Pluralism As An Ethical Imperative For A Democratic...

Pluralism as an ethical imperative for a democratic communication The concepts of civil rights and citizenship are rooted in the Enlightenment and the liberal revolutions of the 18th Century, in which the individual was at the core of the intellectual, philosophical, and political concern. In that sense, these ideas should be historically and intellectually reviewed rather than naturalized as the only way to organize social life. Actually, the Westernized nature of this tradition cannot be neglected in order to better understand and enhance contemporary cultural thinking, particularly in communication and journalism. As Taylor (1994) states, liberalism can’t and shouldn’t claim cultural neutrality. Consequently, the identity emerging†¦show more content†¦This doesn’t mean neither actual inequality ceased to play a role in social reproduction, nor social positions didn’t define people’s lives, but defined the conceptual lenses through which modern individual has been defined. However, the history of the ideas not necessarily matches to how they actually have been deployed legally, institutionally, and in everyday life. Although the Enlightenment and the liberal revolutions recognized citizen at the center of the public life, only elite of wealthy and white men enjoyed this status. So, for example, women, children, dispossessed, and illiterates, still endured a subordinate position in early Modernity and longer. Besides its applied shortcomings, Enlightenment and Western tradition of rationality fall short also into provide a global frame to understand and enhance humanness. As Christians points out advocating for universal principles based in truth, human dignity, and non-violence, Enlightenment rationalism contending for absolutes across time and space has been exposed as imperialistic, oppressive of non-Western perspectives, and exclusively male (Christians, 2010: 7). Indeed, Modernity has been built up upon a binary logic: as the opposite of medieval world, as industrial and scientific instead of agricultural, as objective rather than subjective, and experimental and scientific instead of based on revelation. Because the weaknesses of modernity as a