Pluralism

My usual way of beginning a post is to plunge right in, without introductions or amusing little stories. This is partly because I know that my stories are not that amusing anyway.

My topic today is pluralism. So, to begin with, what does the word mean?

A community of people can properly be called "pluralistic" when it contains a wide variety of members, who are so varied in their race, sexual orientation, and belief systems that at first it might seem strange to call them a "community" at all. When visiting a pluralistic nation for the first time, travelers from less varied nations wonder how the pluralistic ones manage to live together and still function. Some Nazis in the 1930's, for example, called Canada and the U.S. "mongrel" nations. They thought of us as being so mixed that we must be inferior and, thus, we should be easy to defeat. 

But we know now that the Nazis were wrong. They lost. The ideas that unite a diverse, pluralistic nation, ideas like freedom and tolerance, can be very powerful.

So a pluralistic community or nation is simply one that contains a lot of really different kinds of people. But is that a weakness as the critics of pluralism claim?

If all of the citizens in that pluralistic community have a democratic right to have a say in all decisions that affect that community, and there are so many varying opinions among them, then it's true the community can take a long time to make decisions or carry out actions. Democracy is cumbersome.

It can also seem at first glance that History bears this cumbersome picture out. But if you think the bullies have all the advantages, because dictators decide and act promptly, you need to think again. The evidence of History, when you look at it hard, says deeper, more hopeful things about our strange species.

Consider just one reality-based argument. In wartime, modern armies have to be directed by radioed messages. To try to send out messages by couriers is simply too slow. So the messages are sent out by radio, in code. Code-breaking becomes the most important part of any modern war effort. Speaking figuratively, if you know where your opponent's next punch is aimed, you can block it or duck. He wears himself out, and you stay fit and ready.

The Americans in World War II broke the Japanese codes early on; the Japanese never did break the American code, and this was because the American code was Navajo. All the "codetalkers" were loyal. None ever betrayed the Allies, and the Japanese never solved the Navajo language. That's pluralism at work in the real world getting real, game-changing results.

On the other hand, using a minority's language as a secret code in the European sector of the war was not going to work. There was no minority there that could be trusted as the Americans trusted the Navajo. As a result, the first computers were built to create codes during World War II so that orders could be sent safely to troops, ships, and planes.

                           

                                                  Alan Turing (Wikimedia Commons) 

Luckily for the English, the smartest computer nerd alive at the time was English. His name was Alan Turing. He figured out how to build another computer that would crack the German codes in two days, rather than the three to six weeks that human code-breakers had been taking up till his breakthrough.

Turing was also gay, which was not a point in his favor in the England of his time. But in Germany, life for gay people got far worse. The Nazis officially hated gay people. They hunted them down and threw them in prisons. In fact, back in 1934, when Hitler was still consolidating his hold on Germany, the leaders of his street-thug army, the SA, were almost all murdered in one night by the SS. Many of the SA leaders were gay; in the NAZI press, their homosexuality was used as an excuse to justify the murders. Of course, from then on, homosexual people in Germany simply stayed out of any spot in the community or the workforce that might attract attention. Or they left Germany for good.

Meantime, in England, gay people were officially disapproved of; unofficially they were tolerated. England wasn't perfect in its treatment of homosexuals; it was just a lot better than Nazi Germany. The calculus of History is enormously complex. But there is this simple fact: Alan Turing was there when Britain needed him.

After the war, Turing's sexual orientation was revealed, and he was treated very unjustly. But that's another story that would take another post. In this post, I will just re-emphasize my main point: pluralism pays off for a society in the long haul.

                                   

                                                   Lise Meitner (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

There were also many Jews in key roles in the work that led up to the Americans’ building the first atom bomb. Lise Meitner, Leo Szilard, and Edmund Teller. Niels Bohr's mother was Jewish. Enrico Fermi had a Jewish wife. These people got out of Europe because of the Nazis. Then, they became key players in the project that saw the Americans get to the bomb first. 

What the American leaders did once they got the bomb was horrific.

But the U.S. dropped only two of the new super-weapons and it is arguable that if they hadn’t, the war would have taken many more lives, Japanese and American, if it had been continued by conventional weapons. Truman certainly thought this was the case. One shudders to think what might have happened if the scientists I listed had stayed in Europe and the Nazis had gotten to the bomb first.

