic vote'. Last year, the Bishops appeared to be favouring Macron over Le Pen. What about Germany? Once again, the thing does not exist. I suppose Rabinovich means Poland- but Poland is Catholic and the Pope is scarcely a 'Religious Nationalist'.

Rabinovich is American. I am not. If he says Trump is a Religious zealot leading a Puritan Revolution- I will defer to him. Israel, of course, is too complex to say anything useful about.

What about India? Surely Modi has strengthened the relationship between the state identity and the dominant religion? Sadly, the answer is no. India was thoroughly Hinduized after independence.

As an example, look at Nathuram Godse's speech defending his assassinating the Mahatma. Godse places a lot of emphasis on Gandhi's preference for 'Hindustani' over 'Hindi' as the National Language. What happened to that 'Hindustani'? It disappeared. The Government promoted 'shuddh' highly Sanskritized Hindi which few Hindi speakers could understand. The joke was when the National Radio announcer said  'Now we bring you the News in Hindi' what actually happened was that people got to hear a little Hindi in the News.

The Muslims had previously enjoyed a significant share in power and there were many tokens of their special status even in States where they were a minority. By 1950, they were completely crushed.  Cow protection was written into the Constitution as a Directive Principle. The wholly Hindu term 'Bharat' was adopted as the official name of the country. Many educated Muslims emigrated to Pakistan during the Fifties and Sixties. Indeed, the mid Sixties was the worst time for Muslims. Salman Rushdie's father was forced to emigrate because of the draconian measures of the 'Custodian of Enemy Property'. During the '65 War, people travelling in border States had to drop their trousers to show they were not circumcised. The troops were trigger happy and what they began the mobs would gleefully have ended. Thankfully, everybody could see that Indian Muslims- including those in the Kashmir Valley- had shown exemplary loyalty. Moreover, even the Ulema were making 'Socialist' noises. Thus the Muslims deserved something more than 'toleration'. They had proved their patriotic credentials and thus had appeased the Brahmins and Kayasthas whose golden age only ended in the mid to late Seventies. The new 'Backward caste' based parties competed for the Muslim swing vote using Religious symbols- the classic example is Ram Vilas Pasvan parading around an Osama look-alike- and Congress and the TMC and so on played along- however, once the BJP consolidated a cross-caste 'backlash' Hindu vote against supposed 'Muslim appeasement', they showed themselves perfectly ready to reassert their orthodox credentials. Thus Rahul Gandhi now says he is a sacred thread wearing, Saivite Brahman who visits Temples to seek blessings. By contrast, Amit Shah is a crypto Jain and Modi some low caste fellow who keeps gassing on about the need to build toilets and end open defecation.

This is not to say that Hindus are or were anti Islam. It is more a case of clashing customs. Hindus oppose cow slaughter but think music delightful. Muslims consider music being played outside a Mosque to be a provocation. Things can come to a head if the festivals of the two religions coincide and so the processions of different creeds clash in the streets. However, this is a policing problem which is efficiently tackled- absent political interference of a mischievous kind.

During the Fifties and Sixties, most developing countries- following the lead of economists like Samuelson- thought Socialist Economic Planning was a short cut to strength and prosperity. It was in this context that Religion was marginalized and 'Secularism' ruled the roost. It was only after it had become apparent that Socialism was a God that failed, that the 'bazaari' middle class saw a superior source of Law- or a superior countervailing power against the elite- in the shape of orthodox Religion.

However, it is by no means clear that voters want the dominant Religion to be the source or mainspring of State Identity. Rather they want to see the State as accepting the constraining and countervailing power of traditional Religion and Moral Values. More importantly, the rural and provincial town voter wants the State to grant them parity, in terms of Hirschman 'Voice', with metropolitan or global elites. But this also means 'last mile delivery' of Public Services. Indeed, arguably, it is this economic aspect which is uppermost in their minds.

