To the Tooting Station

Ideological Nonsense About Right and Other Trash*

You know you sometimes get intellectual doubts, you're not entirely sure of your position, people will expose your faulty reasoning, you welcome criticism as you would the presence of a loyal puppy or the finest truckle of cheese, your levels of self-awareness or truly something to behold? Yes? Hmm. Ok, that's good.

Friday’s Indy was spot-on when it called this an “unhealthy obsession with counting the days“.

The definition of obsession clearly being something other than:

1. Establishing a Facebook group (Christ on a friggin stick)
2. Encouraging readers to sign the Amnesty petition (it is, after all, not far off the Gulag)
3. An understated and entirely un-obsessive interest in anti post-28 days blog buttons (oh for fuck's sake)
4. Pleading by any other means

*Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme

Non-blogger's non-block

Ok, now I know it might seem that this blog died a hasty and rather unseemly death - it’s really just having a brief winter/spring/summer snooze, followed by a minor refurbishment - I've been doing things, sort of. So... apologies for lack of posts (not that there were ever that many).

I'll do a real post soon, just you wait. Maybe.

Mill, Marx, and multiculturalism

Is Ken Livingstone’s support of multiculturalism in keeping with Millian liberalism? Or is it, as David Cameron claims, a Marxist and ‘discreditable attempt by an ageing far left politician to hang on to a narrative about race that sees people from ethnic minorities as potential agents of revolutionary change’?

Now, there’s a lot to untangle here. Livingstone uses the term multiculturalism referring to both the fact of multiculturalism – that modern society comprises many different cultures, races, traditions and religions – and the project of multiculturalism – that government and its agencies should not only permit the existence of these cultures, traditions and religions, but that it also has a responsibility to promote these cultures, traditions and religions through policies of diversity, group rights, difference-friendly liberalism, cultural programmes and the establishment of quotas. The interchangeability simply obfuscates two issues, in turn confusing two distinct objections: those from the lobotomized fringe of the hard right objecting to the very fact of multiculturalism, and those objections from progressive leftists that see multiculturalism as as a departure from a philosophy of individual rights, individual autonomy, universalism, difference-blind liberalism, and an embrace of relativism .

Livingstone declares that multiculturalism is simply a contemporary manifestation of Mill’s principle of liberty:

That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. (J S Mill, Stefan Collini (ed.) On Liberty, 1989, p.13)

For Livingstone, this simply means:

Multiculturalism asserts the right of a person to live their life as they wish, including culturally. If they wish to live in classically "English" style, then this is fine. But it is also fine if they want to lead a more Indian lifestyle, or a more Jamaican one, or if they wish to organise their life more around the ideas of Buddhism or Judaism. This is the basic principle of multiculturalism.

And the basic principle of liberalism. So why invent the new term? Is there any difference between Millian liberalism and multiculturalism? Certain elements are in keeping with the Millian legacy: the state has no warrant to interfere in matters of culture and tradition, and freedom of association is sacrosanct. So in this sense of a weak multiculturalism, Livingstone’s claims seem to stack up.

Yet this liberal principle was qualified by Mill. Mill sought to extend some of the state’s power to hitherto excluded areas. Mill was, in particular, scathing about men who regarded the family as his personal fiefdom, writing of the ‘almost despotic power of husbands over wives’. (J S Mill, Stefan Collini (ed.) On Liberty, 1989, p.105) In The Subjection of Women he noted: ‘[…] man had anciently […] the power of life and death over his wife. She could invoke no law against him: he was her sole tribunal and law.’ (Ibid. p.146) This clearly has implications for those promoting or embracing conservative cultures – would Mill really have welcomed this as a contribution to diversity, despite its subordination of liberty?

The notion of positive interference is even more problematic. In a sense, the notion of group rights, difference-friendly liberalism, and positive discrimination betray a certain Marxist critique of liberalism. Marx contended that oppression was primarily economic, that only through the overthrow of the capitalist forces of production, would oppression end. Because oppression was primarily economic, he declared notions of political individual rights to be both ‘ideological nonsense’ and ‘obsolete verbal rubbish’ – this seemingly fictitious legalistic freedom was contrasted with real freedom to be gained under Communism. Theorists of group rights and difference-friendly liberalism cling to a similar logic – oppression is practised against otherwise excluded minorities. While these groups possess a formal freedom, inequality and oppression remains. Only by bringing these minorities into a full and proportionate participation in the spheres of politics, economics and culture can the real root of oppression be erased.

