There have been different interpretations of cultural relativism in anthropology. Some anthropologists have favored the normative conception; others the methodological. I, of course, favor the methodological.
I do not see any danger in studying another culture, or in trying to understand its institutions in its own terms, instead of our terms; if anything, it can help us see through our own culture’s institutions.
Sovietology was different; people could go into it with their own prejudices, and come out of it with these infinitely reinforced, and with an absolute sense of urgency about them.
]]>Ok.
I entirely respect this kind of anthropological relativism, as long as it is not confused with normative relativism. My impression from most anthropology I’ve read has not suggested that those within the field always make this distinction, or are willing to make this distinction. If you do, then were in senselessly violent agreement.
Relativism in your sense has value in the sense of an intellectual tool for understanding societies with different premises. Even if one is studying the Soviet Union, one needs to set aside one’s knowledge as to what is necessarily and contextually valuable to rational animals, so that one can understand it as if from the inside.
The process does seem inherently philosophically dangerous (but so is life). It always seemed to me that most state-backed ‘Sovietologists’ came to be changed by what they studied- they started with a disturbingly intent interest in horrifying things, and ended up mirror-imaging the horrifying thing in their own lives, policies, and institutions. You probably can’t study irrational murder well without ether liking what you’re studying or cruelly dulling or repressing one’s sensitivity. The same principle applies to studying societies which may not institutionally recognise reason, individualism, or human rights as valid premises. Cthulhu mythos knowledge=lost sanity.
I would merely emphasise that anthropological relativism is the most appropriate tool for understanding a society only in certain contexts. One can with profit choose to specialise in these contexts, as does an anthropologist- or a missionary, market researcher, or diplomat. But learning how to drop one’s values for a context or a period of time is a skill or a specialisation (possibly an art), not a normative cultural philosophy. The danger of grappling with the monster is that you become it.
Please tell me if I’m wrong to state that we agree on these points. Where we may inessentially disagree may regard where we would draw the lines as to when we should relate to societies in an anthropologically relativist fashion. The issue seems to me to be a matter of context, personal experience, and trust. Personally, I trust individuals isolated from the mob’s influence a great deal. In groups I trust the traditional or cultural aspects of the human condition to enshrine falsehood, persecute outsiders, and burn thinking people at the stake if you turn your philosophical back for half a moment. But I don’t object if you’re more trusting, as long as we both believes in human reason’s capacity to invalidate tradition and social authority. I think there’s a time for hospitable diplomatic understanding on the presumption that all are trying to honestly observe and know the good with what context and mental tools each has. I think there’s also a time to draw lines and recognise and respond to the incredible harm to human life implicit in certain kind of falsehoods, superstitions, parochialisms, and ignorances. There are people who will evade the reality of genocide because they are unwilling to judge others. There are people who will enable genocide because they are in love with national, religious, or ideological myths and will refuse to acknowledge their natures and implications until it is too late for the victims.
When discussing the European Left, I’m thinking of the kind of relativism which will play any kind of mental game in order to avoid describing a set of cultural beliefs, values, or practices as false, wrong, harmful, evil, dangerous, or intolerable. Academic relativism, as nurtured by historicism and pragmatism and brought to fruition in the postmodern turn, has a great deal to do with this. Perhaps we’ve had different experiences, but when I was in high school and uni this kind of relativism was a commonplace, especially among those politically inclined to the centre-left. Many professors did everything they could to batter down certainties, always equating rational judgment with religious and cultural prejudice as if such a distinction did not exist, usually employing various versions of post-Kantian philosophy as their preferred tool to undermine their student’s intellectual confidence.
My fear is that it all works to the advantage of the political and cultural Right. When reason and universalism are deligitimised as standards their places will be taken by convention, tradition, authority, and faith. The nouvelle droit cash in on this vacuum- as, more crudely, do the American evangelicals. The result is generally horror, and always horror for the young who choose to think. My concern in that this relativism has escaped the control of those leftists who primarily intended to deploy it as a weapon against Western dogmatisms, and is now used to excuse and legitimise not only non-Western authoritarian traditionalisms but immediately dangerous Western authoritarian traditionalisms as well. Islamists, European fascists, American fundamentalists, Southern neo-Confederates, and Asian dictators all stand to gain from declarations that cultures and ways of being are their own justifications which reason and liberalism dare not have the presumption to criticise or prevent from acquiring greater power. We’re becoming disarmed against fascists, and if reason doesn’t offer people the tools to resist the forms of irrationality they fear, another irrationalities will. Contemporary Europe seems to be a field in which centre leftists wring their hands while native and transplanted barbarities batter them about from both aides. Liberalism has been here before, and I think the more quickly liberalism has the courage of its convictions the better.
