AKU-ISMC Seminar on Pluralism

• first, that justice is the first virtue of society;
• second,  that justice is the outcome of two principles:
• the liberty principle:  each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others;
• the equality principle which itself has two parts:
• that any inequalities in the distribution of social goods are only permissible insofar as they are to the advantage of all;
•  inequalities are attached to positions and offices open to all.

This can be seen as  a monistic as opposed to pluralistic  theory because it orders values hierarchically (or, as Rawls puts it, 'lexically', meaning that their ordering is non-negotiable and non-adjustable, just as the alphabetical order of words in a dictionary is fixed).   Justice comes first and consists first of liberty and second of equality. Other values, such as community, then take their place and make their contribution maintaining and stabilising this trinity.  Thus, there are no conflicts or clashes between values, because the hierarchical model tells us authoritatively which is to prevail.  That is, a monistic solution is offered to the problem of pluralism.

Other 'isms', of course, also use this solution of hierarchical ordering in order to produce a unity solution to the problem of plurality and clashes between values.  So in anarchisms individual autonomy and liberty will triumph in conflicts with equality, or authority, or virtue.  In socialism, equality is the primary value.  In conservatism in its reactionary, western form this part is frequently played by authority and/or tradition.   Fascism values order and discipline first.  And so on. 

The Counter-Enlightenment

These ways of resolving potential clashes of values by the construction of monism is criticised by some liberal theorists including perhaps most notably Isaiah Berlin. Berlin argues that 'monism' has had a dominant place in the structure of European (including Russian) political thought, and was particularly pronounced in the thought of the French Enlightenment.    Monis, in Berlin's interpretation, consists of the following:

• all genuine questions (questions about facts, or about values) have one and only one true answer;
• there must be a dependable path which human beings can follow to guarantee their arrival at this answer;
• all truths must be compatible with each other; they must form a single and systematic whole.

These premises underpin the thought of Voltaire (1694-1778)  But, Berlin argues,  any project to make one value prevail over others will fail simply because values don't behave in such an orderly fashion in any human or social life.  Human beings value many things, and they can't have everything that they value all at once.  Indeed, we will frequently face tragic dilemmas and be forced to choose between values. Furthermore, some values are evaluatively incomparable - there can be pairs of  values,  equality and authority, say,  between which it is not possible to say which is best.  Furthermore the belief in monism, in the twentieth century and at other times, has been a most dangerous belief, for if you truly believe in a single truth then surely no cost could be too high in seeking to attain it. The alternative is value pluralism. 

Berlin himself thinks that the emergence of an alternative, pluralistic  conception in Europe was a  truly significant intellectual event.  Monism and pluralism have been in tension and in competition with one another since the philosophy of  Giambattisto Vico  (1668-1744)  where  we meet the 'birth of a new belief' in the value and importance of the singular and the unique, the value of variety as such.  From now on it is possible for unity and oneness to be associated with monotony and uniformity, thought of as 'dead' or 'dreary', and for variety to be associated with vitality. Berlin thinks that the relative disadvantage of German speaking people in the cultural, political  and scientific innovation and development  of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is one reason why the idea that 'every culture has its own attributes, which must be grasped in and for themselves', the ideal of particularism, was particularly developed in German thought, in particular that of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803).   This particularistic view was a reaction against the rationalism and monism, and the political and cultural dominance and success, of the French enlightenment. What we have here is cultural pluralism.  Different cultures have different values and virtues; so the possibility of one perfect society, or one single hierarchical system of values,  is now logically incoherent. 

Scepticism

I also think that pluralism is implicit, if not explicitly articulated as such, in the sceptical tradition.  The idea (or problem) of perspectivalism is articulated in the  scepticism of Sextus Empiricus (C2-C3 of the Xian era).  The appearance of what is must be distinguished from what is; and appearances can vary for one subject as compared to another.  Objects are relative to perceiving subjects.   The plurality of views or perspectives stems from differences between individuals, and, of course, from differences of position of individuals.  (And to be an individual is to be spatially and temporally separate from other individuals).   Pyrrhonism - a philosophical programme traceable to Pyrrho (365-275 BCE)  analysed and expounded by Sextus Empiricus - proposes 'suspension of judgement' as the appropriate response to our lack of certainty, and to the unsatisfactory strategies and tactics of dogmatism. A number of alternative solutions to these problems of uncertainty and plurality of appearances and belief have been developed.  The Scottish Enlightenment philosopher  David Hume  (1711-1776) developed a  theory of  non-rationally based habits of belief.  He denied that our beliefs in the existence of an external world, or in God, or in the existence of other subjects, could be rationally based (unlike, for example, our answers to mathematical or logical problems).  That is, Hume elaborates a theory of philosophical scepticism, married to practical dogmatism (or habit).  However, such a radical bifurcation of knowledge - the radical separation of philosophy from practical life - is hardly a satisfactory solution, and Hume himself makes a plea for 'common sense'.  This common sense led him to emphasise the significance of 'taste and sentiment' in morals.  Read from our perspective there seems to be a plausible inference from this, to pluralism.  (However, in his moral philosophy Hume rests heavily on our 'natural sympathy' towards others which make compassion, concern for others' welfare, civility, kindness, and so on, into a more or less universal set of values).  Others reintroduce dogmatism in the form of faith in God, guarantor of the world as it is,  as in the philosophy of Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1773).   According to Berkeley, the philosopher cannot validly make any sense of existence (or truth) other than as it seems to us - esse is percipi:  to be is to be seen (or heard or otherwise sensed).  Absolutely aware of the implications of this subjectivism, Berkeley argues, nevertheless, that God is known 'certainly and immediately'; and it is he who upholds 'all things by the Word of his Power'.  Scepticism, then, offers a variety of responses to the question: what should we do in the face of plurality and perspectivalism?  Pluralism is one philosophical problem that the sceptical philosopher identifies and attempts to deal with.

Politics

Hannah Arendt argues that the Greeks discovered that the world we have in common is regarded from an infinite number of viewpoints.  Objectivity, and the approach, therefore, to truth, requires impartiality and a capacity to appreciate these many viewpoints.  In unconstrained talk and communication, as the Greeks discovered, we can not so much understand another person intimately, nor come to a certain knowledge of the world, but we understand in the sense that we can 

look upon the same world from one another's standpoint, to see the same in very different and frequently opposing aspects.

Arendt laments the fact that in the Christian era this concentration on the world, and this capacity to take up the point of view of others, has not been present.  For Christianity, after all, the world will pass away while the soul will live on, and in the context of a theology of individual salvation there is no reward for understanding the world from another's viewpoint.

Berlin, in his reading of western thought, which is focussed differently from Arendt's, agrees that in the early and middle Christian era it was  impossible to articulate anything like appreciation of or respect for the beliefs of heretics, infidels or religious enemies in general.  At most one could acknowledge the courage or dignity with which they die.  It would be impossible to say, as the modern pluralist says,  'I do not agree with what you believe but I absolutely defend your right to believe it'.  Nor could the crusader or heretic hunter imagine

'how men like ourselves, in a particular natural or man-made environment, could embody [those values or beliefs] in their activities, and why'.  

