The problem with the liberal position is neither it advocates virtues which are bloodless, nor that the virtues it espouses are often injurious to virtues held dear by custom. Citing many instances of the bloody history of customary virtues, one could reasonably argue that we are better off without them. The real problem with liberal virtues lies elsewhere. The liberal conception of virtues and their relation to the community is idiosyncratic: it confuses how one argues for the espousal of a virtue with how one gets initiated into that virtue. A virtue, such as humility, is available to a person as something to be learnt as a disposition in the many actions preformed around him. That is, a virtue is learnt because it is present as a learnable and begins to get appreciated while and through learning. As a consequence, in most cases, appreciation of the desirability of a virtue precedes the arguments for its desirability. Put differently, virtues are inculcated and cultivated as part of living in a particular community, and consequently, the relevant community is a necessary precondition for those virtues to exist.
It appears that liberals think otherwise. They assume that virtues, at any rate those virtues needed to sustain a liberal community, are things that individuals get hold of by merely consenting to them. Virtues, it is supposed, manifest when individuals opt for them by undertaking an intellectual arbitration in favour of them. Inculcating a virtue is just a matter of showing it to be the best option for a reasonable person to espouse. This understanding cuts off the community aspect of virtues, even though, in fact, the virtues liberals focus on are inconceivable without the social history of the society where they have come into being.[16] Arguing the need for a virtue is one thing and securing it in a society is another; the means for the latter is not the former. Appreciating the reasons for cultivating a virtue is not tantamount to cultivating that virtue.
However, the community aspect of virtues, denied by the liberals, springs back with vengeance when they accord a semi-legal status to the thin variety of virtues they value most. Let us look at this a bit closely by comparing the virtue liberals often highlight, tolerance, with that of humility on the one hand, and entrepreneurship on the other. On the face of it, tolerance appears as similar in status to humility; it is a desirable characteristic in individuals. But in the liberal scheme the practise of tolerance is not merely desirable but something on which the very existence of the liberal community depends. Consequently, there is a role to the state apparatus in certain circumstances where liberals invoke this virtue. In those circumstances the practise of tolerance is legally obligatory. The obligatory feature becomes even more evident when we compare it with entrepreneurship as a virtue prevailing in a community. It may be suggested that the prosperity of a society/community depends in the long run on the existence of a culture of entrepreneurship, and therefore the state may take upon itself the task of fostering and encouraging the practice. However, it would be unthinkable to say that the state has to enforce it. Tolerance, in contrast, needs to be enforced by the state when the interests of different individuals and communities clash.
Thus, the virtues liberals emphasize tend to belong to the category of justiciable virtues even when they are not strictly enforced legally. Social justice or equality, unlike virtues such as courage (which can be looked upon as adverbial characteristics of actions performed by individuals), are virtues pertaining to institutions; that is, they can only be seen as rules organising an institutional arrangement. As such, however, they can only be invoked institutionally and retrospectively, at the level of the meta-talk, to justify or vilify an action. Unlike courage, filial piety or frugality, the virtue of gender equality, for instance, can only be something a person could be accused of breaching in a specific instance and not something one could be meaningfully encouraged to cultivate.
However, as explained earlier, liberal virtues and the liberal notion of the meta-community are parasitic on given communities and the object-level talk within them. The fact that the liberal notion undercuts this necessary dependence is reason enough to suspect their notion of community. Nationalism too, as shown earlier, surreptitiously grants primacy to the meta-level talk over the object-level talk of communities it claims to speak for. But the nationalists’ meta-level talk in India is burdened with another problem even more corrosive to their claims: privileging a particularly wrong variety of meta-level talk for articulating the community concerns in the task of nation building. Indian traditions of earlier periods were neither concerned with the question of sovereignty in relation to specific communities nor with questions of reparation for claims of historical injustice. Neither are the conflicts, where they exist, between different communities in India defined by doctrinal fault-lines, nor are the fringe-traditions of India instances of a quasi-protestant movement against the centralising authority of a dominant Church-like creed. Most importantly, Indian traditions seldom have articulated their concerns in the language befitting a corporate body. The Buddhist traditions did not speak in the interest of a corporate entity called Buddhism, neither the Vedantins in the interest of a corporate entity called Brahmanism nor the Veerashaivas for a Lingayat corporate body.[17] However, present day nationalist rhetoric single-handedly converts all these claims as claims on behalf of a corporate body and all practitioners of these traditions into members of such bodies, making claims of right, contract and equity similar to the ones we are acquainted with in the case of corporate bodies.
