"Tolerance in and of Itself Doesn't Change Anything"

​​Among other things, you study religion as an "interpretative and controlling power" in various cultures and societies. What does that mean?

Hans Joas: The expression stems from Max Weber, whose greatest claim to fame was his work on the "Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism". It raises three questions for our centre in particular: What part does religion play in modernization processes?

Secondly, how will religion itself be changed in connection with modernization processes? And thirdly, how much potential lies in religion for critiquing and adjusting modernization processes? Religion as a driving force, as an object and as a regulatory instance for modernization processes – these are the three ways in which Weber's expression concretely applies to our work.

Given religion's potential for influencing social modernization processes, how do you view the present-day conflict between Islamic culture in Arab countries and the predominantly Christian culture of Europe and America? Is the conflict at all religious in the first place or is it essentially social and political?

Joas: It's implicit in your question. I myself happen to be among those who are extremely sceptical about describing the current conflicts in the Middle East in mainly religious terms. We need to remember that the Arab side in the Middle East conflict already had an Arab-nationalistic and quasi-Marxist bent in the past. That intellectuals and politicians, both among Palestinians and in the countries bordering Israel, have drawn on a wide array of ideologies to articulate their own interests – which are decidedly power-political interests.

It would be absurd to turn a blind eye to that in any analysis of the present conflicts there, which are so heavily charged with Islamist ideology. I think we have to understand what leads to a self-interpretation of this conflict in religious terms. One can't simply regard religious categories as being at the origin thereof.

But the main protagonists in the conflict argue along religious lines. So doesn't one have to look to religion for counter-arguments?

Joas: Naturally, our analysis can't disregard the fact that religion is also fuelling the fire. Only one mustn't fall for the trap of those protagonists' arguments by implicitly admitting it's a genuinely religious conflict. Christian Arabs in the Gaza Strip feel every bit as oppressed by Israel as Muslims do. In its "pure" form, the conflict is not religiously motivated.

At the very top of your centre's agenda is the critical analysis of "violence and human dignity". Specifically, you examine our faith in "universal human dignity" and assert that this faith can grow not only out of positive experiences, but also out of negative ones. What are the most well-known examples from 19th- and 20th-century history?

Joas: The international movements to abolish slavery in the 19th century, above all in Great Britain and the United States. Research on abolitionism is key to our study of violence and human dignity. Then the first major human rights movement of the 20th century: namely the one about the Belgian Congo, where atrocious forms of forced labour and the like were practised, essentially another form of slavery, in some cases while hypocritically exploiting the "fight slavery" slogan.

Resistance to these practices led to a major human rights movement in the first decade of the 20th century. Besides that, of course, there are the two big topics after World War II: the Holocaust and the gulag, and the question of the consequences thereof for human dignity.

Social norms and values in general have to admit of discussion and communication if they're to be the subject of useful discourse. You're working on a corresponding theory of the communication of values. What specific properties must such a theory have?

I'm interested in the rational communication of differing values. But I don't think this communication can become rational discourse in the most demanding sense according to Habermas' stringent criteria. Jürgen Habermas (German contemporary philosopher, ed.) framed a theory of rational discourse, whose goal is, so to speak, the reasonable consensus of all the participants in a given discourse.

In my opinion, this can be meaningfully applied to scientific discourse and certain parts of political debate. But not to the field of interreligious dialogue and rational discussion of fundamentally divergent values.

We can't enter into interreligious dialogue with a view to arriving at a consensus. Judeo-Christian dialogue, for example, can't be guided by the goal of culminating in the conversion of Christians to Judaism or of Jews to Christianity. But there is rational discussion of values whose object is confined to expanding one party's understanding of the other party's attachments to certain values and vice-versa.

In a word: tolerance.

Joas: Tolerance is certainly part of it, of course, but tolerance doesn't necessarily mean a real interest in another's values. Tolerance in and of itself doesn't change anything, it doesn't augment our knowledge of another's values. Tolerance alone doesn't impel you to want to really understand the other in his value attachments. What interests us at the Max Weber Centre is the logic of the communication of values, which differs from rational discourse as defined by Habermas.

Mightn't that also be because religion involves a non-rational impulse as a necessary condition for understanding itself, namely faith?

Joas: That's correct, to be sure, religion isn't based entirely on rational arguments. I maintain, however, that that holds for all value systems. Take Jürgen Habermas, for instance: His intense attachment to the value system of democracy has something to do with his personal experiences of National Socialism. This is a highly emotionally charged biographical experience, not a rational argument.

In other words, even people who feel bound to a secular system of interpretation – such as the Enlightenment, Marxism, racial theory or what have you – are not solely bound by arguments of rational persuasion.

Would it be within the realm of possibility for such a theory of value communication to influence the creation of values in the discourse of society as a whole?

Joas: I should hope so! Here at our centre we try to look into interreligious dialogues above and beyond what is purely academic discourse. A current study of the theological legitimization of violence and non-violence in various religions, for example, should feed back to a certain extent into religious instruction. So whilst our work is highly abstract, on the one hand – the logic of the communication of values –, it does indeed have some very concrete applications.

Interview by Volker Maria Neuman

© Goethe-Institut 2006

The full-length version of the interview was published on the website of the Goethe-Institut.

Hans Joas took his doctorate in 1979 at the Free University of Berlin, then worked at the Max Planck Institute for Educational Research. After teaching sociology at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg from 1987–90, he returned to Berlin. Since 2002 Joas has served as dean of the Max Weber Centre for Cultural and Social Sciences at the University of Erfurt. He also teaches regularly at the University of Chicago.

Translated from the German by Eric Rosencrantz

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