When William James inaugurated his all-out campaign against intellectual absolutism, his shield and buckler were radical empiricism and pragmatism, but his trusty right-hand sword, we should remember, was pluralism. He even hinted, in a way that his generation was not prepared to understand, at a vital connection between pluralism and democracy. Today, in our present culture crisis, it is both timely to recall this, and important to ponder over it, for several reasons.
In the first place, absolutism has come forward again in new and readable guise, social and political forms of it, with their solid intellectual tyrannies of authoritarian dogmatism and universality. We are warrantably alarmed to see these new secular absolutisms added to the older, waning metaphysical and doctrinal ones to which we had become somewhat inured and from which, through science and the scientific spirit, we have gained some degree of immunity. Though alarmed, we do not always realize, however, the extent to which these modern Frankensteins are the spawn of the older absolutist breeds, or the degree to which they are inherent strains, so to speak, in the germ-plasm of our culture.
In the second place, in the zeal of culture defense, in the effort to bring about the rapprochement of a united front, we do not always stop to envisage the danger and inconsistency of a crisis, unifomitarianism of our own. There exists, fortunately a sounder and more permanent alternative,—the possibility of a type of agreement such as may stem from a pluralistic base. Agreement of this common denominator type would, accordingly, provide a flexible, more democratic nexus, a unity in diversity rather than another counter-uniformitarianism.
Third, we should realize that the cure radical empiricism proposed for intellectual absolutism was stultified when it, itself, became arbitrary and dogmatic. With its later variants,—behaviourism, and what not, it fell increasingly into the hands of the empiricalism, positivism,/monists, who, in the cause of scientific objectivity, squeezed values and ideals out completely in a fanatical cult of “fact.” Not all the recalcitrance, therefore, was on the side of those disciplines and doctrines, which, being concerned with the vital interests of “value” as contrasted with “fact,” are after all functionally vital in our intellectual life and tradition. Today, we are more ready to recognize them and concede them a place, though not necessarily to recognize or condone them in the arbitrary and authoritarian guise they still too often assume.
In this connection, it is encouraging to see empiricism abdicating some of its former arbitrary hardness and toning down its intransigent attitudes toward the more traditional value disciplines. This is a wise and potentially profitable concession on the part of science to the elder sisters,—philosophy and religion, especially if it can be made the quid pro quo of their renunciation, in turn, of their dogmatic absolutisms. The admirable paper of Professor Morris, prepared for this conference, does just this, I think, by redefining a more liberal and humane empiricism, which not only recognizes “values,” but provides, on the basis of sound reservations as to the basic primacy of factual knowledge, for reconcilable supplementation of our knowledge of fact by value interpretations and even by value systems and creeds. This reverses the previous tactic of empiricists to deny any validity to values and so to create a hopeless divide between the sciences of fact and the value disciplines. Here again, in this more liberal empiricism, pluralism, and particularly value pluralism, has a sound and broadly acceptable basis of rapprochement to offer. Such rapprochement being one of the main objectives as well as one of the crucial problems of this conference, it is perhaps relevant to propose the consideration of pluralism as a working base and solution for this problem. This would be all the more justified if it could be shown that pluralism was a proper and congenial rationale for intellectual democracy.
James, pluralistically tempered, did not take the position, it is interesting to note, which many of his followers have taken. He did propose giving up for good and all the “game of metaphysics” and the “false” and categorical rationalizing of values, but he did not advocate sterilizing the “will to believe” or abandoning the search for pragmatic sanctions for our values. As Horace Kallen aptly states it (William James and Henri Bergson,—pp. 10–11):—“James insisted that each event of experience must be acknowledged for what it appears to be, and heard for its own claims. To neither doubt nor belief, datum nor preference, term nor relation, value nor fact, did he concede superiority over the others … He pointed out to the rationalist the co-ordinate presence in experience of so much more then reason; he called the monist’s attention to the world’s diversity; the pluralist’s to its unity. He said to the materialist: You shall not shut your eyes to the immaterial; to the spiritualist: You shall take cognizance also of the non-spiritual. He was a rationalist without unreason; an empiricist without prejudice. His empiricism was radical, preferring correctness to consistency, truth to logic.” I do not quote for complete agreement, because I think we have come to the point where we can and must go beyond this somewhat anarchic pluralism and relativism to a more systematic relativism. This becomes possible as we are able to discover through the objective comparison of basic human values certain basic equivalences among them, what we may warrantably call “functional constants” to take scientifically the place of our outmoded categoricals and our banned arbitrary “universals.” However, the present point is that James did not intend to invalidate values in his attack on absolutes and categoricals or to abolish creeds in assailing dogma. Nor was he intent on deepening the divide between science, philosophy and religion: on the contrary, he was hoping for a new rapprochement and unity among them, once philosophy and religion had renounced absolutist metaphysics and dogmatism.
