Monism and Pluralism

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t read about someone warning us against some critical danger facing humanity. Global warming is the most dangerous issue facing us today, threatening unimaginable disaster. Abortion is the most terrible tragedy one could imagine, and it is vital that we do something to stop it. There is nothing more important than stopping the gay agenda, the conservative movement, religious intolerance, Islamic extremism, or corporate bonuses. Holocaust denial is undermining the foundations of Western civilization. “It’s the economy, stupid!”

These warnings have three things in common: a conviction that the issue in question is so important that we should ignore everything else and focus all of our energies and attention on it; a belief that overcoming this challenge will at least lessen, if not eliminate all of our other problems; and a tendency to view dissenters as evildoers. When I say “dissenters,” I don’t mean merely those who disagree with the speaker on the substance of the problem and its solution. I mean particularly those who don’t put the speaker’s issue at the top of their personal catastrophic hit parade.

I was taught by my first political science professor to mistrust monist explanations and to prefer pluralistic accounts. As soon as someone says, “The problem is …” my nonsense detector starts beeping. And when they say, “The solution is …” that beeping rises to a shriek. Life isn’t simple enough for any one thing to be the problem or for any one thing to be the answer to our problems.

Marx believed that everything in society arose from the distribution of economic forces. Even he, however, was forced to introduce the concept of “false consciousness,” in order to explain why people didn’t, in fact, behave according to his view of their economic interests. We have seen this variety of monism more recently, not only in James Carville’s “It’s the economy, stupid,” but from a number of analysts baffled by the tendency of working folk in the red states to persist in voting for Republican candidates. Economics is not the answer, and neither is original sin, man’s violent nature, man’s non-violent nature, women’s non-violent nature, Western imperialism, Zionism, or anti-Semitism.

There are many good examples of this sort of rhetoric in the current healthcare debate. Is the free market the solution to all of the problems we see in healthcare? Is, on the other hand, the creation of a government-owned health insurance company going to put a stop to all of the bad behavior of private insurance companies? Will the Obama administration’s efforts to extend health insurance to more people bring about the end of American civilization? Will they, on the other hand, save our society and economy from all of their problems?

No one problem is going to destroy this country, and no one government program is going to save us from all of our problems. Nor will the rejection of any one government program avert all foreseeable disasters. We have a multiplicity of problems, for which there are a multiplicity of solutions, some of which will raise new problems of their own.