In each case, democratic elections have reinforced the significance of the majority’s religion to the meaning of state and nation, elevating the power of that religion. We can see a rising chauvinism in the mix of Catholicism and politics in eastern Europe today that portrays liberals and communists (often a code for ‘Jews’) as enemies. We can see a similar dynamic in the Turkish celebration of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. And we can also see it in the reemerging influence of Evangelicals in the US, as defenders of ‘religious liberty’ in their associations and businesses, and against ‘Sharia’ – as they imagine it – in the public sphere.

 Our Professor can see whatever he wants to see by the same method that those he decries see what they want to see- viz. Soros imperilling White, Christian, Europe coz Rich Jews only love Muslim terrorists and are keen to import as many of them as possible because Muslims are so sweet and nice to  Jews.

Even as religious nationalism gains strength, claims to membership in the ‘West’ rest in large part on a political avowal of religious tolerance.

Very true! The late Rev. Ian Paisley, notoriously, applied for membership to ASEAN because he rejected any sort of toleration of Catholics who, he said, 'breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin”.  However, this attempt of his to leave the West and join the East was rejected because his description of Pope John Paul II as “the scarlet woman of Rome” was held to be dangerously misleading to Oriental sex tourists visiting the Eternal City.

When religious nationalists claim the mantle of tolerance based on the legal protections that exist for religious minorities in their states, they are not wrong. Tolerance has indeed historically been a framework for people fundamentally different from one another to live peacefully together. Which is precisely why it is time to dispense once and for all with tolerance as a model for relations between groups.

When religious nationalists claim the mantle of continence based on not shitting and pissing all over the place, they are not wrong. Continence has indeed historically been the framework for people fundamentally different from one another to not piss and shit all over each other. Which is precisely why it is time to dispense once and for all with continence as a model for relations between groups who don't want to pissed or shat upon.

Tolerance skepticism has a long history, stretching back to the German author J W Goethe, who said ‘to tolerate is to insult’. It faced a sustained critique after the Second World War from philosophers and political theorists such as Karl Popper, Herbert Marcuse and many others who saw liberal tolerance as guilty of passively acquiescing to the rise of fascism in the first half of the 20th century. Where Popper saw that a liberal society required repression of some intolerant views for self-preservation, Marcuse saw liberalism’s tolerance of injustice as the problem itself.

Popper and Marcuse were around in the Thirties. Their critique didn't stop Hitler. Why? Critique is worthless. It is just something pedagogues do in between marking exams and awarding worthless degrees in shite subjects.

Following Marcuse, in the 1960s the New Left asked if the idea of tolerance – especially of speech and political diversity – served only to shield governments, corporations and the elite in continuing policies of economic and racial oppression.

They also asked if the reason public masturbation was discouraged was because the practice destabilised and subverted the declensional heterocilty of the Post Kristevan Chora as instrumentalised by Wall Street and them evil bastards at the Post Office who put thoughts into my head when I'm stoned.

More recently, a school of international-relations scholarship has emerged emphasising how the foreign policy guiding Western governments now divides the world between the tolerant and the intolerant in much the same way that it has always distinguished between the civilised (whites) and the barbaric (everyone else).

More recently still, that 'school' was found to be as bankrupt as Trump University. 

Even so, the question of how tolerance – religious tolerance in particular – could be a tool of domination strikes many people as counterintuitive or perverse. Tolerance is deeply rooted in the canon of apparent modern ideals: as an inherent good, a necessary individual ethic, a pillar of Western civilisation and proof of its superiority.

Utter bilge! Indifference to Religious nutjobs claiming they have the power to damn one's soul for all eternity, not tolerance, is a pillar of any sane society.

Yet tolerance, as an idea and an ethic, obscures the interaction between individuals and groups on both a daily basis and over the longue durée; the mutually reinforcing exchange of culture and ideas between groups in a society is missing in the idea of tolerance.

