If ten people look at a cloud, there will be ten different perceptions of it. Whether it is perceived as a dog, a hammer, or a coat depends on our mind — our sadness, our memories, our anger. Our perceptions carry with them all the errors of subjectivity. […] Relatively speaking, there are right views and there are wrong views. But if we look more deeply, we see that all views are wrong views. No view can ever be the truth. It is just from one point; that is why it is called a “point of view.” If we go to another point, we will see things differently and realize that our first view was not entirely right.
Thich Nhat Hanh1
Pluralism is a word with many meanings. When used by political philosophers, it most often means the dispersal of power in a society between lots of different interest groups. People of a particular religion, for example, may share a specific view on some government policy. If they band together to advocate for their policy of choice (whether peacefully or violently), they can exert influence on the rulers or the general public, which can in turn result in a change to said policy. Business people may also have a shared view on certain policies, as can industrial workers, mothers, veterans, farmers, teachers, environmentalists, religious people, intellectuals, and many many other “interest groups.” Of course mothers can also be teachers, and veterans can be environmentalists, and proletarians can be Catholics. A pluralistic society is said to be one wherein all these diverse and over-lapping groups are allowed to compete for influence and make their contradictory demands heard.
It is clear to see why pluralism is a crucial feature of any legitimate democracy (as opposed to a Democracy In Name Only). In a legit democracy, every voter holds a negligibly small portion of the scattered political power, but all are welcome to join various interest groups where power can be pooled together and magnified, where it can be wielded effectively. Governmental power is also dispersed between various branches of government, so that no single person or branch can accumulate too much power. Power is scattered even further when minority rights are protected via a constitution or Bill of Rights; the government, and even the electoral majority, are prohibited from taking certain actions. In this pluralistic democracy, power is rarely concentrated in the same hands for long; the fickle, contradictory, and ever-shifting sands of public opinion help give pluralistic democracy its restless, dynamic, and innovative character.
This also explains why democracy is so messy. When political power is divided among so many interest groups, it can often be challenging or even impossible to reach a society-wide consensus regarding any particular policy, and infighting or gridlock can easily set in. However, though such a system often leads to inefficient decision-making, the alternative is a society which limits pluralism: power is placed in the hands of a dictator or oligarchy (or even a single party), and all competing power bases are eliminated (usually through violence and terror), so that the ruler(s) are free to act in their own self-interest rather than the interests of society at large. Any lover of democracy must oppose such a situation, even if a less pluralistic society would be more efficient. A legitimate democracy, for all its faults, must embrace (and even be defined by) pluralism. Power is to be scattered across society and shared in small portions by us all. Such a society will therefore welcome diversity. Members of different ethnic, religious, political, racial, and social groups will be encouraged to develop their own unique traditions and perspectives, and all persons will be invited to participate in the political process, regardless of background or lifestyle.
The above paragraphs make pluralism sound like it pertains only to the formation of public policy, and that it is really no more than a symptom of modern bourgeois democracy. But pluralism is much more than that. Pluralism is not only about who holds power to make laws, but also about how culture, our value systems, and our individual perceptions of the world are shaped. Every human perceives the world in a unique way. We all see through a special pair of eyes that take in information and send it to a unique brain that processes it in a way unlike the eyes and brains of other humans. Our brains are so incredibly complex and diverse, that a diversity in how we perceive the world is inevitable. This diversity in the way every individual member of our species perceives and understands our world is part of what makes the history of ideas so wonderfully rich. Meanwhile the world itself is too complex for any one brain to completely understand. No single person can ever see the whole picture and fully grasp all of it; our sight is too limited and the world is too big. And so this pluralism—a pluralism of perceptions and perspectives and value systems and world-views—is a fundamental feature of humanity.
The English philosopher John Stuart Mill put it well:
What has been the opinion of mankind, has been the opinion of persons of all tempers and dispositions, of all the partialities and prepossessions, of all the varieties in position, in education, in opportunities of observation and inquiry. No one inquirer is all this: every inquirer is either young or old, rich or poor, sickly or healthy, married or unmarried, meditative or active, a poet or a logician, an ancient or a modern, a man or a woman; and, if a thinking person, has, in addition, the accidental peculiarities of his individual modes of thought. Every circumstance which gives a character to the life of a human being carries with it its peculiar biases—its peculiar facilities for perceiving some things, and for missing or forgetting others.2
Our views are shaped by our cultures, our personal experiences, our upbringings, our geographies, our peers, our failures, and so many other unknowns, all of which are perfectly unique to every individual. And though this process is personal, it is largely out of our control (one doesn’t usually choose, for example, to be shaped by grief; it just happens). It gets more complicated when we consider that people can easily hold competing or disconnected or even contradictory views, and can legitimately belong to multiple interest groups. A woman’s opinions on public policy might be shaped by her experiences as a mother, and also her economic status, and also her church, and her ethnic ties, and her geographic location, and her unique memories and experiences. I appreciate this definition of pluralism from Webster’s Dictionary: “a theory that there are more than one or more than two kinds of ultimate reality”. Nobody has a monopoly on reality; everyone sees his or her world in his or her own special way. The development of every person’s individual world-view is as unfathomably complex as the human brain itself. On this earth there are almost 8 billion human brains, each one possessing roughly 100 billion neurons (brain cells).3 We have a galaxy of neurons in our heads! Each of these galaxies creates its own unique and special reality.4
Needless to say, this is too complex an arrangement for any human authority to control. Pluralism has scattered power yet again, but this time the power that is scattered is the power to control our very thoughts. One type of pluralism (the scattering of political power among many small groups) is easier for authorities to curtail; the other kind of pluralism (the innumerable factors that shape a person’s world-view) can never be eliminated or fully controlled. I will call this the pluralism of world-views. Though certain antidemocratic regimes may successfully limit pluralism to the extent that almost all political power rests in the hands of the authorities, no ruling power will ever possess absolute authority over how humans see and interpret their world, how their individual lives shape the way they perceive reality, how their personalities and value systems develop through personal experience. Authorities can certainly use violence to coerce people, and will often use various techniques in an attempt to influence how/what people think, but they can never fully control the intricate machinery of 8 billion human brains. No dictator, ruling party, secret police, revolutionary committee, or even democratic majority has ever possessed such power over mankind.5
If a certain lack of agreement—on what fundamentally matters to humans, what is moral, how to build the best possible world, what events mean—is the natural state of affairs for humans, it would therefore be foolish to expect any single philosophical theory or school of thought or political party to meet the intricate needs of every single of these 8 billion unique brains. There will never be one stand-alone theory of politics, of economics, of value, of the mind, of raising children, of God that every human can accept. We all rank the values of various ends (equality, virtue, peace, liberty, piety, privacy, success, justice, independence, etc.) differently, and there will never be a time when every person values the same exact end to the same degree as every other person. To expect “total agreement” from the human race is to expect something foreign to our nature: a hive mind.