Yet both Mill and Marx are quite opposed to any promotion of existing cultures. While Mill regarded cultural encumbrances as unavoidable, he also emphasized the importance of individual autonomy and the creative fashioning of the self. He spoke of the ‘despotism of custom’ as being opposed to the ‘spirit of liberty’ (Ibid. p.70). Mill called for ‘experiments of living’:

Where, not the person’s own character, but the traditions or customs of other people are the rule of conduct, there is wanting one of the principal ingredients of human happiness, and quite the chief ingredient of individual and social progress.

[…] He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best.

[…] He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.(Ibid.p.57-59)

Marx is largely at one with Mill here – he lamented the role of tradition: ‘Tradition from all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.’ (T. Carver ed., Marx: Later Political Writings,1996, p.32) So clinging onto the remnants of any culture is quite an un-Millian position. This isn’t an argument against specific cultures as such – rather it’s an argument for an individualist, rather than a communitarian, mode of living. This isn’t, then, simply an argument against non-Western religions and cultures, but against all communitarian, anti-individualists ways of fashioning the self.

For Mill, diversity is never a good in itself. It’s a good if it highlights alternative modes of living that free individuals could potentially adopt. It also contributes to the search for truth and the revitalisation of thought. Yet these diverse modes of living are only a good when they express the individual’s chosen path, not the dictates of custom: ‘… his own mode of laying out his existence is the best, not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode.’ (J S Mill, Stefan Collini (ed.) On Liberty, 1989, p.67)

So that’s the theory. In practice, Livingstone strays even further from Marx and Mill. He not only promotes all sorts of benign cultures and religions, but also embraces the malignant ones, embracing those leaders of a fundamentalist Islamism. Livingstone’s just a little too keen on, for instance, Yusuf al-Quaradawi, the latter a diverse proponent of wife-beating - ‘[…] far from being in any way countenanced by the principle of liberty, it is a direct infraction of that principle, being a mere riveting of the chains of one-half of the community, and an emancipation of the other from reciprocity of obligation towards them.’ (Ibid. p. 91-92) -  clitoridectomy, death for apostasy, suicide bombing, and something of a hard-line opponent of the liberty principle for homosexuals. Mill, or Marx for that matter, wouldn’t have embraced any of this nonsense.

There might be the odd Millian or Marxist kernel within multiculturalism. But with Livingstone it appears it’s not only standing on its head, but performing intellectual pirouettes.

Adam Smith on money

Wouldn't get over-excited about getting one of these:

Power and riches appear then to be, what they are, enormous and operous machines contrived to produce a few trifling conveniences to the body, consisting of springs the most nice and delicate, which must be kept in order with the most anxious attention, and which in spite of all our care are ready every moment to burst into pieces, and crush in their ruins their unfortunate possessor.
(Adam Smith, Theory of the Moral Sentiments, IV, p.249)

 

Bodies and embodiments

I’ve been thinking about bodies. Well, not just like that, but you know, things like rationality, reason, truth, universalism, culture and their relation to the flesh.

For the cultural relativist, the fact of individuals’ embodiment by culture and history makes appeals to reason, universalism and truth untenable: individuals are solely moulded by these external forces, passive recipients of the diktats of their environment. They adopt the latter element of Marx’s phrase from the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte – ‘ [...] they make it in present circumstances, given and inherited. Tradition from all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.’ – yet ignore its former assertion: ‘Men make their own history […] .’

Because individuals are unable to step out of their own (historical and cultural) skins, because language is said, like an over-zealous, if slightly clumsy, lover, to go ‘all the way down’, we can never attain that God’s-eye position of pure reason. Truth is diminished to the status of incommensurable ‘truths’, conversations that may possess coherence within a specific culture, but have no necessary relation to the external world or humanity. So in this sense they seem to take the bodies’ embodiment in culture and history seriously.