Where am I going with all of this? I am building a case for the argument that pluralistic, diverse societies may have their troubles, but they are much stronger in the long run than any single-culture community can ever be. 

Pluralistic societies are resourceful. From diversity come resourcefulness and nimbleness.   

In a more positive example, the U.S. too has gotten loyalty in war and hard work in peace out of its African-American minority. But much more importantly, in literature, Science, music, sport, and many other fields, what people all over the world think of as “American culture” wouldn't exist without the contributions of that African-American minority. They put creativity and vigor into the mix.

In Canada, the Canadian nation itself was held together in my lifetime by one visionary politician, namely Pierre Trudeau. He was Franco-Canadian. On the grim but necessary side, the best Canadian snipers in both World Wars were from another minority, namely native Canadians. No one on either side could match them for stealth or accuracy.

 

                              Chinese-British woman in London in 1920's 

                    (credit: Harry Parkinson, via Wikimedia Commons) 

And since I'm being so honest, let's be even more frank. Britain has traditionally been more tolerant than the other nations of Europe for a simple, obvious reason. The earliest known Brits in what is now England were Welsh. In 44 A.D., the Romans conquered the area and began to establish colonies. Many intermarried with locals. The Roman legions abandoned Britain four hundred years later, but the people of mixed stock stayed. Then, from what is now Germany, came Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, all very different tribes, who also settled and inter-married with locals. Then, over the centuries, Danes and Normans did the same. In recent times, people from every country in the former British Empire have followed the same route. And the Scots added a mix of Picts and Gaels. Britain is more creative and vigorous for having all of them.

Racist thinking is the thinking that makes people say: "I want to be with my own kind and only my own kind". It is just as wrong when Ian Paisley does it as when Bernadette Devlin does it. It is just as wrong when Louis Farrakhan does it as when NBA owner Donald Sterling does it. Pluralism says the opposite. Let's embrace our differences.

But let me be clear: I'm not just saying the bigoted ones are wrong, unfair, or mean. I'm saying that, in the long run, bigots lose.

The hard scientific explanation is that the future keeps coming at us in ways that can't be foreseen or prepared for. Up till the twentieth century, scientists thought that if they could know the position of every particle in the universe and also know all of the laws by which the universe works, they could predict all future events. Physics causes Chemistry, Chemistry shapes Biology, Biology shapes Psychology, and Psychology causes History. 

The total set of data would be much too large for any human brain to take in, but nevertheless the future is already determined. Or so people used to think. Life, for them, was mostly about accepting our fate because Newton's laws of motion, ultimately, determined everything.

In modern times, quantum theory has given us another picture. It is telling us that the future is made of infinite numbers of possible sequences of events, some more probable, some less. In that picture, there is room for us to learn how to intervene in the flows of events around us, alter some of the odds, and, so, shape the future in ways that will make life for us and our kids a little easier, healthier, and more enjoyable. We're free. 

And in that picture, when events seem to be going sideways, communities and nations have a better chance of being able to find a solution and restore balance if they contain lots of different kinds of people, all sharing ideas and working together.

And that's it. I'll draw this post to a close now.

Love your neighbor, folks, not in spite of the ways in which she is different from you, but because of those ways. One day, one of her odd ways may save your life. 

That is not a dreamy platitude; it is a fact of hard reality. Love your neighbor, even when it's not easy to do. Believe in, and defend, his or her human rights.

And now I want to end by telling you one more heavy thought. In order for us to keep loving our neighbors and sticking up for their human rights, especially when events are going badly, we need to believe in an ideal, a thing that we can't see. 

Belief in a thing that you can't see - especially when events around you may be making that ideal look painfully naive - is a definition of the word "faith". It takes a kind of faith to keep believing in pluralism. Maybe it's not the kind of faith that the followers of the world's big religions say they have, but it qualifies. It takes a belief in things not seen. I believe that, if our species does survive, it will be because we finally acquire this faith on a global scale. 

And we will. Not for wild, speculative reasons, but for the hardest of practical ones. We want to live. 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a nice day. 

                          (credit: Elizabeth Jackson, via Wikimedia Commons)