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.

Comments

[Will]

come on Tootmiester. post something man will ya!