Yet this doesn’t necessarily refute the idea of reason and truth. Bodies don’t necessarily restrict comprehension of the world, but enhance our understanding. The relativist can’t quite get over the limitations of pure reason, so diminish the possibility of any reason, of any thought process that engages with, and seeks to understand the world. Simon Blackburn notes this in Truth, A Guide for the Perplexed:

What we talk about is intimately involved in our doings…. We are not ‘stepping outside our own skins’ as we say these things, we are staying firmly inside them, but secure in our explanations of our own doings. If Baudrillard’s contemporaries saw the bombs as real, this is not because they were getting above themselves, but because they were prepared to think about where their beliefs came from, and if anyone averts their gaze from such a question this means that they do not acknowledge their embodiment in the world at all.
(Simon Blackburn, Truth, A Guide for the Perplexed, 2005, p.171)

But there’s more to this. Thought isn’t only a product of culture – while thought is undoubtedly mediated through cultural forms, it may sometimes express some bodily truth, a truth that may transcend culture and history. Relativists deny this – for them, this form of universalism robs the individual of its culture heritage. While they take cultural embodiment seriously, the material fact of fleshly embodiment seems something of a different matter. The material body is robbed of its agency, it is unable to free itself from the determinations of culture - the body appears powerless against these dark forces at work.

Then the relativist denies the universality of rights – if individuals are solely shaped by culture, rights only exist when groups assert their existence: there is nothing external to culture we could look to in providing a foundation for universalism. The body, its material existence, the possibility that some universalism could be based on its very physicality, is discounted. Individuals are not simply seen as cultural producers, but become precisely synonymous with culture. In preserving and respecting actually existing cultures, the relativist asserts his respect for the individual by proxy: by respecting specific cultures. To them, the cultural embodying is the important thing: actual bodies seem all too much of a churlish distraction.

Binary oppositions

Binary thinking is obviously a Bad Thing (as binary opposed, to, say a Good Thing). But perhaps not all binary thinking is so bad:

It is better to be alive than dead. It is better to be free than to be a slave. It is better to be healthy than sick. It is better to be adequately nourished than malnourished. It is better to drink pure water than contaminated water. It is better to have effective sanitation than to live over an open sewer. It is better to be well educated than to be illiterate and ignorant. It is better to be able to practise the form of worship prescribed by your religion than to be prevented from doing so. It is better to be able to speak freely and be able to join social and political organizations of your choice than to fear that, of your activities attract the disfavour of the regime, you face arbitrary arrest, torture or 'disappearance' at the hands of bodies organized by or connived at by the state. And so on.

... There are a variety of way in which we might support the claim that such interests are universal. One would be to argue that there is a universal human nature which gives rise to certain physiological and psychological needs. [...] it may usefully be supplemented by an appeal to the choices actually made by people in a position to make choices. [...] people strongly prefer life to death, freedom to slavery, and health to sickness. [...] It was the anthropologist, not the people involved, who elevated the value of cultural diversity above that of health.
(Brian Barry, Culture & Equality, 2001, p.285)

If you're into polemical defences of liberalism, universalism and egalitarianism, go and buy it. Then read it. Then quote it in a post.

Historiosophistry

It's a mere 32 years old, but still a bit too relevant - Leslez Kolakowski on Edward Thompson's 'double standards of evaluation' (pdf):

And when I say "double standards" I do not mean indulgence for the justifiable inexperience of the "new society" in coping with new problems. I mean the use, alternatively, of political or moral standards to similar situations and this I find unjustifiable. We must not be fervent moralists in some cases and Real-politikers or philosophers of world history in others, depending on political circumstances.

... I simply refuse to join people who show how their hearts are bleeding to death when they hear about any, big or minor (and rightly condemnable) injustice in the US and suddenly become wise historiosophists or cool rationalists when told about worse horrors of the new alternative society.

If you like scorn, spleen and contempt, you should probably read it all. (via Norm)

Blushing

There I was, almost becoming quite disillusioned with blogging. But when you're second for 'appiah recognizing our obligations to other human beings offers world fanaticism  intolerance cosmopolitanism', you know it's all been worth it.

Absolute cobblers

Mark Braund writes today's obligatory Comment is Free faith v rationality piece:

This is not to imply that the conclusions I draw through reasoned reflection are necessarily more correct than the conclusions of those who seek guidance from religious teachings.

... I cannot claim that my non-religious world view is more accurate than the various world views of people of faith. There is no possible rational basis for such a claim. All I can say is that having had some exposure to the alternative, and having thought long and hard about it, my non-religious world view is the one the best suits me.

