AKU-ISMC Seminar on Pluralism

Pluralism and Politics

Introduction

I have been asked to analyse and discuss 'the theoretical foundations of pluralism'.  I see no better way to do this than directly to address the questions put to me by Abdou Filali-Ansary in his briefing about this seminar's intellectual aims and content.

The big question he set me is:

What are the theoretical foundations of pluralism?

In my understanding, several  major bodies of western philosophy  can be interpreted as grounding pluralism.

These are:

• Liberalism as it descended from the European enlightenments,
• the Counter-Enlightenment,
• the tradition of philosophical scepticism
• classical and republican political theories.

I know that many scholars of Islam and other religions also emphasise pluralist themes in other traditions. 

It's worth pausing to think about the significance of the fact that pluralist commitments and pluralist themes can be found in a plurality of philosophical traditions. 

I don't have time to discuss all of these, but here are some headlines:

Liberalism, and other 'isms'

In current debates it is often the case that 'pluralism' is linked closely with 'liberalism'.

In the liberal tradition indebted to Immanuel Kant a  central idea is that individual persons must be treated both as autonomous (which means they must be treated as rational and free,  capable of governing themselves) and as ends in themselves (that is, not to be used as means in any other person's projects).  This implies that each one of us must decide for ourselves, live our own lives, exercise our own faculties of reason,  and, ultimately, govern ourselves.

Liberalism represents the world as a plurality of individuals. 

However, it is important to note that not all liberals are pluralists.    Some philosophers reason as follows:

• The power of 'rationality' is that a rational solution to a problem (as opposed to a 'magical' solution, or a solution that just does what the relevant people have always done, or a solution arrived at by some powerful person acting in his own interests)  is the solution that any rational individual whatsoever would arrive at. 
• This being so, it can be argued that  instead of everyone individually and severally working out what to do,  that one agency (the philosopher, say, or the government) should decide on our behalf and
• providing that that agent is fully rational none of us should object to their decision.  It's  the conclusion to which we would come.

 Here we have an argument for 'unity' or 'authority' over against plurality.

Utlitiarianism, and on some readings, John Rawls' theory of justice, are monistic theories of this sort. 

Other 'isms', of course, arrive at monism by a different route.   'Ideologies' sort out values and put them in a hierarchy. 

• 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

In response to Enlightenment thinking, and especially, the view that rationality dominates over all other values a number of arguments are made: 

• 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. 

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe the argument was also made that:

• every culture has its own attributes, which must be grasped in and for themselves
•  Different cultures have different values and virtues; so the possibility of one perfect society, or one single hierarchical system of values,  is  logically incoherent. 

What we have here is cultural pluralism

Politics

Let's say that politics is

• all those processes connected with the power to govern: competing for it, winning or losing it, exploiting is, squandering it, opposing it, subverting it, etc etc etc.

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.    

It is an ancient Greek idea that the world we have in common is regarded from an infinite number of 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.

In much of the Christian era this concentration on the world, and this capacity to take up the point of view of others, has been suppressed.  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

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.

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

• 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.  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 discourse?

Postmodernity

• Theorists of 'post-modernism' argue that the currency of 'grand theories' or 'totalising discourses'  or any kind of monism, is irreparably debased.
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• 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 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 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. 
  
  
• 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).

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

We need a little bit of analysis here.

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. 

Fourth, pluralism pertains between social groups, and their voices, within, and across, societies and cultures.

And there are three possible responses to plurality:

• We might embrace and live with conflict and tragedy; 
• we might attempt to encounter and accommodate people unlike us; 
• or we might try to live in mutual indifference.

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

Monism

To re-cap:

• 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.
  
  
•  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.  

• 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

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

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).

The relativist says that grounds for judgement are internal to a system.  There are no grounds for commensurability between the judgement made from one point of view, or from within one culture, and the judgement made from another point of view or culture.

Immediately, this doesn't look right.  Understanding why we disagree is obviously better than not understanding.  We have opened up a channel of communication.  I can come to understand why someone else judges as he judges, and he can understand me. 

The problem as the relativist sees it is that at the end of day, even knowing why we believe what we believe, why we inhabit two 'different realities' ,  there is nothing more to be said or done. 

One argument against relativism rests on the idea of an '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 - even global society - can consist of an interlocking, pretty stable, set of groups, beliefs and belief systems.  Individuals and groups can all 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 politics.   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. 

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?

I don't have time this morning to tackle all these interesting questions.  Anyone who wants to know that I think about them can read the full version of this paper. 

However, I must make the following points:

Truth

My main  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. But in politics and ethics, 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.  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.       

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 many philosophers,  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.

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.  Some such  beliefs, values and practices - for example, the practice of charitable giving -  could be contingently religious.  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',.   The commitment to participation in the prescribed form of prayer can only be  essential, and would make no sense without the relevant religious tradition. 

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.  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.

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