To the Tooting Station

No borders

Eve Garrard posted on the notion of cultural relativism (some of the more outlandish examples being this and this) over at Norm’s a couple of weeks ago (real life's unfortunately intruded on the possibility of an earlier response). It’s pretty good stuff - but in one way it seems to go not nearly far enough, in another, too far.

When we talk of Enlightenment values – universalism, the prioritisation of reason, individual autonomy, the free-flow of ideas, freedom of thought, individual rights, the liberal rule of law – are these values solely and uniquely Enlightenment values? For instance, some of these values – the prioritisation of reason – are not necessarily unique to the Enlightenment. Some display a stubborn permanence over long swathes of human history – they are not confined to the one historical period and its subsequent intellectual and political heritage. So these values might not necessarily be described as solely Enlightenment values. Amartya Sen made this point a few years ago:

… once we recognize that many ideas that are taken to be quintessentially Western have also flourished in other civilizations, we also see that these ideas are not as culture-specific as is sometimes claimed. We need not begin with pessimism, at least on this ground, about the prospects of reasoned humanism in the world.
(Amartya Sen, in NYRB July 2000, pp.33-38)

Describing them as Enlightenment values as such can give the impression – however misleading - of some sort of ‘imposition’ on other, somehow alien, cultures.

Many of the values referred to as Enlightenment values are important in themselves, regardless of their provenance, or not, in the Enlightenment. Just as things like British values aren’t important because of their Britishness: their significance stems from the fact they are, broadly speaking, good universal values. Eve says as much in her second point.

But if this is true, that some of these Enlightenment values are universal, then the third point on the porousness of cultural borders is not a necessary condition of the second point regarding the indigenous sources of these values – you might even argue that by stressing the growing inter-relatedness of cultures, their permeability, you almost undercut the second point of universality: the apparent universality is more of a process of universalisation. If Enlightenment values are universal and good, and can emanate from indigenous sources rather than from foreign impositions, interactions, etc… it could be expected that these values are present, to some degree or another, in most nations, almost irrespective of the degree of cross-cultural dialogue. Kwame Anthony Appiah convincingly argues this in the Ethics of the Identity (p.269) – for instance:

Skepticism about the genuinely cosmopolitan character of the view I have been defending may flow in part from the thought that it seems so much a creature of Europe and its liberal tradition. So it may be well to insist… that my own attachment to these ideas comes, as much as anything, from my father, who grew up in Asante, at a time when the independence of its moral climate from that of European Enlightenment was extremely obvious. Now, it would be preposterous to claim that he came to his cosmopolitanism or his faith in human rights and the rule of law unaffected by European traditions. But it would be equally untenable to deny that the view he arrived at had roots in Asante….

So you might argue this the other way around: that the inter-relatedness of culture is a permanent feature of human life; that the immutable things are the constant flows from one to culture to another and vice versa; yet the world’s open borders are not a necessary precondition of the spread of Enlightenment values, but are symptomatic of its pre-existing universal applicability. Rather than borders being open, in some respects they simply don’t exist.

They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented

What is it with the Guardian and democracy? First, there was Madeleine Bunting (yep, her again) in her attack on the ‘cheerleaders’ of the Iraqi war. Bunting’s case against the Iraqi war was based on the apparent impossibility of establishing democracy in a liberated Iraq – Iraq, it seemed, doesn’t (or at least didn’t) possess democratic foundations:

This callow arrogance about the political cultures of other countries, more than any other issue, prompted my opposition to both wars.

… Francis Fukuyama's new book admits the error of the assumption that "democracy was the default condition to which societies reverted once coercive regime change occurred".

Then we had Martin Jacques musing over the incompatibility of democracy with non-Western societies:

The idea that western-style democracy is universally applicable in the world today is mistaken: it is a product of a desire to impose our system on cultures which are quite different and which require an indigenous form of democratic process that will often be very protracted and certainly very distinct from our own.

Now Jacques’ at it again:

In short, globalisation has brought with it a new kind of western hubris - present in Europe in a relatively benign form, manifest in the US in the belligerent manner befitting a superpower: that western values and arrangements should be those of the world; that they are of universal application and merit. At the heart of globalisation is a new kind of intolerance in the west towards other cultures, traditions and values, less brutal than in the era of colonialism, but more comprehensive and totalitarian.

