The politics of plenitude

Reason, August-Sept, 1998 by Grant McCracken

Our world is filling up with differences. And this is a good thing, for some of these differences advance the cause of human dignity. Plenitude embraces those who would otherwise be persecuted for their difference. Better, plenitude dispenses with "permission." No one needs the liberal generosity of the mainstream to exist. It is enough merely to stake out a social space and to occupy it. Plainly, this is to the good.

But plenitude should also give us pause. It has a darker side. It is capable of creating horrifying aberrations. Plenitude allows (encourages?) the "mustering" of paramilitary groups who cultivate their own deeply skewed notion of the world. It forgives (encourages?) a world so decentered that even the bombing of federal office buildings in Oklahoma City can seem plausible. Plenitude permits (encourages?) the monstrous.

We have a choice. Plenitude can create the glorious or the monstrous. It depends on what we do with difference. It depends on what difference becomes for us.

Traditionally, difference has been a path to identity paved with hostility and antagonism. It has given us a "sharpener" of identity and a recipe for action: find the odd man, the odd group, the odd nation, the odd culture, and then: mock, repudiate, assault, and, too often, exterminate. (Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Amin, Pol Pot eliminated difference by eliminating people, tens of millions of them. They made our century a slaughterhouse.) This approach to difference has used it to sharpen identity through contradistinction. We are what the other is not. Worse, our path to definition may be found through acts of differentiation, antagonism, and hostility against the other.

By this reckoning, things look rather grim. More difference can only mean more antagonism. If we are filling up with differences, we will find ourselves surrounded by otherness and increasingly called upon to challenge it. New and emerging identities will put our own in question. Our identity will depend upon the defacement of their identity. Plenitude's world has the potential to make us smaller, meaner, more loathing, and more loathsome. And we are the God-fearing folk. It will be worse for others, the bigots and the hatemongers. These people will find themselves so provoked by the rising tide of plenitude that any act of opposition will seem tolerable (and psychologically necessary).

But there is an other use for difference. In this case, we use difference as a definitional opportunity. We say of otherness, "Wonder what that's like?" We venture out and try otherness on. This has always been the spirit of Mardi Gras and other liminal moments. But I think there is good evidence that our entire culture is shifting in a transformational direction. More and more, we are prepared to try on difference, to test it out.

This is a radically new approach to difference, one that completely shifts the field of assumptions. In the old sharpening model, we use difference to push off against. We are not what the other is. In this new transformational model, we use difference as a definitional opportunity. We use it as a shape to try on and act out. Our most fundamental reflexes are rewired. When we see a new species of social life (Dennis Rodman, say) we no longer say, "Weirdo! Get 'em? We say, "Um, that's pretty strange. What's it like to be like that?"