Tolerance and Multiple Narratives

In the early twentieth century, the philosophy of logical positivism swept the academia, and some of its tenets became absorbed into popular culture. Even though it was later proven wrong, it continues to deeply influence our ways of thinking about the world we live in it. According to this philosophy, all valid human knowledge is based solely on facts and logic, with no room for subjective elements like intuition or feelings. We will trace just one among the many consequences that resulted from widespread acceptance of this philosophy in the early twentieth century.

Any collection of facts can be put together in many different ways to create a narrative. For example a sequence of defeats in battle can be taken as demonstrating inherent superiority of the winners, and the necessity of emulating them. Or it can be taken as a challenge to put in greater effort and struggle in order to win. Rhetoric is the art of putting together the facts into a persuasive and coherent narrative. Skill in this art was much admired, and the subject was taught in universities until the early twentieth century. However, the positivist idea that facts by themselves are enough, led to the misconception that rhetoric involved distorting facts, and deceiving people by mis-representing them. Thus rhetoric went from being a valuable skill and a virtue to a vice: rhetoric came to mean use of empty words and emotional appeals to over-ride facts.

“Just give me the facts (I don’t want your opinions)” is the popular expression of the positivist disdain for the subjective, and the elevated status of facts as the sole source of truth. This led to the idea that there was only one truth corresponding to the facts; the possibility of multiple narratives and pluralistic views were shunted aside. Many of the deepest truths about human existence are paradoxical. For example, “the glass is half empty” reflects a truth about a shortcoming, and encourages us to strive for completion and fullness. At the same time, “the glass is half full” encourages to appreciate what we have, and avoid poisoning our hearts by focusing on scarcity and lack. Understanding the simultaneous truth, relevance and importance of opposing points of view is essential. Such an understanding is blocked by the positivist view that meaningful sentences must be either true or false.

The positivist binary of true/false leads to the common attitude that you are either with us or against us. Extremists of all shades believe that there is only one truth, and they are the sole possessors of this truth. All who disagree are wrong. Similarly, it is widely believed that there is only one collection of facts which is the correct description of history, and any account which highlights certain events and ignores others is biased and inaccurate. In fact, history books of the victors and the vanquished look very different, as has now been widely realized. Even more importantly, to understand history, we must understand the multiplicity of narratives, and not reject them as false in a vain search for a single objective truth, which does not exist.

To illustrate the necessity of understanding multiple narrative, consider Cecil Rhodes (1902) view that: "we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings; what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence ... " According to the imperialist narrative, Rhodes took up the “White Man’s burden,” suffering exile, and struggling and sacrificing to bring the benefits of civilization to the savages of Africa. The fortune that he acquired, which funds the Rhodes scholarship, was only an incidental side-effect. Numerous statues, plaques, buildings bearing his name, honor the remarkable achievements of one of the national heroes of England.

An altogether different narrative is available from former Rhodesians, who re-named their country as soon as they could do so. The Pan Africanist Congress in January 2002 argued that "the problems which were being blamed on [President Robert] Mugabe were created by British colonialism, whose agent Cecil Rhodes used armed force to acquire land for settlers". Rhodes “preferred land to niggers” and acquired a fortune using immoral and unscrupulous methods. He used this fortune to fund a private invasion of East Africa. He bought newspapers in order to shape and control public opinion. He brokered secret deals, issued bribes and used gangs of mercenaries to butcher his opponents, seizing close to a million square miles of territory from “despicable specimens”, i.e. the native inhabitants.

To try to decide which of the narratives is true is to completely miss the point I am trying to make. It is an indisputable fact that large numbers of sincere and honest men have held the story of the “White Man’s Burden” to be a simple fact, an objective understanding of a harsh reality. This belief has shaped their actions, and also the stories which have been told about imperialism, as well as the stories which have been dropped from the history books because they conflict with this narrative. If we internalize the African viewpoint, we would consider the imperialist narratives be a hypocritical lie, invented to provide cover for a greedy land grabs, and justify ruthless massacres. But this would leave us completely in the dark as to why a people who favor justice, liberty, equality and fraternity, honor Rhodes as a national hero. To understand history, we must simultaneously understand both stories, directly opposite to each other, as being the “truth” to different groups of people.

A partisan who has internalized a narrative finds it difficult to conceive of the possibility that there exist other ways of looking at the world. Understanding the simultaneous truth of conflicting narratives is a difficult challenge, and yet this is a crucial pre-requisite for developing tolerance. A cinematic illustration of this concept is presented in the classic Japanese movie Rashomon, which presents four different narratives woven around exactly the same collection of facts. Manly heroism in one version is abject cowardice in the other; chastity in one is carnal heat in the other; magnanimity in one is brutality in the other; and so on. Perhaps the Japanese are better attuned to this art because of a cultural practice: meditation on Zen Koan’s forces one to contemplate, struggle with, and try to make sense out of the paradoxical, such as “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

The idea that the same collection of facts can be validly interpreted in radically different ways, leading to a multiplicity of “truths” has startling implications. One of these can be termed the “plasticity of the past.” History regarded as the collection of life stories of billions is obviously far too vast to be grasped by any human mind. Recorded history is only a very tiny percentage of these facts, but even this small portion is far too large for any human being to absorb. A much smaller collection of ten, hundred or thousand facts that we learn to call our history must be chosen arbitrarily, and we are free to choose different collections of facts to call our past. Thus we are as free to choose our past as we are free to shape our future. Currently, the dominant narrative portrays an Islamic history of intolerance, rigidity, and dogmatic adherence to irrational positions. There is no doubt that we can find plenty of historical facts to support such a narrative. But history also provides records within the Islamic tradition of enlightened, benevolent and compassionate search for understanding the “other”.

One illustration is provided by Yale professor Maria Rosa Menocal in “The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain” She documents how tolerance dictated by Islamic laws led to peaceful coexistence with mutual respect and learning from each other for seven centuries in Islamic Spain. Very significantly, long standing tolerance was "profoundly rooted in the cultivation of the complexities, charms and challenges of contradictions." Our modern education leads us to believe in a single objective truth, and worse, that we are the sole possessors of this truth. Anyone who disagrees with us is automatically an irrational lunatic or worse. Creation of tolerance desperately needed in today’s world requires moving beyond binary logic, towards understanding the paradox of simultaneous truth of opposing narratives.