So, it is a worthless notion. Only indifference or well bred, scarcely concealed, contempt for claims of supernatural powers or occurrences matter.

Groups do not interact in isolation, they share reciprocally, sometimes intentionally and sometimes inadvertently.

If Groups interact they can't be isolated. They don't 'share reciprocally' at all. My Doctor refuses to listen to the medical advise I very kindly offer her in return for her stern admonition against my eating my own weight in chocolate biscuits every week. This is because the Group she belongs to regards itself as superior to the Group I belong to- at least when it comes to medical knowledge.

If it is true that a global society exists, what its best parts embody today is not tolerance, but reciprocity, the vital and dynamic relationship of mutual exchange that occurs every day between individuals and groups within a society.

A Global Society is one characterised by Trade and Human and Capital flows of a predominantly economic kind. There is no dynamic relationship of 'mutual exchange' in economic transactions because specialisation is on the basis of comparative advantage and most transactions are intermediated or arbitraged.

For teachers, journalists and politicians to begin to speak in terms of reciprocity instead of tolerance will not do away with intolerance or prejudice.

So, why bother?

But words are important and, as much as they reflect our thoughts, they also shape how we think.

Sheer nonsense! Having to mouth the Party line does not 'shape how we think'. Rather it is an excuse not to think.

I may say to myself every day 'I am witty and charming and devilishly good looking'. But my shaving mirror tells me a different story.

Idealising tolerance embeds dominance.

Really?  If I 'idealise tolerance', will I become a charismatic and powerful man, able to dominate a board room, or the unruly denizens of a brothel, with a mere jut of my jaw or flicker of my eyebrows?

Speaking in terms of reciprocity instead of tolerance would both better reflect what peaceful societies look like, and also tune people’s minds to the societal benefits of cultural exchange.

Wonderful! We should not just welcome refugees from horrible parts of the world but learn how to properly circumcise our daughters from them. Reciprocity requires nothing less. Tolerance is not enough!

The idea of tolerance owes its origins in part to the Augustinian tradition of the early Christian Church, which was greatly concerned with defining the boundaries of the Christian community. How could Christians live peacefully with people they believed to have crucified their god? St Augustine’s position on the Jews held that these crucifiers should be allowed to live in the midst of Christians and to bear witness to the fate of those who reject Christ.

So, tolerentia was similar to patientia- a Stoic putting up with something painful which strengthened one's character.
However, States and Empires already had a better model of what we mean by the term in a Religious context. Josephus, explaining the origin of anti-Semitism, stresses the tolerant founding regime in Alexandria where Greeks and Jews and native Egyptians co-existed. The Greeks didn't like this and so they calumnied the Jews. However, Josephus's patron, the Emperor, could not be affected by the malice of those miserable scribblers. Rather, like the great Macedonian, or his Persian predecessors, Ceasar would act pragmatically and fully avail himself of the talents of the Jews- despite their religious peculiarities.

Jews would remain on the outside of the holy Christian community – tolerated, as a remnant of the pre-Christian past. But Christian tolerance of Jews also created a theological problem: how to square the premise of God’s punishment of the Jews with the simultaneous reality of Jewish agency, sometimes prosperity, and sometimes power (even over Christians).
To take one example, during Poland’s late-medieval and early modern expansion, the need for mobile, literate managers with commercial experience (and preferably few political demands) led the Polish nobility and the Crown to welcome Jews to Poland to fulfil important socioeconomic roles. Some towns in the 14th century wrote charters for the Jews, outlining explicitly their freedom to organise their autonomous religious and communal life for the benefit of mutual Jewish and Christian prosperity. Yet this prosperity also brought increased competition between Jews and Christian burghers, to whom, by the 16th century, the Crown granted in some towns the Privilegium de non tolerandis Judaeis (the right not to tolerate Jews). The town of Lublin received such a privilege in 1535, but then the Jews, who formed a Jewish town at the foot of the castle walls (on the outside) received a parallel privilege, de non tolerandis Christianis in 1568. These arrangements successfully created a stable society with co-dependent and reciprocal relationships between groups, even while the goal of tolerance for all parties remained the greatest possible isolation, or perhaps insulation, from one another.

