Our democracy needs us to think differently about truth and error
More of us have to embrace away of thinking that is fundamental to being a citizen in a democracy, but not as common as it should be. That is value pluralism.
It’s most associated with British philosopher Isaiah Berlin and is based on the premise that the world doesn’t fit neatly together. He argued that we all want to pursue a variety of goods, but unfortunately, some goods will undermine others. For example, we may want to use government to make society more equal, but if we do, we’ll have to expand state power so much that it will impinge on some people’s freedom, harming a good we also believe in.
Choices involve losses
Damon Linker teaches a course on Berlin and others at the University of Pennsylvania. He noted recently that these kinds of tensions are common in our political lives: loyalty to a particular community versus universal solidarity with all humankind; respect for authority versus individual autonomy; social progress versus social stability.
I’d add that individuals feel these kinds of tensions as well: the desire to be enmeshed in community versus the desire to have the personal space to do what you want; the desire to stand out versus the desire to fit in; the cry for justice versus the cry for mercy.
If we choose one good, we sacrifice a piece of another. The tragic fact about the human condition is that many choices involve loss. Day after day, the trick is figuring out what you are willing to sacrifice for the more important good.
Sure, there are some occasions when the struggle really is good versus evil: World War II, the civil rights movement, the Civil War.
But these occasions are rarer than we might think.
Trumpian populism represents some very legitimate values: the fear of imperial overreach; the need to preserve social cohesion amid mass migration; the need to protect working-class wages from the pressures of globalization. The struggle between liberalism and Trumpian populism is a wrestling match over how to balance legitimate concerns.
The right question
But today, many on the left or right see all political conflicts as fights of good and evil between the oppressors and the oppressed. The left describes these conflicts as the colonizer versus the colonized. The Trumpian right describes these conflicts as the coastal elites, globalists or cultural Marxists. But both sides hold up the illusion that we can solve our problems if we just crush the bad people.
We pluralists resist that kind of Manichaean moralism. We begin with the premise that most political factions in a democratic society are trying to pursue some good end. The right question is not who is good or evil. The right question is what balance do we need to strike in these circumstances?
In the 1980s, I thought the chief worry was economic sclerosis and that Reagan/Thatcher policies, including tax cuts, were the right response. Now I think the chief worry is inequality and social fragmentation, and I think the Biden policies, including tax increases, are the right response.
We pluralists believe that conflict is an eternal part of public life, that we’re always going to be struggling over how to balance competing goods. But it is conflict of a limited sort, a debate among patriots, not a death match between the children of light and the children of darkness.
In our view, Congress is supposed to be the place where these kinds of balances are struck, the place where different sorts of representatives meet to weigh interests and strike compromises. It’s not supposed to be a place where representatives destroy compromises so they can go on TV taking some ideologically pure stance.
Pluralism is a creed that induces humility (even among us pundits, who are resistant to the virtue). A pluralist never believes that he is in possession of the truth, and that all others live in error. The pluralist is slow to assert certainty, knowing that even those people who strenuously denounce him are probably partially right. “I am bored by reading people who are allies,” Berlin once confessed.
Berlin went to strenuous lengths to argue that pluralism is not relativism. It’s not the belief that we all get to have our own truth. It’s the belief that objective truths exist, but unfortunately, in political life, they don’t fit into one frictionless whole.
Holy war and pluralism
Berlin was more interesting when writing about specific people — like Machiavelli or Churchill — than when writing about abstract ideas. That captures something deeply humanistic about him: tHe was always the searcher, struggling with ironies and incongruities, always trying empathetically to understand other minds, always trying to keep his head while others are losing theirs.
He argued that if there were a final set of solutions, “a final pattern in which society could be arranged,” then “liberty would become a sin.” But there are no final right answers to political questions, so history remains a conversation that has no end.
Many American voters reward politicians who offer them a holy war. If more Americans were pluralists, we’d elect more people interested in gradually and steadily making life better.