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Show Chapter XI. Xenophobia and Moral Anomaly 468 xenophobia is that of physical violence, rape, genocide, or territorial invasion, where the felt need is for physical control and the boundaries being invaded are physical rather than psychological. Both extremes and the large range of variations in between manifest the same xenophobic response. In the end, the personal really is, as is often said, political; and the quality of political discrimination is the same in all of them. It is because the anxieties, conflicts and misunderstandings inherent in close interpersonal relationships are of a piece and psychologically continuous with the anxieties, conflicts and misunderstandings inherent in macroscopic political discrimination that abstractions such as nation, race, ethnicity, sexual identity, or religion can divide friends, couples, colleagues, co-workers and fellow citizens, and turn them into enemies overnight. The relative crudeness and inadequacy of abstract and general concepts and principles to capture another's singularity diminishes neither their importance in the structure of the self nor their motivational efficacy under the right circumstances. The very same cognitive disposition that engages our interest in another and motivates us to learn more about her also restricts our capacity to know her; and motivates us to pseudorationalize, in distorted concepts and principles ranging from the benignly to the lethally ignorant, the theoretical anomaly the other represents. Indeed, the very same concept or principle - for example, the liberation of one's country - can be a source of moral heroism on the one hand; and of moral alienation, personal betrayal or xenophobia on the other. The very same concepts and categories that structure the self and make an agent's experience coherent and meaningful are those which can turn friends into ideological enemies; or make the justified moral demand that friendship be sacrificed to the demands of principle; or prompt fear and hatred toward an anomalous other who appears to threaten or violate them. No particular type of moral or political theory can be hailed or faulted for this, nor is any particular moral or political content especially susceptible to it. It is rather our hard-wired cognitive apparatus itself that is the culprit. The deplorable facts that deep personal attachments can be flimsy in the face of theoretical provincialism or political ideology, and that even the most inspiring of moral principles is vulnerable to rigidity and provincial constriction in its application to actual moral agents, are the flip side of the sometimes salutary facts that matters of abstract principle of any kind can validly come between people or before profit; that one can validly choose to sacrifice a love relationship or one's family or one's career opportunities for the sake of moral commitment. All are by-products of the necessary conditions of unified experience on which this discussed has focused. So the problems of xenophobia and of moral alienation on the one hand, and respect for principle and moral integrity on the other, are two sides of the same coin. The coin is the inherently inscrutable nature of © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