So what? The Poles, notoriously, foisted the worst possible political arrangement on themselves. Why mention them? They are scarcely a role model.

Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, Sikhism and many other civilisations have historically maintained their own traditions of religious tolerance.

Confucianism- maybe, because the Buddhists contributed to improvements in Chinese philology and helped bring barbarian tribes within the ambit of Chinese literary culture. But, currently, Islam and Buddhism and Sikhism are in the news for the opposite quality. In the case of Sikhism, I believe internecine conflict- e.g. with Nirankaris and various Dera heads- are a comparatively new development.

On the other hand, Europe’s Reformations, if anything, expanded intolerance. The Reformation made stamping out heresy a marker of religious devotion. Before the compromises required for different Christians to live among one another were made, violent religious wars plagued Europe for 100-plus years in the wake of the Protestant and Catholic reformations (from the mid-16th to the mid-17th century). Legal tolerance might have been the winning solution to resolve that century-long descent into fratricide but, for a long time after the reformations, intolerance was seen as a worthwhile theological attribute. A Christian refusal to tolerate significant deviation from doctrinal orthodoxy – or the Jew or the Muslim, or the ‘heathens’ and ‘savages’ whom Europeans were first encountering in their Age of Discovery – was a marker of holiness and purity, and of a leader’s willingness to put spiritual matters above earthly concerns. A certain notion of tolerance, and the necessity of freedom of conscience in places where the balance of military power was not held overwhelmingly by one group or another, did indeed grow from the reformations and the wars of religion. But it took many years, with dramatic downs and ups, for the idea of tolerance to become a positive good valued in European society.

I think the author means 'the right to due process irrespective of confessional status'. This had to do with economics not some 'idea of tolerance' which only pedagogues gas on about.

Tolerance was not a virtue brought to America: it was imposed by Europe to administer its overseas empires.

Rubbish. The Spanish and the Portuguese did not impose tolerance on their possessions in the New World. Quite the contrary. Many of the leading Sephardic families in America can trace an ancestor to the 23 Jews expelled from Brazil in 1654 who chose to settle in New Amsterdam- that is New York.

For the first English theorists of tolerance such as John Locke, tolerance was necessary first and foremost to protect Christianity and Christians’ souls. As Locke put it, ‘that I esteem that toleration to be the chief characteristic mark of the true Church’ (some have tried to differentiate between tolerance and toleration – using the latter to refer to state policy – but the two words remain synonymous in common usage).

Sheer nonsense. Locke was simply saying that the State had better things to do then worry about what might happen to the souls of its subjects. This did not mean he thought atheists or scandalous antinomians should be tolerated.

It was in the 17th century, at the very earliest, that the idea of tolerance began to take root in Europe as a principle consistent with good and effective government, and only with the European Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries that philosophers, theologians, political theorists and men of letters argued that tolerating difference was necessary for a functioning and prosperous society.

So, only Economics mattered. Ideas could go hang.

The idea of a citizen or subject’s ‘right to toleration’ circulated throughout Europe with the philosophes’ project of the Encyclopédie (1751-72), an attempt to reorganise human knowledge in a way that its editor Denis Diderot believed would ‘change the general way of thinking’. Not only republicans, but enlightened absolutists too, such as Prussia’s Frederick the Great and the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, became proponents of tolerance, always, of course, defined on their own terms.

Yup. Despots wanted to kick meddling Bishops to the curb- when it suited them.

It was in the American colonies where European powers – first the Dutch and then the British, seeking peace among their colonists – instituted protection of individual religious conscience. Contrary to American national mythology, tolerance was not a distinct virtue carried to America by those who built their imagined city upon a hill: it was imposed by European colonial powers to better administer their overseas empires. The ideal of religious tolerance was sewn further in the colonies by transplanted Londoners such as William Penn and Roger Williams, but always to protect Christianity from politics, and not the other way around.

