The Trouble Isn't that Curmudgeons Are Ignorant ...

I'm reading Edmund White's latest book, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading (Bloomsbury, 2018).  It's as well-written and engaging as I expected, and also as studded with White's customary misplaced animadversions on Society Today.

This one's my favorite so far.  Recalling his youthful absorption in East Asian culture and art, White declares:

Like most educated Americans of the period, I had an almost holy respect for other cultures. That was the main difference between the solemn, diffident Americans and the mocking, ethnocentric English—our cultural relativism is deeply rooted [53].

This isn't "cultural relativism" at all, however: it's cultural absolutism.  White doesn't think that one culture is as good as another, he believes that American has been weighed against Chinese culture and been found wanting.

I dug out the anthropologist Clifford Geertz' great 1982 essay on relativism, in which he quoted (among others) his colleague Robert Edgerton's complaint about "our inability to test any proposition about the relative adequacy of a society. Our relativistic tradition in anthropology has been slow to yield to the idea that there could be such a thing as a deviant society, one that is contrary to human nature."*

However, it seems that many anti-relativists are as confused about relativism as White is.  Geertz also quotes the very distinguished Melford Spiro (page 55):

[The] concept of cultural relativism . . . was enlisted to do battle against racist notions in general, and the notion of primitive mentality, in particular. . . . [But] cultural relativism was also used, at least by some anthropologists, to perpetuate a kind of inverted racism. That is, it was used as a powerful tool of cultural criticism, with the consequent derogation of Western culture and of the mentality which it produced.**

It's odd to conflate a concept with its misuse by "at least ... some anthropologists."  I'd expect a relative absolutist to deny them title to the concept, rather than cede it to them.  But this is a common theme in anti-relativist discourse, and it appears to be rooted in indignation that anyone should rank Euro-American culture below any other.  America is the norm against which deviant cultures are supposed to be measured, for heaven's sake!  Ironically, it's Spiro and Edgerton who are the real relativists here, criticizing cultural absolutists.

There's nothing wrong with White, or anyone else, finding features of other cultures that he prefers to features of his own.  I, for example, enjoy the varieties of bows that are customary in some East Asian cultures, from slight nods of the head to bowing deeply from the waist. (I've never been in a position where prostration would be appropriate, except in Buddhist temples.)  I enjoy doing it because it pleases the people I bow to.  But I know it makes a difference that I don't have to do it.  I don't have to worry, for example, about being beaten if I fail to bow, or bow incorrectly. I don't love every aspect of these cultures, and indeed am critical of many of their ways and customs -- just as I am of my own culture.  Nor do I consider these cultures superior to the West because of this custom.  It's a matter of temperament, an aesthetic judgment rather than a moral one.

I noticed that when White and his friends acted out certain details of Japanese culture, they played the roles of upper-status people, not servants or slaves.  Much of what he liked about the East was limited to scholars, priests, and rulers, not those who made their comfort and leisure possible.  When I read Tale of Genji, for example, I noticed that when the noble title character goes out into the rain to find a branch with flowers to send as a gift to some lady he hopes to rape, he is protected by oilcloth while his servant, who does the actual work, is not.  (White read a different translation than I did, but I think his failure to notice that Genji often coerced his lady loves into having sex with him has more to do with the rose-colored glasses through which he viewed Japanese culture than any significant difference in the translation.)  This isn't an unusual blind spot for those who romanticize other cultures, or even their own; how many Jane Austen fans identify with the servants in her novels, rather than the lovely, delicate young husband-hunters the servants care for?  (Jo Baker's 2013 novel Longbourn, which retells Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of a servant girl in the Bennet household, is a fine corrective.)

White also has some rather standard, but no less annoying for that, remarks about the American educational system; maybe I'll pick on those in another post.  I'm now about halfway through The Unpunished Vice, and while it's an interesting read, I think I'll take a break from it for a day or two.  Other books await.

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* C. Geertz, "Anti-anti-relativism," in Geertz, Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (Princeton, 2000), page 56, quoting R. Edgerton, “The Study of Deviance, Marginal Man or Everyman?” in Spindler, ed., The Making of Psychological Anthropology, pp. 444–471.  The quotation from Edgerton is from page 470.

** M. Spiro, “Culture and Human Nature,” in G. Spindler, ed., The Making of Psychological Anthropology, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978, pp. 330–360.  The quotation here is from page 336.

Power to the People -- The Right People, I Mean

Here's another useful bit from Lawrence W. Levine's The Opening of the American Mind, which I'm very glad I decided to reread:

Critics of the contemporary university have maintained that for too many professors there is no longer any "objective" truth; everything has become subjective.  "An increasingly influential view," Lynn Cheney charged in 1992, "is that there is no truth to tell.  What we think of as truth is merely a cultural construct, serving to empower some and oppress others.  Since power and politics are part of every quest for knowledge -- so it is argued -- professors are perfectly justified in using the classroom to advance political agendas" [158].