According to Berlin, though, pluralism in this new sense can be traced to the sixteenth century and the Reformation.   Now it became possible to deny that  'there is one, and only one, true morality or aesthetics or theology'. 

Berlin and Arendt are not often thought of as a pair who have much in common (despite their sharing of an era, and other social characteristics).  Unlike Arendt, Berlin is not a thinker for whom politics as such exerts much fascination, and she was sceptical about liberalism.   Yet, on my reading of their theories, there are striking parallels and convergences.  Arendt herself dedicated a good deal of her work to analysing and theorising the phenomenology of political relations and actions, to elucidating political values, and the relations between politics and truth, justice, welfare and so on.  For Arendt politics is a form of human action and relating that proceeds from the fact that men have the capacity for free action, and the fact that men can tyrannise over others.  For politics to emerge and to be articulated in practices and institutions takes, to be sure, a number of quite special conditions.  But it doesn't take much - oppression, an attempt at liberation, action in concert, speech instead of physical violence (that is, elements that are pretty much ubiquitous features of any social set up) - for the germ, the possibility, of politics to begin to stir.

 'the acts and deeds demanded by liberation throw [individuals] into public business, where intentionally or more often unexpectedly they begin to constitute that space of appearances where freedom can unfold its charms and become a visible, tangible reality.'

In this reference to 'the space of appearances' we can read a double meaning.  It means both that in politics we act, precisely appear to one another, we perform.  It also gestures to the appearance/reality distinction we met above.  In politics we have many actors, many bodies.  We have a shared world.  When politics operates  the public power can guarantee a  space where we can all meet, see and hear each other, collectively decide and act together. The point of politics is that we don't have to agree. We don't have to live in harmony.  We recognise each other as actors, as free. If we are to respect freedom, if we are to defeat tyranny, to head off totalitarian government, to prevent corruption and cruelty, it is crucial that we act politically.  Politics and pluralism, then, go together.

As I have remarked Berlin does not spend much time on the  logic or phenomenology of politics, or on values pertaining specifically to the domain of politics as such.   He certainly is committed to what I would think of as a political solution to dilemmas of value and goals.  He is deeply critical of utopian thought and goals of harmony; he is critical as we have seen of any monism.  He believes values can clash, individuals and groups can be faced with tragic dilemmas (and no point denying they are tragic) - that

'we are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss'.

He says:

'social and political collisions will take place; the mere conflict of positive values alone makes this unavoidable.  Yet, they can, I believe, be minimised by promoting and preserving an uneasy equilibrium, which is constantly threatened and in constant need of repair - that alone, I repeat, is the precondition for decent societies ...'

This looks, to me, like the first move in what could be a fascinating and complex theory of politics.  But Berlin (not a systematic theorist, anyway) produces no such complex theory as far as I know.  We can probably infer that he was only committed to something like an ideal Westminster-Whitehall model of  thoughtful and responsible government by an educated elite (of which he himself had been part during and after World War 2.)  However, it is striking  that for him pluralism begins to be articulated at a point at which individuals and groups are struggling to be free - namely protestant christians are struggling against the dominance of roman catholicism, and struggling against a particular imbrication of political and religious power.  At this point, pluralism can be articulated.  And that the preconditions for a workable society are politics - the promotion of an uneasy equilibrium.   For me, this location of the roots of pluralism in political reality is most fascinating and most suggestive.

My argument is that where there is politics there is pluralism.  Where there is the use of violence to dominate and kill we have the denial of pluralism.  Where societies are governed by military structures there is an attempt at uniformed discipline.  Where there are universal laws all are treated as if they are the same with the same characteristics and capacities.  Where there is egoism and each for himself - as in primitive exchange relations and spontaneous markets, each actor has no particular regard for the others whether 'same' or 'different'. Where we have personal relations of domination - masters and slaves, or lords and serfs, or patrons and clients, or boss and machine  - there is struggle and thwarting.  Resistance on the part of the oppressed can be hidden or passive, and thus fall short of the conditions of politics in its fullest sense. Where we have politics, we have freedom, and action, and plurality.  The justification of politics is freedom: there is no justification for denying any human's capacities for action and freedom. 

Now I am not saying that there are any societies, or even could be any societies,  in which relations are entirely political.  Military, physical, personal, economic, sexual, religious and other forms of power are a ubiquitous aspect of any complex human life.  Of  course, in the real world these other forms of power intersect with, and can oppose, undermine, and destabilise political governing structures.  In some social set ups there are more or less orderly arrangements of power.  It can be acknowledged, for instance, that market relationships rely on laws which in turn rely on political government.  The relationships between political and sexual power can vary - sometimes they are pretty stable; at other times competitions about sexuality can be politically destabilising.  Politics can lapse into authoritarianism or tyranny - although in the medium and long term tyranny is very costly for governors and governed alike.  Political energy is always present, but it takes certain social, cultural, sexual, and economic conditions for a stabilised political space to open up and stay open.  The contours and boundaries of this public space will always, anyway, be contested both with political and other forms of power.  Plurality is the other side of this coin of contestation.

Why has the idea of pluralism gained such currency in contemporary intellectual discourses?

Politics

I think I'm right about a deep relationship between politics and pluralism.  Indeed, some conventional analyses of the concept of politics - which emphasise, for instance, that politics is the 'public  process of the conciliation of interests', - support this analysis. Discourses about politics are, in my view, very muddled at present.  'Politics' is often simply associated with 'party politics' and government by party.  Although people widely do recognise 'political corruption' it is often not clear what would count as 'politics uncorrupted'.  As I have discussed above, although I think 'politics itself' is a coherent category, in the real world we are used to militaristic politics, political violence, political economy, the economic domination of the political process (both in the form of the wielding of the power to govern by corporations, and in the form of voters voting according to their economic interests), and we don't hesitate to talk about sexual politics, and so forth.  I think that all these usages can be coherent and these concepts capture important aspects of the world.  But often insufficient attention is paid to what is specific about politics in these terms.  One context in which the term politics has quite a clear, although not very clearly articulated, content of its own, is in the familiar discussion of whether a political or a military solution to some problem (relations between the north and south of Ireland, civil relations within the north of Ireland, relations between the state of Israel and the Palestinian people) is most favoured.  To the activities of bomb makers the response must be that politics is the only possible way (both, the only justifiable way, and the only possibly successful way).  In areas where the traffic in drugs, or women and children, or pornography, dominates societies we ask whether the political authority can prevail over the gangsters and the criminals and the bosses.  All of these questions and discussions presuppose, even if they don't clearly articulate, a normative idea of politics as such.  And if politics involves pluralism then a commitment to politics involves a commitment to pluralism.

