Ajume Wingo's book seeks to fill the motivational gap in liberal political theory through a novel account of political veils – myths, symbols, rituals and stories – that move citizens to action. Accepting as given the view that the essential core of liberal persons is their rational autonomy, Wingo maintains that appeal to this alone is insufficient to engender loyalty and participation among persons steeped in their own lives and surrounded by so much symbolic paraphernalia. ‘[R]eason's role in politics is limited and . . . veils can serve as tools for doing what reason cannot do’ (p. 34). What veils can do is to develop the habits, intuitions and character of liberal citizens. Thus Lincoln's Gettysburg address helped restore the Union and establish equality through a 300-word rhetorical spell. The American eagle, clutching an olive branch and thirteen arrows in its talons, symbolizes the unity and power (and peaceful intent?) of the United States. The recent sculpture outside the New York City Fire Department Headquarters of three fire-fighters during 9/11 raising the American flag symbolizes a post-terrorist national attitude. (This is a book about American veils.)
Political veils mediate between citizens and their political structure, idealizing their best features and surrounding them in mystique. They build a bridge between reason and action and foster solidarity between citizens. The last chapter in this short book defends an account of liberal civic education grounded in both reason and sentiment. Demonstrative civic education supplements the acquisition of intellectual skills by adding to the curriculum civic exemplars (Lincoln, for example, or Martin Luther King) and useful myths (‘the melting pot’). It supplements Amy Gutmann's more rationalistic conception of deliberative civic education. Thus equipped with critical reason and motivated by symbolic lustre, liberal citizens will participate in the design of the very veils that move them. (Thus the original photograph of three white firemen on 9/11 became a sculpture of a white, a black and a Hispanic fireman.)
Wingo is aware of familiar liberal worries concerning the extra-cognitive material left beside the fairly narrow road of the rational justification of values, but of course he faces the problem to a greater degree than most since on the veil view such material has a use. Sometimes he confronts the problem with some skill, at other times less so. Quite convincing, for example, is Wingo's discussion of which veils can command a liberal people's legitimate consent and which cannot. This is crucial since ‘veils have the capacity to bias choices in dramatic ways . . . making certain options “invisible” to citizens’ (p. 103). Legitimate veils, Wingo argues, satisfy three criteria. They do not undermine the autonomy of other basic liberal values; they are translucent in the sense that citizens can see through the veil to the real nature of the veiled object; and they have received the consent of the population. The first criterion seems clear enough, though since most veils (symbols, myths) do not make truth claims the question of whether they undermine liberal values depends in large part on how the veil is interpreted. The second criterion rules out veils that systematically manipulate the population subject to them, while the third allows for hypothetical consent: legitimate veils may be ones to which citizens would agree had they the time and opportunity to decide upon them. On the other hand, liberal democracies do demand a high level of participation in the use and design of veils. One of the things wrong with colonialism was that veils were imposed on subject populations.
Elaborating on the consent issue, Wingo goes on to discuss the relation between veils and liberal autonomy. There are plainly questions about how the latter is squared with even his sanitized use of myth and tradition. One reply Wingo gives is that veils create the social conditions necessary for autonomy such as peace and stability. But of course you can have peaceful, stable polities of different kinds and veils need not deliver autonomy-supporting peace and stability. His more considered view is that veils give citizens ownership of their cultural influences, supplying them with a character and ensuring that they do not inhabit a society that is alien. Does this perhaps conflate personal character with national values? Wingo's view seems to occupy an intermediate position between a strong view where sedimented values inhibit autonomy and a weak view where, being the objects of autonomous choice, values do little to fill out a person's character. The intermediate view says that we always choose from some value commitment as we endorse others. But what is not clear is the relation between people's idiosyncratic characters and the necessarily shared veils which are, for Wingo, the bearers of a nation's values. And beyond that, there are questions about individuality and seeing the world anew, and how the more creative virtues fit with established veils.
Veils move citizens equipped with knowledge of their history and a cultural vocabulary, and this naturally raises questions about boundaries. Wingo criticizes Huntington's view that the primitive forces of family, faith, blood and belief keep civilizations apart. On the contrary, veil politics, which relies on such ‘primitive forces’, can bridge societies in ways that reason cannot. What brings the Southern Baptist and the atheist professor together, he writes on the last page, are a set of shared veils, ‘symbols that give them a common ground’ (p. 145); and what might bring the atheist professor and a radical cleric together is likewise ‘some such common plot’. Well, either the latter sort of plot is supplied by veils or it isn't. If it is, then where are the shared history and cultural sources? If (as seems plain) it isn't, then veil politics seems peculiarly ill equipped to build bridges across lifeworlds. What the professor and the cleric do share is a common humanity, a capacity to reason and to enter into dialogue, all universal attributes removed from the idiosyncratic appeal of veils.
Where this book succeeds admirably is in exploring the gap between justification and motivation in a new way, and in suggesting with verve and passion what might fill it. Yet some of the harder questions don't get the analytical treatment they merit. Like veils themselves, Wingo's vision is often more appealing than that to which the intellect would see reason to consent.