Is such rapprochement possible? As we have already seen, only if empiricists and rationalists both make concessions. Further, these concessions must be comparable, and provide, in addition, a workable base of contact. From either side this is difficult. And lest the concession proposed for the value disciplines seem unequal or unduly great, let us make note of the fact that it is a very considerable concession, from the point of view of orthodox empiricism, to concede the scientific monism of mechanism, determinism and materialism. The scientific point of view, by making a place for values, makes obviously the concession of pluralism. In a complementary concession, the value disciplines, it seems to me, should make the concession of relativism. Frankly, this asks that they dethrone their absolutes, not as values or even as preferred values, but nonetheless as arbitrary universals, whether they be “sole ways of salvation,” “perfect forms of the state or society,” or self-evident intellectual systems of interpretation. Difficult as this may be for our various traditional values systems, once they do so, they thereby not only make peace with one another, but make also an honorable peace with science. For, automatically in so doing they cease to be rival interpretations of that objective reality which it is the function of science to analyze, measure and explain, or monopolistic versions of human nature and experience, which it is, similarly, the business of social science to record and describe.
Such value pluralism, with its corallary of relativity, admittedly entails initial losses for the traditional claims and prestige of our value systems. But it also holds out to them an effective Pax Romana of values, with greater and more permanent eventual gains. It calls, in the first place, for a resolving or at least an abatement of the chronic internecine conflict of competing absolutes, now so hopelessly snared in mutual contradictoriness. Not that there must be, in consequence of this relativistic view, an anarchy or a complete downfall of values, but rather that there should be only relative and functional rightness, with no throne or absolute sovereignty in dispute. To intelligent partisans, especially those who can come within hailing distance of Royce’s principle of “loyalty to loyalty,” such value reciprocity might be acceptable and welcome. As we shall see later, this principle has vital relevance to the whole question of a democracy of values.
There would also be the further possibility of a more objective confirmation of many basic human values, and on a basis of proof approximating scientific validity. For if once the broader relativistic approach could discover beneath the expected culture differentials of time and face such common-denominator “universals” as actually may be there, these values would stand out as pragmatically confirmed by common human experience. Either their observable generality or their comparatively established equivalence would give them status far beyond any “universals” merely asserted by orthodox dogmatisms. And the standard of proof would after all not be very different from the accepted scientific criterion of proof;—confirmable invariability in concrete human experience. After an apparent downfall and temporary banishment, many of our most prized “universals” would reappear, clothed with this newly acquired vitality and validity of general concurrence. So confirmed, they would be more widely acceptable and more objectively justified than would ever be possible either by the arbitrary fiat of belief or the brittle criterion of logical consistency. Paradoxically enough, then, the pluralistic approach to values opens the way to a universality and objectivity for them quite beyond the reach of the a priori assertions and dogmatic demands of their rational and orthodox promulgations.
More important, however, than what this view contributes toward a realistic understanding of values, are the clues it offers for a more practical and consistent way of holding and advocating them. It is here that a basic connection between pluralism and intellectual democracy becomes evident. In the pluralistic frame of reference value dogmatism is outlawed. A consistent application of this invalidation would sever the trunk nerves of bigotry or arbitrary orthodoxy all along the line, applying to religious, ideological and cultural as well as to political and social values. Value profession or adherence on that basis would need to be critical and selective and tentative (in the sense that science is tentative) and revisionist in procedure rather than dogmatic, final and en bloc. One can visualize the difference by saying that with any articles of faith, each article would need independent scrutiny and justification and would stand or fall or be revised, be accepted or rejected or qualified accordingly. Fundamentalism of the “all or none” or “this goes with it” varieties would neither be demanded, expected nor tolerated.
