Recognizing vast, significant differences between cultures and religions is sane and necessary, and I can understand very well the impulse to push back against the fantasies of universalist theories that hold that these differences are superficial and unimportant, but... Essentialist arguments betray their basic hostility to history and culture in that they are blind to the possibility of change over time within and across cultures, they cannot fully accept that culture is a human invention, and hold instead that cultural difference must be rooted in essence rather than in will, which in turn denies the importance of human agency in history and endorses one of a variety of determinisms.
About a month ago, on a short trip through Jordan, I spent a lot of time writing about the conflict between what Larison is here terming 'universalism' and cultural distinctions, in an attempt to grapple with some of my own prejudices. Walking down the street and seeing "There is no God but Allah" on one side and on the other a Coca-Cola ad is enough to send any aspiring universalist into reverie.
It's conventional to assign touchy/feely universalism to a liberal or progressive point of view, although in fact it seems more of a consequence of capitalism. (What could be better for globalized business than confidence in a worldwide desire for a decent paycheck, TV, and central air?) I can tend too far in the opposite direction, labeling as a right-wing nut anyone who dares assign primary cause to cultural roots.
So Larison's distinction appeals to me, insofar as it seems like a respectful acknowledgment of cultural diversity that also gets pretty close to what I find so frustrating about the "culture warriors" against whom I find myself railing so often. Daniel wants to return the question of cultural influence vs. one-world hopefulness to a dignified place: human agency.
Nonetheless, even if I can respect the moral impulse, I'm skeptical of the usefulness of such a framing. Daniel says that "essentialists" deny that culture is a "human invention." Is this right? My impression has been, in the more typical diatribes that are less extreme than that of the Peters column to which Daniel is referring, that what the so-termed "essentialists" are ranting about is not the human origin of culture, but rather the inability of individuals to rise above its influence. When Andrew and others fret about "alien culture," they're not worried that Afghanis and Pakistanis are genetically incapable of understanding the Western world; rather, they fear that individuals, caught up in the overwhelming influence of their environments, will be unable (or will prefer not) to see past them.
I think it is ultimately no more than a comforting ellision to say that those who subscribe to theories of cultural warfare therefore do not understand that culture changes over time. Quite likely many of them do. What they are pointing out, sometimes xenophobically, is that when a culture "changes over time," it often takes decades or centuries to see real change -- making cultural change a process that takes place outside of the existence of the individual.
There can be no question that the people Daniel calls "essentialists" and "universalists" lack respect for people of other cultures in their fundamental assumptions: either good, Western people are to be defended from the savages at all costs, or the savages are to be saved from themselves at all costs.
But in Daniel's formulation, what remains unanswered is the urgent, political question of culture: what motivates the individual, the man who is so small that he essentially lives outside the slow-moving tide of cultural history? In the globalized world, it is in no way sufficient to say that the Jordanian man-on-the-street is essentially Jordanian, or essentially capitalist. He is a mixture of both -- even though, in many ways, the two aspects are in tension.
I pay a cab driver to take me on a tour of Petra, an enormous canyon considered to be one of the wonders of the world. He is a native of the small town just above the formations, and he knows them like the back of his hand; he has been giving informal tours for years. He also knows that I am Western, because of my skin and hair and language. He knows I am Jewish and came to visit his village from Israel because I told him so. We are together in the canyon on a cold weekday afternoon, an off-day for hiking; there are no other tourists. By all appearances my driver is a friendly, law-abiding citizen of his country -- but we are two weeks out from the war in Gaza.
Suddenly there are substantive reasons to care about the relationship my driver has to his cultural and capitalist heritage. On the one hand, I represent business and, in my own small way, prosperity for his village. On the other hand, I am the very image of the callous Western thug: an arrogant American Jew, wandering carefree through a foreign country that has had less than a century of peace with my current home, in the wake of a bombing campaign that the vast majority of Muslims here consider to be an unspeakable crime.
It would be melodramatic to suggest that this man would physically assault me, even in if the situation were more extreme. But what is to stop him from simply leaving me in the canyon? He could easily return to his cab and drive back to town without me. It would take me an entire afternoon of strenuous, dangerous hiking to get back to the village -- assuming I didn't get lost. The driver would forgo his fare, and in exchange be able to take some small part in punishing international Jewry for its role in Gaza. How does he make his decision?
It is the question of culture at this level that concerns me -- and many others writing on the subject, I suspect. How do world capitalism and local or regional heritage interact in the individual? When, as Americans, we engage with the individuals outside our immediate cultural understanding, with what, precisely, are we engaging? These are not questions that lend themselves to easy answers, and no amount of well-intentioned respect on our part will solve them. But they are precisely the questions that matter most when we talk about the perceptual impact of American presence, military or otherwise, abroad.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment