Pluralism

Pluralism, part of the Artspeak in the 80’s  (that no one uses anymore), seemed to try to justify the fracturing of prevailing art movements and encourage doing, well, whatever you wanted, even if it seemed retrograde.

So I looked it up and of course it denotes a diversity of views and stands, rather than a single approach or method. Click it in Wikipedia, and you wade into a pluralism of pluralist definitions:

You have Legal Pluralism, The Pluralism in political practice and theory, such as Pluralist Democracy, where you have a political system with more than one center of power (sound familiar?). There’s Philosophic Pluralism that says many basic substances make up reality, and Value Pluralism- the idea that several values may be equally correct and yet in conflict with one another. There’s Religious, Cultural, and even Cosmic Pluralism, that believes in numerous other worlds beyond earth.

Who knew, then, that when Post-Modernism poked up its head back then, skeptical of grand narratives or ideologies, that this multi-cultural movement comprised of multi-faceted agendas would soon follow, and degrade into such a free-for-all?  Never-mind what Andy Warhol said, about everyone in the future being famous for fifteen minutes. We’re entering a world, where, in the future, everyone will be their own minority. Perhaps that will be a good thing - leading to a shared collective consciousness - where everyone will know everyone else’s name, rank and intentions - where human nature will be taken for what it is - that there’s always going to be a conflict between the truth of beauty and the will to power.