Levine has his own answer to Cheney's accusation, but I want to go off in another direction.  I thought that conservatives (which means not only people like the Cheney crime family but academics like Arthur Schlesinger Jr.) thought -- hell, insisted -- that it's not only perfectly correct but highly desirable to use the classroom to advance political agendas, as long as the agenda advanced is the celebration of American might, righteousness, and exceptionalism.  I'm almost tempted to find a copy of Cheney's screed (Telling the Truth: A Report on the State of the Humanities in Higher Education [Washington DC: National Endowment for the Humanities, September 1992) and read Cheney's complaint in context.  Surely she wouldn't want our students to be denied proper indoctrination -- oops, I mean "instruction," of course! -- in Our Country's greatness?  That is what our schools are for, isn't it?

Rivers of Santorum

Credit for the title of this post goes to Leedsman, a commenter at alicublog.  Spread it around, so to speak.

Roy Edroso, the proprietor of alicublog, found another entertaining quotation from a right-wing Christian frother upset by the re-election of the Kenyan Usurper:

The American culture war has been markedly intensified, as those who booed God, celebrated an unfettered abortion license, canonized Sandra Fluke, and sacramentalized sodomy at the Democratic National Convention will have been emboldened to advance the cause of lifestyle libertinism through coercive state power, thus deepening the danger of what a noted Bavarian theologian calls the “dictatorship of relativism.”

The "noted Bavarian theologian" is of course, Pope Rat, who knows about relativism, and about dictatorship, or "the Kingdom of God" as a noted Jewish theologian called it.

Some commenters wondered what a "dictatorship of relativism" would be like.  Something like this, maybe.

"You must believe in the power of the State! Unless you have some other idea. Do you? Really our answer isn't better than any other answer. Let's discuss this over a beer. Oh, you don't drink? That's okay."

But it's simple enough, even obvious.  A "dictatorship of relativism" is a situation in which sincere believers aren't allowed to torture and execute sodomites or adulteresses or heretics or Jews, or to stone their daughters for marrying out of the faith, or to demolish competing houses of worship (preferably while the worshipers are inside), or to make everybody's children pray in public schools, or deny access to contraception to everybody, or to segregate the races as God intended while still getting tax exemptions for their sectarian academies, or at least to make everybody else segregate the races as God intended. These horrible restrictions (and so many more) infringe their freedom of religion, which to them means the freedom to impose their religion on everyone else.

"Relativism" is one of those buzzword epithets that don't mean much (like "postmodernism"), but that is what people like Pope Rat and his minions are complaining about: they are denied the freedom to deny freedom to everyone else.

Of Relatives And Relativism

On Christmas Eve I listened to our community radio station’s weekly program on African-American affairs. This week the topic was Christmas, naturally, and the format was a roundtable on Christmas memories and traditions. One of the speakers, a man known on the station as the Deacon, interrupted his reminiscences of school Christmas parties to claim that you’d get a “phone call from the ACLU” if you did today the kinds of things they did in his youth. Well, of course: state-run public schools shouldn’t be fostering religious observances. (The irony of black folks attacking an organization dedicated to the defense of civil liberties and civil rights wasn’t lost on me either.)

But the moment passed, and soon everyone was laughing over memories of waiting to open presents on Christmas morning. About midway, though, one of the regular hosts of the program got serious and reminded everyone that the “reason for the season” was “Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”, even though you can’t say that nowadays without getting “a phone call from the ACLU.” Considering that the station has a weekly gospel music program (the Deacon is one of its programmers, and also occasionally plays Christian disco/techno/hiphop on Saturday nights), it was a comical accusation. In a country whose President claims to be taking instructions from Yahweh, Christians still love to claim that they’re embattled and persecuted.

But then, the ambition to have total social penetration and control isn’t limited to religious believers. It seems to be a fairly typical outcome of social organization: many scientists and their allies (Al Gore, for example) would like you to believe there’s currently a War Against Science and Reason. (My personal favorite is sociobiologist E. O. Wilson’s “Multiculturalism equals relativism equals no supercollider equals communism” – Pat Robertson couldn’t have said it better.) There must be no corner where the light of faith, be it in Jesus or superstrings, shineth not.

Despite these infomercials for the Lord, and occasional efforts (mostly by the Deacon) to steer the focus back to religion, the overwhelming bulk of this Christmas program was devoted to food, gifts, shopping, competitive poverty (your family wasn’t as poor as my family!), and family. Leading the prayer over the Christmas ham, the Deacon declared bravely, that’s a tradition, and he is a man of tradition, tradition is important to him. But before long the others were teasing him for not having been as poor as he claimed, while he insisted that he was so.

