I guess I'm more cautious about assuming my moral superiority. What do you say to African women who claim that your position is an example of imperialism?
Once again, the noble whites have to demonstrate to backwards Africans how to live in a "civilized" way. This issue is way more complicated than you want it to be: substitute any of the cultural practices we engage
in for FGM: do you honestly believe some group (with more military might or financial power than we have) should dictate to us--for our own good--that we abandon something we consider to be important to our way of life?
Miles, in response to me:
You're missing my point. Obviously we have our moral standards. They are crucial to our way of life, and activities in our society that contradict our own standards are bad. I'm talking about using our standards to criticize and devalue people in other societies.
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Dostoevsky, I believe, once wrote that "any idea, taken to its logical conclusion, leads to tragedy" and so it is with the notion there are no universally applicable standards.
I notice something in your responses - you're keen on avoiding the appearance of elevating Western ideas above those of other cultures. Here we're in agreement. But there's something else: you're apparently focused on a particular view of culture - as a pure artifact and a thing worthy of defense against outside interference above all other concerns.
This leads you, I think, to interpret all differences as being the result of "culture" and not of power relationships or politics or the cynical pursuit of self interest by one group at the expense of another.
Everything that happens in Zimbabwe, for example, is not the expression of cultural differences between the
West and this particular place; much is the working out of age old power relationships between rulers and ruled.
If I were to adopt your approach of assuming all differences and every practice to be culturally based - and, therefore, sacrosanct from outsider criticism - I would have nothing to say about the various abuses that have occurred.
...
Your position reminds me of the spin applied to Japan during the 1980s (and still, to some extent, today).
Everything was the result of bushido. There was no labor unrest, we were told, because the Japanese favored consensus over conflict. The culturalists accepted this as gospel, unaware of the 1950s postwar period's many upheavals. People who asked basic questions about power relationships in Japan and who bothered to study a bit of Japanese history learned a different story.
The conscious decisions of the Meiji period rulers to mythologize certain elements of Japanese culture (as detailed in the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education) set that nation on a path that directly led to the military aggressions of the first half of the 20th century.
In short, political decisions, made by the powerful, created the conditions that would later be described as organically cultural. I suspect that you - in a rush to defend cultural difference, avoid imposition of "Western ideas" and ethnocentrism - would fail to see the political origins of what appear to be purely cultural manifestations.
Culture is not some thing that exists outside of the time worn pattern of oppressor and oppressed. If women in Afghanistan are prevented from full participation in social and political life I get the feeling you'd chalk this up to difference, express your condolences but insist that you didn't have the right to say anything negative about the situation because doing so would be an imposition or a devaluation of the culture being criticized.
My view is quite the opposite.
If women in Afghanistan are prevented from full participation in social and political life, I assume this is because the practice benefits another group. Of course, that would be men. Although a patina of culture surrounds this gender-based based suppression, it is, at center, a power relationship in which one group is held back for the benefit of another.
If a group of women in Afghanistan - such as RAWA - seek to change this so their lives can be improved they should be applauded and supported in whatever way they request (the key factor - they call the shots) . In other words, indigenous movements for liberation of all sorts, political and social - should be supported.
Yes, even supported by Westerners.
Would it be an imposition of "Western values" to do this, even though the movements are homegrown?
I don't want to belabor this as the schism between our outlooks is clear.
I can't accept your ideas on moral and cultural relativism. They seem, to me, to be warmed over versions of the sort of wrong-headed application to human affairs of Einstein's description of time-space relativity that was so popular with some folks years ago. Ironically, this view, which cries that it's the avoidance of cultural devaluation, is a kind of devaluation itself: it's a devaluation of the study of power relationships, of history and of full context.
You and I agree, I'm certain, that my wife, if she chooses to divorce me, should not be killed. Where we differ is that I think women all over the world, regardless of the local cultural rules, should enjoy an identical assurance of physical safety. Not only that, I think that anyone who seeks to ensure this is so in a given culture is not devaluing that culture but seeking to change it to be safer for women.
I have a feeling you would say in response that my concern for my wife's freedom of movement is fine for us but might conflict with the culture of others and, as outsiders, we should have little or nothing to say about the matter in other places.
This is unacceptable to me.
.d.