Postmodernity

It is also true, as theorists of 'post-modernism' argue, that the currency of 'grand theories' or 'totalising discourses'  or any kind of monism, is irreparably debased. The intellectual commitment to, let alone political projects based on, unified and simple explanatory theories which tell us how the world is, why it is that way, and how it will be in the future, is no longer possible or respectable.  We might speak of certain versions of marxist political economy, or versions of capitalism, or versions of liberalism which offer simple solutions to dilemmas and clear diagnoses of why we face the dilemmas we do.  Theoretically and intellectually  all these  have been assailed by accusations of conceptual stretching in order to neutralise anomalies.  For example, marxist explanations of all forms of social conflict (religious, ethnic, sexual) can be couched in terms of class.  If it seems too difficult to talk about Hindus or Buddhists as 'classes' then marxist theorists have recourse to saying that the conflicts, in any case, are about material goods and distributions.  But this is ad-hocery and undermines the marxist theory of class based production.  Liberal uses of 'rational choice theory' end up stretching the concept of rationality so that any action whatsoever (axing one's girlfriend to death, committing suicide, making a mistake) are included in the domain of rational actions. 

Practically, the upsurge of new social movements of the right and left, new forms of social and political organisation, new political identities making claims to power and action,  is connected both with the intellectual failure of grand theories and with the loss of political leverage by conventional institutions.  The explanations for this are clearly complex.  Undoubtedly, the workings of political generations is very significant.  Think of the children raised in welfare states in Europe and north America, as against their depression and war formed parents.  Second and third generation children of migrants, educated linguistically or culturally in the country of arrival, against their incoming parents.  The generations who celebrated the end of imperial or colonial regimes, and their children, against those who were oppressed by occupying powers.  Generations for whom global travel and global communication are commonplace as against their immobile parents.  Whichever of these shifts we speak of,  we are speaking of cohorts of political actors and potential political actors whose incentives are not to do as their parents and grandparents did, not to defer to whatever their parents and grandparents deferred to, not to have the same allegiances and loyalties.  They are not enmeshed in  the same networks of ties.  They face new worlds and new dilemmas.  New economies and new technologies.  New hybridities of culture, new interactions of identity.

The new political agents who have emerged, and the new networks of allegiance  - among women, notably; also dissenting sexual identities, and religious and ethnic groups - are constructing and making claims about new political issues - environmental justice,  sexual justice. They are also making claims against  new parties - men as such rather than the capitalist class; or fellow citizens rather than government. The logic of these new claims, from new claimants, against new 'claimees', conduces to a much more complex model of paths of power and responsibility than were worked out by the high modernist European social theorists  - Marx, even Weber;  JSMill, even Mary Wollstonecraft; Durkheim, even de Toqueville.

The competition for power, in this complicated theoretical and social context, requires all of us to treat with complexity and difference.  Of course, we can ignore the claims of religious and cultural groups.   We can attempt to turn a deaf ear to rows about  sexuality and parenting.  We can fail to see diversity; or we can be appalled by it.  We can affect to take boundaries for granted, to treat them as fixed.  We can build walls and mend fences; we can patrol our borders with guns and send military power to the crossing points.  We can let xenophobic insults fly, let racism go unchecked, allow adults to deplore the existence, aspirations and behaviour of the young.   None of this - not refugee camps, not organised violence, not deprivation and concerted attempts to dehumanise - none of this can silence voice.  Where there is power there will be resistance.  Where people have the capacity for freedom they will speak.  In this century, with its communicative technologies, they will be heard by someone, and no structure of power can make them utterly inaudible. (Of course, whether their voice is effective, whether their humanity is fully recognised and respected, whether power and resources are fairly shared - all those are quite different questions).

In this historical context, thoughtful people cannot help but revisit the theme of pluralism.  If you lack the thoroughgoing density that enables you to ignore a claimant subject in front of you  (and I don't deny that some people do enjoy that degree of density);   if you lack the tolerance for violence and blood that we see daily  - albeit, mostly, mediated via TV, the press, and the internet (and I don't deny that some individuals seem to have an unlimited tolerance of such horrors, albeit, I assume, tolerance that is the outcome of training and discipline); if you lack such density and such tolerance, then we must acknowledge the freedom and the humanity of those others.  We must, in Isaiah Berlin's words realise that, in other circumstances, should our lives have worked out otherwise, in other social contexts, we could have been them - with their beliefs, and their values, their ways of life, and lifecourses and goals.  Those values could be ours.  This is pluralism. 

What are the different ways in which the idea of pluralism has been understood?

This is an extremely good question.  In my discussion so far,  the word, the concept, pluralism has signified a range of referents.  Now's the time to sort them out.          

It is important to note, first, that in my discussion so far plurality has been a predicate of four distinct subjects.   First, pluralism pertains to  individuals.   Just from the sheer fact of individual variation in tastes, beliefs, life choices and goals people will disagree and clash one with another.  No one person's goals, tastes and beliefs can prevail over all others.  Second, pluralism pertains to values themselves, and therefore can set up tensions and competitions within, as well as between, individuals.  I may wish my child to obey my authority, and I also wish for him to be autonomous.  Although there are some more or less messy compromises and trade offs between these two, and although with a bit of theoretical and psychological ingenuity I can come up with a way for him to be both autonomous and obedient to authority, between these two values there is actually the makings of a tragic dilemma.  Third, pluralism between cultures (or civilisations).  What's good for the Germans is not good for the French; what's good for and in Islam is not the same as is good for and in Buddhism.  Nations, and religions, consist in part of sets of values, constellations of virtues, specific beliefs and commitments about how life should be lived and how social relations should be conducted.  Within each culture, maybe, there is a coherence, and a settled order of values and principles.  Then, between cultures there will be clashes and disagreements and misunderstandings.  Fourth, pluralism pertains between social groups, and their voices, within, and across, societies and cultures.  What's good for women isn't, necessarily, what's good for men (there can be zero sum games in political societies).  What's good for employers isn't necessarily good for employees (and one person can be both, of course). 

Next, we must be clear about the distinction between plurality and pluralism.  It is one thing to acknowledge difference and variety, the existence and claims of many voices, and the tragic potential in conflicts between values, individuals, groups and civilisations.   It is another to elaborate and elevate this into, to begin with, a philosophy for life, and second into a normative prescriptive political theory.  To do  the latter is to say: difference and variety, the claims of many voices, tragedy - all these are what there ought to be.  They are valuable as such. 

