[lbo-talk] Narmada dam

[Miles Jackson]

James Heartfield wrote:
> Miles finally works out that his position is incoherent:
> 
> "Ironically, I'm making a blatant moral appeal here ("human
> misery is bad"), but I consider even this banal moral position a product
> of the social relations in which I'm embedded; it's not a universal
> standard by which to judge all societies."
> 
> Yes, indeed. From your standpoint it is impossible to pass judgement on 
> anything, and yet you do, incessantly. You say "ethnocentrism" meaning 
> something bad, which is a value judgement. In fact your moral outlook is 
> that perfect distillation of contemporary capitalism - "Whatever" - with its 
> origins in the End of Ideology thesis advanced by Cold War liberals like 
> Daniel Bell and Clifford Geertz carefully tucked away out of sight. 

You're not getting my argument.  When I say, "don't be ethnocentric", 
I'm not appealing to a universal moral standard; I'm appealing to what I 
thought was a shared value in our subculture.  I have no delusions that 
the principle of avoiding ethnocentrism is some universally valid moral 
precept.  --So when I see Japanese culture, 17th century, in which 
Europeans were considered primitives, I don't say "They are clearly 
inferior to us because they're ethnocentric"; I say "Based on my 
socialization, I don't share their ethnocentric worldview".

Perhaps the problem here is that people tend to assume that morals are 
only valid if they are universal, and any claim to the social production 
of morals and values is a rhetorical device to discredit those moral 
standards.  To borrow from old whiskers, let's turn this on its head: it 
is only through social relations that morals are produced.  Note this 
does not mean our morals are unimportant to us; it just means--they are 
important to us because social relations have made them important to us. 

  C'mon, how much more Marxist can you get?

Miles