J. Edward Chamberlin states that “Pluralism is a danger not because it creates conflicts, as [Arnold] thought, but because it masks them” (If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories 25). I think that this danger is in part what MacIntyre is getting at when he claims that “the liberal university aspires to be a university of unconstrained agreements and hence its abolition of religious and moral tests and exclusions, and hence also, so I have argued, its present endangered state” (230). I find MacIntyre’s call for dialogue and conflict challenging, but I also think that his criticism of the university is in part correct.
Why do we read literature? Why do we study and/or teach it? Why is it valuable? As an undergraduate student at The King’s University College one of the answers I inherited was that we read literature to know that we are not alone, and we read literature in order to understand ourselves and each other more clearly and more deeply. But inevitably, through literature, we will also come across worldviews that conflict with our own. How do we read texts that challenge us in this way? By adopting an easy pluralism, sometimes it feels like today’s secular universities do not acknowledge incommensurability of worldviews.
These questions are important for me and my work with Aboriginal literature. In his Massey Lectures Thomas King claims “If we see the world through Adam’s eyes, we are necessarily blind to the world that Charm and the Twins and the animals help to create. If we believe one story to be sacred, we must see the other as secular” (The Truth About Stories 25). Similarly, Tomson Highway continually draws his readers’ and audience’s attention to the conflict that exists between Christian and Cree worldviews. This conflict deserves attention, energy, and work. It is not enough to simply say that both stories are equally valid without investing yourself in a real struggle for understanding. It is also too easy to simply say that “I don’t believe either story is sacred.” I have been studying Cree for the past two and half years. The more I learn of the language and culture the more I learn how discordant my language and my culture is. As I learn Cree I am continually reminded how “white” I am, and how “white” my thoughts and philosophy are. I believe we are all deeply affected by Western society’s traditions of thought.
In response to Camille’s criticism of MacIntyre putting too much emphasis on conflict I would like to suggest that perhaps MacIntyre is calling for a life-long struggle with conflicting worldviews. The conflicts he points to are not ones that will be solved in any 3-credit university course classroom. I see his call for conflict as a call for all of us to look carefully at our own worldviews, and to bring them honestly to bear in our approaches to literature and teaching.
This honesty is for me, at times, terrifying. Especially as (as Camille aptly points out) some aspects of identity are more acceptable for discussion than others, and some identity groups have been privileged above others. Religion, for example, seems to be one aspect of identity that is currently not an acceptable point of reference in a secular university.
Perhaps my dread at the thought of displaying and exploring such honesty in our colloquium, or Camille’s discomfort with MacIntyre’s call for conflict points to the need for these discussions to take place within a mutually honest and respectful atmosphere (an atmosphere that has yet to be established).
Several good points here, Angela. If I forget to ask you to raise them, could you? I think it's interesting how religion has become a kind of "don't ask, don't tell" feature of university life. This despite the fact that if we are studying the kinds of things that humanity spends its time concerned with (esp. re: belief, morality, ethics, the basis of action, etc.), religion remains a dominant social force.
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