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WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY

Through that philosophy the humane desire for tolerance is pushed to the extreme

where tolerance becomes perverted into abandonment of all standards and hence of

all discipline, including philological discipline. But absolute tolerance is altogether

impossible; the allegedly absolute tolerance turns into ferocious hatred of those who

have stated most clearly and most forcefully that there are unchangeable standards

founded in the nature of man and the nature of things.^10

I find Strauss’s use of such phrases as ‘‘enemies of civilization,’’ ‘‘squander,’’ ‘‘per-
verted,’’ ‘‘shallow and glib futurists,’’ ‘‘rootless,’’ ‘‘utmost,’’ ‘‘abandonment of all stan-
dards,’’ and ‘‘ferocious hatred’’ to express a degree of virulence outstripping the
intellectual vices of his object of attack. I do, however, agree that every political regime
must set limits and seek to secure them through education and discipline. A pluralistic
society, for example, inculcates the virtue of relational modesty between proponents of
different faiths and creeds, and it seeks to limit the power of those who would overthrow
diversity in the name of religious unitarianism.
Most importantly, pluralism is not the same as cultural relativism, ‘‘absolute toler-
ance,’’ or ‘‘the abandonment of all standards,’’ though many of its critics, Straussian and
otherwise, tend to treat these perspectives as if they were the same. Cultural relativism is
the view that you should support the culture that is dominant in a particular place. The
termscultureandplaceare key, for relativism is most at home with itself when it is
situated in a concentric image of territorial culture. Here culture is said to radiate from
the family to larger circles such as neighborhood, locality, and nation. The largest circles
of belonging in turn radiate back to the smaller ones, with each circle entering into rela-
tions of resonance with the others. Given such an understanding of culture, a relativist is
one who supports whatever practices and norms prevail in each concentrically ordered
‘‘place.’’ Indeed, it is the concentric image of culture that allows you, first, to isolate each
territorial regime as an enclosed ‘‘culture’’ and then to support the content of each territo-
rial culture so defined. I don’t, in fact, know many cultural relativists, for many called
‘‘relativists’’ by others do not in fact embrace a concentric image of culture. Rather, abso-
lutists are apt to support such an image of culture and then to project their own image
back on those they define as relativists.
A pluralist, by comparison, is one who prizes cultural diversity along several dimen-
sions and is ready to join others in militant action, when necessary, to support pluralism
against counter drives to unitarianism. A pluralist is unlikely to define culture through its
concentric dimension alone, the definition of culture that allows both relativism and
universalism in their simple forms to be. Pluralism, of the sort to be supported here at
least, denies the sufficiency of a concentric image of culture to territorial politics. Pluralists
are also alert to ec-centric connections that cut across the circles of family, neighborhood,
and nation, as when ecologists in different parts of the world align to put pressure on
several states at once, or gays and their supporters from different families, neighborhoods,

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