Pluralism: Hard and Soft

[Jeff]

Pluralism: Hard and Soft
(A 1 hour essay)

I.
One of the places where I agree with Thanin is that pluralism is the preferred position among the following more or less traditional choices: Exclusivism (Particularism), Inclusivism, and Pluralism. As is the case with much of the most important vocabulary for our times, these terms began their life in debates about the nature of religion. There they are usually defined (prescriptively) as follows:

Pluralism – There are complementary or competitive schemes of thought that might be valuable depending upon the circumstances. A stronger version would say that every competing scheme of thought is true in some sense. In religion, this would amount to saying that every scheme is either pragmatically true (it can give us an encounter with ultimate reality), or true on grounds of internal self-coherence, or true because they all correspond (somehow!) to the way things really are.

Inclusivism – Among competing schemes of thought there is one that is most valuable, but the others are valuable to some extent (and much (all?) of what is valuable in them can be discussed in terms of the highest ranking scheme).

Exclusivism – There is but one really valuable way of looking at the world. All other schemes of thought have inherent flaws or make important and ineradicable mistakes.

There are descriptive uses of these terms, but these are not so interesting. I think most of the meaningful questions arise when we recognize that the field contains many competing views, i.e., it is descriptively pluralist.

As we have discussed since 2004 on these boards and the Christian Politics board, I believe Exclusivism to be untenable. The real choice, it seems to me, is between Pluralism and Inclusivism. The upside of Pluralism is that it is egalitarian and universalist. The downside, is that though it seems to promote diversity and tolerance, it really does nothing of the sort. Tolerance is a definite view, and to promote it, one must claim it affirmatively. An extreme but principled Pluralist would be forced to admit that tolerance is just one value among many competing values.

Thus popular pluralism is really self-contradictory in that most people embrace it to thwart one of the other views mentioned above. And extreme pluralism cannot do this since it doesn’t aim to deny any scheme of thought at all.

Inclusivism seems a reasonable alternative. It privileges a single scheme of thought, but does its best to respect other schemes as well. It’s a nice sounding compromise…if only it would work out. What Inclusivism fails to recognize is the reality of competition among ideas. Almost no view is neutral about the values of other views. For example, even if we assume that Inclusivist Christianity is true, we would still have to deal with all the condemnations of practices of other religions that are prima facie at odds with Christian precepts. Both Testaments teach about the sinfulness of idolatry (Ex 34:12-15, 1 Cor 10:20-23, 2 Cor 1:7-18, Gal 4:8-9, 1 Peter 4:3, etc…). It looks like there is some necessary competitiveness inherent in Christianity. How do we defang it and preserve its message at the same time. The truth is, even a rudimentary investigation of other religions would reveal the same kind of competitiveness there. Inclusivism comes off, then, as an attempt to tame the free competition among ideas. But this taming is not neutral, i.e., it has definite goals, and it may be incompatible with the ideas it seeks to mollify.

Second, not all ideas can be retranslated into alien vocabularies. (In fact, sometimes Justin claims that all translation is necessarily indeterminable. I think he has backed off this position in recent years. But if the view is correct, then no restatement in common terms is ever really possible, hence, no common understanding through words.)

Finally, there is a further question of power—which is the bane of the exclusivist, as well. Which scheme of thought is to be preferred? What are the criteria upon which any single scheme ever becomes privileged in the first place? It might seem as though Inclusivism escapes from much of the hardness of the exclusivist view, but it does not. Almost all the problems with that view arise here, as well.

So, in many ways, the inclusivist view manages to capture the worst of both worlds.

II.
I am not going to argue against Exclusivism here. Again, in my view, it is an idiotic position. But it does get something right: It affirms a belief in truth, and such a view is indispensable. One way to characterize the deepest problems with both pluralism and inclusivism is by noting their aversion to affirm truth whether it be the reality of the world or the reality of real competition among ideas.