Now such a rationale is needed for the effective implementation of the practical corollaries of value pluralism,—tolerance and value reciprocity, and one might add, as a sturdier intellectual base for democracy. We know, of course, that we cannot get tolerance from a fanatic or reciprocity from a fundamentalist of any stripe,—religious, philosophical, cultural, political or ideological. But what is often overlooked is that we cannot,—soundly and safely at least, preach liberalism and abet bigotry, condemn uniformitarianism and placate orthodoxy, promote tolerance and harbor the seeds of intolerance. I suggest that our duty to democracy on the plane of ideas, especially in time of crisis, is the analysis of just this problem and some consideration of its possible solution.
In this connection it is necessary to recall an earlier statement that we are for the most part unaware of the latent absolutism in many of our traditional loyalties and that some of this might very well condition our concepts and sanctions of democracy. The ancient spiritual lineage of “hundred per-centism” is only too obvious; so much so that one marvels that it could still be a typical and acceptable norm of patriotism,—political or cultural. More obvious still is the secular dogma of “my country, right or wrong.” Such instances confront us with the paradox of democratic loyalties conceived absolutistically and dogmatically sanctioned. Far too much, indeed, of our democratic creed and practise is cast in the mould of blind loyalty and en bloc rationalization, with too many of our citizens the best of democrats for the worst of reasons,—mere conformity. Apart from the absolutistic taint, it should be disconcerting to ponder that by the same token, if transported, they would be “perfect” Nazis and the best of totalitarians.
But to come to less obvious instances,—our democratic tolerance, of whose uniqueness and quantity we can boast with some warrant, on close scrutiny seems qualitatively weak and unstable. It is uncritical because propagated on too emotional and too abstract a basis. Not being anchored in any definite intellectual base, it is too easily set aside in time of stress and challenge. Some is tolerance only in name, for it is simply indifference and laissez-faire rationalized. We are all sadly acquainted with how it may blow away in time of crisis or break when challenged by self-interest, and how under stress we find ourselves, after all, unreasonably biased in favor of “our own,” whether it be the mores, ideas, faiths or merely “our crowd.” This is a sure sign that value bigotry is somehow still deep-rooted there. Under the surface of such frail tolerance some unreconstructed dogmatisms lie, the latent source of the emerging intolerance. This is apt to happen to any attitude lacking the stamina of deep intellectual conviction, that has been nurtured on abstract sentiment, and that has not been buttressed by an objective conception of one’s own values and loyalties.
There is a reason for all this shallow tolerance, grudging and fickle reciprocity, blind and fanatical loyalty persisting in our social behavior, democratic professions to the contrary. Democracy has promulgated these virtues and ideals zealously, but as attitudes and habits of thought has not implemented them successfully. First, they have been based on moral abstractions and vague sentimental sanctions as “virtues” and “ideals,” since, on the whole, idealistic liberalism and goodwill humanitarianism have nursed our democratic tradition. Rarely have these attitudes been connected sensibly with self-interest or realistically bound up with a perspective turned toward one’s own position and its values. Had this been the case a sturdier tolerance and a readier reciprocity would have ensued, and with them a more enlightened type of loyalty.
But a more enlightened loyalty involves of necessity a less bigoted national and cultural tradition. Democratic liberalism, limited both by the viewpoint of its generation and by its close affiliation with doctrinal religious and philosophical traditions, modelled its rationale of democracy too closely to authoritarian patterns, and made a creed of democratic principles. For wide acceptance or easy assent it condoned or compromised with too much dogmatism and orthodoxy. Outmoded scientifically and ideologically today, this dogmatism is the refuge of too much provincialism, intolerance and prejudice to be a healthy, expanding contemporary base for democracy. Our democratic values require an equally liberal but also a more scientific and realistic rationale today. This is why we presume to suggest pluralism as a more appropriate and effective democratic rationale.
