Valuing Diversity

Buddhist Reflection on Realizing a More Equitable Global Future

Peter D. Hershock

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781438444581, 9781438444598
• eBook ISBN: 9781438444604
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

Diversity matters. Whether in the context of ecosystems, education, the workplace, or politics, diversity is now recognized as a fact and as something to be positively affirmed. But what is the value of diversity? What explains its increasing significance? Valuing Diversity is a groundbreaking response to these questions and to the contemporary global dynamics that make them so salient. Peter D. Hershock examines the changes of the last century to show how the successes of Western-style modernity and industrially-powered markets have, ironically, coupled progressive integration and interdependence with the proliferation of political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental differences. Global predicaments like climate change and persistent wealth inequalities compel recognition that we are in the midst of an era-defining shift from the primacy of the technical to that of the ethical. Yet, neither modern liberalism nor its postmodern critiques have offered the resources needed to address such challenges. Making use of Buddhist and ecological insights, Valuing Diversity develops a qualitatively rich conception of diversity as an emerging value and global relational commons, forwarding an ethics of interdependence and responsive virtuosity that opens prospects for a paradigm shift in our pursuits of equity, freedom, and democratic justice.

CHAPTER ONE

Toward a New Paradigm of Difference

As it happens, we no longer have the relative luxury of indifference with respect to difference. Even a casual survey of news and entertainment media, on any given day, anywhere on the planet, leaves little doubt that present day scales and depths of globalization processes are serving as multipliers and, frequently, magnifiers of difference, both within and among societies.

Perhaps the most high-profile examples of contemporary increases in the prominence and power of difference are those differences underpinning the emergence of global terrorism, the elusiveness of global resolve in addressing the causes and likely impacts of climate change, and the global fair trade—not “free trade”—movement. These represent the effects of especially deep differences in what, for convenience, we can refer to as “values and interests.” But as important as are such powerful and often tragic manifestations of the increasing gravity of differences, they represent a tiny fraction of the ways in which difference is now being felt, fomented, protested, and praised.

Whether locally, nationally, regionally, or globally, in evaluating and responding to the processes that constitute and shape our day-to-day lives and the dynamics of the public sphere, we are now compelled to consider not only state-centered political differences, class-based socioeconomic differences, and the possibility of underlying differences in explicitly held values and claimed interests, but also patterns of difference reverberating within and across such complex and densely interwoven domains as morality, gender, ethnicity, culture, religion, and historical experience. In domains like these, differences—especially among both real and ideal identities—often factor concretely (and yet nearly invisibly) into institutions and practices. Some of the affected institutions and practices, like marriage, are traditional; others, like legal same-sex domestic partnerships, are still in their formative stages. Either way, they are relatively stable features of the societal landscape that shape our daily interactions in consistent (though seldom holistically coherent) ways. Changes to such institutions and practices, especially if rapid or sudden, will often fundamentally challenge not only how we live, but also why we live as we do.

The longevity of institutions and practices in traditional societies can be seen, then, as an index of stable patterns of difference and identity: for example, relatively constant ways of distinguishing male and female roles and responsibilities. By contrast, it is a hallmark of modern and postmodern societies that both the private and public spheres are continuously undergoing differentiation, characterized by new or intensified constellations of differences that are often of a magnitude capable of transforming even the most basic and time-honored institutions and practices. Beyond certain thresholds of scale and scope, such transformations entail a basic restructuring of our lifeworlds—a substantial revision of the meaning of common sense and a reorganizing of those shared contexts of relevance that Jurgen Habermas has termed “the grammar of forms of life.”¹ Such restructurings cannot but alter our possibilities for (and approaches to) both self-making and making sense to and with one another. Consider again the ways in which emerging differences with respect to gender construction and sexuality over the past quarter century have destabilized and/or transformed the institution of marriage and the practice of adoption; altered the legal landscapes of benefit sharing and inheritance; forced into existence new medical and public health protocols regarding such issues as contraception, abortion, and the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases; and significantly reframed the roles of parenting and the meaning of family.

