Reconciliation As Non-Alienation
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The American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy is distributing this draft to its members and registrants for our Zoom conference on “Reconciliation and Repair,” September 25, 2020, https://www.political-theory.org/event-3736560. Please do not distribute the draft further or quote or cite it without the permission of the author: [email protected] Reconciliation as Non-Alienation: The Politics of Being at Home in the World Catherine Lu (First Draft) 19 August 2020 For the ASPLP Conference on Reconciliation and Repair: Mending Frayed Civic Bonds, 25 September 2020. https://www.political-theory.org/event-3736560 *Please do not quote without author’s permission, or distribute beyond this workshop. Comments welcome at [email protected].* … he is suffering from a pathological oikophobia, a hatred of home, which has been a frequent disease among intellectuals since the Enlightenment. He sees that which is his “own,” his inheritance, as alien; he has fallen out of communication with it and feels tainted by its claim on him. Roger Scruton, “Oikophobia”1 … it is the colonized man who wants to move forward, and the colonizer who holds things back. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism2 1. Introduction On the evening of May 25, 2020, the Minneapolis Police Department responded to a call from a grocery store that a man had purchased cigarettes with a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, and was still near the premise. Four police officers eventually responded, and while the handcuffed man became prostrate on his side, the veteran officer on the scene pressed his knee into the man’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. Gasping “I can’t breathe,” and calling out for his dead mother, the man lapsed into unconsciousness. The death of George Floyd from that encounter with police, captured on video, led to criminal charges against the four police officers at the scene, and sparked hundreds of protests in America, and across the world, against structural racism and police violence.3 Demands for justice for Floyd, as well as for hundreds of other victims of racist and state- sponsored violence, have come from human rights organizations such as Amnesty International,4 as well as several other grassroots petitions that are focused on ensuring that the police officers involved are held accountable for his killing.5 In conjunction with these demands for individual accountability, there have also been calls for the United States to address systemic or structural racism. Thus, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet called on U.S. authorities to end “entrenched and pervasive racial discrimination,” by taking “serious action to stop such killings, and to ensure justice is done when they do occur. Procedures must change, prevention systems must be put in place, and above all police officers who resort to excessive use of force should be charged and convicted for the crimes committed.”6 Such demands have been part of the Black Lives Matter Movement, now a global social force dedicated to countering state-sanctioned violence and anti-Black racism, in order to promote “freedom and justice for Black people and, by extension, all people.”7 A steady companion to such calls for justice are pleas for reconciliation. At George Floyd’s funeral in Houston, U.S. Congressional Democratic Representative of Texas, Al Green, called for the creation of a national Department of Reconciliation.8 Pope Francis implored “the national reconciliation and peace for which we yearn.”9 Scholars and journalists have also advocated the creation of truth and reconciliation commissions.10 The cities of San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Boston are working with the Grassroots Law Project to create Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation commissions, to be launched in the fall of 2020, to address structural racism and police brutality in the criminal justice system, in order to dismantle a “cruel and oppressive force of injustice for African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, immigrants, members of the LGBTQIA community, and all marginalized communities.”11 The City Council of Asheville, North Carolina, also established a Community Reparations Commission, with budgetary implications for “increasing minority home ownership and access to other affordable housing, increasing minority business ownership and career opportunities, strategies to grow equity and generational wealth, closing the gaps in health care, education, employment and pay, neighborhood safety and fairness within criminal justice.”12 In Canada, the exposure of police brutality against Athabasca Chipewyan Chief Allan Adam, who was stopped in March 2020 for an expired licence plate in Fort McMurray, Alberta, motivated public officials to acknowledge the need for investigations into anti-Indigenous racism in law enforcement. The 2019 Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls already called on police services to establish “an independent, special investigation unit for the investigation of incidents of failures to investigate, police misconduct, and all forms of discriminatory practices and mistreatment of Indigenous peoples within their police service”.13 In addition to a continuing investigation into the conduct of officers involved in Chief Allan Adam’s ordeal with police, the Alberta Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) launched a formal Reconciliation Strategy on June 19th, 2020, National Indigenous Day.14 In my previous work, I have argued that justice and reconciliation respond to distinct but related challenges arising from conditions of injustice. Whereas the tasks of doing justice aim 3 toward the rectification or redress of interactional or structural injustice, reconciliation addresses different forms of alienation implicated in such contexts.15 I draw on critical theorist Rahel Jaeggi’s conception of alienation, which refers to experiences of disconnection, disruption, or distortion in “the structure of human relations to self and world” and “the relations agents have to themselves, to their own actions, and to the social and natural worlds.” Alienation is a “particular form of the loss of freedom” that involves “a relation of disturbed or inhibited appropriation of world and self.” Successful appropriation by an agent “can be explicated as the capacity to make the life one leads, or what one wills and does, one’s own; as the capacity to identify with oneself and with what one does; in other words, as the ability to realize oneself in what one does.”16 It is important to understand that in critical theory, the concept of alienation functions as a critique of a social condition, in which subjects either have lost or are denied their standing as morally autonomous agents (and hence are dominated),17 or have lost or are deprived of their appropriative agency to participate meaningfully in the making of the social order (and hence are oppressed). Alienation thus has not only psycho-affective effects on agents, but denotes a social condition that is dominating and oppressive of certain human potentialities. I developed three aspects of reconciliation that respond to different forms of such alienation: (1) interactional reconciliation, which responds to alienation arising between agents through their interactions; (2) structural reconciliation, which responds to the alienation of agents from the social and political structures that mediate their activities and relations; (3) and existential reconciliation, which responds to the self-alienation of agents, in the inhibition of their appropriative agency, that accompanies some forms of interactional and structural alienation. While popular views of reconciliation typically focus on the interactional dimension between agents, I have argued that structural reconciliation is normatively fundamental, because it is the terms of structural reconciliation that establish the background conditions and frameworks that mediate any negotiated settlement on interactional reconciliation between agents. Structural reconciliation, however, requires more than non-domination, and presupposes existential non- alienation. Reconciliation should be understood as a regulative political ideal that aims to create a mutually affirmable and affirmed social/political order that can support the flourishing of non- alienated agents.18 Rather than addressing an abstract philosophical question about how rational individuals may feel at home in the modern world, reconciliation as a moral/political project can be formulated as addressing a more practical question: Under what terms and conditions might agents be able to affirm the social/political structures that enabled or produced (and still may be enabling and producing) social and political injustices, and which still may constitute so many of the options and limits of their lives? In answering this question, reconciliation can be reconstructed as a regulative social/political ideal of structures of social relations in which individual agents “can understand themselves as the (co-) authors of those institutions and identify with them as agents.”19 This is what it means to be at home in the world. The politics of reconciliation ultimately is a struggle about the shape of the social world that organizes and mediates agents’ social positions, identities, agency, and well-bring. Such politics involve contestations over narratives of that order in historic terms, as well as over representations of the current social/political order, and reveal conflicting images of