The Source of Multiculturalism
From TheAtlasphere.com
Opinion Editorial
By Tibor Machan
Dec 12, 2005
Multiculturalism is the position that all cultures, past and present, are legitimate, valid ways to understand and cope with the world.
Now and then we hear that such strange ideas have come to us from Europe or the far East. Deconstruction and post-modernism are frequently said to have originated abroad but have seduced many American intellectuals and academics.
What is interesting is that the underlying rationale for the idea of multiculturalism had its origins in a philosophical movement that was spawned right here in the USA.
In the late 1800s the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) made a big splash with his philosophy of pragmatism — or pragmaticism — which argues, in essence, that a belief is true if it works when one puts it into practice. Later William James (1842--1910), who is known for his important contributions to both psychology and philosophy, developed the pragmatic theory of truth. Applying it to, say, belief in God, he maintained — putting it a bit simply — that if that belief works out for someone, produces results in one’s life that are satisfactory, and makes one happy, then it counts as a true belief.
Now at first this appears odd, but the pragmatists put forth these ideas once they became convinced that alternative views on how to verify the truth of an idea didn’t succeed. Particularly problematic were views such as those of the highly influential French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650), who held that truth is a matter of deducing conclusions from undeniable, axiomatic first principles — “I think, so I exist.” Philosophers found that such ideas could not be sustained.
Even logic was thought by some influential pragmatists to be unrelated to reality and thus not serve as a starting point for knowledge. C. I. Lewis (1883-1964), another pragmatist, argued that we choose to enact logic as a device for thinking straight. It is not the world itself that requires logic from us but we impose it on the world. From this idea grew the view that there could be alternate logics and that even the law of non-contradiction — certainly its corollary, that a thing is either A or not A, but not both — is optional. Logic is a convention, was the claim, not a necessary tool for thinking.
Back in ancient Greece, when Aristotle developed the system we call logic, the view was that this system is required by reality itself. It isn’t just that people want to be logical but that reality makes being logical necessary for sound thinking. So, over the centuries, logic served as a basic critical device. Once a viewpoint or idea or theory was found illogical — such as a witness’s testimony in court — it was immediately discredited.
There had always been some dissidents who thought there had been too much emphasis on reason or logic in the Western tradition. These dissidents tended to come from the humanities, not the sciences, but even in science there were some influential ones in the twentieth century (for example, Niels Bohr). In literature such people were more numerous and today we have a Nobel Laureate in Literature, J. M. Coetzee, from South Africa (now living in Australia), author of the highly acclaimed novel Disgrace, who champions the idea that logic shouldn’t matter so much and that human reasoning doesn’t amount to much — feelings are far more significant.
But the most influential detractors from the view that logic is vital were the alternative logic advocates and those who held that logic is a mere convention, something we have accepted over centuries, a little like slowing adopting a language — we could have adopted quite another.
By the latter part of the 20th century this notion spawned multiculturalism — the idea that no culture is superior to any other, no practices are worse then others, it’s all the same how one conducts oneself, no matter what regime a society has. Logic itself is seen by such people as merely what European culture “bought into” and something that cannot serve as an arbiter of sound thinking and action. And truth, according to radical pragmatist Richard Rorty of Stanford University, is what one’s community determines. There is no objectivity at all, we all think from a point of view and no one can escape that point of view.
There is a saying that philosophers never bake any bread. They do, but sadly it’s often stale and rancid.
Tibor Machan is R. C. Hoiles Professor of Business Ethics & Free Enterprise at the Argyros School of Business and Economics at Chapman University in Orange, California. He is also a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and an advisor on public policy matters for Freedom Communications, Inc.
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