Ever since William James’s ardent and creative advocacy of it, pluralism has involved, explicitly or by implication, an antiauthoritarian principle. This is because James carried the pluralistic position definitely and perhaps permanently beyond the traditional metaphysical pluralism based on the recognition of a plurality of principles or elements to the discovery and vindication of a psychological pluralism stemming from a plurality of values and viewpoints. In this view it is man himself who is at least in part responsible for the irreducible variety of human experience by making a pluriverse out of the common substratum of experience—the objective universe. Except for agreement on the hard core of experience susceptible of empirical validation, ideological agreement in terms of values such as is envisaged by monism and absolutism is, accordingly, not to be expected. It is the potentialities of such value pluralism, with its still only partially developed corollaries of cultural pluralism, that need to be explored as a possible and favorable foundation for wide-scale ideological peace. For the complete implementation of the pluralistic philosophy it is not sufficient merely to disestablish authoritarianism and its absolutes; a more positive and constructive development of pluralism can and should establish some effective mediating principles for situations of basic value divergence and conflict.
Some realistic basis for ideological peace is certainly an imperative need today, and that need is for more than a pro tempore truce; a real intellectual and spiritual disarmament is indicated by the ideological tensions of our present-day world crisis. Admitting that ideas originally became weapons merely as rationalizations of other conflicts of interest, and that there still remain many nonideological factors of potential strife and discord, it is still true that in our time ideological divergence has become a primary basis of hostility and is so potent a possible source of strife that more than ever now “ideas are weapons.” The present situation, then, calls for some permanently conceded basis of ideological neutrality or reciprocity in the context of which our differences over values can be regarded as natural, inevitable, and mutually acceptable. It is ironical to talk of “civilization” without as yet having acquired ideological civility—a necessary ingredient of civilized intercourse and co-operation, especially now that we are committed to contact and communication on a world scale.
Of course, such intellectual tolerance and courtesy cannot be effectively arrived at by cynical indifference or by proclaiming value anarchy, but only through the recognition of the importance of value systems on a “live and let live” basis. For this we need a realistic but sympathetic understanding of the bases of our value differences, and their root causes—some of them temperamental, more of them experiential, still more, of cultural derivation. After outlawing orthodoxy, the next step is to legitimate and interpret diversity, and then, if possible, to discover some “harmony in contrariety,” some commonality in divergence.
In spite of the leveling off of many present differences under the impact of science, technology, and increased intercommunication, we cannot in any reasonably near future envisage any substantial lessening of the differences in our basic value systems, either philosophical or cultural. The only viable alternative seems, therefore, not to expect to change others but to change our attitudes toward them, and to seek rapprochement not by the eradication of such differences as there are but by schooling ourselves not to make so much of the differences. These differences, since they are as real and hard as “facts” should be accepted as unemotionally and objectively as we accept fact. F. S. C. Northrop, who so brilliantly and suggestively has attempted to bridge the great ideological divide between the Occident and the Orient, is quite right in calling this pluralistic and relativistic approach “realism with respect to ideals.”
A genuine realism in this respect must take into account … the ideological beliefs to which any people has been conditioned by its traditional education, political propaganda, artistic creations, and religious ceremonies. These traditional ideological factors embodied in the institutions and emotions of the people are just as much part of the de facto situation as are the pestilences, the climate, the ethnology, or the course of pig iron prices in the market place.1
This type of understanding, it seems to me, begins in a basic recognition of value pluralism, converts itself to value relativism as its only consistent interpretation, and then passes over into a ready and willing admission of both cultural relativism and pluralism. In practice, this ideological orientation concedes reciprocity and requires mutual respect and noninterference. It pivots on the principle that the affirmation of one’s own world of values does not of necessity involve the denial or deprecation of someone else’s. The obvious analogy with a basic democratic viewpoint will immediately suggest itself; in fact there seems to be an affinity, historical and ideological, between pluralism and democracy, as has been frequently observed. Only this is an extension of democracy beyond individuals and individual rights to the equal recognition of the parity and inalienable rights of corporate ways of life. Cultural parity and reciprocity we have yet in large part to learn, for where our values are concerned, most of us, even those who have abandoned philosophical absolutism, still hold on to remnants of absolutistic thinking. How slowly does this ancient obsession retreat from the concept of an absolute God to that of an absolute reason, to that of an absolute morality, to linger on entrenched in the last-stand theories of an absolute state and an absolute culture!
