It may seem a bit perverse to argue that pluralism is a kind of dogmatism, since pluralists invariably define themselves as antidogmatists. (..) Pike's account of religious dogma makes it clear that dogma is not just a belief, but an explicit, public declaration of a belief that has a binding force on a community of believers. (..) In its meaning as "ordinance," it is quite close to the notion of law, a body of principles, precepts, and prohibitions that is, once established, not subject to argument except in special circumstances. Dogmas, like laws, are made to be obeyed, to serve the ends of social stability and human well-being; they are not made in order to be debated. (..) The philosophy of secular pluralism, growing out of Enlightenment liberalism and scientism, has consistently used "dogmatism" as its foil, its demonic Other. Dogmatism, to the pluralist, stands for everything that is both cognitively and morally reprehensible. (..) Since pluralism is by definition the philosophy of tolerance for multiple points of view, it's not hard to see why it has some trouble with dogmatism. (..) If ideology shares with dogma the status of "self-evident truth," it is the sort of truth that need not be affirmed. These differences between dogma and ideology rest upon a deeper level of similarity. Both involve deeply rooted beliefs that bind a community or class together. (..) Pluralism is a curious hybrid of dogmatic and ideological elements. The moment it is suggested that the pluralists' de jure tolerance for multiple truths is actually a way of rationalizing de facto domination and intolerance, the moment pluralism is exposed, as Herbert Marcuse put it, as a strategy of "repressive toleration," then the pluralists' happiness vanishes. (..) Pluralism takes the moral high ground by designating itself as the philosophy uniquely devoted to liberal generosity and tolerance; it takes the intellectual high ground by reducing all other philosophies to "methods" that it contains and compares; and it takes the political high ground by appointing itself as a kind of supreme court of critical method, a power which derives from the paradoxical strategy of seeming to renounce all power. (..) Pluralism has a tendency to delude us into thinking that we occupy a position from which critical decisions can be made on the basis of pure, disinterested standards of value. (..) Some examples given, amongst: choice of speakers in adacemical institutions; political debate between pluralists who both want Latin America to evolve into pluralism, that is, modern liberal democratic social, economic, and political structures; one trusts that it will happen naturally, if the United States avoids military intervention; the other insists that it can happen only if the United States intervenes wherever and whenever necessary. (..) The question we need to ask ourselves, however, is which sort of pluralism actually prevails in American intellectual and political life today? |