I want to defend a view that I will call hardheaded pluralism. I am not sure what it consists in other than these two things: Truth and a recognition of the inherent value in all competing schemes of thought. At this point, my model is mainly biological. We can profitably think of schemes of ideas as species of animals which are better or worse depending upon their circumstances and environment. For example, on earth a human that could breathe Sulfur dioxide would not survive for long. But if the conditions were changed, such an individual might be best suited to thrive. The same is true, I think of schemes of ideas. Given any set of conditions (our commitment to truth), there will be some sets of ideas that are better suited to them. The position is pluralist in the sense that any view could be most valuable if the conditions were right, and it is aggressively pluralist in its insistence upon our nearly complete ignorance in predicting future conditions, hence which views ought to survive. That is, it seeks to conserve diversity as a means of ensuring that complex thought survives into the future whatever it looks like. As such, hardheaded pluralists seek a variety of view about the nature of things, both scientific and religious, and a pluralism of views in both fields.

But the hardheaded pluralist gives up the idea that all views are equally valuable here and now. Right now, only a narrow selection of views are worth holding, though there may be some diversity, some opportunity for choice among them. For example, the hardheaded pluralist should claim that exclusivism is not a view that is well adapted to the reality of today. It tends to fling airplanes into tall buildings and leap past science in a single bound. While the practitioners of exclusivism, e.g., religious fundamentalists of all sorts, should not be punished, they should be recognized as having maladaptive ideas, and should lose out in the marketplace of ideas.

My view does have some kinks to be worked out. The biggest, it seems to me, is a reliance upon nature to sort out ideas. I don’t believe that it does this very well at all. And history is filled with real setbacks that could have been prevented with a little forethought and planning. I also believe that perhaps the biggest ongoing catastrophe is the loss of human creativity through inadequate institutions and modes of interaction. We capitalize on only a small amount of the real human potential available to us. So, some kinds of protections seem to be in order.

If anyone wants to take up this creative position building, I think it would be fun and useful. I keep trying to find ways to express what are essentially political ideas. An intellectually respectable pluralism that could be captured in some pithy ways would be such a nice alternative to the stale democratic talk about tolerance and equality. Not that such ideas are bad, it’s just that the relativism that founded such values in the 1960s and 1970s died about 25 years ago. And if we are ever to articulate a position, again, we need a new way of talking.

Jeff

[Jeff]

Please excuse all the grammatical errors in my essay. I see them (well probably only most of them) but have no time to correct them.

I didn't make this clear: I am interested in detractors as well. Blast the view if you have a mind to. Develop it if that suits you. Or ignore it. You know the drill.

[chris]

"I am not going to argue against Exclusivism here. Again, in my view, it is an idiotic position."

Sounds kind of Exclusivist to me! 8^)

[chris]

My first reactions:

Relativism dead? Not as long as I breathe sulfur dioxide!

The "ideas" that you seem to be referring to, in that they are diametrically opposed to other ideas, etc., seem to be more "ideals" than "ideas." And to believe that any particular ideal is all right all the time is, yeah, idiotic. But is it any less exclusionist to believe that a combination of these ideals, changing for different circumstances, is "truth"? To me, it seems the higher "idea" is that combination of "ideals"...

There is an assumption of criteria here... what would constitute an ideal situation (sorry to reuse the word). One of the things that makes fundamentalism so scary is that adherents adjust their idea of the "ideal situation" to fit what would result if their "ideal" was taken to the extreme. Women oppressed under our "ideal"... um... well, then that must be a good thing!

Is there any word for Christians who don't adhere to the teachings of Paul? Gospelists? If not, there should be.

[i]

chris said:

Is there any word for Christians who don't adhere to the teachings of Paul? Gospelists? If not, there should be.

Would you be a Gospelists?

[Jeff]

Thanks for responding, Chris. Excellent points. I have only 20 minutes to respond right now, so I’ll be writing even less accurately in what follows. Anticipatory apologies…

1. You are right to say that ideas in themselves are not contradictory. Contradictory is a property that attaches to propositions. So, there was an assumption left out: Ideas are capable of being represented propositionally. If that is true, then ideas can be contradictory. For example, the idea that I am here now typing a response to you contradictions the negation of any proposition that expresses this idea.