Undoubtedly, there is much to recommend celebrating the conditions that are accelerating change and fostering the advent of enhanced experiences of and sensitivities to difference. Confronting the range of differences with respect to gender construction, for instance, has opened concrete possibilities for challenging and developing alternatives to institutions and customs that have long denied women either equality or equity, either in public or in the home. Within the global political sphere, the voices of nonstate actors—for example, those of civil society groups and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—are being raised in ever-greater numbers and to ever-greater effect, significantly extending the scope of democratic processes. And, at a more pedestrian level, market-driven innovations in goods and services are continuously expanding not only choices with respect to meeting basic needs, but also the horizons of desire, opening freedoms of choice with respect to an ever more variegated range of lifestyles and experiential possibilities.

Yet, globally broadening and deepening economic interdependence is at the same time bringing about markedly uneven geographies of development, accentuating (rather than alleviating) disparities in the distribution of the benefits and costs of industrialization and globalization. For instance, while the wealth and income gap between the richest 20% of countries in the world and the poorest 20% stood at a ratio of three to one in 1820, after a century of industrialization and globalization in 1913 that ratio had increased to eleven to one. In 1950, it was thirty-five to one; in 1973, forty-four to one; and in 1998, eighty-six to one (1999 Human Development Report, UNDP). These disparities are not simply numbers in statistical arrays. The new global standard of fragmented and spatially dispersed production systems are bringing about equivalently fragmented patterns of labor needs, with the effect in many locales of shifting or truncating opportunities for long-term skills development. The global explosion of educational opportunities and a burgeoning internet-mediated “marketplace of ideas,” while arguably positive developments in their own lights, have not proven synonymous with education for all and seem likely to presage a widening rift between the qualities of education and knowledge available to the global majority and those available to a contracting and disproportionately wealthy global elite. For many, postmodern multiplications of difference are inseparable from threats of endlessly magnifying spirals into relative—and perhaps also absolute—disadvantage.²

To give a single concrete example of the unevenness of development and the profound association of difference with disadvantage, consider the geography of health in the national capital of the world's wealthiest nation, Washington, D.C. There, the life expectancy of an African American male living in the city center is a mere fifty-seven years—compared to the fifty-five years expected in Sudan or the forty-seven years expected in Uganda, countries deeply ravaged by war, famine, and disease. But by stepping onto a commuter train traveling into the city's suburbs, it is possible for an African American man to “add” a year to his life expectancy with every passing minute. Twenty miles out of the city center, African American male life expectancy is seventy-seven years.³

Facts like these notwithstanding, it must be acknowledged that new kinds and degrees of difference also open possibilities for forming new commonalities. These can take the form of support groups for those bound together by a disease like HIV/AIDS; interest groups aligned with emerging lifestyles; or international organizations like the World Social Forum, constituted in acknowledgement of links among residents of the “global South.” But they can also take the form of transnational capitalist classes, the members of which have more in common with elites scattered on the “commanding heights” of the global economy around the world than they do with the local populations immediately surrounding them. The dark side of difference acquiring (or being laden with) normative force as something that should be attended and perhaps celebrated is that, at some level, recognizing differences is also a projecting or attributing of identities—a process that becomes troubling when emerging differences so often signal emerging power differentials, new hierarchies of advantage, and new categories or classes of disadvantage.

DIFFERENCE AS RELATIONAL DYNAMIC

The general point here is that the multiplications and magnifications of difference being brought about by contemporary industrialization and globalization processes are inseparable from accelerating and significantly reorienting patterns of change. The more specific truth is that difference is never just a state of affairs or a particular status attaching to individual persons, societies, or cultures. Neither is it simply an artifact of comparison—a “gap” measured along some dimension of relevance between what are taken to be self-identical events, things, or beings. Difference is a relational process that occurs or “carries forward” in a particular direction. Far from being a generic and conceptually vacuous category of contrast, difference marks the occurrence of relational potentials—an opening of specific directions for relational change and creativity.⁴ In short, differences are ontologically ambiguous—at once emerging as generic means (for making a difference) and as specific meanings (of differentiation). Put another way, difference is a function of differentiation: a situationally focused and recursive process.

