At the End of the Circle of Pluralism

摘要

Columnist thomas friedman has suggested on a number of recent occasions in The New York Times that what was lacking in the Taliban―and by extension conservative Islam―was any sense of pluralism. Pluralism is the underlying principle that represents the blooming of a thousand flowers in any domestic society, but also in a globalized society. It is the pride in one's culture as distinct from the blending and compromising of integration and assimilation. It is the "live and let live" concept that has made the U.S. the home to so many contradictory ways of life, so much dissension, so much conflict and rivalry, so much inventiveness, and so much freedom. Its antithesis is the notion that there are right and wrong, with a need to force on some an understanding of what is right. Pluralist thought is so prevalent in intellectual America that it has become a mantra, reflecting the right of every culture (except mainstream white culture) not only to exist, but to hold every facet of its construction sacred and thereby permanent. Pluralism was the put-down to the integrationists who had carried the early and hard years of the civil rights movement in America. Multiculturalism, rather than "melting pot," has come to be the underlying, politically correct version of how cultures and subcultures deal with each other. Every species has to survive.