Now, so far I have suggested that politics is good (and especially, looks very good when compared with the alternatives).  And I have suggested that politics as such entails plurality, so if politics is good I am constrained to accept that plurality is good - to be, in short, a pluralist.  But, this is a bit quick.  Berlin clearly was committed to value pluralism.  It is not at all  clear to me how enthusiastic he was  about the identity pluralism and pluralism of voice that disrupted the political order in the last decade of his life.  In fact, the tone of his writing when he discusses Marx's class theory is both sceptical and disapproving. [31]   As a thoroughgoing political theorist, I think politics operates at every level - the level of value, and individual persons, and cultures, and groups, and in citizenship, and economies, and it disrupts military power and so on.  But of course, the history of the world is the history of the thwarting of politics, the suppression of political relations and political aspiration.  It is theoretically possible to accept pluralism  as it pertains to cultures, but reject pluralism with regard to individuals.   For instance, a thoroughgoing nationalist, who really believes that 'the English people' at root share a particular set of values and characteristics, and a destiny, might be such a theorist.  We need to acknowledge then that at the outset 'pluralism' is a two dimensional phenomenon:

Further, the possible political responses to  any one of these  eight varieties of plurality are in turn three fold - at least.  Either, we could conclude that the outcome of plurality-pluralism is to be conflict and tragedy - two  luxurious and sensuous fates.  Or, we could conclude that the outcome is to be separation  - cold mutual indifference.  Or, we could go for the cooler, warmer solution of encounter and mutual accommodation. And for any of these, we could think that they are just how things are, or we could think they are how things ought to be.

Pluralism of what?

'Pluralism' is, that is, a three dimensional, 24 celled, theory.  This three dimensional space undoubtedly has heuristic value when we attempt to read the complex theoretical literature on pluralism and sort out who says what.    For example, Berlin, it seems to me, is a prescriptive pluralist theorist when it  comes to individuals and values;  he is sceptical of nationalist and romantic theories which promote pluralism of cultures and civilisations, and my guess is that he would have been similarly sceptical about pluralism across lines of sex, or other social identities and even social class.  Insofar as he is a pluralist, he straightforwardly meets the possibility and the challenge of conflict and tragedy.  Insofar as he is a liberal, he seems relatively confident in the possibility for men of sense and  good will to govern wisely, and to manage to a good enough degree the projects of encounter, accommodation, and adjustment, around a (rather wobbly) equilibrium. 

How do we conceptualise the similarities and differences between monism, pluralism, and relativism?

Obviously, the key problem here is 'relativism'.  Is it true that whereas 'monism' implies epistemological and ontological objectivism, pluralism implies subjectivism or relativism?  And if it does imply relativism, doesn't this mean that we are asking people with ethical and  theological commitments to admit that the things (values, principles, facts) they believe in are not true in the way they at the outset take them to be?  If this is the case, the whole project of pluralism is doing violence to people's (and groups') identities and ontology.  This is the issue. 

`Monism

Let's look again at what this means. 

We can call a theory of values, or a moral way of life, or a system of authority 'monistic' if one single value has preeminence.  Thus, insofar as socialists believe that the preeminent value, the one that must be realised before others, is social and material equality, those socialists are monistic theorists.   We can also call a set of values, or a set of ways of life, monistic, if those values or ways of life form a single and integrated system.  Thus, liberalism can be thought of as a system of values - liberty, equality, fraternity, rationality - which together form a coherent way of life, and a coherent basis for judgements regarding truth, justice, the good and so on.  

As Berlin's studies of western moral and political thought show, monism does not have to proceed from any kind of blinkered bigotry or refusal to see that there are more values than one.  It has, in the western tradition, also proceeded from the epistemological and ontological view that it must be the case that truth deliver harmony.  If x is true and y is true, then it must be the case that x and y can be true together.  x and y must be elements in a working system of truth.  Furthermore, if x is true and y is true, then in a rational universe, it must be the case that human beings can, in principle, come to know that x and y are true.  This means that if it seems to us that x  and y, both known or thought to be true, nevertheless clash, our first thought must be that we have gone wrong somewhere.  Perhaps either x or y is false after all.  Or perhaps we have misunderstood exactly the nature of x or y in virtue of which they are true.    For example, if we think both that ' autonomy is good' and 'authority is good' are true propositions, and it looks as though we can't have both autonomy and authority, then the monistic thought is that we need to revisit the question of what autonomy and authority mean, examine our concepts, or our theories of autonomy and authority, and straighten them out in such a way that both of these propositions can indeed be true.  As we have seen, many philosophers have come up with systems which rank order values; so that in the case of an apparent clash we can say that, for instance, 'rights' trump what is thought to be good, or that justice should trump social stability. The point here is that philosophy based on rationality has the potential to smooth out apparent conflict and discomfort - nobody should be discomforted, really, by truth.  People who can share in rationality can share in its solutions and live a life that makes sense.

Value monism undoubtedly connects directly with monarchy (mon-archē)  - a single unified source of authority.  This can be the Prince, the Duke or the King, the Leader, the Philosopher-Kings, the Priest or Pope, the Clergy collectively.  It can also be a more abstract idealisation, like 'the Rule of Law' or  'Rationality' itself.  (Arguably, the European enlightenments displaced embodied monistic authority, and replaced it with disembodied monistic authority). From a critical point of view it is obvious that the maintenance of a hierarchical and fixed order value system will require coercive authority to enforce it.  Think back to the classroom example I used earlier.  Liberals,  I noted then, have an interest in each child, individually, reaching the right answer to arithmetic problems, for him or herself.  The point here is that it  is the right answer that much be reached.  And we need considerable coercive efforts - schools, classroom discipline, pedagogies and instruction - to ensure that all, including those who don't like arithmetic, or are weak at it, or don't concentrate in the required way, reach the right answer.  There I argued that arithmetic is a bad analogy for social, moral and political life.  Here's why.  Given that there just will be more dissent about issues such as the right way to live, the correct way of organising social relations, the goals for a state and so on than there typically will be about long division sums, a society that does try to maintain a system of 'right answers' to these problems will need to expend considerable coercive resources ensuring that each individual either obeys the authority when told the right answer, or reaches the 'correct' answer for her or himself. 

Pluralism

By pluralism we mean any normative theory of values, or any moral way of life,  or any system of authority and government, in which there any many values which compete or are in tension with one another, many systems of values, many sources of authority.    Some philosophers insist that value pluralism (or value system pluralism) involves incommensurability between values.  By this is meant not just that we don't order our values hierarchically, or weigh them one against the other in situations where they are in conflict, but that we cannot do this.

To illustrate the problem let's take an  example where values are taken to be commensurable.  The kind of moral dilemma that anyone with kin and friends and jobs  (that is, all of us) face all the time.    I have a public or professional engagement which is important not just for me personally, but for my colleagues and my university, my profession, perhaps some wider public interest.    I also have a child who finds life difficult, who is dependent on me for his welfare and security.   He needs me just at the time I should be going off to my engagement.  Now of course there are many ways that as moral individuals, or as moral philosophers, we  tackle these dilemmas, practically and theoretically.  Invariably, though, they involve weighing up and comparing the relative ranks of the different values (parenthood and kinship, versus professional and political values, or, if you like care and cherishing another human being, against power and influence in the public domain), different obligations ( the duty to a child versus the duty to the public), different interests (the interests of the child versus the interests of a public institution, what I really want to do against what I ought to do).  The upshot of our reasoning will be something like: 'this time he's going to have to cope without me - the needs, interests and expectations of my colleagues are just too important for me to miss this engagement' (or, vice versa: 'if he needs me I have no alternative really but to drop everything else to care for him'.)  Implicitly or explicitly one value has come first, and the others are second, third, and so on down the field.  I am measuring all these values, all these obligations, on one common measuring rule, or on one pair of scales, and seeing which comes first, which is heaviest, which 'wins'. 