You are also right to point out that I cannot really speak of contradictory schemes of thought. Rather I would have to speak in terms of propositional understandings of all the ideas within a scheme. Any contradiction that arises would have to be between individual propositions in rival schemes.

While you are correct about both points, I don’t think there is much hay to be made with them. I am not committed to the idea that all ideas are representable in words, just the ones that are the subjects of relations like contradiction. In any case, I would defend the idea that there is a naïve notion of tension among our thoughts. Even children recognize it, even if they don’t have the vocabulary to discuss it. (Example: Last night Emily asked Jenn if she could eat some soup. It was 11 PM and time for bed. Jenn said, “No.” To which Emily responded, “Well dad put a can of soup on the counter just now. Why should he have soup at bedtime when I can’t?”)

2. “But is it any less exclusionist to believe that a combination of these ideals, changing for different circumstances, is ‘truth’? To me, it seems the higher ‘idea’ is that combination of ‘ideals’...” and “’I am not going to argue against Exclusivism here. Again, in my view, it is an idiotic position.’ Sounds kind of Exclusivist to me! 8^)”

This is an important point. I come to my commitment to truth by way of defeated soft pluralism and inclusivism. I don’t think that we get to give it up, even if it would be nice to do sometimes. Relativism in every extreme form is dead philosophically. (Not that dead positions are rehabilitated from time to time.) The central reason is that the view is deeply incoherent. (We can discuss this if you like.) This is not to say that mitigated forms of relativity aren’t true. For example, no one disputes Einstein’s claims, but then he never doubted that there was a truth about how things are, just whether it corresponds to the behavior of medium-sized dry goods moving at moderate speeds.

But my commitment to truth doesn’t entail a commitment to a single view of what that truth is or a single method for its discovery. In this sense I am not an exclusivist.

As for truth, I left that blank. You are right however to gather that I am deeply attracted to the correspondence theory of truth, i.e., the idea that truth is a certain relationship between our ideas and the world. We can argue this point, also, if you like. Your suggestion seems to be that truth is to be found in the collection of ideas and theories themselves. Perhaps you would say it is a measure of their self-consistency. Coherence theories of truth work that way. Perhaps you just mean there is greater reality in the collection of ideas and theories than in any single one of them. If so, I agree. I would continue with my biology metaphor in this case by saying that a species with many members increases its chances of survival.

3. “What would constitute the ideal situation?” Again, great question. It would be hard for me to spell out, but I think the ideal is a situation where the best ideas and theories survive and thrive and incoherent and maladaptive theories are preserved as matters of history and (perhaps) are practiced by some few individuals who cannot do any real harm to society with their craziness. All the parts of this description would need to be carefully examined, especially the last part as there is a real question concerning the coercive containment of bad ideas.

4. “Gospelists” is a nice word. It’s pretty close to my own understanding of Christianity. At any rate, where Jesus and Paul diverge I know who has the more tremendous hem.

Again, thanks for the comments!

Jeff

[Jeff]

Yesterday Chris raised some good questions about the view I am trying to develop. His most important point, I thought, was that it shares some characteristics of exclusivism. I have about ½ an hour so I thought that I’d address this issue as well as the fact that I never got around to defining soft pluralism.

I’ll take the second issue first. Soft pluralism is a prescriptive view which takes relativism about values as a matter of fact. It tells us not only that there is there no way to choose among rival positions but there is also no reason to choose, since all positions are equally valuable. I call my view hard pluralism because it takes seriously the difficulty of justifying the value of tolerance in some intellectual framework.

Now, one may balk at this and insist that any prescriptive pluralism that makes claims about truth doesn’t deserve the name. Fine. We can use whatever names we like provided we respect some kind of truth relation and some kind of tolerance toward others whose views differ from our own.