In this context, it isn’t anthropological relativism which is of most concern to me, which is not the same thing as dismissing its contextual value. I think Soviet felt the same way as regards a similar issue on the pan-secessionist FLL thread (which I wish to get back to).
]]>I certainly don’t allow cultural relativism to keep me from criticizing genuinely oppressive practices in other cultures.
It would be far more complicated if I were performing fieldwork and encountered an oppressive practice in that culture. Perhaps most anthropologists would be too loath to criticize, or intervene, but anthropologists may remember the ethnic cleansing of Native American populations, through the Indian School system, the forced switch to agriculture, the forced division of tribal lands, etc. and the role of pseudo-liberal missionary universalism in enabling this, as well as the use of European inheritance laws to deny native inheritance practices, and confiscate the land.
There are several contexts which require three kinds of cultural relativism.
Fieldwork requires one. Study outside fieldwork requires another, which may attempt to explain the institutions in terms of each other, or by comparison with other institutions, and their respective conditions, roles, etc.
Philosophical and political work requires another. I assume we are defending individual rights; collective rights all too often refer to the powers of a hegemonic group within any given culture, and all too rarely refer to the collective exercise of individual rights. That said, we need to understand the context; it makes sense to defer to dissenting voices from within the cultures and communities in question.
]]>I don’t understand how one can justify an idea simply by noting that it was a reaction to the idea before it. If someone revolts from dogmatism in favour of skepticism, and dogmatism is wrong, that doesn’t necessarily make the skepticism more right- in fact I might argue that one is simply the flip side of the other.
Otherwise I’m not sure which to distrust more in this formulation, the triplicate ‘I believe’ form or the appeal to progressive historical necessity over truth or humanism.
It may be true that, say, Boas’ relativism was a reaction against missionary imperialism, but relativism as a philosophical concept is at least as old as the sophists, and it was false and dangerous then and remains so now. Levi-Struass may have beautifully understood the subtleties of kinship systems that escape an ignorant observer, but any society which functions on sexist categories still makes this feminist sick- including, of course, contemporary examples.
I mean, someone who tells me that Nazi Germany, Imperial America, the Mongol Hordes, Puritan New England, or the slave South were ‘just their way’ and ‘who are we to criticise’ is either abdicating their ability to evaluate social systems or evaluating them by a standard that cares little for freedom, individualism, or human happiness. The intellectual history is interesting, and I don’t doubt your knowledge of the field, but the point was that today’s Left has philosophically crippled itself and is steadily losing to the neo-fascist Right on one side and Islamism on the other. Perhaps they had understandable reasons for doing this, but that doesn’t help the Roma under Alemanno or women trapped under legitimised Sharia in localised European enclaves.
My point as to how this leads to tribalism is simple: if you blind human beings to the possibility of consciously identifying and defining the good society, if you proclaim all cultures equal and all judgment by a historically transcendent reason or exterior standards imperialistic, then you open the door to every absurdity and atrocity rooted in faith and tradition. By what standard can one henceforth criticise socially accepted evil? Human rights? Liberty? Equality? Social Justice? Human dignity? Once you reduce all of these to mere prejudice, you render yourself powerless before anyone who wishes to proclaim his ancient legends and tablets of divine commandments equal to science and humanism.
As for Leibniz and the missionaries, what was fundamentally wrong with them was not that they believed in truth but that the truths they proclaimed were fundamentally arbitrary- cranky floating abstractions or dogmatic revelations, is either case mental concepts spun out of nothing with no relevance to reality. Now if that is what is meant by foundationalism- ‘rationalism’ in the narrow technical sense of ideas derived without reference to the sensory experience, then I’d agree with the rejection entirely, further technical disputes aside. But the point remains that ideas need to be based upon reality, and the fact that some people declare all value systems arbitrarily equal as a response to others declaring certain arbitrary values as absolutes is merely a sign of one error inspiring another. Fascism is wrong. Islamism is wrong. Both are wrong because they endorse social systems that make human beings into miserable slaves incapable of expressing their potential.