The idea that each culture is possessed of its own specific wisdom and characteristics, its own novelty and uniqueness, born of its own individual struggle over thousands of years to cope with nature and circumstance, has been drowned out by the hue and cry that the world is now one, that the western model - neoliberal markets, democracy and the rest - is the template for all.

In one sense democracy always has to be ‘imposed’, whether it be internally or externally. Democracy didn’t exist at the dawn of time, it had to be established. Yet its introduction has to take the form of an imposition - it’s simply impossible for democracy to conjure itself into being any other way. While the imposition may be popular – even, you could say, democratic – there must be a prior acceptance of democracy for it to democratically occur, which would, in turn, require a prior democratic imposition. You end up in some infinite regression to the first stage when democracy was imposed.

But why does Jacques refer to this as an ‘imposition’? If democracy always has to be created, was its creation in Europe and the US an imposition? Was it incompatible with the previously (un?)-democratic culture? Do we regard it as being imposed, or simply a reflection of these underlying cultures? When historians refer to the creation of democracy in the West, its development tends to be celebrated in slightly less pejorative, more progressive, terms. Couldn’t this progressive narrative be equally transferable to other nations, even cultures?

For Bunting and Jacques the problem is cultural incommensurability – democracy is an integral element of Western culture. The world is neatly divided up into camps each possessing differing cultures and, subsequently, differing political, economic, legal forms - the erstwhile Marxist Jacques has simply replaced the economy with culture as the determining substructure. Yet this categorisation isn’t the only one available - why specific national cultures? Why not a class-based analysis? Or maybe one that primarily deals with political affiliations irreducible to national culture? Or economic interests? Or even one of universal interests? These could, after all, be opposed to the determinant monoculture that Jacques seeks to theoretically impose. As Amartya Sen has reiterated:

In fact, of course, the people of the world can be classified according to many other partitions, each of which has some—often far-reaching—relevance in our lives: nationalities, locations, classes, occupations, social status, languages, politics, and many others. While religious categories have received much airing in recent years, they cannot be presumed to obliterate other distinctions, and even less can they be seen as the only relevant system of classifying people across the globe. In partitioning the population of the world into those belonging to "the Islamic world," "the Western world," "the Hindu world," "the Buddhist world," the divisive power of classificatory priority is implicitly used to place people firmly inside a unique set of rigid boxes. Other divisions (say, between the rich and the poor, between members of different classes and occupations, between people of different politics, between distinct nationalities and residential locations, between language groups, etc.) are all submerged by this allegedly primal way of seeing the differences between people.

But why is there even the temptation to begin from the assumption of difference? Isn’t it at least equally plausible that humans have some interests that are irreducible to things like culture, economics, politics, territory, etc…? That some values are universal? If democracy is possible in South Korea and Iceland, why not in Iraq or North Korea?

When you begin to empirically test the theory, things start to get worse. For even on their own premise – that Western forms of government (not necessarily confined to democracy) are incompatible with non-Western cultures - wouldn’t you have to logically oppose any non-Western government with even minimal (and seemingly inexplicable) traces of Western influence? Why is it that only democracy is opposed? After all, the Ba’athist government of Iraq was a murderous blend of Nazism and Stalinism. On the basis of Bunting’s and Jacques’ argument, shouldn’t that have been opposed as a Western imposition and subsequently replaced with something more in tune with Iraqi culture?

And what happens when you run into people from non-Western cultures that – despite your careful analysis – want democracy and insist on universal rights? Once again, you could deploy an enormously condescending Marxist term – false consciousness. You could casually inform them how they’re betraying their undemocratic culture – and I’m sure most would welcome the insight. Or you might want to revert to an older notion of solidarity, siding with the victims of oppression, rather than its very perpetrators:

Thomas Mann used to say that Hitler didn’t land on German ground like a meteor, and so Germany, as a result, could never simply rid itself of Nazism. He added, however, that he too was Germany. Rather than trying to sweet-talk fanatics with dishonorable pieties about The Other and respecting The Other, it is incumbent upon us to affirm unceasing solidarity with all the Thomas Manns of the Muslim world.