Well there is, and you could, especially on the basis of your own argument. Accuracy here refers to a world view, what we might slightly differently call, say, a 'view of the world'. So there is something out there, something independent of our perceptions, some object called the 'world'. This worldly thing includes humans, mountains, gasses, minerals, animals, liquids, all these sort of things. A view that correctly, or probabilistically, represents this world, could be said to be accurate, or in the second case, probable.

Once we admit there is something called the world, we can either say the world exists independent of what we say about it, or that somehow we magically construct that 'world' through acts of speech – that there is indeed no palpable world out there, nothing our concepts could ever be adequate to, for that world is merely one of of our own nocturnal imaginings. If it's acknowledged there's something out there known as the world, a specific representation or theory - utilising certain concepts, discarding others - can be judged on how it relates to this thing we call the world, whether it works or not: a map that directs us to our desired destination could be said to be accurate. One that fails is inferior and demonstrably inaccurate. Concepts that represent that world better (i.e. are more accurate) can be described as rational – those that fail to, or simply regard the world as something of a troublesome obstacle ultimately to be ignored can be regarded as irrational, as inferior descriptions or representations, of that world. Braund admits as much – he seems concerned about some phenomenon, an all-too-worldly phenomenon, called 'global warming': i.e. a theory based on certain facts and masses of scientific data, utilising certain concepts, all about that thing out there. A thing which under any other circumstance, we're apparently powerless to understand.

If we opt for the first option, that there is a material world out there, independent of our perceptions of it, the case for relativism starts to fall down – some descriptions aren't adequate to the external world, they can be falsified through experiment. Yet with the constructivist position, we're no longer talking about a world as usually defined, rather a world differently imagined by each and every individual – it's not even possible to agree any description is more accurate than any other, for we're all at liberty to construct that world just as we see fit. It's also simply impossible to define what that peculiar thing under discussion, the world, even is.

Yet the argument becomes even more baffling. For the theory, that one 'cannot claim that my non-religious world view is more accurate than the various world views of people of faith', is presented as something of an absolute fact – a true, fact-dependent description of the status of belief, science, knowledge, etc... So while, say, a rational or scientific description of the world is reduced to the realm of pure theory or faith, a theory about this apparent scientific theory – that all theories are equally accurate and fact-independent – is elevated to the status of fact. The only facts that are truly factual are facts about theories. This isn't necessarily bad, though. You can now theorise for all eternity upon theories on the status of fact-dependent theory, erecting an infinite supply of additional theories - the first being that it's definitively, logically, and scientifically, a load of cobblers.

Being choosy (and right)

A couple of weeks back in the New Statesman John Pilger railed against the apparent lies of, you know, the usual. His attacks range from the ‘fantasy’ of al-Qaeda, Iraq, Lebanon, to New Labour’s outsourcing of GP services. Pilger called for a ‘critical public intelligence and moral sense’, an "insurrection of subjugated knowledge" (quoting Vandana Shiva). The call may have a bit more weight if, say, some of the evidence had what used to be called a factual basis. This paragraph in particular:

In Iraq, in contrast to the embedded lie that the killings are now almost entirely sectarian, 70 per cent of the 1,666 bombs exploded by the resistance in July were directed against the American occupiers and 20 per cent against the puppet police force. Civilian casualties amounted to 10 per cent. In other words, unlike the collective punishment meted out by the US, such as the killing of several thousand people in Fallujah, the resistance is fighting basically a military war and it is winning. That truth is suppressed, as it was in Vietnam.

It goes without saying that the whole paragraph is one of the more distasteful examples of left-jihadism. Yet it’s simultaneously – and un-coincidentally – a slippery enough paragraph that’s almost impossible to falsify. For instance, that 70% of bombs are targeted against the US military doesn’t disprove the predominance of sectarian fatalities. Are these civilian casualties the total number of civilian casualties, or the number of civilian casualties from the ‘1,666 bombs’? Pilger fails to offer us any source for these assertions – we’re really left to take his word for it, which, under the circumstances, is more than unfortunate. Yet, as Pilger seems to be contrasting the truth with the ‘embedded lie’ of sectarian killings, it wouldn’t be a wild step to examine these figures.

