The One and the Many

On Monotheism, Paganism, Pluralism, and Globalism

1.

One of the common criticisms of monotheism is that if there’s only one God, there’s only one truth. And if there’s only one truth, then we end up killing each other in the name of our version of the truth. Monotheism breeds exclusivity. Monotheism = mono-vocality. In academic circles, Jan Assmann is known for this critique of monotheistic religion. One God for all requires intolerance of idolaters. Thus, the Biblical law: When you conquer a polytheistic city, destroy the local religion.

At a political level, we find a similar critique of imperialism, federalism, and globalization—all forms of centralized authority (more or less) that create unanimity at scale. The stronger the center of power, the weaker the periphery. Centralized authority creates unity, but it’s a violent unity. All can be Roman or French, but only by giving up idiosyncrasy.

Secular liberalism ditched the synagogue and the church, but erected its own: Starbucks, McDonalds, H&M, HSBC, Google. International cities have more in common with one another—so the argument goes—than they do with the rural towns in their own countries.

Paganism is more pluralistic than monotheism, just as localism is more pluralistic than empire or federalism.

2.

The flip-side, though, of the critique of monotheism and centralized authority, is that paganism and localism are relativistic and postmodern, in the negative sense. You need some objective, or at least, consensus standard to coordinate people, be it in the scientific realm or in the moral realm. Rashomon-style storytelling may be more true to human experience, but it ensures that conflict is perpetual, as there is no common ground. I have my truth, you have yours. One person’s pluralism is another’s relativism. One person’s “tolerance” is another’s solipsism.

Carl Schmitt was fond of citing the anarchist Proudhon, in defense of the pagan-pluralistic view: “Whenever someone invokes ‘humanity’, they are cheating.” The pagan views any effort to bring people together under one shared belief system as a form of domination, not humanitarianism. Thus, the question of American foreign policy—to intervene or not in “humanitarian crises” abroad—is one that does not cut easily down a left-right axis. Rather, it’s a question of localism vs. globalism, relativism (pluralism) vs. monotheism. In a secular context, the common religion is democratic liberalism. Can and should one impose it on others?

In Greek tragedy, the gods fight endlessly, and we are bystanders, collateral, in their gigantomachia. In monotheism, God says, “This is right and this is wrong.” There is no Biblical genre that matches the Greek mode of tragedy, except, perhaps Job. (Job is caught not between two gods, but between two ideas of God, one being the God of quid pro quo reward and punishment as presented in Deuteronomy and the other being a new concept of God, namely, the idea that God is capricious, not bound by human expectations).

3.

But does monotheism require monovocality, or can it also justify a kind of metaphysical and political pluralism? The Tower of Babel story (Gen. 11) suggests that God wants humanity to be scattered into different groups, that a unified world-state would be a bad thing.

Jewish thought, by the time we get to the Talmud, if not before, celebrates debate, and allows for the possibility that God can validate contradictory conclusions (“these and these are the words of the living God.”)

It is a hallmark of medieval Jewish scholarship that God and the Torah have “70 faces” (70 being a stand-in for the totality of ways one might experience the world, in accordance with one’s culture).

Long before Wallace Stevens wrote about 13 ways of looking at a blackbird, medieval theologians wrote about 70 ways of looking at a Scriptural verse.

Pluralism (and relativism), therefore, need not be opposed to monotheism. Nor should we think that postmodernism is somehow a new development.

The Talmud imagines heaven as a Beit Midrash, a house of study, where angels debate each other. It’s not like everything will be resolved if and when we peel back the veil of illusion separating us mortals from the divine realm. No, heaven, too, contains aporiae, literally, places where one is stumped by forking paths.

4.

In my next post, I will write about the implications of pluralism for the relationship between aesthetics and politics. My argument will be that if pluralism holds, we cannot reduce the one to the other. Works can be both beautiful and terrible, illuminating and flawed. We need not restrict our enjoyment of art to works that are moral or politically correct. At the same time, we need not think that beauty and insight alone let us off the hook from considering the moral and political context for works of art.

Pluralism means there are at least 70 things we can say about great works. One of those things might be, “Look at how amazing this is” and another might be “Look at the slave labor required to make it” (or “Look at the prejudices of the artist”). Both the requirement that aesthetics pass a moral litmus test and the notion that aesthetics is exempt from political analysis lack pluralism. Whether this is good or bad, we will soon explore.

Meanwhile, happy to share new works just out. Here is my mega thread on Hans Jonas, philosopher, theologian, and historian of Gnosticism. And here is my podcast interview on reason and religion with Rabbi David Bashevkin.

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