Guardian columnist seeks enlightenment

‘I need some help’ – yep, for once she’s bang on. Madeleine’s been getting down with Muslim intellectuals: they’re getting edgy about the Enlightenment tradition being ‘used (implicitly or explicitly) against Islam’:

These Muslims then argue that the Enlightenment was a process of European definition in the face of the Ottoman Empire; it was shaped in opposition to Islam and hence has an inbuilt anti-Islamic bias.

It’s the classic Orientalist argument, so all well and good. But… Accusing the Enlightenment of being anti-Islamic is a bit like accusing a curmudgeonly misanthropist of having it in for blondes – it’s not the hair that’s the unique object of enmity. Similarly with the Enlightenment - when it was atheist, it was against religion per se: Islam wasn’t a unique target. In fact, the Enlightenment’s main target was European Christianity, clericalism, and monarchy – the arbitrary authority of theistic tradition and social conservatism in eighteenth-century Europe.

When the Enlightenment did address non-European cultures, it was far from disdainful, without falling into some proto-Buntingesque relativism. It accepted cultural and religious diversity, yet simultaneously held to a limited universalism. It could sometimes indulge religious thought, yet believed religion should be subjected to the appeal of reason. And it also sought to establish institutions and laws to guarantee freedom of religion, freedom of thought, the free flow of ideas, etc…. When Enlightenment thinkers analysed non-European societies, they refused to place cultures in a hierarchy of development, in some crude Hegelian-cum-Darwinian fashion. Far from being uniquely hostile to religion, the Enlightenment established conditions for private religiosity:

Usually deists rather than atheists, concerned with fostering tolerance rather than embracing any type of dogma, most philosophes considered religious faith nothing more than superstition, but they were content to leave matters of belief to the individual. Hardly any of them were concerned with abolishing religious forms of identification and most implicitly understood the difference between “religiosity” and “religion.”

Enlightenment thinkers wished to temper the power of religious institutions by privileging the secular state and, for this reason, traditionalists and dogmatic defenders of the faith – all faiths – have criticized them unmercifully ever since…. Such a stance involves recognizing faith as a private conviction…. For those committed to the Enlightenment legacy, indeed, religion turns into a problem only when it strays beyond the private sphere and identifies its concerns with those of the public weal. (Stephen Eric Bronner, Reclaiming the Enlightenment, 2004, pp.166-167)

But what the Enlightenment balked at was the idea that religion should ever intrude into the public sphere, that it should subsume government and law.

Bunting describes a debate between Bronner – also author of an impassioned, if sometimes rather ranting, diatribe against the Iraqi War – and Jonathan Ree: Bronner sees the Enlightenment positioned

… at the heart of all democracy. It forms the basis of freedom and human rights, for example its views on torture. It argued that we temper our worst tendencies through reason. It was not against religion, but against fanaticism, and argued that religion should be kept in the private sphere…. He concluded by saying we need to pick up the Enlightenment legacy and adapt it.

Yet for Bunting this is all superfluous. Despite holding to some Enlightenment values – free flow of ideas, the appeal to evidence, some notion of what is a true argument, and, the courage to use her own (admittedly tenuous) understanding – she’d rather embrace the irrationality of Freud, Nietzsche and Foucault.

Then we come to this un-enlightened flourish:

… why do people think an understanding of rationality which is over 200 years old is useful now?

Oh, I don't know? Maybe because of all the above? Why does 200 years old become the arbitrary cut-off point? Of course, it doesn’t: if it did, why would Madeleine pay any attention to Islamic thought (1400 years old). Why would Freud (80 years old), Foucault (30 years old) and Nietzsche (120 years old) sneak in through the back door with their theories of irrationality? And why would people still persist in writing (and unfortunately reading) interminable nonsense, despite all the available evidence suggesting they should probably desist?

Offensive phantasmagorias

After David Irving's incarceration for holocaust denial, quite a few commentators leapt at this judgement as a brazen display of the West’s double standards:

The uncanny coincidence of three trials involving free speech - Nick Griffin, David Irving and Abu Hamza - has only thrust into sharper contrast for British Muslims the double standards of which they believe they are so often victims.

