Free The Rights Revolution by Michael Ignatieff Page A

reluctant tolerance.
    In the era of the rights revolution, demands for equal rights have also become demands for approval. Indeed, it might even be claimed that anything less than full approval denies the excluded individual (or group) recognition of his or her status as an equal. But there is a problem here — and it is colloquially called politicalcorrectness. One fundamental critique of the rights revolution is that it engenders a coercive culture of ritualized, insincere approval. When every excluded group is demanding both equal rights and recognition, the majority can feel that it is being compelled to accord moral approval to practices that, at best, it only tolerates. So political correctness becomes a code word for a new form of moral tyranny: the tyranny of the minority over the majority. You can’t speak of sexual promiscuity among gay people, lest you appear to be demeaning gays in general. You can’t speak against affirmative-action programs that favour women, lest you seem to be denying women full recognition and respect. And so on.
    Whether these constraints on public speech are actually a form of tyranny is another matter. Anyone with a memory knows that coarse, offensive, and demeaning remarks about women and gays were commonplace in the male culture of recent times. Creating a culture where groups are freed from the dismal drizzle of these remarks cannot be regarded as a serious constraint on the free speech of those attached to these stereotypes. So on balance, the idea that the rights revolution ends in coercive political correctness seems obviously misconceived. Yet closing down a culture of casual and ill-considered abuse is quite different from moving a culture towards full-hearted approval of same-sex activity and positive discrimination in favour of women. Rights equality changes moral culture because groups demand recognition. As they do so, they force sexual majorities beyond toleration towards acceptance and approval. So long asthis process is negotiated, so long as it is not presented as a unilateral demand for surrender, rights equality can be followed successfully by full recognition. But if the majority feels coerced into according approval, rather than just toleration, the result is likely to be a backlash. Once the relationship between rights and moral change is understood as a protracted process of intercultural negotiation between majority and minority, it becomes clear that rights are a necessary precondition for recognition, but not a sufficient one. Even if they secure equal rights, same-sex couples may still have to await their fellow citizens’ recognition of them as moral equals. The process will take some time and properly should do. But again, it seems hard to imagine that this respect will not follow eventually.
    In this lecture, I am examining the intertwined process by which a rights revolution became a sexual revolution, which in turn became a moral revolution driven by a demand for equal recognition. But even this doesn’t begin to describe the magnitude of the change that has overtaken private life since I came to manhood in the 1960s. The rights revolution surfed on top of a much bigger wave, which brought with it improved access to higher education for women, the entry of married women into the workforce, the arrival of the birth control pill, and the development of social security systems that cushioned the impact of family breakup.
    The American social theorist Francis Fukuyama has called this converging set of moral, technological, demographic, and legal changes “the great disruption.” 4 Alladvanced societies were affected by it, but as Fukuyama argues, Western societies were more disrupted than any other. In a society like Japan, the great disruption did not sweep away traditional marriages or increase the rate of divorce. This fact helps us to see that rights talk in the West did more than ratify social changes that were already under way. It actually helped