Btw it was not the pomo PCniki who showed me the greater wisdom of leaving academia for the law--and it really was greater wisdom; I only wish I'd done it years before--but a bunch of analytical philosophers. Le Carre's George Smiley reflects that if he goes down in his spy games, it will be at the hand of his own kind, and it was certainly what was in some broad sense my own kind that, years ago, did me in as an academic. My experiences with the pomists have been at conferences and in seminars and such, never as colleagues. So whatever horrors I may or may not have experienced in being fired (try it some time before you get snide, R), I can't blame it on them.
The long and short of what R says as to my little paean to Western cultural superiority is that I don't know enough about Indian culture to condescend to it, which is almost certainly true, and that many of the bad things in it, such as fundamentalist Hindu nationalism, are really the fault of Western colonialism, which is probably true in part. Certainly R is right to reproach me with talking as if cultures were hermetically sealed from one another, which is not so, least of all in a world of global capitalism.
But still I think it makes sense to talk of different, if not hermetically sealed, cultural traditions: TV, Coca Cola, MacDonalds, and even the Internet has not washed out all the distinct traditions into a universal world culture yet. And constructed though this may be, several of these cultural traditions are broadly "Western" in looking back in large part to Europe for the origin of their values, ideals, political institutions, and more narrowly "cultural" (art, literature, music, etc.) values. In Europe itself, these cultures came out of a long interaction with Islam and more remotely Black Africa; in the Americas they have been affected and interpenetrated more closely by Africa, and, in Luso-Hispanic America, by the native American Indian cultures. For all that, they are still Western in important senses.
Now, this came up because I was responding to the comment that Western culture is a "con job." I think waht was meant was that Western culture is cosntructed. It's not objective in the sense taht the Ricky Mountains are objective, merely there independently of what we think or choose. Western culture is clear nothing but what we think or choose, constraibed by what we have thought and chosen, so it lacks the mountanous objectivity of the external world. Granted. As a good, of maybe not so good, Hegelian, I opined thst that didn't seem to me to make it a "con job."
And also, as a not so good Hegelian, I thought I'd mention that western culture had some things of value to offer the world, that some of its achievements constituted progress, an unfashionable notion, not merely over the west's own disreputable past, but with respect to other cultures. I really do take it that no sane person thinks otherwise, that bourgeois notions like the rule of law and liberal rights and representative democracy really are properly aspired to by almost everyone in the world who has an inkling of what they are, even granting the distorted forms in which they appear in actual Western societies. And likewise, at least in this circle, where most us trace our own pedigree in w ole or in part back to a classically educated German exile journalist and self-taught political economist, that Marxist analysis might be thought to be an advance over past and even many present ways of thing available in any society.
I do not say that Western Culture is the Best, Full Stop. I said that there are important parts of it that are progressive and better than what's elsewhere on offer. I'll stand by that, even if saying that means that I have pleaded guilty to being a typically ethnocentric imperialist pig. I should add that I don't think that the superiority of the parts of Western culture I admire means that I think that Western governments have any right to go about improving other people's ways of life whether they like it or not, or indeed, even if they would like it. If they would like it, it';s for them to do it, self-determination being another of those Western (liberal and socialist) values.
]In a message dated 00-01-23 18:00:56 EST, you write:
<< After Justin painfully reminisced about incomparable horrors he must have
suffered (hey, are these the same people who denied you tenure and drove
you of the university):
> If by righteous condemnation of these displays you don't study them as
at one level Western representations you will not understand the history
of your own culture. You will remain close minded not only to your own
history but the history of peoples so mis-represented by romantic
stereotypes of caste society and buried by the urge to understand another
society as governed by a single dominant value: homo hierarchus.
> Do you agree with the dubious claim that a concern with purity and
impurity, or hierarchy, or an ambiguous relation of power to authority are
somehown peculiarly Indian and determinative of the specific Indian caste
system? I
I don't know enough about it.
> Moreover, fundamentalist Hindu nationalism--as well as the horrific
partition itself--resulted in many ways from the colonial enumerative
regime--a western technology in demographic management has Foucault has
shown--in which identities of caste and especially religion were
recofingured as hard and impermeable. They were given greater substance
and clearer boundaries by homogenizing *Western* imperial state practices.
> So as a Westerner, it's all yours, Justin, with the attendant
responsibilities.
Fair enough. But not all mine. It's all of ours.
> But I get the sense that you don't think about colonialism, imperialism,
comparative analysis, or orientalism because after all the tools of the
progress--liberal rights and marxist analysis--are all we need, and they
are Western, dammit.
That's unfair. I expressly said that these things were taken up, transformed, and appropriated by others--among others, by Indians, who have their own version of liberal democracy, a common law legal system, and more real living Marxism that America or indeed today almost anywhere in Europe could boast. These things are no longer Western, or merely Western--in India, they are Indian.
> Of course I note the occasional nod to some black American genius. Oh,
how white, how American. And nowhere more than in the underlying logic of
binary categories with sharp boundaries--our culture and theirs.
Well, American anyway, where the color line was the problem of the last century and is shaping up to be the problem of this one. What do you expect, I'm an American. Is that so terrible?
--jks
>>