The Dutch and the British were solely concerned with Economics. Neither tried to impose Christianity on their possessions in the East Indies, unlike the Portuguese or even the French.
However, other European colonisers in the New World did impose Catholicism.

The US, from its birth, marked groups for tolerance and intolerance. The country attempted to conquer, control and Christianise the native people and, until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, the very minimum tolerance – the simple ability to live – was denied to them in most places, and in others was the most they received. Africans fell into an entirely different category; slavery reflects neither tolerance nor intolerance, but rather inhumanity. Even so, the idea that the foundation of the American polity is a multiplicity of ideals – religious and political – was a tension among the founders of the early republic who themselves debated which Enlightenment principles should stand at the forefront of their ideological experiment. It was Thomas Jefferson and James Madison’s vision that an enlightened state must resist creating a religious foundation upon which other dissenting views are dependent for toleration. Jefferson’s view of the political community failed to include women, African Americans or native people, but he grasped the danger of premising citizenship on the tolerance of one religious group by another.

The American founding Fathers were always prepared to turn a blind eye to the massacre of Chritianised natives- like the Lenape massacred at Gnadenhutten- or the continued enslavement of Christians of colour. Perhaps, this was a factor in the persecution of the Mormons who were chased from one State to another. I'd like to believe so because I like Mormons and would certainly invite to dinner, and then dine on, any young missionaries of theirs who chance to be in the neighborhood of my wigwam.

The Enlightenment, the rise of nation states, two world wars and post-war European decolonisation transformed tolerance from a legal concept that regulated the privileges and disabilities of minority religions to a philosophical and ethical ideal.

Economic and technological development led to orthodox Religion being seen to be absurd and having no basis in fact. People also stopped believing in magic and witchcraft and alchemy and so forth.

With the ascension of international human rights law following the Second World War, states stopped articulating the protection of minorities in edicts of tolerance or guarantees of minority rights.

No they didn't. Pakistan had some first class, international level, jurists. Their constitution does have old fashioned 'protection of minorities'. So what? Nobody was fooled. J.C Mandal, who was Pakistan's first Law ministers, picked up his dhoti pleats and ran for the border.

They instead created legal protections for speech and conscience and laws protecting against discrimination.

Speech and conscience were already protected. Laws against discrimination were a later development in response to demographic shifts and pressure from below.

Many of the old compromises of early modern toleration live on in state churches, officially recognised religious minorities and the accommodations to religion (especially in family law) that remain in many states. But for the most part, as the political theorist Wendy Brown has observed in Regulating Aversion (2008), the sites of tolerance have changed. Tolerance is discussed today as a moral rather than a legal question, and as a matter of civic and cultural life rather than as a practical answer to theological problems.

It is only discussed by pedagogues and pi-jaw merchants. The thing is meaningless simply.

In fact, tolerance has never escaped its origins as a means for the majority to regulate the minority.

It had no such origins. The means for the majority to regulate the minority is by beating them and stealing any cool stuff they might have.

It continues to be the case that in today’s national state system the overwhelming majority of governments associate the state directly or indirectly with the majority religion.

Though it makes absolutely no difference to anybody. America does not have an Established Church. England does. An American who moves to England will not feel obliged T.S Eliot's example and embrace Anglicanism. Indeed, he'd be considered a pretty odd fish if he did.

This is even true in states with legal neutrality on matters of religion such as the US and France. As such, tolerance remains a one-way relationship between the tolerating and the tolerated that, intended or not, keeps the tolerated outside of full membership in the dominant group.

