The Paradox of Pluralism

Octavio Paz articulates many of my own sentiments - especially as they relate to the universal and the particular, the we and the other. To wit, the interview published under the title Iniquitous Symmetries in which his reflections on Latin America have import that go beyond it:

Latin America belongs to the West both by virtue of its languages - Spanish and Portuguese - and by virtue of its civilization. Our political and economic institutions are also Western. But within this "Westernness" the Other, the Others lie hidden: Indians, pre-Columbian cultures or those brought from Africa by blacks, the peculiarity of our Hispano-Arabic heritage, the particularity of our history. All this makes of us a different, unique, eccentric world: we are and are not the West.

Jews are similar to Latin Americans in this regard, except our particularity is our Semitic origins and history of exile. That makes us different, unique and eccentric compared with other Western peoples, but we are nonetheless of the West. Even Zionists carried with them to the Middle East the Europe they sought to escape, in terms of democratic political institutions and nationalist ideology. Our Westernness makes us eccentric in the Middle East, just as our Easternness made us eccentric in the West. Yet that eccentricity is also the root of our national genius: the genius of exile. We are not the only ones in such a position, as the Latin American example indicates. Perhaps stronger ties need to be cultivated among the "non-Western Westerners:" a brotherhood of insider-exiles.

In the second half of the twentieth century we have witnessed a general collapse of ideas, philosophies, and systems. We have also seen the reppearance of realities buried prematurely by arrogant ideologies. Among the great survivals of the century - fortunately or unfortunately? - are religions and nationalisms. . . . Liberalism, positivism and now Marxist-Leninism have been enthusiastically adopted by Latin American intellectuals as abstract formulas; none of these doctrines has been thoroughly reexamined by and for Latin Americans. Hence we live in a state of permanent dualism: Latin America claims to be modern, but our social and political realities are premodern.

Jewish liberals also enthusiastically adopt abstract formulas without thoroughly reexamining them, yet these are in tension with our "premodern" realities as Jews. For instance, most liberal Jews are Zionists. As Zionists, they support the maintenance of Israel as a Jewish state; thus they are concerned about maintaining a Jewish majority between the Sinai and the Jordan river. I once asked my dad, who is no fool, why he supported Israel's effort to maintain its demographic Jewish majority but looked askance upon the rise of the analogously concerned Pim Fortuyn in Holland (this was before he was assassinated). His answer, roughly, was that as Jews we had a historical obligation to be wary of nativist rhetoric.

I do not discount his view, and I understand why many people of the older generation have it. However, times have changed and that answer is no longer sufficient. Anti-Semites are wrong about most things, but they are right that American Jews tend to be inconsistent in their liberalism when it comes to Israel. The reason is not a conspiracy or even conscious hypocrisy, but outdated historical habit: the right has traditionally been the source of anti-Semitism, while Israel's survival is said to be needed as a haven from anti-Semitism. Jews, we must remember, owe their political equality in Western society to the "liberal agendas" of the French and American revolutions. Yet a liberal polity depends on a population with liberal values; and liberal values like open immigration are not shared by all the immigrants who take advantage of them. We cannot simply ignore the possible long-term consequences of this paradox.

The extinction of each marginal society and each ethnic and cultural difference means the extinction of yet another possibility of survival for the entire species. With each society that disappears, destroyed or devoured by industrial civilization, a human possibility also disappears - not only a past but a present and a future. History has thus far been plural: different visions of humanity, each with a different vision of its past and future. To preserve this diversity is to preserve a plurality of futures, that is to say life itself.

One of the lessons of Jewish survival is the value of particularity. Yet our particularity must be universal in the sense of taking others' particularity seriously. We are not Christians. As much as we do not want to annul Jew and Greek in Christ, we should not want to annul Jew and Greek in globalized American culture or in some humanist utopia. Yet the preservation of pluralism is in tension with the tenets of ideological multiculturalism. The demographic growth of non-pluralist cultures can destroy the pluralist basis of the country that hosts them.

I believe the preservation of Jewish vitality through the horrors of history is symbolic of the preservation of life itself. We can be true to our own particularity without being parochial by wishing to preserve "different visions of humanity, each with a different vision of its past and future." We would be betraying our past by counselling legalized discrimination or deportation of minorities. But we we would also be betraying our past by counselling the slow death of the majority, when it is the majority culture that allows for pluralism in the first place.