Pluralism is a spirit of welcoming, warmth, and care to the other. It is a willingness to engage in dialogue. It is an openness to being wrong and to learning. Pluralism says, ‘How I see things is one way of seeing the world and I want to value—and learn from—others.’
Pluralism isn’t easy. It’s a constant willingness to self-challenge and to look at where we might be wrong, or limited; even with regard to pluralism itself. It requires a capacity to detach ourselves from our agendas, our beliefs, our commitments, and to recognise that there may be other ways. And it also requires us to recognise that we can never wholly achieve that: that we will always have things that we want and that there’s always the possibility of taking a step further back.
Pluralism isn’t just a stance of ‘anything goes’. Of course, there’s a plurality of pluralistic perspectives, but the kind of pluralism that appeals to me most is a ‘foundational pluralism’, in which pluralistic ideas and practices are embedded in a more singular set of values. What are those values? Most fundamentally, for me, it’s an ethic of ‘holding open a space for otherness’: supporting difference and diversity to thrive.
So pluralism is not just a passive, wishy-washy, relativistic acceptance of everything. At times it needs to be militant. A willingness to really fight to hold that space open if others are threatening to close it down. Pluralism challenges, vigorously, ideologies that claim to be single and superior truths—and even more so those that impose their ‘truths’ on others. It doesn’t challenge the possibility of their ideas; but, like postmodernism, it challenges any single claim to metanarrative status. In foundational pluralism, care for the other is not a relative value but a fundamental ethic: the grounds from which a pluralistic prizing of difference and diversity grows.
Pluralism is there in a wide diversity of domains. In therapy, in religion, in politics. It’s there in the writings of Isaiah Berlin, William James, Carl Rogers, and many others. And, most of the time, a pluralistic standpoint is implicit rather than explicit: in appeals for tolerance, or social justice, or dialogue. And it’s hallmark is that critical, non-dogmatic self-reflexivity which strives to hold open spaces for us all, while also recognising our tendencies to try and shut them down. It is characterised by humility, by a quest for a learning, and by a deep love for others and a prizing of the unique contribution that each of us can make.
(Image By ESA/Hubble, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8788068)