The possibility of incommensurability is this.  Supposing the obligations and values of kinship, affective relations and  household are to the values of professional public and political life as mangoes are to mathematical treatises.  Of two mangoes we can ask which is the best, which wins on the scale of mango quality.  Of two mathematical treatises we can judge similarly.  Arguably, though, it is impossible to begin to judge whether this mango is better or worse, heavier or lighter, winner or loser in a competition with, that mathematical treatise.  If it is impossible, arguably, it is because they cannot be measured by a single measure.  We can imagine possible directions to take out of this difficulty.  'On the scale by which mathematical treatises are measured' we might ask, 'where does this one come?  Is it top, or in the first rank, or is it middling?  Then, how does this mango do in its competition?  Is this the top mango? '  But how do we judge the top mango against the top mathematical treatise?  Or even, the top mango versus a middling mathematical treatise?   By their contribution to the sum total of human happiness?  By their perfection in the sight of God?  Note that even if we came up with some criterion by which to judge between odd pairs - their functional perfection (the extent to which they are an do everything a thing of their kind ought be and do), their favouredness in the sight of good, their contribution to human happiness, their contribution to my happiness, etc - then the problem of commensurability can simply be displaced to our choice between these criterial values.  We can then go through the whole mango and maths exercise, substituting 'perfection in the sight of God' versus ' contribution to my happiness'. 

It might be that, like this,  between pairs of values that most of us are juggling with in our daily lives, there is no commensurability.  The pull of domestic and kinship obligations, and the pull of public obligations, have often been thought to be like this; and in western literature are the stuff of tragedy. We simply cannot compare, on some readings of western literature, the values of the household and the values of the state.  They clash with tragic consequences for human lives.  In western thought this incommensurability has often been 'resolved' by allocating domestic values to women and public values to men and treating the two spheres as separate.  Needless to say, this simply makes tragedy more piquant because part of its texture is the heterosexual encounter.  The alternative is to say what has equally often been said: household and state are commensurable.  In the end the domestic must defer to the political;   the world of the man dominates over that of the woman - masculine values will prevail in any competition with the feminine.  The interests of the household simply have to come second to the interests of the state.   The incommensurability theorist says that any such so-called resolution is doomed.  When we make choices between incommensurable values we bear irreparable loss and damage, to persons and to the social fabric. 

The theme of incommensurability has an important place in recent western philosophy in which it gestures toward the 'negativity', the 'otherness', that rationalist philosophy overlooks, ignores or denies.  But it is not the case that the incommensurability thesis is a necessary element of any thesis of pluralism, although some philosophers take it that the problem of pluralism involves  the problem of incommensurability.  There is tragedy, too, in always coming second, always having to defer to some higher value or higher authority.  Feminists and other egalitarians don't have to have recourse to incommensurability as such to capture the essence of their discontent - oppression and disadvantage are enough.  Feminism has forever struggled to  rescale values  - to argue that the pulls of affect are  morally as significant as the pulls of rationality; that the duties of parenting and friendship are morally as weighty as the duty of citizenship.  Any such struggle to rescale values is likely to be a Sysiphean never ending task.  Where child and job are equally important, but you can't do both, that's tragedy enough, without any reflection that actually you can't even measure the two on the same scale. This, it seems to me, is Berlin's point.

Berlin then, like other critics of enlightenment values, seems to have two arguments.  First, he wants to deny what enlightenment philosophers can seem to claim - that the rational solution eliminates friction and tragedy.  Let's suppose that the rational answer to some given dilemma is, for instance, 'the state must prevail'.  Let's suppose that it is true that on adequate reflection, everyone involved does agree that this is correct.  Even in those circumstances, there is no entailment  that  we can all feel jolly happy about it.  And affect, feelings, cannot be ignored, cannot count for nothing, in moral and political life. That's one point - that 'rationalistic monism' does not deliver a solution, let alone a unique solution, to moral and political dilemmas.  The second argument is that, in any case, there are many many values, many rank orderings of values, many ways of life.  And this fact proceeds from the prior fact that human beings can choose how to live; at any rate they believe they can, and they can live as if they can choose.  One's choice is one's own.  A group's choice is its own. If one is thwarted in one's choice, we might add, one might not gracefully submit to one's fate, to choices made by others.  To these two arguments we must now add a third.  Of course, when we 'choose how to live' we do so in  conditions of uncertainty; we have no capacity to forsee let alone explicitly to choose all the upshots and outcomes of what we do.  So, if one's choice delivers unexpected or tragic outcomes, again, one might not gracefully submit to this fate.

The upshot of all this is that human lives are characterised by multiple values, human societies by multiple value systems, and these are parts of multiple social and cultural and moral identities.  This means that there will always be a plurality of voices.  Numbers of groups will be trying by different means to 'decontest' values - that is to get their values accepted as legitimate and worthy of reflection in social and political institutions, perhaps to discredit systems of values and ways of life that undermine or challenge their own.  There will be multiple lines of antagonism, competition and bargaining.  And people will not accept the tragic outcomes of their actions and choices quietly. It is part of our political human nature to rail against our 'fate' and our position in structures of power.  It takes an enormous effort of coercive power to keep this all quiet. 

Relativism

Like pluralism, relativism is a multi-dimensional theory.  In different philosophical debates relativism of value, relativism of meaning, and relativism of the truth of propositions are tackled.  Similarly, truth, meaning, or values, are sometimes thought to be relative to an individual subject (this is often called 'subjectivism'), sometimes to a cultural group or 'epistemic community' (ie a group of people who share an understanding of the world),  sometimes to a whole tradition or civilisation (past, present and future).

Relativism would say, for instance, that what's valuable for me is not valuable for you [cell 1]; or the meaning of justice for us is 'an eye for an eye' whereas justice for them means restitution and rehabilitation tempered by mercy [cells 5, or 6].  Or that when we ask about the following diagram 'how many are there?' the answer is either 'three' or 'seven' depending on what logical system is being used [cell 9]. In addition to this, though, strong relativism would say something like: there is nothing more to be said about this.  In my system there are three, in your system there are seven (or eight).  There is nothing to be gained, no progress to be made, by discussing this any further.  The only political or moral response to relativism, if relativism is valid, is separatism and mutual indifference (or perhaps, antipathy).

