The Limits of Pluralism

Kyle would like to give a shout out to secular pluralism, and pluralist secularism:

Pluralism, which entails both a plurality of worldviews and a widespread respect for that plurality, helps keep secular society from becoming an authoritarian instrument of a particular secular worldview. It shies away from forcing people to think and act in a certain moral way. It prefers dialogue and persuasion to command and enforcement. It values hospitality and dissent and disagreement and criticism. It looks suspiciously at all grand narratives and comprehensive doctrines, especially those espoused by people with guns.

It was the people with guns who might espouse grand narratives and comprehensive doctrines that got me. I had to respond.

Men with guns aside, there's an extent to which I perhaps agree with Kyle. If by secularism, one simply means not having the state enforce the practice of religion, then I of course support it. And if my pluralism one means keeping the power of the state modest enough (in certain dimensions at any rate) to allow as many different sorts of people to practice their beliefs, rather than imposing a uniformity of life and practice on all of them, then again I am for it.

The problem seems to be that when "pluralism" is actually stated as a goal, people seem to develop a sort of gardener's eye about the whole thing. Those protecting pluralism start to look for all the way in which those with one set of beliefs might be stepping upon those with another set. Not "imposing beliefs on others" becomes and end unto itself, and since most beliefs actually do have implications that would touch on others, soon the gardener is uprooting one thing and then another, sorting and separating and trying to impose and orderly "pluralism" on the whole. Just as the parent who tries to stop all fights and unfairnesses among a large gathering of children tends to make them either bitter or bored (or occasionally both) if we set the goal of rigorously enforcing pluralism, we soon find ourselves wiping out nearly all beliefs other than the admiration of pluralism itself.

It seems to me that what is more likely to achieve real pluralism if one does "impose" certain shared values or beliefs, while leaving a fairly wide range for people to do as they will in other areas. Ironically, given my jumping off point, imperial might ("men with guns") has, in some cases, been one of the less problematic shared values to tie a highly pluralistic empire together. Thus, for instance, the British empire was, in a sense, able to maintain a more pluralistic society than its successor states of India and Pakistan, because it was clearly being run for the benefit of the British empire. Once that layer of force and order was accepted, pluralism was possible because it was not necessary to define what it was to be Indian other than "the British rule it". Independence brought the necessity of definition, and with national definition, such high levels of pluralism were no longer tolerable.

The Contradiction of Religious Freedom

Perhaps one of the most cherished freedoms of liberal democracy (in the sense of classical liberalism, not modern progressivism) is the freedom of religion. Much though I admire many elements of Western Civilization prior to the modern era, I cannot help thinking that the end of the formal confessional state has generally been a good thing not only for the state, but even more so for the Church. It has given the Church, no longer tied down by the need to support explicitly Catholic regimes, the freedom to speak more openly and forcefully on the demands that Christ's message puts upon us in the public and economic realms.

That said, it seems to me that there is a built in contradiction in the place of religious freedom in classical liberalism: While religious freedom is a central element of classical liberalism, the ability of a state to function as a liberal democracy will collapse if a large majority of the population do not share a common basic moral and philosophical (and thus by implication theological) worldview. Thus, while religious freedom is a foundational element of classical liberalism, only a certain degree of religious conformity makes it possible.

Why do I argue this? If there is a basic agreement throughout society about what is right, what is wrong, what constitutes the common good, under what conditions people are meant to live, etc., then it is possible for the institutions of a liberal democracy to be used to allow people to sort out how to achieve these ends. Disagreements may be passionate, as people will not agree on the pragmatic questions of how it is best to run a country. But compromise will at least be possible, and the democracy is likely to survive.

If, however, there is fundamental disagreement among the populace about basic issues of right and wrong and what the purpose of the human person is, the victory of the other side will increasingly look to the defeated like an unacceptable tyranny, and the state will risk coming apart at the seams.