If a society exists in which women or Black people are treated as property, in which Jews are gassed, in which unbelievers are stoned or burned at the stake, in which queer people are thrown out to starve, where police or soldiers brutalise the populace, where wars of aggression are launched on the basis of lies, or where wealth is monopolised by a tenth of the percent of the population, or any other number of imaginable atrocities, then the situation is objectively bad for human beings. And yes, I think it’s entirely reasonable for Boas, Heidegger, de Man, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, de Benoist, and all the rest to have figured this out. They had the evidence. They’d read most of the same basic books we had. They knew. They may have evaded the bloody horror before their eyes, but they knew.
Relativist intellectuals have been giving the whole world the same lesson which O’Brien gave Winston Smith in 1984, and much of the Left has listened, and learned, and betrayed all of us and themselves. Certainly, some of the intellectuals had better intentions, if such a word has meaning once one has abandoned transhistorical standards. But the creatures who stand to benefit from better people learning those false lessons (and need others to become defenceless by learning them) are IRL fascists and religious fanatics who aren’t that far away from the world of Big Brother and Airstrip One.
2+2=4. Dictatorships are bad for human survival and flourishing. The open society is superior to the closed society, and we should be prepared to defend that superiority y any means necessary. This means that when the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is something to say to them. Or more precisely, we may sit down and reason with those who are not torturers, who do not create social systems in which individual rights are merely someone else’s prejudice. Against the torturers and violators, the appropriate words are less complicated:
“stop, or I’ll shoot”.
]]>I believe that cultural relativism was and is a necessary reaction. It helps to shed our baggage. It makes sense to see how each culture’s customs fit together, instead of examining each custom in isolation, or how it would fail to fit in some other culture.
Well, presumably we need to distinguish here between some different meanings for the term cultural relativism.
There’s relativism
in the methodological sense, as used to describe a particular approach in cultural anthropology (as associated with, e.g., Franz Boas and Margaret Mead), which involved the claim that the anthropologist should try to understand other cultures primarily on their own terms, rather than in comparison with either the anthropologist’s own culture, or as representatives of various stages in some scheme of world-historical development (from savagery to barbarism and onward to civilization, or whatever); and that people’s customs and conventions within a culture should not be analyzed in isolation, but rather should be understood holistically, in the context of the larger system of categories, judgments, practices, projects, etc. which make up the culture that person is living within. I think that this methodological thesis is clearly a legitimate response to the missionary and imperialist approaches; that it does indeed shed baggage that needs to be shed, and (by stressing the importance of context) corrects one-sided theories and half-baked analyses that often are made. And I don’t think it’s just a necessary moment in the dialectic I think that most of the positions defended under that heading are basically right, and should remain best practices in the long term.
There is also, however, cultural relativism
as a normative theory, which is not just about the best way to understand other people’s conduct and customs but also about how to evaluate them — which not only suggests that people’s conduct and customs should be understood in the context of their own culture, but also that people’s conduct and customs, once understood correctly, can then only be evaluated as good or bad relative to that culture’s majority opinion, or hegemonic opinion, about what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad, or what is beneficial and what is harmful for the people effected. (This is generally combined with a false claim to the effect that majority or hegemonic opinion is the same thing as the values
of the culture as a whole; and it is generally justified by reference to some logical or epistemological theory which claims that there are no facts of the matter at all, or no discoverable facts of the matter, as to whether value judgments
are correct or incorrect; or a claim to the effect that there are no such facts of the matter which are universally binding on all people, regardless of culture; or no such facts of the matter which are independently discoverable by means of individual reason; or rationally communicable from a person in one culture to another person in an alien culture. If that’s the claim — not just the descriptive claim, but the normative one as well — then we’re no longer just talking about the best way to understand people; we’re also saying something further about how to react to them once you’ve understood what they’re doing. And in fact I think that further claim is not really an intelligent critical response to either the missionary ethos or to sadistic imperialism, and is philosophically indefensible, and in fact actively immoral as a doctrine (because it involves you not only in cognitive vices, but also in the moral vice of making excuses for some people who don’t deserve it, and of condemning other people who don’t deserve it, and generally of expressing disrespect for people in alien cultures, by failing to hold them to the same standards of common human decency and responsiveness to intelligent criticism that you hold people in your own culture to).