This seems like such an easy question. We talk about liberty and respect all the time. But it seems to me that our tolerance is an ungrounded value. When we push at it, we generally find two kinds of defenses of it. First, there is the exclusivist defense: “We tolerate you but you are wrong and have no chance or hope of being right.” In careful hands this view can be practiced. It leads to a kind of elitist arrogance, but educated people are used to dealing with that. We say, “Reasonable people can disagree,” while we in fact question the thought of our adversaries. However, when exclusivism meets the masses, its problems with power come to the fore. It is a belligerent position, one that cannot learn or grow.

On the other hand, tolerance cannot be defended by the pluralist without the pluralist being at the same time hostile to all those views that are intolerant. I tried to point this out last time using a religious example. It wouldn’t have to be, though. Propositions have their own consistency conditions, which means that they all cannot fit together in one grand scheme. There must be discrimination and selection among the possible options for belief. There is no way around this. And this selection is something that we do publicly, since any belief worth talking about is a public matter, however private we pretend it is.

So, tolerance needs a reasonable justification. My justification proceeds from our ignorance of truth. Because we know so little and things change so unpredictably, we must be tolerant. But this is not the tolerance of the exclusivist. It is not the sort that says, I know that my scheme of ideas is right for all time. Rather, it only says, by our best lights this is the scheme of ideas that works best right now. That could change in the future, just as Newtonian physics was displaced by General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

If my view sounds too little like pluralism, then I am happy to give up the moniker. I do agree that pluralism is a descriptive fact about the world. We live in a time where there are many popular ways of understanding its events and structures. My question is how are we to deal prescriptively with the fact of descriptive pluralism?

Jeff

[Jeff]

20th Century Theology and Religious Exclusivism

I.
I don’t know how much you guys know about the history of theology. You probably know more than I do, but I did want to share with you a couple of ideas pertaining to current events and this idea of exclusivism that I’ve been talking about. I am probably in the minority here when I say that I think that philosophy and theology are perhaps the most important subjects to understand if one wants to get a grip on the large scale problematique of current events. A quick look at what happened to them in the 20th century is vital for all intellectuals. And I’ll be very brief.

Before the 20th century both studies were very liberal in their tolerance of a variety of ideas. Josiah Royce could still expound his form of Objective Idealism at Harvard well into the 20th century. And the liberal theologians were freely asking (as we ask on this board) whether certain doctrines found in the bible were in fact compatible with biblical teachings. In other words, the theologians of 100 years ago were closer to constructing the Orange Catholic Bible than we are now. But there came in both studies a new positivism. This positivism was partly a reaction to conflicting claims in science in the early decades of the 20th century. General Relativity (paradoxically, some might think) gave rise to the idea that we have to refocus our attention on what we can know to be true. This happened because we realized that our casual observations about the world can be systematically mistaken. The positivism was also a result of rising world tensions which resulted in world wars in the 1st half of the 20th century. (Sometimes I tell my students that the World Wars were, to a large extent, world wars, i.e., fights about how we are to understand things.) At any rate philosophy and theology both chose a retreat to isolationism and positivism over the open conflict that was raging everywhere anyone happened to be looking.

Of course, I am oversimplifying things for the sake of brevity, but the positivism was very real in both philosophy and theology. It did not, however, have the same effect in both studies. In philosophy, the positivism led philosophers to break with their (glorious, I’d say) history of speculation on a grand scale and to concentrate on conceptual analysis. Some philosophers even argued that the study has nothing to contribute to the world other than the clarification of the concepts of science. This idea has only really died down in the last 10 or 15 years, so that today you are finally able to read books that sound like they could have been written 100 years ago. Many philosophers (including me) think that the last 100 years of philosophy has been pretty dry stuff. If it was surviving anywhere it was only in the classroom and in Europe and of course around campfires and cookpots.

In theology the positivism also refocused the field on its roots. But here one must ask what the legitimate sources of theology are. Generally there are thought to be four: Tradition, Reason, Scripture, and Experience (maybe I can write about these later for you guys). The speculation in theology was thought to be a result of the devaluation of Scripture and Tradition (but especially the former) and an overestimation of Experience and Reason (but especially the latter). In other words, when positivism met theology we got Theology of the Word and all its hostility to Reason and Experience. Theologians like Karl Barth ( www.bartleby.com/65/ba/Barth-Ka.html ) insisted that Christianity return to its origins, that no other source of religious propositions could ever trump Scripture, i.e., that Scripture is the only real form of Revelation.