Either one is or is not a member of a group with an intensional definition. Toleration won't change this. Nor will 'reciprocity'. Let us say I tolerate your moving into my house. Does this mean you become me? Nope. Suppose things move on and we end up in a relationship which involves reciprocal exchanges of bodily fluid. Will you have become me? The answer is still no.

In contrast to tolerance, reciprocity recognises that strong and dynamic societies are based on social and cultural exchange.

Weak and stagnating societies are equally based on social and cultural exchange. When a society becomes less reciprocal- for example, you stop braiding my hair in exchange for my braiding your hair and set up a hairdressing salon so as to charge money for your superior skills in matters of coiffure- Society may become more, not less, dynamic. Barter is highly reciprocal. It is also a giant pain in the ass. Market transactions are the way to go though no doubt you have to tolerate people you don't like coming into your place of business. Still, them's the breaks. Suck it up and laugh all the way to the bank.

A focus on reciprocal exchange first emerged in the social philosophy of the early pluralists of the American intellectual tradition about 100 years ago, who battled nativism and resistance to immigration. For instance, in 1915 the philosopher Horace Kallen attacked the sociologist and eugenicist Edward Alsworth Ross for his claim that 20th-century immigrants to the US brought with them dual allegiances that could not be assimilated into American society. Kallen argued in the Nation that what the ‘dominant classes in America’ fear is precisely the fact that, in the process of becoming American, religious and national groups create something new and different that in turn affects American civilisation. Kallen, who coined the term ‘cultural pluralism’ in 1925, and others among the first theorists of pluralism in the country, argued against a kind of toleration contingent on groups effacing their origins. Rather, the pluralism that took hold in some universities and urban landscapes – and certainly not without resistance – presumed that the US and its immigrants benefited reciprocally from immigration.

The American economy boomed thanks to immigration. Lifting restrictions- for e.g. on Indians and Pakistanis and so forth- in the mid Sixties turned out to be a great boon for what would become NASDAQ. This is pure economics. Nothing to do with some pedagogue arguing with some other pedagogue. Move along please. Nothing to see here.

The early pluralists’ preferred metaphor for American civilisation was a symphony. In this metaphor, each group contributed a distinct sound to an evolving and harmonious musical arrangement. But the fact that each group played its own instrument, and performed from its own music, became a problem for later critics of both pluralism and multiculturalism. The symphony is fine and good, so the argument goes, except when everyone is too concerned with the musicality of their own performance. For liberal doubters, pluralism’s emphasis on ethnic and religious identities only serves to draw boundaries that exaggerate differences. For conservative critics, multiculturalism is incoherent compared with patriotism to country, the only identity of significance. Without all groups adopting a shared civic identity, the ideals of pluralism and multiculturalism are just variations on the old idea of toleration, albeit with a greater appreciation for the benefits of diversity to society.

There is a good reason nobody bothers with these 'early pluralists' and their conservative critics. They had shit for brains and influenced nothing. Only Economic forces matter.

However, using reciprocity as a lens to view society, the instruments themselves change, and are exchanged, along with the music.

Nonsense. There was no symphony. People were working producing cool stuff and then spending their money buying cool stuff. Using this lens or that lens didn't help any though taking a shitload of drugs might have done.

Like pluralism and multiculturalism, reciprocity exalts the virtuous circle by which the many cultures of groups shape the culture of a state, and the evolving culture of a state in turn changes the cultures of the groups.

It may exalt whatever it likes. Nobody cares.

Yet unlike pluralism and multiculturalism, reciprocity, as a term, directly evokes active mutual interaction and influence.

So does cuddling. Why not say 'Like pluralism and multiculturalism, cuddling, as a term, directly evokes mutual interaction and influence'.

Indeed, this may be the correct Straussian reading of Rabinovitch- let's try it, and see.

