I was browsing through Ektopos when I ran into an interesting link, something I’ve seen pop up in politicaltheory.net. It’s a brief overview of “Cultural Revolutions: Reason versus Culture in Philosophy, Politics, and Jihad” by Lawrence E. Cahoone, and one of his more interesting starting points is a lament that ‘culture’ as a term is not clear enough. The review is over here.
The whole idea of it sounds pseudo-stuffy, but some interesting excerpts:-
In a somewhat weaker argument, Cahoone also says that relativism cannot make sense of our actual behavior. That is, in the pursuit of any sort of inquiry, whether scientific or common-sense, people act as if contradictory claims to truth are a problem. But that may just be how people act. Perhaps his better argument is that if we were to adopt relativism, we would have to give up “inquiry as we understand it” (171). Instead, he recommends a minimal realism, according to which all truth-claims must be mutually consistent. He believes this realism is necessary, even if he cannot provide a non-circular justification for it. Finally, he reasons that social constructivism is untenable, for if it were true, we would have constructed a much better world for ourselves.
In his introduction, Cahoone complains that in most writings on culture, there is no good philosophical definition of this concept. Lacking such a definition, there is no way to tell where one culture ends and the next begins. Although he is sure that nothing we ever do or say transcends our culture, he does not think that this implies cultural relativism. In order to show this, he then seeks to clarify the notion of culture.
I started laughing for no clear reason when I read that bit. I remember struggling through Gadamer’s explication of bild just like it was yesterday, and realizing at one point how little informed I was in German thought. My seniors were no help: one told me to start with Kant. Yet another told me to start with Hegel. My best friend at the time told me to abandon all hope and run for the hills. I settled with Heidegger, got irretrievably confused and then bought a summary of German thought, the sort you can ingest in 2 weeks or so. Boo hoo.
I used to make fun of soci students, forgetting I was one myself, when they’d talk quite seriously about ‘culture’ without having explicated its meaning, relying only on our implicit understanding of the word. One day, I got fedup and railed against the misuse of the term during a sociology of religion tutorial and I was greeted with understanding, patronizing smiles. Ugh.
It’ll be interesting to read how Cahoone defines culture, though. At one point in his book, it seems, he says:
In the trenchant seventh chapter, Cahoone argues that the very notion of cultural relativism assumes that a culture constitutes some sort of integrated whole. To think of a belief as culturally determined rather than based on reason and evidence is to presuppose that a culture’s beliefs are unified through resting on some subset of fundamental cultural assumptions in the same way that a philosophical system rests on its metaphysical foundations. This kind of systematicity is also supposed to define or provide limits or borders to the culture. Cultural relativism results from raising skeptical questions concerning the warrant for the first principles of one’s own culture.
And that after defining culture in terms of achieving goals and the depth hermeneutic of play. All that’s well and good, but that’s precisely the problem: it may appear disingenuous to assume that there are concretized borders between culture A and culture B, but the plain fact of the matter is, cultural relativism gives rise to the perception that this is so, never mind the reasoned criticism. What is engendered is still a kind of exclusivity which, even if it doesn’t exist in truth, exists in the minds of those who advocate such a relativism.
I was reading something on Fascism and was shuddering at the thought of a totalitarian state in which all discourse, communal life and enterprise is subsumed under the national identity represented by the State. Cultural relativism demands that we bracket our own cultural identities in response to the other, and yet this bracketing is at best something that can only be done in the most perfect of worlds; just as greed is part of human nature, and a retaliatory salvo against idealised proletariats or nationalists, this bracketing of our own prejudgements is fake. It’s impossible. Does cultural relativism in real life break down to that magnificent word, “tolerance”? And what are the implications thereto?