Both philosophy and science rely critically upon reason. The idea that one could reject reason as a philosophical basis for a world view is old. But it has never worked. The Pyrrhonians ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhonians ) tried it in ancient times and David Hume in modern times, but it has never flown. The fact is that any understanding of the world is an understanding, an interpretation which requires creative reason to originate and expound. All radical skepticisms are self-defeating in this way. BUT they are also impossible to answer. When the skeptic tells you that you can’t prove what you think you know, she is right. At the same time, you know you can’t be a skeptic, if you know anything at all. This does not mean that Reason is worthless. But it is insufficient to found a life upon. Theology in the 20th century made too much of this criticism of Reason. (Though I won’t make this argument here, the same kind of reasoning condemns any theology that would seek to found itself on Experience.)

When theology closes the door to Reason and Experience it becomes Exclusivist. It sees its own Tradition and Scripture as inerrant and in all ways absolutely authoritative. But whereas philosophy and science can recover from this because they cannot escape their commitment to Reason and Experience, theology can just fall and fall. It took almost 2000 years of theology before Christology could seriously take up the question, “What if Jesus didn’t really exist?” And there is no guarantee that the leaders of Christianity will be taking seriously these kinds of skeptical questions any time soon. For the liberal theologians have long since ceased to be the leaders of the worldview.

In the second part of this essay, I am going to present my three favorite critiques of 20th century Christian Exclusivism. It is my hope that these can be broadened into a general critique of Exclusivism. But I think the history lesson above is useful at least in allowing us to see part of the problem: The exclusion of Reason and Experience from a world view prevents its ongoing critique and growth.

(Note 1: This is why historical theology got so strong in the 20th century. If reason cannot critique the faith, then maybe the hard evidence of history can budge the traditionalists. As we have seen, this method of attack didn’t work either. Again, Jack Miles documents all this nicely in his appendix to Christ: Crisis in the Life of God: www.jackmiles.com/default.asp?id=25 .

Note 2: Today, Christian Exclusivists are the ones running the show. They call themselves Evangelicals which is even more frightening because that term implies a mission from God to spread their mind-numbing ideology. Because they are in charge, they are setting the terms for the debate. And they don’t like the term “Exclusivism.” They prefer “Particularism.” And because they prefer it, it is the term used in the journals.

Note 3: An interesting link concerning the Perpetual Confusion Machine: www.thechristadelphians.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t3595.html )

[Jeff]

II.

In what follows I will be confining myself to the Christian debate concerning religious exclusivism. I hope that the substance of the debate can be transferred to other religious contexts (in fact, I think this is easily done) and ultimately to any context in which the ideology of reasonable people is at odds. This is a much taller order. In much of what I’ve written about exclusivism in the last year I’ve made my case against it in abstracto, but I hope that locating the debate within its original religious context can make everything much more concrete for us. This was my original idea at the beginning of the week, to which I’ve only given inadequate expression in my hurried writing since.

I’ll begin by listing what I consider to be the three best criticisms of 20th century Christian exclusivism. For any criticism to bite, it must be something the exclusivist can feel while he is holed up in the fake safety of his ideology. It does no good whatever to level a critique about the virtues of pluralism, for example, so long as the exclusivist thinks he has the truth on his side. Whatever critique is offered must have the net effect of showing that exclusivism fails from the inside, as it were. That said, here are the ones that work the best in my view. Feel free to add your own or tell me how wrong I am:

1. Christian Exclusivism is self-limiting and blind to spiritual truths—even those it could otherwise embrace—because it denies and/or undervalues other sources of religious authority within the Christian tradition. Upshot: Exclusivists close themselves off from important truth.

2. Christian Exclusivism overestimates the importance of Scriptural authority and in so doing exclusivists make their religion irrelevant to their lives. Upshot: Exclusivists close themselves off from a real encounter with God.

