Pluralism, Truth, and Social Democracy

...DISSENT / Fall 2002 • 71 SEEKING TRUTH Third, Foucault was adamant in his insistence that we should immerse ourselves with patience and perseverance in the life-anddeath problems of everyday life...

...Whatever may be said against them, they at least have the great redeeming feature of trying to show how the meaning of our lives is intimately connected to the meaning of the universe as a whole...

...Families and communities are breaking up...

...All too many young people today do not experience a way of life whose core values and beliefs they are invited to endorse, but which they can also challenge, modify, or cast into new forms...

...or he may feel, as a consequence of his critical reflections, that the truth he has inherited and wishes to live by needs to be expressed differ70 n DISSENT / Fall 2002 ently by his generation and that he has important "work" to do...

...For what group does not secretly harbor the desire to shield its truths, which it hopes are expressions of Truth itself, from a probing critique...

...This vertical relation to Truth is crucial...

...They may even feel that their chosen form of social engagement is nothing more than an expression of their "will to power," as Foucault would say, and not part of a wider, genuinely progressive social movement...

...In the 1960s, young people either felt a deep sense of alienation and fought against what they saw as obsolete and repressive (capitalist/individualist/materialist) truths in the name of Truth itself, or they saw the same truths (now expressed as liberalism, individualism, material progress) as genuine values...

...Genuine pluralism and truth-seeking social criticism go together, even if the two are in perpetual tension...

...The danger, however, is that it might too readily be dismissed as a merely private, horizontal truth, peculiar to a particular group, with the result that the kind of tension it should introduce into the inter-group life of a pluralist society is avoided...

...Walzer has carried the work thus far, but to carry it further, we need to ask what it is that makes a possibility "seriously and interestingly different...

...It links the story of my/ our origin and destiny to the origin and destiny of "all of us...

...When we call a particular exercise of criticism sound or incisive, don't we SEEKING TRUTH have its relation to Truth in mind—or its unmasking of the ways in which current practices distort truth...

...Consider Walzer's own example of a longstanding oppressive practice that he wishes to name and criticize: the denial of education to their women members by religious or cultural associations...

...But how is the social critic to execute this task...

...Truth in Social Criticism I now wish to suggest that an explicitly truthseeking approach provides support to the kind of social criticism so strongly commended by Walzer...

...It is certainly unexceptionable for leftist thinkers to aspire to be "practical and engaged philosopher[s]" but only if this stance is not compared invidiously with that of speculative, metaphysical, or truth-seeking philosophers...

...Here, however, we encounter a profound irony and a curious, even dreadful, paradox...

...large sections of our youth are confused and uncertain about life, and too many of them are close to suicidal despair: we need to know why...

...it requires a genuine pluralism, a diversity of groups with members who are engaged, entangled, committed, hard at work...

...If philosophy is to engage with politics, it had better be political, not metapolitical philosophy...

...I suggest that a society characterized only by a horizontal series of groups, each hugging its own private truth, which it regards as beyond the reach of criticism, can hardly be described as a pluralist society...

...indeed, it is more in need of them, for there is much more danger today than in the past that editors of union newspapers, teachers in experimental schools, or young lawyers working for civil rights lobbies may feel that they are on their own, that perhaps, after all, they are just pursuing their own private interest or hobby (what "turns them on...

...Walzer is concerned that modern individuality and mobility may be selfdefeating if individuals "move so fast and in such numbers that [society's] groups and associations cannot sustain an inner life and if they experiment so casually that they are not marked by the experience...

...But surely what this means is that we should strive all the harder to be "seekers and servants of Truth...

...But whatever choice he makes, he is answerable to the higher court of our common humanity...

...For what if we take our cue from Foucault and focus upon pressing everyday concerns in the manner he commends, only to find that the burning issue that forces itself upon our attention is the issue of truth itself...

...Given the intense hostility they have aroused among postmodernist critics, I want to pause for a moment to consider this question...

...A merely horizontal defense would consist in saying that, as a matter of fact, the belief is accepted by all members of the group, including its women...

...It's as if a mushroom generation has sprung overnight into existence, without having grown steadily and surely in the soil provided by inherited cultural traditions...

...What if the crucial questions are the meaning-of-life questions that philosophy once routinely dealt with...

...Now the key characteristic of this latter line of defense is that, simply by virtue of being truth-seeking, it automatically renders itself susceptible to arguments from other perspectives—for example, to the argument that formal education for women may enhance, rather than undermine, their mothering role or that mothering isn't the necessary role of every woman...

...Standing before the court of humanity, this young man must believe that Truth itself legitimates his personal choice by speaking to him in its unique voice...

