My M.A. Thesis

When I was in high school I’d take Religion. It wasn’t a mandatory class: the way it used to work, back then and there, was that if you were not a Christian and/or an atheist you would just skip it (even though the class was supposedly about religions, in general).
I guess I fell in the Christian category so I’d tag along.
It wasn’t bad. Especially in the first two years of school, by far the hardest out of 5, that weekly Religion period served as a break from the despair of all of the other tough classes. It was a sort of safe haven where people in class (well, actually half or what remained of us) would take it easy and discuss with the teacher about life in a philosophical way, I guess.

It was interesting and respectful, with everybody saying what they felt they wanted to say, and the teacher leading the discussion as an equal among us. (Still, it would be unfair to deny it, many of us just used that period to catch up with the other subjects not paying attention whatsoever to what was going on in class. But as far as I can remember, I was pretty much into the discussions more than I was into fixing my homework for what was coming next).

Then, all of a sudden, during the third year, something changed. The teacher had sort of switched gears, and class discussion started being strained and tedious. In particular, I remember this one time when I was trying to make a point about the fact that, even as a Christian, one can understand other points of view (whether belonging to an atheist, or a Muslim) and respect them. This seemed to me as a pretty logic and defendable position back then as it does now. But my teacher was differently advised. I remember him telling me something along the lines: “How can you understand them?”. I don’t know exactly what I said, but it was something like, well, I may have my own religion, but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand someone else’s position about belonging to another religion, or not being religious at all. “I may not share it, but I understand it”.

He gave me a down-up look like I was an idiot. Just like a math teacher would look to a 16 years old student (that was my age at the time) that insists that 2+2 does not equal 4.

“What do you mean, you understand it? If you are really a Christian, you cannot say you understand it. They are wrong”. Just like that, he put the words ‘the end’ to our discussion and went on rambling about who knows what. I was appalled by his single-mindedness and dismissiveness. Not only was he exuding contempt for non-Christian views of life (and acting as a self-appointed inquisitor for judging a view, like mine, he’d consider not enough Christian), but he liquidated with that smirk all the progresses humanity had made as far as it goes for civil co-existence of people with different views. Probably I hadn’t been able to elaborate further, hit as I was by his repelling satisfaction in wearing blinders. But that was the moment when attending that class turned from being something half-boring half-interesting into a full-fledged pain. I’d have dropped it right there and then. (Unfortunately I was not allowed to do so until the beginning of the following school year).

I have been thinking of this episode very often lately, while writing my thesis.
Without even realizing it, this little work of mine addresses the question raised in that class. I talk about two authors, Popper and Berlin, whose thinking I really dig.
I decided to compare them because, apparently, no one ever did it before, despite they display striking similarities, and I thought it'd be interesting to put them one next to the other.

I knew Berlin only recently, while studying at NYU. The more I was getting into his ideas, the more I realized he had a lot to share with Popper, whom I had studied extensively in my first year of college. If I had to sum up in a sentence what the gist of their thinking was, then I would say:

Whenever those in power think they own the truth, then they will feel entitled to commit the most hideous atrocities to the detriment of those who don’t agree with them.

That’s why living in a democracy is so important: not because it is the “rule of the many” but because, as Popper says, leadership is constantly questioned and periodically subject to the judgement of “the many”. Moreover, in a pluralistic society people may hold up to different values and systems of belief; but no one can say to the other “you are wrong” just for basing his or her life on another set of values. There have always been clashes of values and there will always be; the point is to understand that they are sometimes irresolvable. Of course, this awareness alone does not make a perfect society. Far from it, a democratic, pluralistic society is imperfect, but so far it seems to be the least imperfect as for degree of violence required to regulate conflict and respect of personal freedoms.

More importantly, acknowledging the presence of irresolvable conflicts of values does not make a pluralist society a relativist one, as religious and/or moral authorities sometimes try to persuade us today. A relativist is someone who, to quote Berlin, thinks that “my values are mine, yours are yours, and if we clash too bad, neither of us can claim to be right”. In other words, while a pluralist can comprehend, understand views different than his own, the relativist ends up justifying whatever is out there. To him, any given set of values is defendable in principle. So, if Hitler were back today ready to trigger another Holocaust, a relativist society would be idle and just watch, since it may not share Hitler’s values, but not even fight against them because no one can claim to be right. Fortunately, I believe our societies are far from relativist.

Naturally, and I come to the limit of a liberalist/pluralist perspective, a society like this can work only as long as those individuals and groups constituting it agree to a certain amount of tolerance and understanding towards those who want to run their lives in other ways. But what can we do with those who don’t share this view? How does a tolerant society deal with the intolerants?

This is clearly today’s problem, especially if we see what’s going on in the world and how hard it is to have things run smoothly not just within societies but mainly among societies.

This problem is more accentuated if we think of religions. Religions are in their nature all encompassing systems of belief, and a liberalist framework is not always fit to do the trick. This remains pluralism’s main problem, one that not even two of its greatest champions have solved.

Enough, I am summarizing my thesis and that is exactly what I didn't mean to do. I should really get back to writing the thesis instead of writing about it. Having said that, the main point for me, here, is to highlight how pleasant it is to discover the way that some thoughts and experiences sometimes assemble in the most unexpected way across space and time to materialize themselves in an M.A. thesis that I am typing on a Mac laptop in Brooklyn but that really started in a classroom with worn-out walls and shabby desks in Rome some 13 years ago. Hadn't I had a stiff of a Religion teacher, I'd have written my thesis on something else.