Against Inclusiveness - James Kalb

the best response is that ordinary people with a life to live and no special ax to grind know more about what distinctions make sense than academic entrepreneurs. The claim that traditional forms of identity are simply expressions of exclusion, like the claim that law is simply an expression of punishment or hierarchy an expression of domination and submission, may give some people a pleasing thrill of horror, but it reverses causality. In any normal case, the positive—what is constructive rather than constructed, what facilitates rather than oppresses—is more fundamental. The contrary view comes out of a belief that hatred and evil are more basic than good in human life. The belief is perverse, and, if true, there is not likely to be much that can be done about the situation.


Social identities are not normally based on exclusion for the sake of excluding or exploiting. The family, for example, is a basic source of identity, and it is primarily defined by functions that demand a degree of mutual loyalty, understanding, and support that could hardly exist in an open-ended group. The boundaries and exclusions it imposes are a consequence of those functions and therefore secondary. Adam and Eve and the Swiss Family Robinson had no one to exclude, but they formed families that are like other families. The first pair may not have been conscious of themselves as a family, because there were no outsiders to provide contrast, but that did not change the nature of their connection.
Other traditional distinctions and exclusions work the same general way. Ethnicity matters, because people connect in networked clusters that help them deal with life by fostering common loyalties and patterns of habit and understanding. Those networks and clusters typically develop over time in settings provided by natural connections like physical propinquity and blood relationship. To discriminate and exclude based on such connections is to maintain a setting that allows established patterns of life to go forward. Ethnic neighborhoods arise not through artificial exclusion, but because people want to feel at home. The Japanese prefer to limit immigration not because they hate other people, but because they are attached to their own way of life and want to live with people who have been brought up in it and see it as part of what they are.
Once distinctions of identity are established, they can of course be used and abused like any human institution. Men sometimes act badly, and a scheme of identity that enables them to function effectively enhances their ability to do so. Such problems ought to be dealt with when they come up, but the solution for them is not to deprive people of their means of understanding their situation and acting in it.
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Such an attitude reflects a world in which formal expertise, bureaucratic regulation, and global markets are considered the sole rational means of social organization. In such a world, people come to view traditional informal institutions and expectations as irrational and therefore illegitimate. That view makes little sense. Not everything can be formalized. The universal importance of personal contacts in hiring, not to mention the possibility of a rule-book slowdown,11 shows as much.
Even today, informal connections, understandings, and arrangements, and the roles, exclusions, and discriminations on which they depend, are fundamental to social life. If they were not, imposition of more regulation and bureaucracy would be a reliable way to improve quality and efficiency. Intentionally to disrupt informal arrangements simply as such and to try to keep them from affecting social life because of their supposed irrationality and injustice is therefore to strike at the root of social functioning. In this, as in other respects, liberalism is radically antihuman, because it rejects basic features of human life. It is able to exist only by virtue of what it rejects.