...poverty and inequality are still very much with us...

...BRIAN T. TRAINOR is the author of The Origin and End of Modernity: Reflections on the Meaning of Post-modernism and Justice and the State: On Liberal Organicism and the Foundations of Emancipatory Politics...

...We need to think as hard as we can about what is happening in our society...

...In contrast, a vertical defense would claim, for example, that a woman finds her ultimate fulfillment (the truth of who she really is) in motherhood and hence that she needs only the informal education provided by everyday family life...

...His games are not, of course, a series of dialectical moves toward a truer account of the social world...

...The end result is unpredictable...

...Consider, for example, the case of a Muslim woman who says, not just to her Muslim sisters but to all women and men: "A woman's veil is her strength...

...Most readers will no doubt feel a strong sympathy with these words from the beginning of Michael Walzer's article "Pluralism and Social Democracy" (Dissent, Winter 1998) and with Michel Foucault's insistence that we should immerse ourselves with patience and persistence in the problems of everyday life...

...Rather, they are the major means through which disciplinary or professional power "manufactures" normal individuals of a certain kind...

...Obviously, it is only when such a point is reached that secular humanism, atheism, Buddhism, Christianity, and so on, fully emerge in his mind as serious and interesting possibilities, having lain latent, so to speak, up to this point in his life, in his pluralist social environment...

...I wish nevertheless to introduce a note of caution...

...E-mail Brian Trainor at brian.trainor@unisa.edu.au . 72 n DISSENT / Fall 2002...

...What this Muslim woman is entitled to from the wider society is, first, the recognition that a serious truth claim is being advanced and, second, the honesty and courage of a vertical response...

...In contrast, young people in the West today exhibit a strong tendency towards anomie, that is, toward a "condition of relative normlessness...

...Walzer is right when he says that we no longer "admire people who make themselves organs of historical necessity, instruments of an all-powerful party, disciples of a sectarian leader, ideological or religious zealots," and Foucault is right when he insists that left intellectuals should cease to be "masters of Truth...

...But certain points are reasonably clear...

...As noted earlier, he wanted to be a practical and engaged philosopher...

...Philosophical and cultural signposts seem to be largely absent in the lives of our young people...

...In The Use of Pleasure he set out to study "the games of truth and error through which being is historically constituted as experience...

...Instead, they have been abandoned to their own devices by the previous generation's numbing fear of "normalization," that is, of "imposing" their values on their children...

...The young Jewish man I spoke of earlier, with his privileged spiritual inheritance, can no longer be seen as representative of today's Western youth...

...Second, Foucault claims that we must always be alert to what he calls the "main danger"—that we will be taken in by the latest "regime of truth" parading itself as a "regime of Truth...

...He insists that what is crucial for freedom is the capacity to exit from (parental) groups, for whatever reason, and find a new home in alternative associations...

...In brief, a metanarrative tries to tell the truth about the collective movement of historical and contemporary humanity, to reflect upon its twists and turns, and to offer ideas and insights about where we should, or shouldn't, be headed...

...Walzer is correct to insist that solidarity "must have its local and particular sites" and that "it is built from the ground up," but it is also true that the empirical (horizontal or inherited) solidarities need to be confirmed and enlivened from the top down...

...or he may come to believe that what was portrayed to him as the living inheritance of truth is in fact a grand deception...

...However, as he says, "this freedom to come and go requires that there be somewhere to come from and go to...

...A metanarrative is a story that provides an account of how the humanity of each of us interweaves with the humanity of all of us...

...In either case, they lived in a cultural ambiance of Truth...

...Marxism and feminism, both of which tell the story of how we exit from an era of darkness (capitalist or patriarchal) and progress toward (or stumble into) some kind of light, are perhaps the best-known examples...

...The importance of truth in a liberal, pluDISSENT I Fall 2002 n 69 SEEKING TRUTH ralist society may be highlighted by considering the old Jewish proverb quoted by Walzer in his article: "You are not bound to finish the work, but neither are you free to give it up...

...Hence, he believes that it is important, both for freedom itself and for our personal and collective health and happiness, to "create and re-create stable social settings—families and communities—that produce strong individuals and provide them with seriously and interestingly different possibilities...

...The significance of human life suddenly seems to shrivel when metanarratives disappear from the philosophical landscape...

...Thus, we may say that in this case, and perhaps for all of us, the solidarities of family and community are horizontal, that is, socially acquired, but that they must be legitimated and confirmed vertically through this relation to truth...

...Having reached the age where he can fully exercise his independent judgment, he owes it to his family, his community, the wider (pluralist) society, but, above all, to himself, to reflect critically upon the upbringing he has received...

