One of the greatest achievements of critical thought is the recognition of invisible power relations – those that exist when no power is being consciously exercised, that seem to be intrinsic to reality, underlying “natural” situations. One of the most challenging manifestations of such power dynamics is the relationship between majority and minority.
Wherever there is a majority and a minority, the majority becomes, to some extent, the default. If most people speak Hebrew, then speaking Hebrew is taken for granted, and the use of another language requires justification. If most people are heterosexual, then assuming a heterosexual identity is self-evident, while a homosexual identity, with its specific attributes, is perceived as an exception that demands explanation.
What is distinctive and compelling about the power relations between majority and minority is that no individual in the majority is personally responsible for the structure of these power dynamics. They emerge organically from the fact that, whether formally or informally, many societies are made up of a majority and a minority.
In many respects, belonging to a majority is highly gratifying. Members of the majority are understood by their peers without the need for explanation. Since members of society are similar, they experience the world in a similar way, share similar fears, and aspire to similar goals. Therefore, the deepest desires of a majority member are mirrored and affirmed in the faces of their peers. For precisely these reasons, someone who does not belong to the majority will find this reality difficult and demanding. The public sphere is also structured according to the expectations and characteristics of the majority. This is not unique to oppressive societies. Even in a society that prides itself on championing its minority groups, the minority individual is still required to engage in the extra labor of self-representation and mediation of their needs and expectations – simply because what is self-evident for the majority is not true for them.
In identity politics, the minority is by definition a victim. The minority may rightly challenge the majority, not due to intentional wrongdoing but due to the very fact of its being the majority. Although these power relations are structural and no single individual is responsible for their existence, the prevailing view within progressive circles is that the majority should be criticized for possessing the unacknowledged privilege of self-evidence, which is inherently denied to the minority. The majority enjoys something valuable, which the minority lacks, and thus becomes an object of condemnation.
But here, the argument begins to lose ground: is there truly something inherently wrong with enjoying the comfort of belonging to a majority? If the answer is yes, then we should not impose that privilege upon the minority. If the answer is no, then on what grounds can we criticize the majority for enjoying it?
The Story about the Green Man
by Yehonatan Geffen
If I happen to meet someone who doesn’t understand me,
Or thinks I’m a baby. If I happen to meet
someone like that, I immediately tell them about the green man.
Once upon a time, in a green city, there lived a man,
A green man. The green man lived in a green house, with
A green door and green windows,
He had a green wife and two green children,
And at night, he went to sleep in his green bed
And dreamt green-green dreams.
One day, the green man got up in a green morning, put on
Green shoes, a green shirt, and
Green pants, placed a green hat on his head, and went outside.
The green man got into his green car and drove
On the green road at a green speed. On one side
Of the road the man saw a green sea, and on the other, lots of green flowers.
It was a beautiful day, and the green man was happy,
And sang green songs and smoked a green cigarette
With green smoke.
And then the green man saw, on the curb,
A blue man standing. The green man stopped his
Green car and asked the blue man: “Hey,
Blue man, what are you doing here?”
“Me?” the blue man replied, “I’m from another story.”
A blue man in a green city is an anomaly. He does not belong. Even if the green man is friendly and welcoming, the fact remains that the entire city is green: the houses, the road, the flowers. The blue man will always feel different and alienated in a world where the public sphere is green. If a mayor is elected in the green city, he will, in all likelihood, be green, with a green office and green assistants. The blue man belongs to another story.
The blue man’s discomfort in the green city is firmly coupled to the green man’s comfort and ease in it. The green man feels at home because he is green and the city is green, while the blue man feels ill at ease because the city is green, and he is not.
Two Possible Solutions
How can we make the blue man feel comfortable?
There are two possible solutions. One is to paint the city in many different colors. Many contemporary children’s books choose this solution – a sort of Benetton world of united colors scenario. In this type of city, each person would proclaim their unique hue in the same way they now proclaim their pronouns; no personal attribute would be taken for granted. In this type of city, everyone would belong, and not belong, in equal measure; no one would feel more at home than others.
This is an excellent solution to some problems but will offer no solution at all to others. It satisfies the yearning for equality by placing the green man and the blue man alongside people in myriad other hues in a city where no one is normative. But it does not solve the original problem: merely taking from the green man what he enjoyed in the green city, it does not give the blue man what he lacked there. The city of many colors does not enable anyone to be a green man in a green city or a blue man in a blue one. The deep-set human desire to be part of a collective that reflects one’s own image remains unmet.
