29
but also in the regulative ideal of pluralist politics itself.”
66
Yet, to support this
precarious balance between a politics that unsettles rigid settlements and a politics of
consolidation, democratic humility does not implore us to hold that “nothing is
fundamental,”
67
but only that we have much to gain by sustaining a sensibility that keeps
us attuned to the moral and political significance of re-visiting past decisions and long-
held convictions. While democratic humility shares a great deal in common with what
Connolly calls an “ethos of critical responsiveness” and an ethic of care for the diversity
of life, it differs from the latter in not grounding the need for this disposition in a
contestable (post-structuralist) epistemological/ontological account of knowledge and
ethics.
68
Democratic humility is offered here not as a virtue that requires agreement that
“nothing is fundamental” – it allows for the possibility that there may be much that is
fundamental. By contrast, it enters our political lives as a virtue precisely because we
cannot hope to come to an agreement on such an ontology (even a “weak” one),
69
and
because we nonetheless need modes and manners of associating with plural others that
can sustain free, open, and meaningful democratic dialogue in a protean and
interdependent social universe.
While it would be foolhardy to deny the ways in which the normative account of
democratic humility offered here is embedded in its own set of ontological attachments
(my use of St. Bernard and Nietzsche testify to that), the cultivation of ethical
sensibilities within late-modern democracies should not be thought to depend on any one
feature of this background account. Thus, while fundamentalists of various stripes cannot
embrace the notion that “nothing is fundamental” without jumping out of their own skin,
these same constituencies, with their own contestable modes of being intact, may be more
Convention