If we go to Iraq Body Count, the total number of fatalities for July 2006 is between 1,130 and 1,202. This includes between 214 and 224 fatalities from the Iraqi police. Being generous to Pilger – although I doubt if this would be reciprocated – the total number of civilian deaths for the period ranges from 916 to 978, or around 80% of fatalities.

These figures are in broad agreement with those from Iraq Coalition Casualty Count. They report a maximum figure of 1,280 for total security and civilian deaths in July 2006. ICCC report the total police and military deaths as 217 (83%), in the mid-range of the IBC figure.

ICCC also provide details of military fatalities and casualties. In July 2006, a total of 46 military personnel were killed in Iraq – this includes 43 US servicemen, 1 UK and 1 Other.

Therefore, including civilians, police and the military, total war-related fatalities for July 2006 therefore range from 1,176 (min IBC) to 1,326 (ICCC). Military deaths range from 3.5% to 3.9% of fatalities for the period. Civilian deaths – if we exclude Pilger’s charmingly termed ‘puppet police force’ – range from 913 to 1066, or 77.6% and 80.3%.

So, as it turns out, Pilger is comprehensively incorrect. The very ‘resistance’ he supports is actually killing more Iraqis than US soldiers. Far from ‘winning’, it is destroying Iraqi civil society, and one man, apparently on the left, seems wholly unashamed of his role in the process.

An unreasonable offence

From the Hitch:

Most of all, throughout his address to the audience at Regensburg, the man who modestly considers himself the vicar of Christ on Earth maintained a steady attack on the idea that reason and the individual conscience can be preferred to faith. He pretends that the word Logos can mean either "the word" or "reason," which it can in Greek but never does in the Bible, where it is presented as heavenly truth. He mentions Kant and Descartes in passing, leaves out Spinoza and Hume entirely, and dishonestly tries to make it seem as if religion and the Enlightenment and science are ultimately compatible, when the whole effort of free inquiry always had to be asserted, at great risk, against the fantastic illusion of "revealed" truth and its all-too-earthly human potentates. It is often said—and was said by Ratzinger when he was an underling of the last Roman prelate—that Islam is not capable of a Reformation. We would not even have this word in our language if the Roman Catholic Church had been able to have its own way. Now its new reactionary leader has really "offended" the Muslim world, while simultaneously asking us to distrust the only reliable weapon—reason—that we possess in these dark times.

Caldwell be confused?

Christopher Caldwell reviews Ian Buruma’s forthcoming Murder in Amsterdam in the New York Times. It’s all pretty harmless stuff, but then you reach this passage:

Buruma interviews two charismatic reformers: van Gogh’s collaborator Hirsi Ali and the Iranian-born legal scholar Afshin Ellian. Both believe that nothing short of dragging Islam through the wringer of skepticism and ridicule, as Voltaire and other Enlightenment philosophers did Catholicism, will suffice to disarm potential militants like Bouyeri. But Buruma is skeptical. He suspects that many of those who invoke the Enlightenment are merely defending a conservative order. “Voltaire had flung his insults at the Catholic Church,” he writes, “while Ayaan risked offending only a minority that was already feeling vulnerable in the heart of Europe.”

That is unfair. Voltaire did not risk, with his every utterance, making a billion enemies who recognized his face and could, via the Internet, share information instantaneously with people who aspired to assassinate him. We need a much more flexible definition of the word “minority” in a world thus networked. Buruma is quite right, though, to suggest that Hirsi Ali’s praise of the Enlightenment, as a movement that “strips away culture, and leaves only the human individual,” has something in common with the promise of Islamism, which would strip away culture and leave only the individual and God.

Both Buruma and Caldwell see an equivalence between the Enlightenment and Islamism. I mean, it’s almost Buntingesque in its crassness. The idea that the Enlightenment sought to remove culture, leaving the individual alone with his Reason, isn’t that convincing. That it sought to overthrow certain conservative traditions, arbitrary authority, monarchism and clericalism is undeniable. But to suggest everything would begin anew…. The Enlightenment also granted significance to the concepts of liberalism, toleration, universalism, rights, these sorts of things. These aren’t mere appeals to some form of disembodied or unencumbered Reason, but are rather the products of engagement with other humans and the material world. The individual is not simply abandoned to his own devices, bereft of any moral compass, devoid of any values whatsoever. If this was really the case, how would we account for the Enlightenment’s legacy of toleration, universalism and human rights, which are pretty obviously based on some notion of a common human nature and a social collective?

