At the end of the circle of pluralism.

• Author: Howell, Llewellyn D.
• Position: World Watcher

COLUMNIST THOMAS FRIEDMAN has suggested on a number of recent occasions in The New York limes 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 fights 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.

Globally, pluralism is the underpinning of expanding tribalism and subdivision--the right of every ethnic group to have a government, of every government to have territory, and of every territory to have a defense. Territorial defense, of course, means conflict, fighting, and war--and there we are. Ultimately, pluralism means war on a planet where nearly every culture is expanding its population. Yet, Friedman and others have also suggested that mainstream Islam can and must "modernize." While modernizing in these references implies an acceptance of pluralism--and the right of differing cultures, thought, and political beliefs to coexist--it also contradicts pluralist thought. To suggest modernizing is to suggest a change in a culture.

By proposing that a culture modernize, one suggests that the way the culture is now is wrong, that it needs to change in a direction that is more broadly acceptable--or maybe more acceptable to a more dominant culture. Isn't this integration? Assimilation? What have all these terms come to mean, and how are they affected by events over the last year? Who is to decide what...