PLURALISM AND FAITHcommunities, and religious faiths press for laws and norms that extend marriage and
family, or an alliance of oil magnates from different countries puts pressure on oil-pro-
ducing states, or a cross-state coalition of citizens presses the United States, Israel, and
Palestine together to forge a real state in the occupied territory of Palestine. Pluralists are
attentive both to established connections that exceed the concentric image of culture and
to ec-centric flows that surge against the grain of the concentric dimension of being, as
when new rights for women are taken through political insurgency, or a new right to
doctor-assisted death for terminally ill patients is pressed into being from below the previ-
ous threshold of recognized rights, or a cross-country citizen movement is organized to
alter state environmental practices.
Pluralists, given the complexity of culture, are often pressed to decide which of these
parties to support, which to oppose, and which to meet with studied indifference. A
pluralist thus seldom bestows ‘‘unqualified tolerance’’ on any specific place or circle of
being, because the image of culture adopted does not divide territorial places up into
intercoded circles. Pluralists are not relativists, in the first instance, because our very
commitment to pluralism makes it incumbent upon us to embrace some things in this
particular place, to be indifferent to others, to be wary of others, and to fight militantly
against the continuation of yet others.
Pluralists set limits to tolerance to ensure that an exclusionary, unitarian movement
does not take over an entire regime, that is, to ensure that a territorial regime does not
become too concentric and too closed. Moreover, we also define a set ofgeneral virtues
and limitsneeded to nourish a pluralist ethos within a territorial regime. Granted, we are
cautious in settingfinallimits in advance to the scope of diversity, for we are attuned to
the dicey history of how absolute limits posed at one time in Europe or America were
revealed later to have fostered grave suffering and to be unnecessary to effective gover-
nance. Take, for starters, ideas, heretofore widespread in the West, that the citizens of a
regime must be Christian, that only men can be citizens, that only heterosexuals can
participate openly in public life, that racial mixing is misogyny, that only landed gentle-
men are qualified to govern a state, that marriage must be restricted to the relation be-
tween men and women, and that avowed atheists are too unreliable to be serve as elected
public officials. It is thus necessary to set limits,but pluralists are critical of the self-confi-
dence with which many unitarians endow already-existing limits with eternal necessity.
It is necessary to set limits, partly because it is impossible to house every possible
mode of diversity in the same regime at the same time. And it is necessary to organize
militantly when pluralism is under grave duress from unitarian movements. You encour-
age a wide range of religious faiths, sensual habits, household organizations, ethnic tradi-
tions, gender practices, and so on, and you encourage the civic virtues of pluralism to
inform relations between these constituencies. But a democratic pluralist won’t willingly,
for instance, allow: murder to go unpunished, parents to refuse to give their children the
opportunity for education, the public school system to deteriorate, wealthy citizens to
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