And as a philosophy, cuddling recognises the mutual collective responsibilities, and even sacrifices, necessary for such symbiosis. All individuals, in our daily choices and conduct, give up some element of our identities to belong to the broader society. In Émile Durkheim’s great work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), he argued that every individual must transcend his or her own needs to participate in a society. The ‘collective effervescence’ that the individual feels in being a member of that community and participating in its rituals is not only very real, but is the essence of every religion and society. At the same time, societies and states – be they civic empires or federations, nation states, ethno-religious states or something else – need cuddling to thrive. History has left us no examples of civilisations that have flourished without the exchange of cultures, ideas and people and cuddles.
What about those who refuse to acknowledge that cuddling is the root of all healthy societies? The question of the limits of toleration has provided grist for the mill of many political theorists; is cuddling vulnerable to the same vexations? If cuddling’s binary is understood to be total isolation, then the answer is no. Perhaps one of the benefits of cuddling as a philosophy or an individual and collective ethic is that it is impossible for any group to live in a society, or at least a liberal-democratic society, non-cuddlingly. There are always individual non-contributors, but no group can exist within a society without cuddling. Individuals and groups might see themselves as living in tolerated isolation, but it is very unlikely that cuddling is not going on. If a group was to say we don’t want to cuddle with the state, other groups or society, the response must be that, willingly or not, you already do. American cuddling has shaped religious groups extolling isolation – such as the Amish in Pennsylvania or Hasidim in New York – no less than anyone else. As for those who claim that they (being some other group) do not cuddle, the response must be that cuddling posits the impossibility of such an existence.

One of my students astutely pointed out that the problem with cuddling is that the mutuality it invokes does not take proper account of the hierarchies that exist in all societies. How, for example, would cuddling resonate with a group that is impoverished and marginalised? Such a group is unlikely to see its relationship with the dominant society through the lens of cuddles. Nonetheless, cuddling remains a helpful ideal from which to approach this structural inequality. Social marginalisation, for example of African Americans in the US or Muslims in Europe, reflects a breakdown in cuddling that can only be improved by greater recognition of the contributions of all groups to our collective wellbeing. The logic and psychology of cuddling suggests that humans feel a sense of obligation to behave in a cuddly manner toward one another, and that cuddling is the source of such basic human activities as the rituals of gift-giving. Similarly, civic cuddling already regulates the relationship between states and groups: the treatment of groups by a state or society tends to determine the sense of obligation to that state or society among individuals in those groups.

Cuddling is a philosophy, a social ethic, a way of seeing the world, and a psychology. At its most basic distillation, it can serve as a description of both what binds individuals and groups to and within a society, and the mutual exchange of culture that serves as the lifeblood of all prosperous societies. Finding a new framework to approach societal problems is important at a time when ideological differences resting on economic worldview seem to be fading. Because one set of ideals (for diversity, pluralism and exchange) is being challenged by another (for intolerance or, at best, a return to a highly contingent tolerance), a space has opened for a new civic philosophy.

To develop the concept of cuddling as an individual and collective political ethic we can teach it, study it and write about it. Most of all, we can talk about it, shifting away from a binary vocabulary that counters intolerance with calls for tolerance, and toward a discussion of shared histories of cuddling and mutual obligations to cuddle. We must also individually and as groups acknowledge our own civic responsibilities, to our society and to one another, as we respect the cuddles of others. In the elected representatives we choose, the policies we support or oppose, and the causes we take on, we can idealise cuddling as a positive good, and measure ourselves and the progress of our societies against that ideal.

The Constitution of the French Second Republic, enacted during the wave of democratic revolutions known as the Springtime of the Peoples, which swept through Europe in 1848, includes one simple article that grants no right or power to either the state or the people. Article VI states only: ‘Cuddly duties bind the citizens to the Republic and the Republic to the citizens.’ The Philosophy of Cuddliness makes this claim but goes further: the more we acknowledge what types of cuddling binds each group to the society, and the society to each group, the better off we will all be.

Dunno about you, but I think this Rabinovitch dude might be onto something.  Think I'll go cuddle some nice chocolate bikkies with the insides of my tummy just now.