But we can build no vital tolerance and mutual understanding on such relics of absolutistic thinking. How aptly Toynbee describes our prevalent cultural monism in this searching passage:
We are no longer conscious of the presence in the world of other societies of equal standing; and that we regard our society as being identical with “civilized” mankind and the peoples outside its pale as being mere “natives” of territories which they inhabit on sufferance, but which are morally as well as practically at our disposal, by the higher right of our assumed monopoly of civilization, whenever we choose to take possession. Conversely, we regard the internal divisions of our society—the national parts into which this society has come to be articulated—as the grand divisions of mankind, and classify the members of the human race as Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans, and so on, without remembering that these are merely subdivisions of a single group within the human family.2
This cultural absolutism of ours is, of course, today under heavy pressure, a double pressure of declining and semibankrupt imperialism and surprisingly strong counterassertive challenge from Asiatic, Moslem, and even African culture groups that for so long a time have been its rather helpless victims. But though shocked out of its traditional complacency and retreating step by step on the basis of tactical expediency, there is as yet no general disestablishment of the core idea in our mass thinking, no profound conversion of our basic value attitudes. Expediency rather than renunciation seems to dictate whatever changes are taking place. But to their great credit, pluralists and relativists like Toynbee and others have long since conceded the principle and have wholeheartedly recanted this arrogant and long-standing bigotry of Western culture. They alone, through having done so, are fully equipped to face the present world crisis with understanding and equanimity. To that extent pluralist thinking has opened out to them in advance the progressive vistas of the new intercultural internationalism and given them passports of world citizenship good for safe ideological conduct anywhere.
Interestingly enough, Northrop3 discovers an analogous relativistic strain in Oriental thought, one that is, in his estimation, of surprising strength and long standing, since it stems from the heart of Buddhist philosophy. Much older and deeper-rooted then than our Occidental pluralism, it accounts, Northrop thinks, for Buddhism’s wide tolerance and effective catholicity. In its more enlightened followers, he says, Buddhist teaching has “a fundamental and characteristic open-mindedness, in fact a positive welcoming of religious and philosophical doctrines other than its own, with an attendant tolerance that has enabled Buddhism to infiltrate almost the whole range of Eastern cultures without disrupting them or losing its own characteristic identity.” In documenting this acceptance of a doctrine of many-sided truth, Northrop quotes a Buddhist scripture as prescribing for the perfect disciple these maxims, among others:
To read a large number of books on the various religions and philosophies; to listen to many learned doctors professing many different doctrines; to experiment oneself with a number of methods; to choose a doctrine among the many one has studied and discard the others; … to consider with perfect equanimity and detachment the conflicting opinions and various manifestations of the activity of beings; to understand that such is the nature of things, the inevitable mode of action of each entity, and remaining always serene, to look upon the world as a man standing on the highest mountain of the country looks at the valleys and the lesser summits spread out below him.4
It may well be, as Northrop thinks, that we have mistaken as mystical indifference and disdain what basically is a humane and realistic relativism motivated by a profound and nonaggressive respect for difference and the right to differ.
Be that as it may, it is important and encouraging to recognize that, however differently based and cued, both Western and Oriental thought do contain humane pluralistic viewpoints which can join forces for intercultural tolerance and ideological peace. Only on some such basis can any wide-scale rapprochement of cultures be undertaken. One can appreciate the deep-seated desire and the ever-recurrent but Utopian dream of the idealist that somehow a single faith, a common culture, an all-embracing institutional life and its confraternity should some day unite man by merging all his loyalties and culture values. But even with almost complete intercommunication within practical grasp, that day seems distant, especially since we have as great need for cultural pluralism in a single unit of society as in a nation as large and composite as our own. What seems more attainable, realistically, is some reconstruction of those attitudes and rationalizations responsible for bitter and irreconcilable conflict over our separate loyalties and value divergencies. The pluralist way to unity seems by far the most practicable.