The reason for this is not just that we disagree, or argue from different premisses to different conclusions.  It is that the grounds for our judgement about questions like 'is proposition p true?' or 'how many are there?' are located firmly within the relevant system.  The relativist says that grounds for judgement are internal to a system.  There are no grounds for commensurability between the judgement that there are three and the judgement that there are seven.  Comparing these two contrasting answers, then, looks  as silly as comparing maths and mangoes. 

Relativism, pluralism and monism

Immediately, this doesn't look right.  It certainly seems to be an advance on a straight disagreement about how many there are, to understand why - proceeding from what system of rules - I judge 'three' and you say 'seven'.  When we come to know the social  and religious traditions in which lex talonis dominates in laws, we know something valuable about legal judgements that we didn't know before.  We have opened up a channel of communication, perhaps, that hitherto was closed.  I can come to understand why someone else judges as he judges, and he can understand me. We can, as Hannah Arendt puts it, understand how the world looks from another person's viewpoint.  The relativist problem is,  though,  that at the end of the day, after all the communication through which we come to understand why we each believe what we believe, why we inhabit two 'different realities' ,  there is nothing more to be said or done.  There is, according to the relativist, no criterion independent of a system by which to judge whether one point of view is better than another. 

Certainly, the kinds of solutions to conflict that monistic philosophers have banked on, are non-starters.  It's not the  case that enlightenment, understanding the truth, and rationality, deliver us from error into a world of correct answers and convergence of us all on those correct answers.   One response to relativism is what we can call the 'bridgehead' solution. As human social beings we have enough basic concepts in common (or, perhaps, enough basic communicative wit) and as subjects have a basic stock of true and rational beliefs (about the material world, other people, social relationships etc)   to enable us to communicate with each other about our contrasting value commitments, judgements etc.  We both have the concept of a 'system of rules' or a 'system of values' and this enables us to get together and compare our systems and see where they diverge, why it is we disagree and what, exactly,  about.  A somewhat more elaborate theory is that of the 'overlapping consensus'. According to this, it is probably not the case that any two parties (individuals, or groups) have an exactly identical set of values and beliefs; and it could be the case that for any pair of parties you pick out, they don't share any values or beliefs.  But in a complex situation of many parties, there will be values shared between many pairs, and any individual or group will share at least some values and beliefs with at least one other.  This way, society can consist of an interlocking, pretty stable, set of groups, beliefs and belief systems.  Individuals and groups can be genuinely committed to the stability and well-being of this interlocking fabric as such.  An alternative is what we might call the 'core value' approach - the attempt to find key values that are shared by all human beings as such, values that 'we cannot help accepting, because we are human'. Candidates would be the good of  human dignity, the wrong or bad of dominating aggression, the value of liberty, the value of human individuals' capacities for reason and choice.  In all these proposals, the thought is that our common commitment to concepts, or a overlapping consensus, or to core values, itself provides the grounds for judgement against which in turn those grounds for judgement internal to distinct systems can be evaluated.

An alternative response  is to turn to political  power and authority.  Let's take as an example a case where different systems deliver different answers, like alternative counting systems.   In  schools mathematics, teachers, backed up by varying degrees of governmental legislation and regulation of the curriculum, use a base ten counting system for most purposes; we use this counting system  for practically all social uses;  technologists  use binary counting in computing technology.  'Agreement' about what system is used when, is authoritative.  I've said before that maths is probably not a good analogy for politics.  Nevetheless, the contrasts are instructive.  One legal system enshrines lex talonis at its heart.  Another legal system is some rather messy amalgam of vaguely liberal and conservative principles. What holds systems of values together?  Partly, to be sure, moral and political subjects' beliefs that as a system a particular range of values makes sense, is coherent, supports an account of how we live our lives.  On top of this, so to speak, are built social, political, legal etc institutions that maintain a particular system of values in place, by way of  laws, sanctions, justified expectations about how others will behave, and so on.  As soon as we consider this, both the fragility and the power  of that authority is clear.  Some moral and political subjects will more or less explicitly articulate their disagreement with the institutionalised values (and the point of political agreement is that this will and must always happen).  Within a system, the extent to which the 'official' system of values is actually embodied in the daily practices of, say, prison governors, magistrates, police officers and others will vary hugely.  And the point of a political system is that the gap between what the laws say should happen, what does happen, and what people collectively think should happen, is constantly under scrutiny and review. 

All the way through this discussion so far I have been insisting that where we seem to have monism, unity in a system of values and a way of life, agreement among all the parties about what the values are and how they are arranged, this just does depend on the use of coercive power.  Ideally, we might wish that each person should freely and fully rationally assent to the value system that prevails,  just as, possibly, we might each freely and fully rationally assent to the base ten counting system, were that agreement to be revisited.   In fact, you can bet your life, if the question of what counting system we use were to be opened up there would doubtless be claims and counter-claims from binarists, and base seven occultists and others.  And as debates about a society's values always show, the same goes in shedloads for values and ways of life. 

Now, to say that the solution to relativism is politics and political discussion can seem alarming to those who associate politics just with coercive power, with governmental domination, with failures of truth and rationality and so on.  But, if we connect politics back to human freedom, we understand it to be an astonishing resource for guaranteeing freedom, for reaching momentary agreements which are immediately unsettled by dissent.  Philosophy tells us what rationality pure would demand; what a pure system based on a particular religious text or set of revelations would say; what tragedies there are in pluralism.  Political power - thought of as a collective resource, at the heart of which is public action, and speech - enables us to live together as human beings.  Political power can be devoted to maintaining an ostensible monism.  The difficulty is that here political power is upholding a falsehood.  If political power is devoted to the maintenance of plurality, at least it will not be  caught in a downright lie.  My argument here, then, is that political communication, the political maintenance of a precarious 'equilibrium', is the nearest we are going to get to a satisfactory solution to the problem of relativism in judgement. 

What attitudes towards truth, the essence of religion, rationality, and the other are necessitated by pluralism?

In what has been said so far I have touched on the topics of truth and rationality a good deal.  I have introduced the notion of 'otherness' or alterity.  I've said very little about essences or about religion as such. So in this section, I will take these questions in that order: truth, rationality, alterity, and essence of religion.  I shall summarise what I've argued so far about the first three, and then consider the implications of all of that for religious belief, commitment, and mission. 

Truth

What does the recognition, in itself,  that different people, and different groups, value different things, and rank order values differently mean for our approach to 'truth'?    Truth still pertains to propositions.  Some propositions, still, are true and some are false.  So, for instance,

• P1: 'in the game of chess, a move along the diagonal, and only along the diagonal, is a legal move for a bishop'

is true. 'The game of chess' specifies the context in which 'a move along the diagonal, and only along the diagonal, is a legal move for a bishop' is true.  Without this contextual specification, and all that it implies for the meaning of 'bishop', for the presence of a chequer board, etc, this is not a true proposition.  So there can be true, and false, propositions, about what is, or is not, in the Koran; and there can be true, and false, propositions about what scholars who are learned in Koranic study have interpreted passages of the Koran to mean for the lives of past, present and future generations of Muslims and non-Muslims.  The same goes for validity and invalidity, which pertain not to propositions but to inferences from one proposition to another.  Within a given context, it might or might not be a valid inference from some action on the part of an actor, to the conclusion that that actor is a sinner.  Propositions about what is right, or proper, or good, have truth values exactly as other propositions do, and arguments about these things are valid or invalid just as other arguments are.    However, on this analysis, context, it seems, is all.   The question that exercises critics of pluralism is whether there are true propositions, about values,  that are universal - that is, not dependent on any specified more local context.  That is, are there any propositions of, roughly, the form:

• P2: 'Value v is valuable for human beings as such'?, or 
• P3: 'Value v is the top value for human beings as such'?

where value v must be something like utility, or obedience to God's revealed will, or justice (or rather justice in a particular conception or as conceptualised through a particular theory). 

