With The Hope That Pluralism Beats Culture Wars

Another embarrassment - this post has taken almost 2 months to write. Why embarrassed? Not just the time, although that has a part to play, as even more the relevance to American life in 2023. We have Florida's Governor DeSantis and other Republicans attacking trans kids, banning books that show there is life outside their tunnel vision, United States Supreme Court has relegated LGBTQ people to second-class status and saved college for white people. 

My own views I learned more than half my life ago when I read William James. In particular, his A Pluralistic Universe. 

The difference I try to describe amounts, you see, to nothing more than the difference between what I formerly called the each-form and the all-form of reality. Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational. The all-form allows of no taking up and dropping of connexions, for in the all the parts are essentially and eternally co-implicated. In the each-form, on the contrary, a thing may be connected by intermediary things, with a thing with which it has no immediate or essential connexion. It is thus at all times in many possible connexions, which are not necessarily actualized at the moment. They depend on which actual path of intermediation it may functionally strike into: the word or names a genuine reality. Thus, as I speak here, I may look ahead or to the right or to the left, and in either case the intervening space and air and aether enable me to see the faces of a different portion of this audience. My being here is independent of any one set of these faces.

Andrew Reck explains this in rather technical terms until the last two sentences.

 At the same time pluralism offers a comprehensive philosophy. James’s case for pluralism rests on more than clearing the ground of its monistic alternative. Not merely negative, pluralism is a philosophy growing from many sources: the humanism of F. S. C. Schiller, the creative evolutionism of Henri Bergson, the individualism of Thomas Davidson, the pluralistic mysticism of the obscure B. P. Blood, the critical idealism of Charles Renouvier, and the panpsychism of Gustav Fechner. By pluralism James meant the description of reality as the “strung-along variety,” the theory of “a world imperfectly unified still.”¹⁴ Nor did James intend to shatter the world into a chaos of unconnected parts. The world exhibits some separation of parts, but considerable connection as well. Thus pluralism is the theory that “the sundry parts of reality may be externally related.”¹⁵

We are separate and we are connected.

 Is Multiculturalism an Oxymoron? On Martin Puchner’s “Culture” by Robert N. Watson, published by the Los Angeles Review of Books, is actual the inspiration for this post. From the review, I gather Martin Puchner agrees that pluralism is beneficial for humanity.

Martin Puchner thinks it does—and explains why in his wonderful new book. Culture: The Story of Us, from Cave Art to K-pop deploys the histories of a vast range of times and places to convince our culture-warring world that amalgamation can work very well. The “us” of the subtitle signals Puchner’s intention: in an era of atomizing identity politics, deployed by both the radical left and right, he wants readers to recognize the many historical instances when cross-cultural transmission has been—and still can be—beneficial, rather than larcenous or contaminating.

A twofold thesis unifies the book. One is that the leftist ban on “cultural appropriation” entails a misunderstanding of the way cultures can appreciate (in both senses) when they meet, rather than merely collide. This seems true: if I think your dinner order looks excellent, and therefore decide to order the same menu item, that is very different from sticking my fork into your plate and gobbling a chunk of your entrée. Puchner’s other thesis is that the conservative aversion to immigration and multiculturalism whitewashes the wonderfully multicolored patchwork of human history. He shows that those who reach across cultures can be heroic rather than invasive, arrogant, or exploitative.

The “story” part of the subtitle matters almost as much as the “us” part. Puchner vividly recounts many times when the importation of a foreign story has positively transformed a culture.

The reviewer provides an example of this multiculturalism:

The same narrative skill and sympathetic imagination shape Puchner’s 14 other lively case studies of the power of cultural syncretism. The ancient Romans imported the even more ancient Greek culture (which had adopted the device of a written alphabet from the even more ancient Egyptian culture), leading to the magnificent cluster studied as “classics.” The 16th-century poet Luís de Camões takes the next step, modeling his epic of heroic Portuguese nation-building on the Roman one that Virgil developed on foundations established by Homer’s Greek version (Puchner does not mention the odd coincidence that one-eyed Camões was combining the works of blind Homer and full-sighted Virgil). Nobel Prize–winning Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka was educated in the British colonial system that included Greek literature, then moved to England where he studied Shakespeare, then returned to liberated Nigeria and deployed his multicultural awareness in the theatrical genre that could best help his fellow citizens navigate their postcolonial experience. Soyinka therefore draws on ancient Oyo culture and modern Yoruba culture, but also on Hamlet and (from ancient Greece) Euripides’s The Bacchae.

The reviewer questions the author's optimism that humanity with its stressed politics of today can tolerate the complexity and novelty of multiculturalism.

Scholarly recovery of alternative cultures can assist critique (Indigenous cultures are proving increasingly valuable in this regard), but such critique is welcomed neither by an anti-intellectual proletariat nor by the elite beneficiaries of current arrangements (such as the Koch brothers), who have the means and motive to amplify the convenient-for-them reactionary resistance to new perspectives.

All I can say is that those who prefer creativity and complexity and the wonder of humanity cannot hope for someone to stand up for pluralistic values. We have a duty to take action. The times are too perilous to allow a one-dimensional culture to prevail.

 sch 7/8