We must live in terms of our own particular institutions and mores, assert and cherish our own specific values, and we could not, even if it were desirable, uproot our own traditions and loyalties. But that is no justification for identifying them en bloc with an ideal like democracy, as though they were a perfect set of architectural specifications for the concept itself. So the only way of freeing our minds from such hypostasizing and its provincial limitations and dogmatic bias is by way of a relativism which reveals our values in proper objective perspective with other sets of values. Through this we may arrive at some clearer recognition of the basic unity or correspondence of our values with those of other men, however dissimilar they may appear on the surface or however differently they may be systematized and sanctioned. Discriminating objective comparison of this sort, using the same yardstick, can alone give us proper scale and perspective. Toward this end, value pluralism has a point of view able to lift us out of the egocentric and ethnocentric predicaments that are without exception involved. This should temper our loyalties with intelligence and tolerance and scotch the potential fanaticism and bigotry which otherwise lurk under blind loyalty and dogmatic faith in our values. We can then take on our particular value systems with temperate and enlightened attachment, and can be sectarian without provincialism and loyal without intolerance.
Since the relativist point of view focuses in an immediately transformed relationship and attitude toward one’s own group values, it is no rare and distant principle, but has, once instated, practical progressive applicability to everyday life. It has more chances thus of becoming habitual. Most importantly perhaps, it breaks down the worship of the form,—that dangerous identification of the symbol with the value, which is the prime psychological root of the fallacies and errors we have been discussing. We might pose it as the acid test for an enlightened value loyalty that it is able to distinguish between the symbol and the form of its loyalty and the essence and objective of that loyalty. Such critical insight, for example, would never mistake a real basic similarity or functional equivalence in other values, even when cloaked in considerable superficial difference. Nor, on the other hand, would it credit any merely superficial conformity with real loyalty. And so, the viewpoint equips us not only to tolerate difference but to bridge divergence by recognizing commonality where present. In social practise this is no scholastic virtue; it has high practical consequences for democratic living, since it puts the premium upon equivalence not identity, calls for cooperation rather than for conformity and promotes reciprocity instead of factional antagonism. Authoritarianism, dogmatism and bigotry just cannot take root and grow in such intellectual soil.
We may assess the possible gains under this more pragmatic and progressive rationale for democratic thought and action briefly under two heads: what these fresh and stimulating sanctions promise internally for democracy on the national front and what externally on the international front in terms of what is vaguely—all too vaguely—styled,—world democracy.
For internal democracy most of the gains involved consist in more practical implementation of the traditional democratic values, but there are also some new sanctions and emphases. So far, of course, as these things can be intellectually implemented, now support is unquestionably given to the enlargement of democratic life, and quite as importantly, some concern is taken for the correction of its aberrations and abuses. On the corrective side, particular impetus is given toward the liberalizing of democracy’s tradition of tolerance, to more effective protection and integration of minority and non-conformist groups, for the protection of the majority itself against liberalism, bigotry and cultural conceit, and toward the tempering of the quality of patriotism and subgroup loyalties. As to new sanctions, the campaign for the revamping of democracy has already put special emphasis on what is currently styled “cultural pluralism” as a proposed liberal rationale for our national democracy. This indeed is but a corollary of the larger relativism and pluralism under discussion. Under it, much can be done toward the more effective bridging of the divergencies of institutional life and traditions which though sometimes conceived as peculiarly characteristic of American society, are rapidly becoming typical of all cosmopolitan modern society. These principles call for promoting respect for difference, for safeguarding respect for the individual and preventing the submergence of the individual in enforced conformity, and for the promotion of commonality over above such differences. Finally, more on the intellectual side, additional motivation is generated for the reinforcement of all the traditional democratic freedoms, but most particularly for the freedom of the mind. For it is in the field of social thinking that freedom of the mind can be most practically established, and no more direct path to that exists than through the promotion of an unbiased scientific conception of the place of the national culture in the world.
For democracy externally both the situation and the prospects are less clear. However, the world crisis poses the issues clearly enough. Democracy has encountered a fighting antithesis, and has awakened from considerable lethargy and decadence to a sharpened realization of its own basic values. This should lead ultimately to a clarified view of its ultimate objectives. The crisis holds also the potential gain of more realistic understanding on the part of democracy of its own shortcomings, since if totalitarianism is its moral antithesis as well as its political enemy, it must fight internally to purge its own culture of dogmatism, absolutism and tyranny, latent and actual.