I could, of course, be mistaken, but it seems to me that Aster is mainly discussing cultural relativism in the second (normative) sense; whereas Marja’s discussion of the context and virtues of relativism seems to be tracking the characteristics of cultural relativism in the first (anthropological) sense.
Aster:
I would also hold the establishment Left substantially responsible for the resurgence [of] European fascism, but in a different way. […]
Well. Couldn’t it be both?
I think that the Social Democratic centre in Europe is more of a mixed bag, philosophically speaking, than what you indicate here. But if the response towards fascist revivalism from the European center-Left has mostly been to abandon a philosophical refutation of fascist principles, in favor of political or legal attacks on its outward trappings, then you might say that the resurgence, where it has happened is both due to the lack of an intellectual response, and also due to the perverse attractions created by repressive policies.
]]>Cultural relativism developed in response to the missionary ethos and the imperialist ethos, both of which sought to remake non-European cultures on European lines.
I believe that cultural relativism was and is a necessary reaction. It helps to shed our baggage. It makes sense to see how each culture’s customs fit together, instead of examining each custom in isolation, or how it would fail to fit in some other culture.
I believe that pragmatism and poststructuralism were and are necessary reactions to some of the poorly-grounded tendencies in late modernism. If we try to base our philosophy on first premises, we may choose false premises (I suspect that Leibniz’s “principle of sufficient reason,” among others, is wrong) or we may commit individually-indiscernible but cumulatively-total equivocations (I can only think of more blatant equivocations, like Fundamentalists’ use of the phrase Word of God in two, arguably three, very different senses).
I believe that postmodernism is the entirely justified rejection of purely formal aesthetics. Meaning matters. The viewer’s reaction, matters, even if postmodernism tends to underrate the artist’s intent. Beauty is more than an elegant arrangement of colors.
That said, I’m not sure how these lead to the kind of tribalism you’re rightly condemning.
]]>Actually, I see the increased fascism in Europe as part of a backlash against Progressive social democracy. The attempt at enforcing unjust and statist taboos has strengthened European fascism, not weakened it. I sincerely don’t mean any offense, but your reasoning here sounds similar to a typical statist (Progressive in this case) explanation: “The fire is still burning; we added fuel to it but it hasn’t been extinguished yet! We need to add more!”
I would also hold the establishment Left substantially responsible for the resurgence o European fascism, but in a different way.
The postmodern trend has long undermined the Enlightenment premises which precede liberalism. It has championed cultural relativism in an unstable form which asks for respect for all inherited traditions, regardless of their truth or humanity, but asks for the mutual tolerance of each tradition by each to be held an an illogical, out-of-context, universalist absolute. Politically, this has translated into making excuses for illiberal abuses among populations who have themselves been collectively oppressed by racism or imperialism, while continuing to apply (properly, if in some cases by unjust methods) the full weight of Enlightenment standards against the past and present barbarities of the dominant white tribes.
This could not last. It was only a matter of time before the priest-backed elites who rule traditional cultures in the real world took the next step and declared their irrational and unjust inherited traditions equal (or better, more ‘grounded’, more ‘authentic’) to the teachings of reason. The result is a politics of a de-Enlightenment and a return of epistemic authority to ways of seeing and being that do not seek to justify themselves by reason. Since it is, of course, only the recognition the validity and competence of independent thought which can justify the individual engaged in religious and social dissent, Europe’s cosmopolitan intelligentsia have been busy digging its own graves- as well as, in principle, ours.
Before the rise of paleolibertarianism, in used to be a libertarian commonplace that nominally Left postmodernists and cultural relativists were reviving precisely the same premises upon which fascism and Nazism depended. Today, the results of these philosophical errors are evident in the rise of conservative collectivist nationalisms against which the established Left is proving itself impotent. These seem to take two primary forms.
The first, and I believe most dangerous, is the resurgence of European right-wing nationalisms which are increasingly open about their racism and fascism. Theoretically, this perspective is articulated by Alain de Benoist and the French nouvelle droit, who have successfully rebottled their far right ideologies by spiking them with the language and hard pluralist philosophy of the postwar Left. Practically, the results are evident in the frightening success of neo-fascist movements such as Le Pen’s National Front, the Belgian Vlaams Blok, Haider’s blasphemously misnamed Freedom Party, or most recently by Alemanno’s electoral sack of Rome.
