“All or Nothing”: On Liberal Universalism

“A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.”

“We make our libraries safe spaces for everyone.”

“Library collections represent all points of view.”

These are some of the platitudes of librarianship, the kinds of things tossed out by library leadership and library schools without much thought. They get to be annoying after a while, and in moments of crisis they become touchstones of struggle within the profession. What I want to focus on here is the universality of each of these statements: “everyone” “all”. I’ve spoken before about how many of the characteristics of library theory and practice as based on fundamental principles of liberal political thought: individualism, private property, exchange, contract, etc. But in this post I want to talk about librarianship’s adherence to liberal universalism.

A Google search for “liberal universalism” will supply many articles on the subject, often critiquing it from the perspective of difference or diversity. Universalism - either as universal reason or universal freedom or both - is present in the writings of Kant and Mill, and is a cornerstone of concrete liberal politics. Pierre Elliot Trudeau, for example, was critical of Quebec nationalism and against giving Quebec special treatment in the constitution because he believed in a universal Canadian identity that could not accommodate the Quebecois sense of difference, let alone an Indigenous or a Multicultural one (Quebec never signed on to the constitution, and Trudeau did his best to scuttle the Meech Lake reforms after he was out of office; the Canadian multiculturalism act also passed after Trudeau’s retirement).

Trudeau, however, was not above scoring political points, as when he defended his immigration policy by saying that “no such thing as a model or ideal Canadian… a society which emphasized uniformity is one which creates intolerance and hate”. Trudeau’s immigration policy was a way for him to defuse Quebecois nationalism in the wake of the October Crisis of 1970. In the second part of that quote, Trudeau reaffirms a commitment to universality by arguing that “what the world should be seeking, and what in Canada we must continue to cherish, are not concepts of uniformity, but human values: compassion, love, and understanding”. Trudeau here replaces one kind of universalism (“uniformity”) with a higher, transcendental universality of values.

Sarah Nickel, in her 2019 book Assembling Unity: Indigenous Politics, Gender, and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, argues that in formulating his “Just Society” policy, Trudeau "rejected the notion that any group could be accorded a position separate from the rest of the population and was convinced that removing the legislated difference between Indigenous and other Canadians [i.e. the Indian Act] could cure Canada's 'Indian Problem'" (49-50)

The liberal conception of universality springs - perhaps paradoxically - from its fundamental individualism. All of the individuals considered self-determining, capable of owning property and signing contracts, and politically participatory (i.e. white, property-owning men possessing reason) are the same in those qualities that matter (rationality, whiteness, property-ownership, gender). Other qualities, that are not politically significant, can be different (i.e. individual), but those four must be universal. The possession of those four equal characteristics both define freedom and make freedom possible. The oppression of groups who do not possess all four characteristics - e.g. women, Indigenous peoples - are politically and ethically legitimate, as per Locke and Mill.

One of the things postmodernism claimed to do was to try to reaffirm the primacy of difference in the face of liberal universalism. As the cultural companion to neoliberalism, postmodern simply doubled down on liberalism’s individualism, creating a pure individualism in which there can be no shared bonds - of identity, culture, solidarity - between people. Postmodernism, from a left perspective, is a reactionary social theory. But from the perspective of classical liberalism, the postmodern insistence on difference is a radical challenge to universal principles; this is the gist of Ed D’Angelo’s Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library.

The tension between individualism and universality allows libraries to emphasize one over the other - as Trudeau did - for pragmatic reasons. The thoroughgoing individualism of “Intellectual Freedom” is supported by a concept of universalism derived from classical liberalism, but that obscures the “selective universalism” of classical liberal politics (i.e. a “universal” politics limited to rational, white, property-owning men).

But one of the criticisms of liberal universality - and this is one of the things postmodern tried (inadequately) to address - is that a presumed universality ignores, and thus erases, the very real differences that exist in society. These can be “good” differences - cultural and ethnic diversity, etc, as in the Quebecois and Indigenous identities that Trudeau rejected - or “bad” differences like power relations, sexism, racism, class society itself. The liberal insistence on “person first” language in disability - challenged by disabled people themselves - is an attempt to erase the (socially constructed and maintained) difference of disability by prioritizing a spurious liberal universalism of personhood obstructed by liberal-capitalism itself.

The universalism supported by the library (“offend everyone”, “safe for everyone”, “all points of view”) is both physically impossible, but also dishonest, in that it rejects existing differences for a false sense of universal participation. It erases differences of power and the structures of oppression which have always existed in liberal society.

What we have seen in Ottawa over the last two weeks is an example of how spaces cannot be universally safe: the presence of Nazis in a space drives out other people. Marginalized people - indeed anyone with a moral conception of the world - cannot tolerate Nazis in the same space. Popper - who wrote a classic defence of the liberal world order - developed his “paradox of tolerance” on precisely this bases. If you make a space safe for both sheep and wolves, you will rapidly find that - one way or the other - only wolves remain.

The COVID pandemic itself has put the lie to the liberal universalism that states “we are all in this together”. As the authors of On Necrocapitalism: A Plague Journal wrote, vulnerability is unequally distributed. The slogan is

appealing because it designated that the pandemic has ramifications for people across the globe. However, it clearly has different ramifications for different people, as classes, according to their economic standing, not to mention race, gender, and other factors are largely left to the side.

However,

The claim that we are all facing a common threat is typically understood within the ideological terms of neoliberalism, which overemphasized personal responsibility and occludes the systemic conditions of personal choice.

In some ways, liberal universalism is aspirational: it is appropriate for the kind of world liberals would like to exist. But it is naive: that world does not exist. The irony is that that world doesn’t exist precisely because of the social, political, and economic order that liberalism exists to support, maintain, protect and justify: white supremacist, patriarchal capitalism. Weirdly, the charge often imputed by liberalism to Marxism - that it is inadequate to the real world - more and more comes to characterize liberalism itself (as witness the failure - on its own terms! - of the liberal state and its police force in Ottawa over the last two weeks).

In order to accommodate difference - to get past the purely rhetorical theatre of its equity, diversity, and inclusion programmes - librarianship must reject the spurious universalism of its liberal heritage. It must give up the unworkable idea that it can do everything (which we see as more and more social work is dumped on public libraries), that it can or should provide equal space, time, or platforms to everyone, as if there’s no such thing as power which can never be equally distributed (or else, contra Foucault, it would no longer be power). It must commit to one side or another. It has to say that the Nazi flag and the trans flag are not equal simply because they are flags, both equally welcome in some mythical space safe for everyone.

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