S'occuper de ses onions: The Civic Virtue of Minding Your Own Business

• In Event: Populist Movements and Paradoxes of Membership

Abstract

Much has been written about the current populist political moment. Polities across the globe have witnessed a resurgence in popular political passions that are astonishing in their sheer power and sobering in their too common tendency toward parochialism and exclusion. In light of these developments, political theorists are increasingly turning their attention to the darker aspects of belonging and political community. This paper contributes to that conversation, critically examining existing ways of conceptualizing toleration and concern for our fellows. We argue that minding one’s own business is more than simply being a good neighbor; rather, it is a civic virtue.

Populist movements -- and especially the current crop of nationalist and nativist populisms -- offer their adherents a number of benefits, not the least of which is a sense of solidarity and belonging. Theorists concerned with political community focus on ties between people, often depicted as ties of “special regard” or heightened concern, rooted in the sense that members of the same community share both a history and a fate unique to that polity. However, solidarity is a notion easily romanticized. Those ties of concern and special regard can mask less admirable impulses – impulses to impose our own wills and values on our neighbors, and especially on those different from ourselves.

This paper takes aim at a paradox of membership in contemporary western liberal democracies. On one hand, these democracies are committed in theory and in law to the idea of toleration. Citizens are seen as having the right to express, within limits, their own conceptions of the good, as dictated by their own consciences. This freedom is protected by norms of toleration, meaning that citizens should refrain from compelling their fellows to conform to any particular vision of the good. On the other, many of these democracies are gradually moving away from political commitments to toleration. Most telling are those populist politics that feed the hatred of supposedly privileged elites and subversive alien Others. In both cases, elites and alien Others are presented as threats to the body politic – threats that ought not be tolerated.

A distinct but related process is equally telling: the increasing enforcement of civic morality. This takes two main forms: (a) the link between criminal law and civic membership, whereby a criminal offense transforms a person’s civic standing as an equal member and makes them an object of scorn and disdain, rather than a citizen entitled to equal toleration; and (b) the exclusion of groups whose morals are judged to lie beyond the core values of “the people.” This second form can be seen in the exclusion and persecution of certain groups whose sexual practices are viewed by the majority as threatening to or subversive of the common good.

We diagnose this predicament and offer a remedy. We argue (1) that toleration is an unsatisfying civic virtue that leads to the paradox just illustrated; and (2) that the civic virtue of “minding your own onions,” (following the Quebecois idiom) offers a promising alternative. If toleration leads to the paradox discussed above, it is first because it is a political virtue that is not simply self-regarding but also (and more problematically) “we-regarding.” Toleration is not concerned merely with one’s attachment to one’s own conception of the good and one’s behavior toward others. It is also concerned with how we, as citizens of liberal democracies, treat different conceptions of the good. Toleration is one ingredient in the concrete that is meant to bind a liberal polity together. It is a civic virtue all citizens of “our” liberal polity should share. Second, in the face of growing nationalism, nativism, and populism, we argue that toleration does not inspire loyalty. It is not a sufficiently solid commitment to bind a people together. Herein lies the seed of the paradox: there is a slippery slope from “we are bound by toleration” to “we are bound by not tolerating X.” The latter is a ground upon which liberal polities stand more often than they care to admit. Out of this “we-regarding” aspect of toleration can grow the enforcement of particularistic civic morality and the exclusionary tendencies of populism.
We present an alternative civic virtue, that of “minding your own onions.” This civic virtue offers opportunities to avoid exclusionary visions of political community. Drawing on a variety of traditions, including the political theory of some Indigenous peoples of North America (notably the Dish-with-one-spoon wampum belt), we argue that this civic virtue captures the behavior, attitudes and dispositions conducive to peaceful co-existence among morally, legally and politically diverse actors. Indeed, our guiding idea should not be the virtue required for a single people, but one that accounts for the full political, legal and moral diversity of the contemporary world.

Author

• Briana L. McGinnis, College of Charleston