Indeed, as the present writer has said previously,
It may well be that at this point relativism has its great historical chance. It may be destined to have its day in the channeling of human progress, not, however, as a mere philosophy or abstract theory, though it began as such, but as a new base and technique for the study and understanding of human cultures and a new way of controlling through education our attitudes toward various group cultures, beginning with our own. For only through having some objective and factual base in the sciences of man and society, can cultural relativism implement itself for this task of reconstructing our basic social and cultural loyalties by lifting them, through some radically new perspective, to a plane of enlarged mutual understanding.5
Cultural outlooks and philosophies rooted in fanatical religious orthodoxy or in inflated cultural bias and partisanship, or in overweening national and racial chauvinism have been outflanked and outmoded by the developments of the present age. Nevertheless, they survive considerably, though more precariously as their provincialisms become more and more obvious. For that very reason they cling all the more tenaciously to the only psychological attitude which can give them support and succor—the mind-set of fundamentalism and orthodoxy. We know all too well, and sorrowfully, how this mind-set constitutes the working base for all those absolutistic dogmatisms that rationalize orthodoxy. In so doing, it fortifies with convictions of finality and self-righteousness the countless crusades for conformity which provide the moral and intellectual sanctions not only for war but for most other irreconcilable group conflicts. If pluralism and relativism can nip in the psychological bud the passion for arbitrary unity and conformity, they already have functioned effectively as ideological peacemakers. And successful in this first and necessary step, they can often later provide favorable ground for the subsequent rapprochement and integration of value systems. But where, as in many instances, values cannot be mediated, they can at least be impartially and sympathetically interpreted, which is almost as important. For with greater mutual understanding, there can only be less motivation for forced unification. Just as in the democratic philosophy, the obvious limit of one’s personal rights is where they begin to infringe similar rights of others, so in this value domain mutual respect and reciprocity, based on nonaggression and nondisparagement, can alone be regarded as justifiable.
Paradoxically enough, absolutism in all its varieties—religious, philosophical, political, and cultural—despite the insistent linking together of unity and universality, seems able, so far as historical evidence shows, to promote unity only at the expense of universality. For absolutism’s way to unity, being the way of orthodoxy, involves authoritarian conformity and subordination. From such premises dogmatism develops sooner or later, and thereafter, history shows us, come those inevitable schisms which disrupt the parent dogmatism and deny it in the name of a new orthodoxy. Once we fully realize the divisive general effect of fundamentalist ideas and all their institutional incorporations and understand that orthodox conformity inevitably breeds its opposite—sectarian disunity—we reach a position where we can recognize relativism as a safer and saner approach to the objectives of practical unity.
What is achieved through relativistic rapprochement is, of course, somewhat different from the goal of the absolutists. It is a fluid and functional unity rather than a fixed and irrevocable one, and its vital norms are equivalence and reciprocity rather than identity or complete agreement. But when we consider the present lack of any overarching synthesis and the unlikelihood of any all-inclusive orthodoxy of human values, we are prepared to accept or even to prefer an attainable concord of understanding and co-operation in lieu of an unattainable unanimity.
Horace Kallen, whom we honor in this volume, himself a pioneer and creative advocate of pluralism, has very aptly described the type of philosophy that can furnish the ideological framework for what he calls “the structure of a lasting peace.”
Such a philosophy will be pluralist and temporalist, its morality will live and let live, it will acknowledge the equal claim of every event to survive and attain excellence, and it will distinguish consequences, not set norms. The unities it validates consequently will be instrumental ones: its attitude toward problems will be tentative and experimental, it will dispute all finalities and doubt all foregone conclusions; its rule will be Nature’s: solvitur ambulando.
1. F. S. C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West (New York: Macmillan, 1946), p. 479.
2. Arnold Toynbee, The Study of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), pp. 31–32.
3. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West, p. 355.
4. Ibid., p. 356.
5. Alain Locke, “Cultural Relativism and Ideological Peace,” Approaches to World Peace, ed. Lyman Bryson, L. Finkelstein, R. M. MacIver (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944), p. 612.