Free-speech, it seemed, only applied in relation to things the West deemed unimportant (caricatures of Muhammad). When it was something the West actually valued (the truth of the Holocaust), there was simply no allowance for free speech. André Glucksmann draws attention to this position:

When the Islamist fanatic affirms that Europeans practise the "religion of the Shoah" while he practises that of Muhammad, he abolishes the distinction between fact and belief. For him there are only beliefs, and so it follows that Europe will favour its own.

These commentators suggested these inclusions and exclusions were probably racist, at best arbitrary.

Radical free-speech advocates imply you should be allowed to say precisely (yet simultaneously, imprecisely) what you think. Those at the opposite extreme argue that while Irving should have been jailed, the Jyllands-Posten cartoons shouldn’t have been printed either – this is a more ‘inclusive’ version of the limits to free speech argument: free speech is a right, yes, but we should all be self-restrained when exercising it – holocaust denial and Muhammad caricatures are equally offensive, therefore neither should be allowed.

Yet there’s obviously one pretty significant difference between these two cases: the issue of historical fact:

Offence for offence? Infringement for infringement? Can the negation of Auschwitz be put on a par with the desecration of Muhammad? This is where two philosophies clash. The one says yes, these are equivalent "beliefs" which have been equally scorned. There is no difference between factual truth and professed faith; the conviction that the genocide took place and the certitude that Muhammad was illuminated by Archangel Gabriel are on a par.

… Opposing them are those who advocate free discussion with a view to distinguishing between true and false, those for whom political and scientific matters – or simple judgement – can be settled on the basis of worldly facts, independently of arbitrary pre-established opinions.

This doesn’t establish that historians know everything there is to know about the Holocaust, rather that there is a wealth of convincing evidence (however limited) that the event occurred. Historical knowledge of the Holocaust may be provisional - it is not the ultimate Truth: yet the event’s occurrence remains determined by the all-too-ample evidence. When you switch to religion – whatever religion – you tend to find the opposite: there is no overwhelming evidence for God, prophets, miracles, etc… (although there is, of course, evidence that many of the individual ‘prophets’ existed, that doesn’t automatically define these mortals as Prophets – you need something additional, something external, some sort of deus ex machina to get to that stage.). Holocaust denial mocks the truth of Suffering and the truth of History; the Jyllands-Posten caricatures merely mock a vague, wholly un-empirical, phantasmagoria.

Reason and liberty

Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Strangroom have an Enlightenment-inspired polemic against identity politics and relativism in Why Truth Matters:

It is not self evident, for example, that one should allow an accident of birth, whether it be one’s race, gender, locality, or religion, to determine, without further reflection, how one goes about finding things out about the world.

In this sense, identity politics is the opposite of progressive or liberating politics. It privileges the unchosen, the happenstance and the biological over the learned, the acquired and the new. There is an irony here. It used to be a vision of the Left that politics was about freeing people from shackles which had been arbitrarily imposed on the by don’t of their birth.

… But for many people on the Left, the dream seems to have been rejected. It is somehow too entangled with the Enlightenment project, too modernist, too ‘Western’. For some reason Western intellectuals, and many non-Western too, have decided that people in the Third World do not want or like freedom or change, that ‘authentic’ Third World people prefer ancient communal ties and oneness with the earth. They tell them to be what they were born, and stay what they were born, on pain of being accused of inauthenticity and mental colonization.

It is a strangely regressive, limiting and limited view that thinks it is somehow progressive to spurn that dream as too Eurocentric or modernist or individualistic. Organic traditional cultures were Burke’s idea of a good thing, but they were not Tom Paine’s, and it’s odd to see the Left choosing Burke over Paine.