Even a moral or political theory that holds itself to the highest standard of truth can never fully satisfy every individual, because there is no one right answer to the puzzle of humanity, no one single solution to the timeless moral and political quandaries that plague mankind, no all-unifying answer to all of life’s questions. The world is ever-changing and infinitely complex, and so are our minds. It is folly to attempt to unite and thereby pacify all of mankind with one single moral/political/economic/religious theory. It can’t be done with reason, nor can it be done with force. All one can do is contribute an idea, add his or her own unique spice to the stew. Any attempt to force all of mankind to accept one unifying theory (which would mean the elimination of humanity’s pluralism of world-views) will lead to abject failure. Along the way it will also likely result in naked despotism.
Since this kind of pluralism is inevitable, every government must wrestle with it in one way or another. So the question becomes: how will the rulers (or in the case of a democracy, the majority of the voting public) in a given society deal with this inevitable diversity of beliefs? Either the rulers/majority can allow pluralism to flourish, thereby facilitating the wide dispersal of political power across the electorate; or they can, through autocracy or violence or terror or propaganda or the stripping away of minority rights, attempt to restrict it, to punish all dissent against the ruling/majority view. By restricting it, in order to maintain autonomy of thought or single party rule, the rulers make legitimate democracy impossible. This is true even if the voting majority votes democratically to strip all minorities of political rights; though this appears to be a democratic act, it actually reveals a sick and dying democracy.
I do not intend here to make a normative argument: that the ideal state is one in which pluralism is maximized, etc. Instead I wish to point out a fact: that it is as impossible to fully eliminate the pluralism of world-views as it is to control completely all human minds; this is a power that will always be scattered, no matter how totalitarian a given regime becomes. Though I do personally believe that a liberal, cosmopolitan democracy which respects pluralism serves mankind better than a state which does the opposite, I am not here to prove that positive argument at this time. Instead I offer up that argument’s corollary: any state which believes it can eliminate the pluralism of world-views (i.e. possess total power over the thoughts, feelings, philosophies, and aspirations of mankind) is mistaken. Any single human (for example, a dictator) or even single party (for example, the Bolsheviks) that claims his/its viewpoints authoritatively represent the views of a large and diverse group of persons (such as the proletariat) is mistaken as well. One’s social class will only ever be one factor that shapes one’s mentality and belief system. Pluralism, even within classes, is a fact of life. Therefore, if a state’s foundational ideology requires that pluralism be eliminated before that state’s political/economic/social plans can achieve their successful ends (we all must agree in order for a given policy to succeed), then that ideology (and the grand plans that hinge on it) are doomed to failure. Leninist communism, for example, is one such ideology.
- Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, trans. Sister Annabel Laity (New York: Broadway Books, 1999), 53 and 56. ↩︎
- John Stuart Mill, “Bentham” [1838], in The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill: Ethical, Political, and Religious, ed. Marshall Cohen (New York: Random House, Inc., 1961), 20. Though Mill makes such a firm statement in favor of pluralism, he elsewhere (in On Utilitarianism) points out that, despite our differences and the endless variety of opinions we generate and lenses we employ to observe our world, we all seem to want happiness. ↩︎
- Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (New York: Penguin Books, 2017), 680. This lovely book offers many examples of the uniqueness and mind-boggling complexity of every individual brain. Though humans all share countless similarities, each brain is distinct and special. ↩︎
- I am not here making a kind of relativistic argument that every person’s version of reality is equally valid as any other version. Instead, the point is merely that every person possesses his or her own unique view of reality, not that these realities are all true. ↩︎
- One might object to this claim by providing a counter-example: during the height of Christendom in the Middle Ages, Western Europe developed into a uniform society composed of millions of persons fully in agreement with Catholic church doctrine. If a civilization that spanned an entire continent could share a single system of religious beliefs, perhaps pluralism is not inevitable after all. To this I say: the briefest study of the Middle Ages will reveal a remarkable diversity of thought and culture spread across the medieval European continent, even within the Catholic clergy. Heretics challenged church dogma, Jews refused to conform, merchants fought to get out from under feudalism, Germans rejected Roman law, nobles refused to comply with tax laws, peasants revolted against unfair treatment, Christian sects battled one another, mercenary armies fought against established authority, pope fought against pope, and on and on. And this was just in Western Europe! Expand the view outward to include the Muslim territories and Asia and Africa, and the world starts to resemble the same unfathomably complex picture that we see today. For more on the diversity of thought during the middle ages, check out Norman E. Cantor’s Civilization of the Middle Ages (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994). That which appears smooth and uniform from a distance often turns out to be complicated and messy when we look a bit closer. ↩︎