Dope

We put up our hot little relativism post [1/30/02] in much the same spirit that the Duke nailed up his posters for the Royal Nonesuch, with its final line: LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED: "if that line don't fetch them, I don't know Arkansaw!" Alas, our line didn't fetch em. Lately there has been a royal falling off of site hits. Proof, perhaps, that our obsessions are not those of the zeitgeist. Or proof that Limited Inc. should sprinkle our posts with "girles" or "tits" to fetch that crowd (peculiarly concentrated in Saudi Arabia for some reason) looking for a combo of both. But no, no, this is how far our head is up our ass: we figure to draw the multitudes with relativism.

So we wrote to one of our readers, Alan, who has previously figured on this site before as our in-house critic. We asked why our post didn't fetch him. Here's his reply:

One reason I didn't respond was I wasn't real sure what you were trying to
say, and so my response would have taken the form of indefinite expansion
("Your claim could be interpreted as A, B, or C. If A, then ...; if B, then
...,). But, since you goad me, I guess I'll have to jump into this one, so
here goes with an analytic-philosopher type question:

You say that

(1)Cultural diversity is unavoidable; cultures arise and form themselves
with regard to their differences.

I have a problem here; I don't see that there is anything conceptually
impossible about the notion of a hermetically sealed and isolated culture.
Can't we imagine a group of people who have, in the robust sense, a "way of
life", with religious and political institutions etc., while being
completely unaware of the existence of any other human groups. Empirically,
we don't find any such groups in the world, but that's another matter.

You say later on that

(2)[My relativism comes out of the idea that] Any point of view is formed by
struggle against other points of view -- it isn't given to us, ab nihilo.

Could we cite as an example here the Freudian view that the ego arises out
the conflict between the desires and mental representations of parental
authority? (Eschewing Teutonic jargon. If so, I see what you're getting at,
but then I don't see how anything about specifically cultural diversity
follows from it.

So . . . could you elaborate (1) in sufficiently determinate form so that I
can see how (2) is supposed to be a consequence thereof?

a.

And here is our reply:

Cool, I got you to bite.

Anyway, I would say that the crucial point is whether your idea of the hermetically sealed and isolated culture could be true. Your point is that one can imagine such a culture. But I don't really think one can imagine such a culture. That doesn't mean that there aren't Pitcairn islands where maroons, whether voluntary or not, do make themselves into a "culture," but even there they start to evolve. And of course they come from elsewhere -- not Adam and Eve, and but other cultures. To my mind, imagining a sealed and hermetic culture is like imagining a sealed and hermetic species -- this isn't just empirically non-existent, it couldn't be existent if evolutionary theory makes a true claim about speciation. Reversing your empirical/theoretical split, I'd say that no culture would long remain sealed and hermetic without producing cultural variants that would, in the long run, turn it into 2+ cultures.

That is my strong claim. Now, the question is, how can I back it up. And this would involve claiming a dialectical view of culture -- that the thing we call a culture, with its indistinct boundaries, is not just peripherally engaged in struggles with other cultures, but that struggle is how it builds as a culture. In other words, I hold to a thoroughly dialectical view of how cultures are.

Now if this dialectical view is right, a mono-culture, so to speak, will suffer a fall into diversity as surely as a mono-language will evolve dialects, because no culture has the instruments to arrest variation. I suppose I can imagine a culture of clones, but there is a rate of mutation in copying that simply can't be gotten around.

So, now: let's say cultural relativism makes some sense. It would seem that, to get off the ground, it has to claim that there are always going to be more than one cultures. Now this claim doesn't mean that there is more than one valuable culture, but I'd like to make that claim for the variant of relativism I am after -- one that actually can explain why cultural diversity is good. The difficulty here is much like the difficulty laissez faire people have with competition -- if you claim that competition is good, and you spot a tendency to monopoly, what do you do about it? I'd claim that human rights principles are going to function as a sort of anti-trust law, limiting the encroachment of mono-culture.

So there you have it: sizzling discussion, man. Is this a get down site or what? And remember: LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED.