Enforced Intimacy

This post is a theoretical and historical exploration of the themes touched on in my post called "Conscience and Civility".

That post was limited to considering businesses' religious objections to serving queer people in intimate ways such as weddings.

I argued that the way the public sphere is legally and socially configured in post-civil rights America leaves the objectors no real way out of an obligation to provide for everyone.

Here, I want to think more broadly about how that intimacy is imposed and enforced the extension of the domain of the public.

Recently, I have been writing about the development of mass education in Egypt. Scholars like Marwa Elshakry look at the beginning of modern schooling in the influence of Western missionary institutions on different confessional communities in the Middle East.

When indigenous Christians wanted schools of their own similar to the missionaries', some among the Muslim elite wanted their children to study in them as well. Not all modern schools developed along similar confessional lines, but across modern contexts, state intervention ultimately defined a school as a space where everyone was supposed to access the same learning as equals.

The prospect of learning alongside those with different commitments troubled the Christian leaders in the 19th century. Though this is different from the panic that racially integrated schools caused in the US in the 20th century, a similar pattern is clear.

In schools, the state enforces a kind of intimacy that used to be seen as a moral transgression. The right to teach is closely connected to the kind of religious authority that was the basis of long-lived institutions in the West and in the Islamic world.

Those institutions were maintained by assumptions of a common purpose and mutual fidelity that teachers and students could expect from one another, and in those expectations, there was an intimacy that the public, collective, and undifferentiated education transgressed.

This was not limited to spheres of religious difference; Kathryn Gines writes that segregated African-American schools demanded political commitment of their teachers, and this purpose could not be the same in integrated schools. The spirit that strived through the repression of segregation had lost its place.

Public spaces maintained by public law and configured through conscriptive kinds of order are a marker of modern states. Though the marketplace I discuss in the last post is distinctive of the modern world like conscriptive education I discuss in this one, it has clear antecedents.

Unlike the schools, older kinds of marketplace were spaces for any number of private transactions. It's not that the transactions had no public rules: the Islamic marketplace had its muḥtasib, an officer responsible for maintaining fair dealing to the standards of the sharīʿa.

It is rather that older kinds of public space like the market allowed for interaction among very different people where each was more in charge of his exposure. Pious Muslims like Taqī al-Dīn ibn Taymiyya, who died in 1328, worried over this exposure in places like Mediterranean agoras where everyday traffic was mixed.

In Distinction from the Companions of Hell Ibn Taymiyya specifies rules of engagement for these situations. What is interesting though, is less the rules for how Muslims are to encounter unbelievers but the assumptions of personal discretion characteristic of a context that was less rule-bound. No one had to do business with anyone.

Modern norms of equality and access structure a very different kind of marketplace, as they do a new kind of education. My goal in these contrasts is not to say conservatives who do not want to serve gay people are beholden to the ideas of 14th-century Damascus any more than I am commending these ideas as more moral than the modern political concepts that have replaced them. 

I am suggesting, though, that the institutions we disagree about are the product of commitments and assumptions that reflect modern processes of conscription into and extension of the public.

What we might do in thinking about the older norms of interaction is that when one demands service of a business in the public sphere, as I would say is their full political right, one could imagine what another person might mean when he says he is made vulnerable by the demand to serve us. 

Some kinds of refusing contact are simply hateful and demeaning, as few would disagree about racial segregation in US.

However, some kinds of enforced non-intimacy like women-only train-cars or worship spaces, historically black colleges, or immigrant discourses opposed to assimilation may be difficult for outsiders to understand but can ask of us a recognition of a moral other.

Though sometimes that recognition is imposed on us by modern politics, I would argue it can be a force for creative moral imagination. As we are more and more enforced into intimacy with those who are more meaningfully different from us, we will have more serious need for that kind of imagination.