I believe that many propositions of the form of P2 are true.  Any philosopher who sets any store by a theory of human needs (as I do) will likely think the same.  Philosophers like Berlin, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  who think that there are certain values that proceed from a theory of humanity as such - values that we cannot help but be committed to just by virtue of being human  - will similarly be committed to the existence of a range of true propositions of the form P2. But neither Berlin, nor Rousseau, believe that there could be a true proposition of form P3.  Human beings of a certain orderly disposition are apt to arrange  their values hierarchically.  For the most part our value orderings will shift over our life course although a well ordered life will be relatively stable in this regard. Different ways of life will coalesce around and institutionalise particular value orderings.

My second point about truth is that in the domain of social life, values and politics, truth does not coerce us directly as it does in some other domains.   In fields like maths the truth of the proposition that two plus two makes four, once we've got it, leaves no room for doubt, cannot be gainsaid.  Similarly, in the domain of sense experience, as Sextus Empiricus put it:

'the impression being self-evident and striking, all but seizes us by the hair ... and pulls us to assent'

- a nice image.  Arendt makes the point that there are no 'self-evident' truths in politics.  Where truths are proclaimed to be self-evident,  that proclamation in itself testifies to their non-self-evidence.  The point for the monist, then - the theologian, say, who believes that his or his school's interpretation of the Bible does truly convey God's will and that God's will is the top authority - is that this 'truth' has to be represented in speech and art,  promoted and proclaimed,  argued for in private spaces and in public.  Social contract theory faces the same difficulty.  The strategy of arguing from basic premisses about human needs or interests, via rational choice theory, to a social agreement that all rational actors would assent to were they to be faced with the original conditions  (the state of nature, as in Hobbes and Rousseau; or the 'original position', as in Rawls' theory of justice) is designed to justify the resulting theory or hypothetical agreement.  The problem is that not all rational actors are prepared to follow the reasoning in every detail - so an enormous amount of philosophical disagreement and conflict ensues.  The philosopher is forced to use rhetoric, poetics, persuasion, multiple representations of his argument designed for different audiences.... in short to participate in a process that looks very much like a political process in order to carry the day philosophically. In politics, our approach to truth if that is how we wish to think of our attempts to converge on something like a just, good, right, worthy, humane collective life, must take account of those perspectives and beliefs that we don't share.  Thus, a dialogic stance is the only possible one.

If some group is determined to evade dialogue, to assert monism and brook no dissent, to engage in dogmatics, to permit discussion only from highly trusted and trained parties (scholars, say, or judges positioned well within the dominating structures) they are going to have to expend huge numbers of resources on the suppression and repression of dissent.

Rationality

There are two key issues, it seems to me, pertaining to rationality that have come out of this discussion. 

The first is the question how we appropriately conduct ourselves in a world in which each individual person is attributed with a capacity for rationality. Political philosophy rehearses a dilemma.  On the one hand, it can be argued that rationality justifies authority.  Were rational people to work things out for themselves they would come to the same conclusion as the rationalist philosopher.  So we can effectively save them the trouble without violating their rationality by simply institutionalising the rational solution, and governing people's conduct that way.  On the other hand, this seems to be based on two very large and questionable premisses.  The first is, that there is indeed one rational solution.  Second, granted that there is a  rational solution, is that it is justifiable to go direct, as it were, to the authoritarian institution of that solution, by-passing any dissent of either rational or non-rational agents. Doubts about these premisses and the authoritarian conclusion turn us to the pluralist view that agents with rational attributes each occupy a unique subject position such that they each have their own perspective on the world, and face a particular set of constraints and incentives and options.  They each have their own preferences, values, allegiances, identity and so forth.  This means that each has her own voice.  Without any assumption that these rational individuals are at all egotistical, or are concerned only with their personal individual utility, we can see that there will inevitably be disagreement about what collective governing decisions should be made, what settlements should be reached, how robust those settlements are.

The second issue is the relation between rationality and other non-rational motivations and justifications of human action.  Rational solutions have often been thought to be harmonious solutions.  As Berlin explains, this idea has been central in the western tradition.  Instability, pain, conflict, want, injustice are in many political and ethical projects believed to stem from error, irrationality, and falsehood.  If only we could get our values straight, our value conflicts sorted, if we could focus on rational solutions to dilemmas (rather than magical solutions, or stopgap solutions or the use of force) instability and conflict could also be seen off.  As we have seen, there are powerful arguments from anti-rationalists generally, pluralists, feminists and others, that even if we do get our values straight  and apply rationality to our decision making and action, that will neither deliver a single solution to human dilemmas nor will it do away with pain and tragedy and conflict.  This does not, of course, mean that we should not endeavour to straighten out our value commitments, nor does it mean that we should not try to apply rationality to decision making.  There might well be strong reasons  for going for rational, rather than magical, or stopgap, or violent solutions.  But among those reasons, the fact that rationality is painless, or smooth, or conflict free, does not figure high.  Feeling, then, discontent, hurt, joy, elation, are part and parcel of any decision and action system. 

It must also not be underestimated how feeling has a legitimate role to play in decision and action.  Clearly, in some theories feeling has a central place -  for instance, hedonistic or happiness focussed versions of utilitarianism.  The fact that 'utility' or 'welfare' or some other principle is frequently substituted for happiness is testament, in part, to the disfavour with which rationalist philosophy looks at emotions and feelings, and attempts to deal with non-affective categories only.  Of course, we should take a critical view of people's declarations about what they feel, and should be cognisant of both the extent to which 'feeling' is discursively and politically constructed, and the extent to which feelings often do not justifiably motivate action.  But equally, we must be prepared to face the possibility that, for example, justified anger will justifiably motivate a public display that might strike people of contrasting affect as violent, or illegitimately disruptive.  Similarly, elation can motivate decisions that have unintended consequences.  But so can rationality.  My point here is partly to dethrone rationality from its preeminent place in much philosophy, and from certain approaches to political philosophy in particular.  It is also, importantly, to emphasise that uncertainty, moral indeterminacy, lack of closure, attend any decisions motivated whether by reason or by emotion.  It is precisely because of this uncertainty and openness that political communication, decision making and action is necessary to hold open the space for freedom, against authoritarian uses of force to settle and suppress.