The alternative solution is to build a blue city for the blue man. In such a place, the blue man can live within a collective identity that he belongs to. Here, he too can enjoy the simple, unproblematic comfort that the green man had. Naturally, in a blue city, a green man would feel out of place, because he would be the one coming from another story.
Comfort Is Not Racism
But what if the green man is white? Or Jewish? And the blue man is homosexual? Or Arab? Suddenly the story of the green man takes on a disturbing discriminatory or maybe even racial undertone. We are unsettled by the idea of a society built on complete homogeneity and devoid of differences. As liberals, we aspire to a diverse society with a place for everyone. Our wish is to allow different people to fully express their identity within our society.
The fact that we find the notion of homogeneity unsettling, when the story of the green man is transferred to a real-world situation, is significant. Our emotional response reflects sensitivity, a sense of justice, and a commitment to equality. But sometimes, this very reaction leads us to equate the green man’s comfort in the green city with racism. The desire to live among those similar to us, to feel a natural sense of belonging, suddenly becomes a wrongdoing. It begins to sound dangerously close to the belief that those different from us do not deserve the rights we enjoy.
However, it is important to remember that there is nothing inherently racist about the story of the green man. The imagined world of the story posits two parallel tales: one of a green city that is home to a green man, another of a blue city that is home to a blue man. This is a symmetrical and harmonious world. Blue people may visit the green city as welcome guests, and vice versa. Some blue people may even choose to make their home in the green city, but this does not imply they would wish to abandon their blue consciousness and assimilate fully into the green culture. And yet, acknowledging that green people will generally feel more at home in a green city, and blue people more at home in a blue city, is not a racist assertion. It is merely a description of the condition of being part of a majority or a minority.
From a liberal perspective, the aspiration should be to make the blue man feel as comfortable as possible in the green city. But in today’s moral discourse, the question has subtly shifted for many: Is it even legitimate for people to feel comfortable among those like them? Is it acceptable for green people to enjoy life in a green city?
One could argue that in an ideal model of equity, this comfort is indeed suspect, and no person should yearn for it. Such a view sees no value in the experience of being part of a majority. However, recognition of the right to collective self-definition and of the importance of group identity – a view universally shared in the liberal world today – implies a different standpoint: that belonging to a majority is a fundamental part of human experience. According to this view, it is not a privilege, but a basic right, and we should strive for a world in which everyone may partake in it.
Nonetheless, when moving from the amusing story of the green man to the complex, and often indeed racist, real world, we become somewhat disoriented and lapse into an inconsistent stance: we want the blue man to have a blue city to belong in, but we also expect the green man to feel shame for living in a green city.
The denial of the green man’s comfort does indeed stem from moral sentiment. It reflects a desire to take the effects of power relations seriously, and a sincere aspiration for a society in which all are equal citizens. Yet although, in theory, it appears to be the natural outcome of liberal thought, that is no more than an illusion. In fact, it marks the point where love distorts judgment, where we try to correct an injustice with another injustice. We should not make light of the misfortune of minorities. Yet even if it is right to hold the majority responsible for improving the minority’s lot, this reasoning cannot logically lead to a demand that the majority cease to be a majority. As long as there are a majority and a minority, some degree of the minority’s suffering is inevitable. We can – and must – seek to alleviate that suffering as much as possible. But if we aim to eliminate it entirely, we pull the rug out from under the very logic that gave rise to our moral sensitivity in the first place.
The rise of populism and nationalist movements in recent years may be described as a mass of green people who are tired of being on the defensive for wanting to live in a green city. The progressive ideal demands that they feel ashamed of feeling at home in a green city; ashamed of experiencing comfort, security, and ease while blue people walk among them feeling foreign and out of place. In effect, they are asked to feel guilty for being the majority, and for allegedly enjoying unearned privileges embedded in the structural power relations between majority and minority. This shame derives from the recognition of power relations between the haves and have-nots, and in this sense, it stems from a sincere striving for justice. Yet in its path it tramples the feelings of the green people and brands them as wrongdoers, as responsible for the suffering of the minority. Many green people – that is, many who belong to a majority group, often derisively labeled the “hegemony” – rightly feel that this demand is inherently inconsistent. After all, it emerges from the wish of granting blue people the same comfort, the same privilege of self-evidence, that green people enjoy. Thus, the divide in the political map grows ever more into two extremities: the progressives on the left, calling for the abolition of the majority’s privileges, and the populists on the right, insisting that the majority be allowed to enjoy its status without apology.