I was especially amused by his appeal to tradition. We’re located in Southern Indiana, where the tradition of white supremacy has not yet been eliminated: tradition doesn’t, in itself, deserve respect.

For example, I recently read British philosopher Stephen Law’s The War For Children’s Minds (Routledge, 2006). Law is a nice middle of the road secularist liberal, grappling with the limits of religious freedom. He imagines a conservative religious parent (a father, no doubt) arguing for his right to keep his children out of secular schools, and perhaps too for government support of sectarian schools:

Surely, as a parent, I have a right to send my child to a school that will raise her in accordance with my own religious convictions. Surely, if I believe it’s in her best interests that she not be encouraged to think critically about her own religious tradition, that she mix only, or almost only, with children of the same faith, and that she not be exposed to other points of view (I feel they will only ‘corrupt’ her), then that is my right. The government has no business stopping me.

Law comments:

Of course, we can concede to the proponent of this objection that the state should respect parental freedom as much as it reasonably can. But there are limits. If a practice is physically or psychologically stunting children, surely we are justified in banning it.

Now, my first reaction to this is to ask how to determine that “a practice is physically or psychologically stunting children,” especially psychologically. I came out at a time when it was taken for granted that gay people were psychologically stunted, and unfit to be parents. To this day we defend ourselves by declaring that the children we raise will be as healthy as the children of heterosexuals, and no less likely to turn out heterosexual. We, you see, have no right to raise our children in our own image (even assuming that we’d succeed – almost all of us had heterosexual parents, after all). We can only be parents if we let the most bigoted heterosexuals decide what is good for our children. It’s as if Christians were allowed forcibly to baptize Jewish children, then to abduct them from their families and raise them as Christians … oops! They did do that, back in the good old days when people took their faith seriously.

Which brings me to my second reaction, which goes deeper. The idea that parents should have the right to choose their children’s religion, or their own for that matter, is a consequence of the Enlightenment, and is presented in relativist terms: I want my children to learn what other parents – and the Church of England! – believe to be false; but it’s my truth, and I’m entitled to impose it on my children. Relativism of this kind is very common among religious conservatives, and indeed might even be their invention, historically. In the good old pre-Enlightenment days, Englishmen belonged to the Church of England (or the Roman Catholic Church, before the heretic and schismatic Henry VIII rebelled against God). “Dissenting” churches (the adjective is significant) were those that refused to submit to duly constituted royal and Divine authority. That’s why these relativists fled to other European countries or to North America, to have a place where their private “truth” could pretend to be the truth.

Why should a benevolent but just Sovereign allow falsehood to be taught in the place of truth? Why permit “faith” schools even to non-Anglican Christians, let alone cattle worshiping heathen and Mahometan infidels? If these people really want to go back to the good old days, they should be allowed to do so: to the days when Catholics burned Protestants or vice versa, depending on who was in power at the moment, and it was always open season on Jews or Albigensians. Of course not many really want to go back to those days, even if they don’t remember that freedom of religion, in all its relativist splendor, was the product of religious believers who didn’t want to be tortured for their faith, and therefore had to forego the pleasure of torturing others for theirs.

If we’re not ready to go back that far, we could be moderate and merely deny full citizenship to dissenters and their children. As for the United States (as opposed to the original colonies with their patchwork of religious establishments), it was founded on the principle of religious freedom and pluralism – in a word, relativism as the word is used by religious and cultural reactionaries. These people cultivate a very convenient historical amnesia when it comes to these issues; they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.

The core issue is authority, isn’t it? Like many secularists Law is defensive about the Holocaust, which absolutists love to blame on relativism: “In fact, it would be accurate to blame [Eichmann’s participation in the Final Solution] on his Authoritarian mind-set.” I think we should be more aggressive, and challenge Authoritarians to specify just why, by their lights, they would condemn Eichmann. After all, he did what he was told without question, just as they want others to do – as long as they’re giving the orders. “Kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out!” is a hallowed Judeo-Christian value, so a better question is whether tradition can object to the Holocaust. Not only Christians (but not all of them!) but Communists, opposed Hitler. Let’s give credit where credit’s due.

Which brings up the popular “moral capital” argument, that atheists are somehow coasting along on the values of religion. Let it be remembered that valuable change occurred because people rebelled against duly constituted authority, for whatever reason. (Amartya Sen has written wisely on this point, especially in The Argumentative Indian [Allen Lane, 2005] and Identity and Violence [Norton, 2006]). If anyone is coasting on moral capital, it’s today’s reactionaries who accept and benefit from the results of the Enlightenment, or the antislavery movement, or the Civil Rights movement, which they opposed fiercely in the day but are perfectly willing to hide behind now.