This truth that differences are always dynamic and meaning-laden is often overlooked in contemporary discussions, where difference has become a politically charged category that is conceptually grounded in assumptions about relatively fixed personal, sexual, cultural, social, ethnic, and political identities. Seeing difference as a process of meaningfully inflected differentiation disallows reducing it to a simple fact about the absence of identity or sameness. Differences mark the opening of new relational dynamics and possibilities.

But if difference is not the content-less and static opposite of sameness, then it is important to question—as we will here and in subsequent chapters—what kind of differences are being generated, to what end, in whose favor, and with what wider ramifications? If differentiation processes are inevitably directed, and hence significant, what patterns of meaning (if any) are being promulgated by the difference-generating workings of contemporary industrialization and globalization regimes, and how do these affect our prospects of realizing increasingly equitable systems of social, economic, political, cultural, and technological interdependence?

A second imperative that follows upon this way of seeing differences is to recognize that they are seldom ethically neutral. The chasm opening between the poorest fifth of all humans and the wealthiest ultimately must be seen as a key meaning of the differentiation processes generated and sustained by global markets as conditions for their own growth. As I will be arguing, changing what the world's poorest and wealthiest mean for and to one another will finally involve changing what global markets have come to be: engines for profitably translating one form of difference (diversity) into another (variety), with inequity as a key by-product. Seeing differences as expressions of changing relational dynamics calls into question both modern and postmodern tendencies to construct differences as occasions for exercising tolerance rather than as openings for mutual appreciation and the shared cultivation of contributory virtuosity.

This is not currently a “common” or “natural” way of thinking about difference. The dominant presupposition—and it is, indeed, a presupposition because it is almost never consciously entertained as an assumption—is that things are different because, or to the precise extent that, they are not the same. The existence of difference, in short, is taken to be parasitic on the prior existence of things, situations, events, or beings that in some relevant respect are independent and incommensurable. First there are things, and then there are differences among them. To the extent that current common sense accords difference some form of existence, it is strictly prepositional: difference obtains only as a fundamentally insignificant “between” or “among.” According to such a view, differences are essentially contingent.

Conceiving of differences as contingent—especially those differences that derive from linguistic, ethnic, cultural, religious, and social practices—has been key to many of the most important successes of the global project of modernity, including that of institutionally recognizing equality as a central, modern political value. But, such an understanding of difference is not without shortcomings. The logical and metaphysical biases embodied in our predominant conceptions of identity and difference are now so powerfully at odds with contemporary realities that they are major obstructions to any effort that would orient global interdependence toward greater equity. To achieve such an orientation, we must reconceive difference.

POSTMODERN PRIVILEGING(S) OF DIFFERENCE: A PREVIEW

The need to reconceive difference is one that has been recognized by many of the most incisive critics of modernity, and at various points we will engage their views in some detail. Here, however, I want in a preliminary way to consider whether the trajectory of ongoing changes in the conception of difference in Western philosophical traditions is carrying us in the direction of developing the critical resources needed to realize greater equity, or whether we are likely to do so only if we seek outside the Western tradition for an alternative or at least complementary set of perspectives on both what differences ultimately are and what they do or might mean.

As early as the nineteenth-century works of G. W. F. Hegel and Fried-rich Nietzsche, modern emphases on sameness, identity, universality, and the nondynamic character of truth and being were being called into question. Hegel's dialectic, for example, stressed the productive nature of difference, albeit as a means to an all-encompassing “absolute idea.” Roughly a half century later, Nietzsche railed with great vigor and acuity against all previously hallowed conceptions of the good because of their common failure to assert the importance of distinctiveness as a function of actively willed self-overcoming and creativity. And, Darwin's theory of evolution posed a profound scientific challenge to the idea that species were essentially determinate forms of life with a fixed point of origin (divine creation), offering instead a vision of the biosphere as a self-regulating system shaped by ongoing processes of adaptive differentiation.

