E pluribus plures

When my middle and high-school orchestra teacher first exposed me to South Indian classical music, my musical sensibilities were offended. I was 14 and had a very clear conception of what music should be: either Coldplay or Rachmaninov and nothing else. My taste for music was as overtly and melodramatically emotional—and traditionally Western—as I was then. There was little place in my worldview for music that downplayed melody, focused on rhythm and used repetition in minute variations as its primary means of developing ideas. I was similarly shocked when the same teacher, on the same day of class, showed us Shaker Loops—a minimalist piece by John Adams. Here too, melody was downplayed and minute variation occupied the forefront. In both cases, I had my first brush with music in which melody and harmony were not the most important aspects. This shocked me because I had never even entertained the notion that this could be the case.

That day was easily one of the most important of my life. Though I wasn't instantly receptive to the music I learned about, my teacher had helped me realize that music wasn't this monolithic thing with only a few major traditions worth taking seriously. This cracked open the kaleidoscopic world of music for me; in a short while, I was listening to South Indian classical music and John Adams on my own time. Music slowly became an act of exploration, and my orchestra teacher became, in many ways, my guide. Throughout high school, he would lend me books and CDs that opened my mind to new worlds.

Today, I'd consider myself a musical omnivore. I like to listen to all sorts of sounds from different places and times. I'm incredibly grateful to my teacher for enriching my music experience by several orders of magnitude, but what I have to thank him most for is giving me my first taste of the very deep value of pluralism.

Pluralism, as I see it, is not just about enriching cultural experiences. It’s not just about trying Ethiopian food and feeling diverse and multicultural, though I think there might be something to be said for that. Pluralism is about exposing yourself to ideas actively at odds with your own even if the exposure doesn’t ultimately change your mind. Just as I hadn’t been fully aware of the assumptions about music tacit in everything I’d listened to up to that day in orchestra class, so too are we often blind to the assumptions in our musings about the world, especially about questions of a moral nature. If nothing else, exposing ourselves to drastically different modes of thought can help us to realize everything we take for granted in our own reasoning.

Most importantly, even if there is a “right way of thinking,” being exposed to the “wrong ways” is a healthy enterprise nevertheless. This is true for a few reasons. The first we’ve already discussed: exposure to the “wrong ways” of thinking helps reveal assumptions that have been implicit in the “right way” all along. Moreover, as famously argued by John Stuart Mill in his defense of free speech, there is no stronger test for an idea than having it successfully stand up against its critics. I think this is true. But even more deeply, the “right way” of thinking has its own pitfalls and dangers. If nothing else than to avoid these dangers, it is worthwhile to understand ideas from many different lenses, even if it's very difficult to ever fully adopt the new perspective.

Let me give an example. I am sympathetic to utilitarianism or at least a very nuanced version of utilitarianism. One of the more controversial aspects of utilitarianism is that it reduces moral questions to measurements of happiness and suffering. While I don’t think it’s wrong to try to quantify these sorts of things, I think it’s true that any measure we currently have, and possibly any that we will ever have, is flawed; it’ll only measure a shadow of what we’re trying to get at. There is therefore the danger of confusing the measure of happiness with the happiness itself. But, even though a nuanced interpretation of utilitarianism can admit this fact, it can nevertheless be easy to forget about that nuance when working in an entirely utilitarian framework. That’s why it’s very useful to a utilitarian to understand ethical theories that care more about studying rights or power than about utility.

Notice that my argument for pluralism isn’t based on a claim that all cultures or ways of thinking are equally valuable. I don’t think that’s true, and in any case, the importance of pluralism in that case is obvious. I’m saying something stronger: even if we believe ourselves to be right, there are great reasons to consider other approaches. So if I could distill this all into a single parting word as I get ready to leave Duke, it’d be this: listen. Listen to the mesmerizing sounds of South Indian classical music, to the sun-drenched dance beats of Congolese soukous, to the sultry rhythms of bossa nova or, if these things are your normal jam, to the drama of Coldplay and Rachmaninov. But just listen.

Eugene Rabinovich is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Friday.