This is precisely what the ‘promise of Islamism’, as described by Caldwell anyway, doesn’t do. The individual here is accountable to nothing but a phantasm of their own making - which, to all intents and purposes, amounts to being accountable only to oneself. The Enlightenment legacy offered individuals the prospect that all ‘that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his, real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.’ The ‘promise of Islamism’ seeks the exact opposite - the preservation of the ‘fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions’.

(via Will)

Just say no

This should be a bloggers dream, but...no, Christ, I'm off to read this instead. Maybe tomorrow. Hmmm:

Almost every thoughtful, educated Muslim in this country has been exposed to - and to varying degrees influenced by - the Muslim Brotherhood, the 20th century's most influential political Islamic movement. The obvious historical analogy to Bright is those US cold war warriors in the 50s who smeared anyone who had ever read Marx.

Yep, it's that obvious? Well, obviously.

UPDATE: Paul Anderson's resistance:

Madeleine Bunting is an affront to all that I hold dear. She is part of a mainstream media assault on atheists and secularists that insults us insistently and leaves us no option but militant resistance.

Salute my fatigability

Apologies for light - well, non-existent - posting. Suffering from acute blog fatigue - recuperating here.

How about going here, here, over there, maybe here. And there's a thoughtful debate on Iraq -contributions from Michael Walzer and Jean Bethke Elshtain - over in Dissent.

Back soon - have a good week.

Provincial relativism

There’s that relativist argument that asserts that humans are solely products of history, culture, the economy, politics, language, etc…; that humanity, or rather ‘humanity’, is the most immensely pliable material; that there are no features of humanity that could possibly be regarded as uniform or constant; everything that occurs is simply a product of these extraneous circumstances – how these circumstances even come into being is never quite explained, only by way of some vaguely tautologous nod to previous historical, economic, cultural or linguistic circumstances. Human agency never quite enters the fray: all that exists is the unceasing flux of anti-humanist historical contexts.

This historical argument is easily transposed, forming cultural relativism. And from these assertions come all sort of ill-judged conclusions: judgement is merely the historically-determined assertion of specific peoples in specific times; there is little prospect of intelligibility between historical periods; all cultures and beliefs are equally valid and equally incommensurable; there exists no possibility of objectivity; there are no historical or culturally-independent facts. History becomes just a further display of the phalocentric, logocentric, Eurocentric – take your historically-determined pick – mindset.

Now, on its own terms, the argument is barely intelligible. I mean, if historical periods (or cultures) are absolutely different, and if humans are only able to peer into other histories from the fortified confines of their current historical position, how could you know these periods were different? Could you write any history at all or might you simply be mirroring the absurd intellectual vogue of your historical location? If other eras are that different and unintelligible, how can an even remotely intelligible history of these periods ever be written? If history is nothing but, well, history, isn’t the entire enterprise doomed from the start?

Equally, how should the statement that everything is historical be viewed? Is that simply a historically-determined view? Or is it a fact? If it’s the latter, fair enough – although how it becomes so is slightly mysterious. If it’s the former, is there even any point in making it? After all, your assertion will inevitably be consigned to the rubbish-bin of history: the only point is either to try and persuade those that miraculously do fall into precisely the same culture and historically period as yourself, and might be able to find some sense in it, of its importance; or that you’re simply speaking for the sake of speech itself, that the air-conditioning’s on the blink and you need to somehow ventilate your head.

And there’s a further problem with this view. While it aims at some understanding of the ‘Other’, it’s simply an expression of its own overwhelming provincialism. Not everything is difference: history is intelligible because there remain some constants; cultures are intelligible as there exist some non-cultural similarities. For instance, in Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed, Simon Blackburn notes:

It is the provincial who finds the ways of the rest of the world too baffling to understand, or who gratuitously reads only the minds of his own narrow circle back into the wider past. … in turn this has a political message. Both Hume and Collingwood hold that it is only when we can find enough in the others as ‘conversible’, that is, in thinking beings susceptible to the considerations we advance, partners in cooperative political enterprises. Otherwise they remain alien, and our only reaction is that of managing them with whatever force we need to muster to stop them from being an obstacle or danger to ourselves.

A realist-cum-universalist can recognise both the constants and the differences. A provincial should probably get out a bit more.