But it was only with mid- to late twentieth-century poststructuralist/postmodern theorists like Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze that the primacy of such core concepts as universality, sameness, certainty, identity, presence, being, and the univocity of truth were not only called into question, but actively (and some would say, aggressively) subordinated to particularity, relativity, difference, ambiguity, absence, and multivocity. Philosophical postmodernity announces a sharp break both from the universalism of systematic philosophies like those of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, and from the constructions of modernity informed by them—an intellectual stance that Lyotard famously described as “incredulity toward metanarratives” and the totalisms they imply (Lyotard 1984).

One way of reading this break from modern idealizations of the univocity of truth and the goal of certain knowledge—especially in thinkers like Lyotard, Foucault, and Derrida—is as a critical extension of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century work of linguists like Ferdinand de Saussure who understood languages as formal systems in which the basic units were signs, each composed of a signifier and signified. Much as those linguists traced language to a combination of differential elements, early articulators of postmodern thought traced the origins of all things, not to inviolable identities, but to ambiguously configured regions of contingency, erasure, dissension, and disparity (Foucault 1977, 142)—what Derrida would refer to as différance.

For many in this generation of postmodern thinkers, a deconstruction of the foundations of knowledge was of crucial concern—a deconstruction of purportedly unified origins, subjects/selves, narratives, and coherences. For others, however, the turn toward difference was motivated by recognition of its ethical primacy. Levinas, for example, explicitly located the very possibility of ethics in the confrontation with an “other” that was incapable of being assimilated within the ambit of “the same”—the intrusion of an infinity that manifests as an experiential lacuna or hiatus eluding all attempts at being fully grasped or comprehended.

It was with a second generation of postmodern thinkers epitomized by Gilles Deleuze that emphasis shifted from the epistemic and ethical centrality of difference to its ontological function. For Deleuze (1995), difference is not simply the negation or superseding of identity; it is the very source of all genesis, the root of all material production. With this shift, difference is fully freed from its presumptive modern determination as a purely negative or parasitic concept or factor, and understood instead as the precondition of all being and beings. Importantly, Deleuze rejects the temptation to depict this relationship in such a way as to cast difference into the (expected) metaphorical role of the “root” of being and identity. Arguing against the foundationalism and verticality implied in the “root” metaphor, he forwards instead the metaphor of the “rhizome”—depicting difference and differentiation as a center-less, “horizontal” process of proliferation. The moral relativism often associated with postmodern thinkers expresses a resolute unwillingness to engage in hierarchic orderings of difference—a refusal to establish any sort of privileged position from which a ranking of perspectives, identities, and moralities might be undertaken.⁵ This would seem to be the point of departure for Deleuze's positive invocation of schizophrenia as both a descriptor of capitalist processes and a metaphor of potential for resistance to capitalism as a deterritorialized regime of desiring-production (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 1987)—a resistance that takes the disruptive, nomadic form of ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Toward a New Paradigm of Difference
• Chapter Two: Variety and Diversity: Two Qualities and Directions of Difference
• Chapter Three: Time Differences: The Changing Nature of Change
• Chapter Four: Writing Histories, Making Differences
• Chapter Five: The Commodification of Difference: Media and the Emerging Attention Economy
• Chapter Six: Ethics and Differentiation: Turning Away from the Same
• Chapter Seven: Convergence on Variety: Modern Irony, Postmodern Ideal
• Chapter Eight: Delinking Equity and Equality
• Chapter Nine: Diversity and Equity: Global Relational Commons and Global Public Good
• Chapter Ten: Making a Difference: Toward a New Structure of Feeling
• Epilogue: The Next Step?
• Notes
• Bibliography of Works Cited