The Middle Way: A Version Update
A moderate political stance would recognize the distress inherent in the minority’s position and, in the name of equality, seek to provide its individuals with the conditions necessary to realize a collective identity. At the same time, it would acknowledge the legitimacy of a similar need for belonging among individuals who belong to the majority. This would, in theory, be a coherent position. In adopting it, we will be required to acknowledge the legitimacy of the majority’s comfort; to be willing to tolerate, to a certain extent, the majority’s peace of mind even when minority does not share it. This stance is difficult for us, as moral beings. It is hard to see someone suffer without concluding that we are obligated to end that suffering forthwith. It is hard to resist interpreting the power relations and hegemony arising from a majority–minority system as a moral call to take action and abolish those very relations.
If the experience of belonging to a majority were truly a privilege – something one could live contentedly without – perhaps it could be relinquished. But it is not. That it is a fundamental human sentiment, is clearly understood by all who maintain the minority’s right to self-determination.
Left-leaning critics of liberalism claim that political moderation is a moral compromise. That it reflects a lack of commitment to the liberal ideal of justice, an unwillingness to relinquish the comfort of hegemonic life that we enjoy through simply belonging to a majority. In the moral climate dominant today in the elite universities of the United States, it is difficult to think otherwise. But we are obligated to think otherwise. For the logical flaw this view produces is not merely theoretical; it is an acute problem in the real world, reflected in the ever-rising global climate of nationalism. The basic human sentiment embodied in the desire to belong, to feel similar, is not one that can be suppressed by moral conscience. The attack on this sentiment as racist is not only misguided and unfair; it is also ineffective and futile, for it targets an existential condition shared by all human beings. Thus, we are witnessing waves of backlash against progressive critique. And if we aspire to a just, liberal society, we must join in this effort of pushback.
Of course, recognizing the humanity of the feeling that seeks to permit the comfort of majority belonging does not imply legitimizing the actions this feeling may inspire. As both distant and recent history have taught us, the aspiration to sameness can give rise to grave and even horrifying injustices. Yet the way to prevent these injustices cannot be through denial of the simple human impulse that sometimes underlies them. Such denial is useless, for a human need so widespread, if violently repressed, will erupt in greater violence. Therefore, this conversation cannot proceed on the level of rights. Recognizing the legitimacy of a sentiment that desires belonging to a majority does not entail granting an actual political majority any specific entitlements. In fact, the discourse of rights itself is largely responsible for the toxic climate of mutual denial we must avoid.
What we need at this time is a path out of the dead end into which the discourse of rights has driven us – a language that will return us to first principles, to the good intentions from which that discourse originally arose. The language of progressive critique is one of atonement for the West’s historical sins through self-mortification. But the ideal of absolute justice is a well-trodden path to uncompromising extremism, whether from the left or the right. That, too, is human –the desire to attain such a perfect ideal of justice, to hold to it in truth. Yet the principle of reality, from which stems the recognition of the unbearable complexity of the human condition, means that we can never reach it. In place of an unattainable ideal of justice, the language we now need is a one of moderation – a language that recognizes the world as a place of compromise, of balance among conflicting needs that are all, in their way, just. Not the correction of wrongs through the denunciation of wrongdoers, but recognition of the humanity of all involved.
The type of moderation I propose here can be regarded as a version update for the idea of the middle way. The Aristotelian tradition formulates moderation as an ideal that consists in distancing oneself from extremes, which are bad in themselves. But the middle way also follows from another logic – one according to which the extremes are good, all of them good. The need to feel self-evident, to feel at ease in belonging to a majority, is part of the human condition; it reflects simple humanity. This insight does not change even when we encounter that sentiment within an inflamed populist crowd. At the same time, we cannot deny the suffering incurred by the power relations that will inevitably develop wherever there is a majority and a minority. That suffering is real, and our moral duty is to acknowledge it and strive to reduce it.
Recognizing that both of these claims are true, and that they do not negate each other, is the middle way. Political moderation, thus defined, is nothing more than the aspiration not to lose contact with all that is human.
