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Subjects of Tolerance

Why We Are Civilized and They Are the Barbarians

Wendy Brown

Primitive men... are uninhibited: thought passes directly into action.

—Sigmund Freud,Totem and Taboo

If intolerance and narcissism are connected, one immediate and practical

conclusion might seem to be: we are only likely to love others more if we

also learn to love ourselves a little less.

—Michael Ignatieff, ‘‘Nationalism and Toleration’’

Since a group is in no doubt as to what constitutes truth or error, and is

conscious, moreover, of its own great strength, it is as intolerant as it is

obedient to authority. It respects force and can only be slightly influenced

by kindness, which it regards merely as a form of weakness. What it de-

mands of its heroes is strength, or even violence. It wants to be ruled and

oppressed and to fear its masters. Fundamentally, it is entirely conserva-

tive, and it has a deep aversion to all innovations and advances and an

unbounded respect for tradition.

—Sigmund Freud, citing Gustav Le Bon,Group Psychology

The murder of [a U.S. civilian working in Saudi Arabia] shows the evil

nature of the enemy we face—these are barbaric people.

—President George W. Bush, June 18, 2004

In recent years, culture has become a cardinal object of tolerance and
intolerance. This is not only because liberal democratic societies have
become increasingly multicultural as a consequence of late-modern
population flows and the affirmation of cultural difference over assimi-
lation. It is also because political conflict has become, in Mahmood
Mamdani’s phrase, ‘‘culturalized’’: ‘‘It is no longer the market (capital-
ism), nor the state (democracy), but culture (modernity) that is said to

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