I know Ophelia's not too enamoured of religion, but the above may contain the possibility of arriving at religious belief (however unlikely it seems) through reason. Yet what it doesn't support is the idea that individuals are just bearers of the religion, identity, culture they were born with. Back to Amartya Sen:

The central issue was put a long time ago with great clarity by Akbar, the Indian emperor, in his observations on reason and faith in the 1590s. Akbar, the Great Mughal, was born a Muslim and died a Muslim, but he insisted that faith cannot have priority over reason, since one must justify--and, if necessary, reject--one's inherited faith through reason. Attacked by traditionalists who argued in favor of instinctive faith, Akbar told his friend and trusted lieutenant Abul Fazl, a formidable scholar with much expertise in different religions: "The pursuit of reason and rejection of traditionalism are so brilliantly patent as to be above the need of argument. If traditionalism were proper, the prophets would merely have followed their own elders (and not come with new messages)." Reason had to be supreme, in Akbar's view, since even in disputing reason, we would have to give reasons. 

Chilli and liberty

Amartya Sen has a good piece in this week's New Republic on the importance of multiculturalism against plural monoculturalism:

Being born in a particular social background is not in itself an exercise of cultural liberty, since it is not an act of choice. In contrast, the decision to stay firmly within the traditional mode would be an exercise of freedom, if the choice were made after considering other altenatives. In the same way, a decision to move away--by a little or a lot--from the standard behavior pattern, arrived at after reflection and reasoning, would also qualify as such an exercise. Indeed, cultural freedom can frequently clash with cultural conservatism, and if multiculturalism is defended in the name of cultural freedom, then it can hardly be seen as demanding unwavering and unqualified support for staying steadfastly within one's inherited cultural tradition.

... There is a real need to re-think the understanding of multiculturalism, so as to avoid conceptual disarray about social identity and also to resist the purposeful exploitation of the divisiveness that this conceptual disarray allows and even, to some extent, encourages. What has to be particularly avoided (if the foregoing analysis is right) is the confusion between a multiculturalism that goes with cultural liberty, on the one side, and plural monoculturalism that goes with faith-based separatism, on the other. A nation can hardly be seen as a collection of sequestered segments, with citizens being assigned places in predetermined segments. 

Shackles of irrationality

Madeleine Bunting draws attention to the apparent inadequacies of tolerance and ‘smug multiculturalism’ in today’s Guardian. There’s quite a lot to take exception to: the implication that ‘glorification-of-terrorism legislation’ is guaranteed to ‘provoke Muslim outrage’ (even from the vast majority of tolerant Muslims?); the assertion that Islam is the ‘object not just of military aggression but also of cultural aggression’; and the statement that Denmark and the Netherlands have ‘hatched a deep hostility to Islam’.

Yet while some of the words change, the argument is practically the same: any problem associated with Islam or Islamism is the fault of the non-Muslim world, whose inhabitants, it seems, are far more interested in ‘Celebrity Big Brother than its Muslim neighbours.’

This is the flipside of Gordon Brown's much lauded British tolerance: indifference. The vast majority in this country know little about Islam and care even less. They know few, if any, Muslims and see no reason to change that. How many Muslims could you count as friends?

…The potential for real dialogue, where there can be a mutual changing of minds rather than simply getting other people to agree with you, is small.

The problem is that the Muslim ‘politicised community [is] desperate to be heard’, yet we’re all too preoccupied mocking George Galloway’s feline impersonations to listen. The failure to listen has provoked the "cream of the Muslim educated elite” into threatening: "we will react without the shackles of rationality, regardless of the consequences".

Bunting suggests that multiculturalism may be a bad thing: that it tends towards insularity, religious navel-gazing, closed cultures, lack of dialogue, etc… Yet her substitute isn’t much of an alternative: rather than dialogue, individuals should actively engage in listening to a faith-inspired monologue. One problem might be with Bunting’s notions of truth and value – for her we all possess equally valid values (none of which are necessarily true, although Bunting tends to imply that non-Western values have a certain novel grandeur) determined by cultural and religious identity. In this world, there aren’t any values that are necessarily preferable – or values that necessarily must precede the proposed conversation. Yet, as Kwame Anthony Appiah has noted, this belief (or, dare I say it, value) inhibits conversation:

For if relativism about ethics and morality were true, then, at the end of many discussions, we each have to end up saying, “From where I stand, I am right. From where you stand, you are right.” And there would be nothing further to say. From our different perspectives, we would be living effectively in different worlds. And without a shared world, what is there to discuss? People often recommend relativism because they think it will lead to tolerance. But if we cannot learn from one another what it is right to think and feel and do, then conversation between us will be pointless. Relativism of that sort isn’t a way to encourage conversation; it’s just a reason to fall silent.

