Berry: Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community

Wendell Berry writes in Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community of our culture's hypocrisy in using the term pluralism. He calls into question the goodness of what our culture means when it talks about it tolerance for plurality, and the wisdom of building community on "superficial courtesies."

"There is, in fact, a good deal of talk about pluralism these days, but most of it that I have seen is fashionable, superficial, and virtually worthless. It does not foresee or advocate a plurality of settled communities but is only a sort of indifferent charity toward a plurality of aggrieved groups and individuals. It attempts to deal liberally - that is, by superficial courtesies of tolerance and egalitarianism - with a confusion of claims."

There are two ways to have peace in a pluralistic society: you can treat every voice as equally true, good, right, and valid, or you can recognize differences in the voices as being real and meaningful (including making judgments about their truth) and still respond with love and respect toward those differences. Our culture has chosen the first way. In doing so we have become tolerant of anyone who has an opinion except those who think their opinion is a kind of truth that everyone belongs to whether they agree or not. This is a culture of "indifferent charity" which can last only as long as you are not too committed to the truth you hold, as long as it stays in the "private" sphere. We believe very strongly that if you believe something too strongly then it will automatically lead to oppression towards those who disagree, but this is only because we are losing the means to truly and deeply those who disagree. We have learned how to be polite, but we have not learned how to love. The problem with a pluralistic society making this choice is that it seeks peace by trying to reduce every claim to the lowest common denominator. In seeking to raise up every idea and equally valid it instead pulls down every idea into a bog where they are truly equal only because they are equally meaningless and powerless. However, there is a another way to have peace in a pluralistic culture, but it involves retaining a healthy sense of Wrong, which our culture hates to do. It means remembering that discernment between good and bad does not always mean oppression, and the belief that it does actually prevents real love because it prevents real community where people can come to understand one another at the deepest level and disagree over their differences but truly love one another.