...the spirit of pluralist democracy requires no less...

...The play of argument and open communication between groups and individuals in a free-flowing dialectic are integral to the life of a pluralist democracy...

...Surely we cannot take the value of our families, associations, or societies seriously unless we believe (even in fear and trembling) that they are genuinely valuable and that our "local site" is a particular embodiment of our common humanity...

...We should seriously consider every truth-seeking metanarrative and every grand theory that claims to illuminate our current malaise...

...Social criticism necessarily cuts both ways, has no favorites, and always has surprises in store...

...He may become, say, a Buddhist monk, if that is the "own self' to which he wishes to be "true...

...We need to keep our minds open to the possibility that an "engaged philosophy" may be practical and at the same time metaphysical...

...But what exactly are metanarratives...

...that is, "to say that this is tyranny...

...Thus, the vertical defense invites, whereas the horizontal defense repels, genuine social criticism...

...What if the meaning and value of one's everyday life is itself a key issue for ordinary people...

...A brief comparison of today's youth with youth in the 1960s highlights the enormous cultural distance we have traveled in a short period of time...

...For Foucault, each professional discipline operates as a "will to power" or a "regime of truth," which holds both its practitioners and those upon whom it is practiced in its grip...

...What if, to be more precise, young people are asking, "How can I live my life as an expression of value...

...it is essential to the group's sense of identity and solidarity, and in a democratic, pluralist society, it is not obliged to say anything more than this...

...But Walzer seems at times to suggest that metaphysical or truth-oriented reflections on political practice hover idly above "real political life," and Foucault is adamantly opposed to any form of truth-seeking political philosophy...

...It wasn't that long ago, after all, that the term praxis was used in leftist circles to highlight the intimacy of philosophy and politics...

...The task of social criticism, he argues, is to identify examples of tyranny and longstanding oppressive practices and to call them by their proper name...

...better...

...Such a group can defend itself in either a vertical, truth-seeking manner or in a horizontal, empirical manner...

...AND WHAT is true of the young today is also true of the left, which is as much in need of metanarratives at the present time as it ever was...

...Foucault's Games The sheer complexity and manysidedness of Foucault's approach to social and political life make any brief treatment of his work difficult...

...A particular Muslim group in a liberal pluralist society, let's say, believes that it is proper to deny its female members any formal education...

...Thus, the fact that left intellectuals have rightly abandoned any claim to be "masters of Truth" in no way lessens their ongoing responsibility to be "servants of Truth," that is, to develop their own critical metanarratives and to play a constructive role in the formation of an intellectual culture characterized by its ecumenical graciousness toward metanarratives in general...

...Even if this is so, modesty can have different cultural expressions of which the veil is only one...

...This, too, is a form of social criticism...

...vantage point...

...They live in a world where Foucault's postmodern opposition to truth-seeking is part of the problem (perhaps, even, the "main danger") rather than part of the solution...

...As a consequence, he may come to realize that he has lived his life up to this point in what we might call a cultural ambiance of truth...

...Far from encouraging the emergence of a society in which young people can live and breathe, it actually impedes the birth, or re-birth, of intellectual vitality...

...I want to argue that left intellectuals should be explicitly and unashamedly truth-seeking, despite the reservations of Walzer and the outright hostility of Foucault to such a suggestion...

...He points out that without projects "so central to our lives that we were prepared to impose them on our children, the freedom to choose (or refuse) would be very nearly meaningless...

...We need to find the real reasons for these things and to provide a true account of what is happening in our society (or to get as close to reality and truth as we can...

...But whatever reply is offered, it should be a vertical, truth-seeking response...

...Walzer uses this proverb to highlight the tensions in our attitude as free citizens of a pluralist society toward the projects we have inherited from previous generations...

...A conceivable reply might proceed along the following lines: "Maybe modesty in dress and behavior does indeed convey a sense of strength, enabling a woman to be her own person and to enjoy a certain freedom in her sexuality...

...What Walzer says of solidarity, that it is something that people experience separately and differently, can also be said of Truth...

...The disorientation, rootlessness, and apathy of so many of them, the strain of violence and mental depression, is largely due, I would suggest, not to an inability or unwillingness to embrace social norms and ideals, but to the felt emptiness of a society without norms and ideals, without metanarratives and grand theorizing...

...All social criticism implicitly involves standing apart from a group or practice in order to criticize it from a different (higher...

...First, Foucault took a strong stand against any sort of truth-seeking politics...

...many, perhaps even most, see nothing on the horizon...

...Consider the case of a young man who is reared in a stable, devout, and deeply spiritual Jewish household...