Yet as a nation we are vague about world democracy and none too well-equipped for its prosecution. It was our intellectual unpreparedness as a nation for thinking consistently in any such terms which stultified our initiative in the peace of 1918 and our participation in the germinal efforts of a democratic world order under the League of Nations plan,—or should we say concept, since the plan minimized it so seriously? Today again, we stand aghast before a self-created dilemma of an impracticable national provinciality of isolationism and a vague idea of a world order made over presumably on an enlarged pattern of our own. There is danger, if we insist on identifying such a cause arbitrarily with our own institutional forms and culture values of its becoming a presumptuous, even though well-intentioned idealistic uniformitarianism. Should this be the case, then only a force crusade for democratic uniformitarianism is in prospect, for that could never come about by force of persuasion.
It is here that the defective perspective of our patriotism and our culture values reveals its seriously limiting character. This intellectually is the greatest single obstacle to any extension of the democratic way of life on an international scale. Surely here the need for the insight and practical sanity of the pluralistic viewpoint is clear. There is a reasonable chance of success to the extent we can disengage the objectives of democracy from the particular institutional forms by which we practise it, and can pierce through to common denominators of equivalent objectives.
The intellectual core of the problems of the peace, should it lie in our control and leadership, will be the discovery of the necessary common denominators and the basic equivalences involved in a democratic world order or democracy on a worldscale. I do not hazard to guess at them; but certain specifications may be stated which I believe they will have to meet, if they are to be successful. It must (like no other peace before it) integrate victors and vanquished alike,—and justly. With no shadow of cultural superiority, it must respectfully protect the cultural values and institutional forms and traditions of a vast congery of peoples and races,—European, Asiatic, African, American, Australasian. Somehow cultural pluralism may yield a touchstone for such thinking. Direct participational representation of all considerable groups must be provided for, although how imperialism is to concede this is almost beyond immediate imagining. That most absolutistic of all our secular concepts,—the autonomous, sacrosanct character of national sovereignty must surely be modified and voluntarily abridged. Daring reciprocities will have to be worked out if the basic traditional democratic freedoms are ever to be transposed to world practise, not to mention the complicated reconstruction of economic life which consistent reciprocity will demand in this field. One suspects that the practical exigencies of world reconstruction will force many of these issues to solution from the practical side, leaving us intellectuals to rationalize the changes ex post facto. Out of the crisis may yet come the forced extension of democratic values and mechanisms in ways that we have not had courage to think of since the early days of its 18th Century conception, when it was naively but perhaps very correctly assumed that to have validity at all democracy must have world vogue.
What intellectuals can do for the extension of the democratic way of life is to discipline our thinking critically into some sort of realistic world-mindedness. Broadening our cultural values and tempering our orthodoxies is of infinitely more service to enlarged democracy than direct praise and advocacy of democracy itself. For until broadened by relativism and reconstructed accordingly, democratic tradition and practise are not ready for world-wide application. Considerable political and cultural dogmatism,—culture bias, nation worship, racism—stands in the way and must first be invalidated and abandoned. In sum, if we refuse to orient ourselves courageously and intelligently to a universe of peoples and cultures, preferring to base our prime values on fractional segments of nation, race, sect, or particular types of institutional culture, there is indeed little or no hope for a stable world order of any kind,—democratic or otherwise. Even when the segment is itself a democratic order, its expansion to world proportions will not necessarily create a world democracy. The democratic mind needs clarifying for the better guidance of the democratic will.
But fortunately, the same correctives needed for the sound maintenance of democracy are also the most promising basis for its expansion. The hostile forces both within and without are of the same type, and stem from absolutism of one sort or another. The suggestion of a vital connection between democracy and pluralism arose from the rather more apparent connection between absolutism and monism. But so destructive has pluralism been of the closed system thinking on which absolutist values and authoritarian dogmatisms thrive that it has proved itself no mere logical antithesis but their specific intellectual antidote. In the present crisis democracy needs the support of the most effective rationale available for the justification and defense of its characteristic values. While we should not be stampeded into pluralism merely by the present emergency, it is nonetheless our handiest intellectual weapon against the totalitarian challenge, but if, as we have seen, it can also make a constructive contribution to the internal fortification of democracy, then it is even more permanently justified and should on that score be doubly welcomed.