There is an interesting article in this month’s Prospect magazine on the response in France to the Charlie Hebdo murders. (‘What’s wrong with France’s schools?’ subscription needed) In it, Lucy Wadham looks at French educational practice and argues that its reaction to the terror threat is threatening to make the problem worse.
In essence, the response has been to stamp ever harder and to shout ever louder that ‘secular, republican values’ are the answer. Only by ensuring, sometimes by some quite heavy-handed and draconian means, that all school children know, believe and adhere to aforementioned secular values can we be confident that Charlie Hebdo will not happen again. Secularism, it seems, is the answer.
The only problem is that it isn’t. Not only does Wadham point out that this approach threatens to suffocate educational and personal freedom – she even uses the word Maoist at one point – but it risks having the opposite effect to the one intended.
The logic is that by bringing all French boys and girls into the tent of laïcité as soon as they can walk, thereby inculcating values of freedom, respect, tolerance and equality among them all, the state will turn out adults imbued with a sense of freedom, respect, tolerance and equality that goes right down to the bone.
Doubtless in many cases it works. But in many others it does not. If you present young Muslims with a set of public values that are so understood as to effectively exclude the possibility of their Muslim faith, should you be surprised if they turn against such values? If being a good member of the republic means signing up to a culture in which I (as a Muslim woman) cannot dress in the way I would like and I (as a Muslim man) am obliged to see Charlie Hebdo’s mocking of my religion as something admirable, and I (as a Muslim child) am being policed for signs of anything that seems antagonistic to the state (and Wadham gives one or two chilling examples of this), then, quite frankly I don’t want to be a good member of the republic. I may sink into an intellectual and cultural ghetto and rub my social bruises. I may nurse a sense of alienation and dislocation. I may do something inexcusably worse. However I respond, it hardly nurtures the health of the republic.
Secularism, then, is not the answer. Or, rather, secularism of this kind is not the answer. There are other kinds, some of which may be more amenable to and supportive of genuine pluralism. (I have discussed this elsewhere) However much that may be the case, though, the basic point stands. ‘Secularism’ is not neutral. It smuggles in various concepts of the good, under the cloak of hooray words like freedom, respect, tolerance and equality, the meanings of which are in fact deeply contested and contestable. We should not give succour to those who call for a culture that is unfree, disrespectful, intolerant or systemically unequal – though I have met few who do. But we should hear those who claim that this supposed freedom, respect, tolerance and equality is not quite as humanising as others claim, and that under the capacious guise of such obvious goods, more controversial notions of the good life and the right life are being trafficked in silence.
Image from wikimedia available in the public domain.