The second disaster enabled by the establishment Left is the threat of Islamism in Europe. The essential problem is the same: a relativism which refuses to uphold the open society as superior to the closed society is leaving reason and freedom defenceless against primordial horror. The only difference is that the particular authoritarian reactionaries enabled by the establishment Left in this case belong to a different tribe.
I wish to be very clear here that I have absolutely no use for the ‘Eurabia’ crowd who object to immigration from Moslem countries and who themselves enable bigotry and persecution against European Moslems. I believe in open borders and detest racism, nativism, and nationalism as the most repulsive, unsophisticated, and inexcusable forms of collectivism. The conservatives advancing this thesis begin with the same basic worldview as the Islamists and their behaviour is the same in practice. The European Right does not object to patriarchy, authoritarian, or theocracy… it merely objects to the versions of these things practiced by other tribes and fears dilution of their collective irrationalism by the collective irrationalism next door, whose members are more brown and look and speak differently.
Any appeals to the defence of liberal civilisation made by the European right are hypocritical propaganda, and are made possible and necessary only the presence of liberal attitudes within Europe utterly at odds with their own deepest convictions. (This attempt by Christian nationalists to present their bigotry as humanism has obvious parallels with the American infiltration of individualistic libertarianism by Christian conservatives) But the danger of Islamism is nevertheless potenitally as serious as that posed by American Christian fundamentalism, and the context of anti-Arab and anti-Moslem prejudice does not alter this fact.
Islamism is not a particular focus of mine, so I’d rather turn elaboration of these issues over to Maryam Namazie’s excellent piece here:
Again, it is the philosophical default of the respectable centre-Left that makes this possible. In fact, the establishment Left’s stuttering in the face of neo-fascism and appeasement in the face of political Islam reminds me forcibly (and painfully) of the Weimar Social Democrats’ parallel behaviour towards, respectively, the Nazis and the Communists. What is needed now, as in that case, is a firm and uncompromising defence of reason and the open society. And, no the mainstream Left isn’t doing this, even when it presides in power over a modernity which can only be preserves, sustained, or extended by the recognition of Enlightenment ideals.
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What isn’t so clear to me is that social democracy, per se, is the element of the contemporary Left program responsible for this catastrophe. New Zealand is more social democratic than America, and there is some law-and-order and economic rightist backlash against these policies, but little of it could be fairly called fascist, and those movements which do suggest fascism (such as the Exclusive Brethren or Bishop Tamaki’s Destiny Church, or Winston Peters’ NZ First Party, are not revolting against social democracy but against cultural modernism and nonwhite immigration. In short, I don’t see how contemporary neo-fascism is significantly a primary response to Left economic policies, whatever one might think of them (my own economic views are very slightly more capitalist ans significantly more globalist than Carson, if that helps).
Note: I hope at some point in this discussion to respond to your analysis of ‘Progressivism’. My own view is that the original American Progressives were indeed as a rule authoritarians working from an explicit or implicit set of political Christian premises. But Progressivism was only one primarily American strain of the Left, and neither the best nor the worst, and some Left-wing currents (the New Left and the counterculture, for instance) evolved in explicit reaction to establishment liberal managerialism. Today, ‘progressive’ is lttle more than a label which the generic Left has picked up after the successful rhetorical demonisation of the term ‘liberal’ by conservatives, and seems to have only a vague relation to the original Progressives. And as regards that crew, I utterly agree that they represent a corrupted pseudo-Enlightenment whose superficial rationality conceals a way of thinking appropopriate to a mystical dogmatism, as did Engels’ ‘scientific socialism’ or Stalinist diamat. John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards captures the type perfectly, altho’ I think his evidence should identify the ruling class as fake rationalists, not the natural product of rationalism as the liberal Burkean Saul insists.
It’s worth noting that it was Progressivism which destroyed America’s sex worker culture, a project which patriarchy and Christianity had until that point failed to complete. There are many parallels between the Progressives’ monopolisation of first wave feminism against sex workers and other insufficiently respectable women and the contemporary division between Dworknite and pro-sex feminisms, or earlier proto-feminist sex-class conflicts between women aligned with collectivist and individualist responses to patriarchy. The convent is to state socialism what the theatre and the salon are to individualist anarchism.
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