The Specter of Pluralism’s Bloodstained History

If laissez-faire is the historic rallying cry of traders and businessmen against the mercantilists and their intellectual and administrator descendents, “to each their own” expresses a similar sentiment for pluralism as a broader enterprise. Modern defenders of liberal democracy believe that ideal policy has a certain neutrality between ways of live. To “legislate morality” is a cardinal sin in the rhetoric of our era. This is, of course, rubbish. No legislation is neutral, each embodies a set of values, explicitly and otherwise. But pluralism is not an illusion; it is simply an outcome of history. An outcome that ultimately helped to unleash the creative forces of mankind to an utterly unprecedented degree.

Freedom of speech is among our most cherished and most misunderstood rights in the European tradition, sanctified here in America as amendment number one in our (capital-C) Constitution. We defend this right on behalf of the search for truth, or of the respect for our fellow citizens as thinking beings, or other universal, noncontingent reasons. But really, freedom of speech and especially of religion emerged in Europe as a tense compromise among war-weary parties after centuries of bloodshed.

At first this tense peace was primarily between nations; protestant kings were allowed their domain and Catholic kings theirs. Increasingly, however, religious liberty became a necessary compromise within nations as well. Especially in England, where the struggle between Anglicans, Catholics, and puritans was a long and grisly, not to mention destabilizing; to say nothing of the Presbyterians in Scotland. Tolerance, so sacred a word for modern pluralists, was then meant in its much older sense of being able to cope with something unpleasant or dangerous.

The tolerance that was required to end the conflicts effectively divorced political authority from religious authority. You can see this in the work of Thomas Hobbes, seen by many as a typical rationalist political philosopher but according to Michael Oakeshott very much a man of his time. It may be strange to speak of Hobbes in the context of pluralism, given the authoritarian character of his philosophy. But at the core of The Leviathan is the idea that bloodletting and perpetual war must be ended by overwhelming force from the center, for the end of establishing a relatively heterogeneous civil society. Hobbes, at least in this Oakeshottian reading of him, then provides the germ for the modern framework of liberal neutrality.

Over time, political authority came to be seen as completely independent of moral authority, was was left to church leaders of the the many multiplying denominations. The citizens of modern states thus largely do not see their relationship to government the way that Aristotle did; that is, they don’t think politics is meant to increase the virtue of the citizenry and pursue a shared conception of the good. Instead, to the extent that the pursuit of a good is perceived to be a goal at all, it’s “to each their own good”. And “each” here is not at the level of community, but the individual—at least, conceptually.

In practice it is always at the level of community, for community is where we are raised, where our peers and mentors and family begin to teach us some notion of right and wrong, virtue and vice. Community is where we ourselves participate in this Protagorean process of shared moral education by teaching others while remaining lifelong learners ourselves.

What the tense compromise of modern pluralism has done is unleashed the the creative energies of humanity; the relentless process of trial and error learning and mass or niche diffusion described by Hayek and many others. We have reaped the material benefits of this, but the ethical implications are, to some such as Alasdair MacIntyre, quite horrifying. Ethical discovery and innovation, for anyone with anything like a rooted moral compass, sounds like the worst sort of “anything goes” relativism.

But for the presumably substantial number of us who do not have a direct line to a higher power, there’s a great deal of uncertainty about the nature of the good. Everyone knows now that slavery is a moral abomination, but why were so many otherwise seemingly admirable people unable to see it when it was a living institution in this country? Why do so many of our cultural stories decry behavior that has become accepted today?

Pluralism is a state of ceasefire across communities which allows the number of communities and conceptions of the good to multiply as their members strive to find answers. The pessimist will see in this nothing but the breakdown in moral order. The optimist will see a broadening of perspectives, of available ground level knowledge, of the stock of stories and ideas available within our common culture. The optimist believes that conceptions of the good which can persist over time are bounded by human nature and by history, but that these bounds are actually quite large, and that exploring them morally enriches us all.

And yet our conceptions of the good must have some shared features or there can be no common culture at all. The pro-pluralist government must set boundaries on variation; we cannot allow a community of rapists and murderers and child-abusers to emerge and thrive. Yet once you have a central apparatus drawing moral lines in the sand and enforcing them, rival and incommensurable conceptions of the good become sources of severe tension. Political groups organize to influence policy in a manner well described by Mancur Olson, but with the goal of imposing the conclusions of their moral framework on everyone else in the body politic, rather than rent-seeking based on a narrowly perceived material interest.

Can pluralism be peacefully maintained? The history is mixed on this—it may be maintained, but the peaceful part is much harder. America ruptured into civil war less than 90 years after its founding. It has only been 150 years since that ended, and though we haven’t seen anything on that scale since, no one would call that period peaceful, or without conflict.

All caveats aside, I consider myself a partisan on behalf of pluralism. I can see practical value in it. I also believe there is a moral value, and dignity, in conferring the freedom and the responsibility on every citizen to find their own way. But I fear that the historically contingent political ceasefire that makes it possible is necessarily a tense one, and that the boiling over of hostilities into active bloodshed is unavoidable. The only question is how long a timeframe peace and a liberal order can be maintained over, a question I’m not sure there can be an answer for.