What is Pluralism?

Disagreement And Agreement Belong Together

Delighted to announce my new podcast, Meditations with Zohar. You can listen to the trailer and subscribe here. First episode drops this week!

---

Pluralism is a word that gets thrown around a lot, and yet is rarely used with precision. Often it’s a kind of code or cipher for a set of specific commitments. To an outsider those commitments might look exclusionary and homogenous, despite the self-perception of the group using the identity-label “pluralistic.”

Pluralism is a term that has a lot of purchase in certain segments of Jewish life, but it also is one that has found a pride of place in American life, as well, from Whitman and Dewey to cold-war liberals like Trilling and Arendt. In both the Jewish world and in American life the term “pluralism” has come under suspicion, in large part because it is seen to be code for a kind of moderation. The ethos of the “marketplace of ideas” that was once the calling card of universities is now under attack from the right (which sees the university as a bastion of liberal brain washing) and from the left (which sees it as insufficiently committed to social justice and a bastion of elite “privilege.”)

Here are some thoughts on the term that has become a kind of minor flashpoint in the culture wars.

Pluralism can only exist on the basis of shared commitments. It offers a flexibility that is made possible only on the basis of an original unity. Pluralism is a word used by people to justify making the tent bigger, but there’s always a point at which the tent ends. The question isn’t who is pluralistic, but about what things. Nationalists can be pluralistic about everything but nationalism itself. To understand what people mean by “pluralism” consider what they first take to be non-negotiable givens.

Ontological pluralism: Being/Truth/Goodness can be described in many (and even contradictory) ways.

Epistemological pluralism: Different people know different things. No person can know it all.

Political pluralism: Putting the desire to share a polis above differences over how the polis should be run; i.e., we all read the constitution differently but agree that it matters that we have a constitution...

Value pluralism: There are many goods, and no overarching algorithm that can tell us how to rank those goods, either in abstraction or in concretion.

Strong pluralism: Our inability to come to consensus is itself a good thing to be valued as a mark of human dignity.

Weak pluralism: Accepting difference of opinion and value are a means to a common end: either better understanding our own position, changing our position on the evidence of counter-evidence, or simply, co-existence (agreeing to disagree).