To begin dialogue there has to be some acceptance on both sides of common values: things like freedom of speech (at least to some extent), the rules of debate, humanity, and that each participant’s input is of equal worth. While Madeleine professes some enthusiasm for such dialogue, she fails to notice that this conversation could be rather limited. For she denigrates non-Muslims’ refusal to even discuss the ‘role of women’ – yet surely this value, the acceptance of the equal contribution of all to the proposed conversation is a precondition of the subsequent conversation. If there is no initial agreement on who may or may not speak, things could get rather quiet. And when you even provisionally suggest that half the human race may not necessarily play any part in this wonderful dialogue, you hardly appear to be aiming at conversation. When there’s no mutuality, the prospect of a ‘mutual changing of minds’ starts to recede.

In addition to these notions, there’s also that of how belief is held, notions that inform the conversational preconditions – the above might be seen as non-negotiable (‘Toleration requires a concept of the intolerable’), yet:

… cosmopolitans believe in universal truth, too, though we are less certain that we have it all already. It is not scepticism about the very idea of truth that guides us; it is realism about how hard the truth is to find. One truth we hold to, however, is that every human being has obligations to every other. Everybody matters: that is our central idea. And it sharply limits the scope of our tolerance.

Rather than forcing others to be free of the ‘shackles of rationality’, it might be an idea to discard some of those more fashionable shackles of irrationality: those of a dubious relativism and fundamentalist version of faith.

Un-objective pro-fascist

Trying my hardest to avoid Schadenfreude… David Irving was yesterday sentenced for three years in an Austrian jail for the crime of Holocaust denial.

Now, David Irving is hardly someone you’d like to pop down the pub with for a nice amiable chat. In fact, he’s got a knack of saying precisely the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time. He’s clearly racist, an anti-Semite and rather blase with the truth. In an essay on Irving Christopher Hitchens noted that when leaving Hitchens’ house, Irving declaimed:

I am a Baby Aryan
Not Jewish or Sectarian
I have no plans to marry an
Ape or Rastafarian

The defence of freedom of speech or that of offering counter-argument to established histories seems something of a red herring. Irving wasn’t tried for any words he’d written in his numerous revisionist works. Rather he was tried for the content of two speeches made in 1989. There is a difference between a work of history – however skewed and ideological that work is – and a speech which borders on racial incitement. The defence of free speech coming from Irving also seems mildly perverse - coming from a man who tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to stifle the freedom of speech of Deborah Lipstadt, a highly respected historian of the old school.

So while Irving probably doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt, he does seem to serve one useful purpose. The advantage of the earlier Deborah Lipstadt libel case was that arguments for and against the more traditional accounts of the Holocaust were judged in public: not only allowing a judge to decide where the strength of evidence lay, but also informing a wider public of all the relevant evidence. In a sense, this brought about a much needed impetus into Holocaust history, progressing through refutation and counter-argument. This inadvertently helped make the history of the Holocaust more watertight.

But this case – along with that of the Irving judgement – clarifies another important issue: that of truth. Many seem accustomed to stating that history is not evidence-based, that it is simply a language game, a rhetorical display, discourse, another branch of literature, or ideology – Irving’s conceit was that it probably was, that he could write in a historical form with scant disregard for its content. Irving’s presence helped expose this. Richard J. Evans has written:

If history really is nothing more than propaganda, then there’s nothing to say it has to be left-wing propaganda, it can just as easily be right-wing propaganda, or racist propaganda, or neo-fascist propaganda, as the High Court in London decided in the end that David Irving’s writings were. If we don’t believe it’s possible to distinguish between truth and falsehood, then we have no means of exposing racism, antisemitism, and neo-fascism as doctrines of hate built on an edifice of lies, indeed we have no real means of discrediting them at all. We can say of course that we disapprove of them in moral and political terms, but neo-fascists can just put forward opposing moral and political arguments of their own in response, and in the end there are no objective criteria by which we can choose between the two positions.