Alterity

Of course, what's at stake in all of this is how we treat, and treat with, others who do not share our perceptions of the world or our way of life, our values or goals, our hopes, who don't fear what we fear or dread what we dread. 

For Berlin, pluralism involves an attitude to others in which we attribute to them at least some shared hopes and fears and dreads; and in which we understand that, in circumstances other than the ones which prevail, they could have been us and we them, their values could have been ours.  At the basis of this attitude is a deep identification.  The same kind of identification is at the heart of Davidson's principle of charity. (But Davidson would resist the metaphor of depth).   A condition of understanding another person (what they say, or what they do)  and communicating with that person, is  some shared world.  To understand and to communicate presupposes that she sees in some basic sense what I see.  By attributing to her veridical perception and true belief about what there is,  I can interpret her utterances and learn her language.  This presumption of a deep identification enables us to know that we could feel that rage, feel that frustration, be committed to that kind of social organisation, believe what they believe about what explains their situation. 

Some philosophers express deep unease, or scepticism,  about the extent to which, in the name of pluralism and communication across difference, by this attitude and this approach all discomfort, all strangeness, are assimilated away. The issue here is 'the uncommunicable'.  Rage, anger, struggle and competition, generate energy, generate pluralities of voice and action.  In a free political setting these voices and actions will be encountered, responded to, engaged with.  However, there can be no assumption that everything will be dealt with, that all that is being 'said' will be heard or understood, that all the emotion will be captured in the dialogical or communicative process.

It is also important to stress the intractability of 'others' - and this is not just 'others' from worlds or cultures different from our own. We  don't have to go very far from home to meet resistance, the desire to overcome, evasion, and conflict - these are part and parcel of ordinary social relationships like friendship and kinship, colleagueship, and political relationships too.

All of this should alert us to both the impermissibility of demonisation and other forms of dehumanisation; and to the impermissibility of over-assimilation.  All human relationships, if we are paying proper attention to others, are figured by the otherness of our others.  To be sure, it pays to treat our friends and our kin as if they were projections of aspects of our selves because to a considerable degree that must be true.  We relate to others through the prism of our own psyche.  To be cared for  I must care.  However, quite apart from the danger of the pathology of treating others (especially, but not only,  our children) as if they are extensions of self, there is the danger of denying the unassimilable otherness of any other in our acting out of deep relatedness.  This is so, to repeat, with friends, and with strangers.  With our foes, the dilemmas of relating are not different: demonisation, and relegation to a domain beyond the world of relations is one obvious pathology.   To this we should not add the mistake of assimilation, or an emphasis on what we all share to a degree that denies what really divides us. 

At the risk of repetition, I shall just remark here that the promise of a specifically political mode of relating is that we can precisely steer this course between intimacy and emnity.  That is the point of our public institutions for treating with strangers. 

The essence of religion

To begin my discussion here I shall state what I mean by the essentials, or the essence, of religion.  I take these to be those beliefs, values, practices, which are the sine qua non of counting as a religious believer - Christian, Hindu,  Jain, or whatever.   By the same token, these beliefs, values and practices could be contingently religious.  For example, Jainism as I understand it requires chastity and avoidance of sensual pleasure  by  Jains.   Of course, there are motivations for  chastity and the avoidance of  sensual pleasure  other than Jainism itself.  It could perhaps be true that among adherents of Jainism are individuals who would be chaste ascetics even were they not Jains.  Just as there could be Christian people who would engage in charitable work and giving even were they not Christians.  But equally, some such beliefs, values and practices could be essentially religious: 'so that to speak of engaging in such activity outside a context of religious meaning and purpose is nonsensical'.[61]  The commitments of Jains not to steal, to be chaste and so on could be essentially religious for them; or contingently so.  By contrast their commitment to participation in the prescribed form of prayer can only be  essential, and would make no sense without the tradition of Jainism. 

Clearly, certain practices, beliefs and values that are essential to a religion are absolutely unaffected one way or another by monism or its falsity, or pluralism or its falsity.  Jains will continue to live the life prescribed by their tradition regardless of anything else that anyone believes, providing some other group don't decide to persecute or otherwise damage Jains and Jainism.  Some beliefs and practices, some hopes and fears and dreads, however, are profoundly affected by pluralism. 

Among these are the belief that the secular political authority must be dominated by the religious power.  Also, the belief that the society within which the religion is situated must itself be thoroughly imbricated with the values of that religion.  And the belief that non-confessors are damned, or polluting, or both.  And the dread of other religions, or of  societies which are permeated with the values of any other religion or cultural tradition.   European history, the history of Christendom,  and the history of the Islamic world in the large frequently feature one or more of such beliefs and dreads. 

However, all these beliefs and dreads are themselves undermined by a number of powerful factors.  It is clearly unwise to underestimate, let alone discount, the capacity and appetite for violence that is cultivated by states, and some societies, and some social groups.  And it's fair to say that any theory of politics must, at some point, squarely face the seductions and the temptations of violence, the uses of violence by states and groups to try to do what, according to the political theorist, can only be done politically.  Politics relies on a cost-benefit analysis that tells us that the costs of violence are, in the end, too high.  It might  also try to rely on the kind of humanist (human rights, human values) convictions that are now central to liberal, socialist and even conservative discourses, but which, it is well to remember, have only very slowly and gradually come to anything like a dominant philosophical and discursive position in modern western societies and elsewhere.  Both of these springboards for politics as oppposed to violence are discouragingly splintery and  wobbly.  Nevertheless, they are what we have to jump off from.  There is, however, one other springboard.  That is the one that I have alluded to  throughout this essay, and that is the capacity of human beings for political resistance to the structures that govern them, the capacity of human beings for speech and public action of the reasoning and argumentative and representational kind.

Within any religious tradition (or any other cultural or political or ethical tradition) adherents do have to engage in this kind of interaction with each other - regardless of exactly what institutional structures for producing legal opinions, or engaging in theological or philosophical dispute, or holding cultural co-members to account for their conduct are.  Around the penumbra of any such institutions are the voices and the words both that aren't wholly assimilated into the dominant discourse, and those that  are positively excluded (such as  the voices of women around the universities of Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; or the voices of Jews around Britain's governing institutions in the nineteenth century).  This aura of half-heard voices, these half-eclipsed yet murmering utterances are the stuff out of which a political encounter will eventually come.  The periodic eruptions of these excluded identities as out of anger or out of exuberance they act out their excessive capacity, crossing the boundaries, scaling the fences, making claims either by aping or using the language of the powerful - all of these are the eruptions out of which political encounter must eventually emerge.  Now this is so within any culture, within any religious tradition. It is this incompleteness of any social structure, this trouble at the boundary, that ensures that someting like pluralism is a constant presence, perhaps just to the edge of the vision, perhaps just over the auditory horizon, but insistently there nevertheless.