Challenges to Cultural Diversity: Absolutism, Democracy, and Alain Locke's Value Relativism

Introduction

Alain Locke left an indelible mark on American culture as one of the leading writers and critics of the Harlem Renaissance. However, beyond his famous contributions like The New Negro (1925), Locke produced a less known body of philosophical reflections on art, culture, and democracy. Locke's philosophy—which was reimmersed in the larger stream of American philosophy in 1989 with the publication of Leonard Harris's The Philosophy of Alain Locke and further recovered with Johnny Washington's 1994 A Journey into the Philosophy of Alain Locke—addresses the problem of cultural conflict with a naturalized epistemology of human values. He strives to illuminate a path toward the gradual elimination of intercultural conflict by digging under the differences that distinguish particular cultures to unearth a set of common values. His hope is that this new axiology might enable all people to communicate their notions of the "beautiful," "good," and "true" without resorting to culturally specific jargon. This hope that we might develop a common aesthetics reveals an ecumenism similar to Emerson's transcendentalism, Royce's loyalty to loyalty, and Dewey's hope for a common, nondogmatic faith. Locke argues that a transcultural communication of aesthetic values is vital for culturally diverse democratic societies, for whom cross-cultural exchange and understanding is necessary in order to avoid conflict among different cultural groups.

While Locke offers cogent arguments on behalf of cultural diversity, even a most charitable reading of this axiology shows that he does not sufficiently address the problem posed by cultural or ideological absolutists. As Rudolph Cain writes in his essay "Andragogy for African American Adults,"

absolutism posed a series of problems for Locke, who was concerned with the diabolical social predicaments of African Americans and the resulting insidiousness of their plight in American society. . . . Absolutism was clearly anathema to Locke's vision of a world that respected and tolerated the plethora of cultural entities and perspectives, a community that would value the imperatives of different groups.

(Cain 1999, 258)

Locke is, to a certain degree, preaching to the choir when he tells us that democracy has little or no hope unless we accept that no one culture or doctrine can legitimately claim authority over any other. While this is reasonable to most tolerant people, the very crux of the problem is that the religious, national, or racial absolutist thinks his or her views are authoritative and thus has no reason to accept diversity. Unfortunately, Locke's theory does not offer enough explicit guidance on how to deal with the sort of people most likely to threaten a culturally diverse democracy. The absolutist would see the entire project of cultural pluralism as question begging: "why should I engage in an attempt to articulate values that are meaningful to all people when my values are the ones that all people should be following?" They see the give-and-take of dialogue and reciprocity as undermining whatever absolute truth they hold.

The absence of a full engagement with absolutism in Locke's work can be traced, in part, to his faith in human progress. While he felt that we urgently need to engage in the implementation of cultural pluralism, he also thought of himself as living in the age where bigotry and provincialism would inevitably give way to tolerance and scientific inquiry. Unfortunately, it is not the case the case that, as Locke wrote in 1944, "all these provincialisms survive considerably, however, but more and more precariously as time goes on" (Locke 1989, 72). Instead, they seem to ebb and flow depending on changes in cultural, economic, and societal tides. We now face biases and provincialisms that would have been hard to imagine in the mid-twentieth century. Therefore, we need to reevaluate Locke's insights into democracy, axiology, and cultural pluralism and use them to construct a methodology for addressing the problems that absolutist ideologies pose for democracies. Locke has offered us the tools for solving the problem of fanaticism, if he has not addressed the problem in sufficient detail. We who face these problems now and also see the great ameliorative...