Holocaust revisionism denies the historical record in the cause of offering apologias for Hitler and de-legitimising the state of Israel – as part of its broader political project. It not only offends people of mild sensibilities, but is actually false. The fact that the Holocaust is a proven historical fact keeps us on our guard up against a possible re-occurrence. When the Holocaust is denied, anti-Semites start to suggest that any contemporary resonances of anti-Semitism are equally as false, part of that same exaggerated history. When it’s accepted as true they have no such excuse. The best way of refuting Holocaust revisionism might be through maintaining free speech, by openly refuting the arguments, revising previously-accepted theories, and by uncovering more evidence - not by locking people up.

Universal respect

In Friday’s Guardian Martin Jacques shoehorns the cartoon controversy into a debate upon the West’s apparent cultural arrogance. For Jacques, the publication of the cartoons by Jyllands-Posten represents just another example of two hundred years of dominant Eurocentrism:

Europe has never had to worry too much about context or effect because for around 200 years it dominated and colonised most of the world. Such was Europe's omnipotence that it never needed to take into account the sensibilities, beliefs and attitudes of those that it colonised, however sacred and sensitive they might have been. On the contrary, European countries imposed their rulers, religion, beliefs, language, racial hierarchy and customs on those to whom they were entirely alien.

… This kind of mentality - combining Eurocentrism, old colonial attitudes of supremacism, racism, provincialism and sheer ignorance - will serve our continent ill in the future. Europe must learn to live in and with the world, not to dominate it, nor to assume it is superior or more virtuous.

Now, this period of history isn’t quite as monolithic as Jacques caricatures it. While some in Europe certainly did display characteristics of ‘supremacism, racism, provincialism and sheer ignorance’, this isn’t necessarily the defining feature of the age. You might look to such varied writers as Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Diderot, and Kant: writers who formulated a belief in a form of universalism incorporating the diversity – and sometimes the incommensurability – of values. And it was from within Europe that the idea of human equality helped put an end to both slavery and colonialism. Jacques - showing some insensitivity to both that European culture and the historical record – simply omits this from his narrative.

Jacques’ treatment of European culture and history is paralleled by his treatment of alternative cultures. These appear to be equally as monolithic, immutable and impermeable as the European one – it’s simply assumed that these cultures must embody different values, yet there’s no debate on what these values might actually be. The implication could be that these values are the precise opposite of Jacques’ catalogue of Eurocentric crimes, but….?

Jacques believes ideas of ‘free speech, progress or whatever’ are simply ‘attitudes of superiority and disdain’ – that these values are solely the preserve of an old Europe, ‘alien’ to non-Europeans. Yet are these values solely and exclusively European? Is it not at least possible that ideas of free speech, liberty, freedom, and human rights are universal values? And that the prioritisation of these values would be far more beneficial than some vague and woolly respect for culture?

Cultures – and their values – should only be respected in so far as they respect minimum universal values. The rather unfortunate implication of Jacques’ argument is that all cultures should be respected regardless of content:

Respect for others, especially in an increasingly interdependent world, is a value of at least equal importance.

But culture and tradition can legitimise any and every brutal practice, practices that can be far more inhumane than the lack of respect. In the Theory of the Moral Sentiments Adam Smith commented:

When custom can give sanction to so dreadful a violation of humanity, we may well imagine that there is scarce any particular practice so gross which it cannot authorise. Such a thing, we hear men every day saying, is commonly done, and they seem to think this is sufficient apology for what, in itself, is the most unjust and unreasonable conduct.

And it’s probably for this reason that all cultures and religions must always be open to all forms of criticism: not just to exercise our rights, but too universalise human rights.

Windy militant trash

A minor postscript to this: Christopher Hitchens reviewing Robert Conquest's The Dragons of Expectatation in this week's TLS:

Conquest cannot quite resist a few more tossings and gorings of the bloody fools who succumbed so willingly to the totalitarian temptation, and who now rush to embrace it once again. Following Walter Laqueur, he points out that many of those who hailed the atrocities of September 11, 2001, were leaders and spokesmen of the hard-line racist Right in the United States and Europe: nihilistic demagogues who thought that any attack on “globalization” (often itself a euphemism for “Jewish world government”) was better than none. Who has not met a cretinized Leftist spouting similar windy militant trash?