3. Christian Exclusivism underestimates the personality and responsibility of both human beings and God. Upshot: Exclusivists indirectly insult both God and man.

Out of time…more later…

[Jeff]

III.

I’ll take up the individual arguments later, probably whether there is any interest from you guys or not. But before I get lost in the details, I think the work I’ve done this week suggests both the flaw and the antidote to exclusivism. In an earlier post, I said that exclusivism was idiotic. That was wrong. There is nothing essentially idiotic about circling the wagons or falling back to a failsafe. When we get too far out on the limb it tends to break—see all the metaphors we have for this behavior? The idea here isn’t limited to just exclusivism, it is a general strategy for dealing with the unknown: When error looms, retreat to what you are only absolutely sure is true. This strategy is essentially modern and has its canonical statement for us in Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy. There—as we all know—he doubts everything until he reaches that which he cannot doubt: the fact that he exists. From this indubitable ground he proceeds to build up an entire system of philosophy.

The political problem with this solution is that there are no uncontested propositions in the world. There are flat-earthers, people who think the moon landing was staged, Libertarians and Mormons. No proposition is so absurd but that some fool doesn’t take it for the gospel. When we retreat to a handful of propositions that we must defend or die trying, we ensure either that some nut will press the attack or that we ourselves are in the Planter’s jar. And this exposes the paradoxical nature of the solution: There is no real encounter with the world, with truth, without the risk of a real encounter. The desire to arrive at truth by retreating from the unknown and its inevitable conflict is contradictory and self-defeating. It is craven. And how many would like to end by chanting that coward’s refrain: “It fortifies the soul to know, that though I perish, the truth is so”?

As I was thinking over these strategic issues today, I remembered one of my favorite essays by William James, “The Will to Believe” ( www.magma.ca/~mfonda/jamesw.html ). There James argues for the rationality of religious belief. He does so be insisting that there are two general human epistemological stances. Each is compelling at certain times for everyone, but there is almost always a personal preference. We either prefer to avoid error or to know truth. We often speak of ethical dilemmas in which problems arise because our sense of Goodness is at odds with itself. James is telling us the crux of the epistemological dilemma, in which our sense of Truth is at odds with itself.

Perhaps, then, the solution to our strategic problem is to risk error as bravely as possible in the quest to know truth. Very practically, this would mean that as creative systematizers our job is not to say that x is always true and y is always false, and then spending our time sorting out who agrees and who is our enemy. Rather, we should be attempting to affirm as many propositions as possible. This means that we should be striving for a global view always and seeking as much agreement as we can muster from all other positions. Again, I do not see this as in any way shirking the truth. The pluralism I am trying to define is a direct result of the quest for truth. It is bold in its conclusions and generalizations. At the same time, it insists upon human ignorance and the unending inadequacy of all our attempts to frame the general character of the universe. Both parts of the position are important to our outreach strategies: We want to get things right and we make the dangerous guesses, but we rest in humility with our erasers out.

This sort of plan has the best chance of building coalitions among lots of groups with individual interests, like the Democratic Party. It suggests that the essence of the Party is not the Platform. In fact, the reduction of the Party to the Platform plays right into the hands of those whose view of truth is the avoidance of error. Rather, groups x, y, and z are united by a kind of “family resemblance,” to borrow a term from Wittgenstein. Group x and z may hold almost none of the same view, but both may share a great deal with y, and all may be united under one tent provided that all are seeking to maximize the truths that they know. In such a case each group could see that the retreat into isolationism would not only weaken their ability to affect change but also hamper their capacity to know truth.

All rests on a demonstration of the ineffectiveness of avoiding error as a pathway to truth. Again, I will be taking this up in detailed argument against Christian Exclusivism in the very near future. Until then, I am happy to have located hard pluralism on exactly the kind of ground that I had hoped to find it.

If it is pith that we want, I might say something like this: The best guide to the truth is the entire community of reasonable people. Then again, maybe I'll just stick to the ideas and leave the wit to my betters.