Fatuous Cultural Relativists: Manners

One often hears objections to the view that we should be respectful of other cultures and beliefs because the Western Enlightenment view of the world that has for so long held an attitude of cultural supremacy has been effectively challenged and subverted by something that is, often very vaguely, referred to as Theory. I've read some works by theorists who are considered cornerstones of Theory and come to the conclusion that it would delight theorists of Theory if I said that Theory was about itself and not much else. I've also come to the conclusion that there are way better reasons for respecting other cultures. My perspective on this is too screwed up for me to take a stand for or against either one of those views, but very often I find myself thinking that people talking about this stuff just don't know what they are talking about.

I've had a Harvard professor tell me that literature is about literature itself, and unlike most people who have lives to worry about I actually knew what he meant by that. It's a postmodern commonplace based on the view that language (a strange object of analysis in itself) is not about things in the world but a reflection of itself. We don't, according to this view, have a window into the world and use words to refer to the things we see through this window but rather we refer to the signs that have been used to denote the thing we wish to point at, and so on ad infinitum.

Some of the flak received by postmodern and poststructuralist philosophy is well-deserved, but not all of it. You can't read Foucault and Derrida, to take two of the most illustrious examples, without noticing the genius of these authors and the perceptiveness and depth of their thinking. The problem is that this stuff was taken to be a method of analysis by some, a consistent way of reading and rereading texts, including historical texts. This was probably the result of encyclopedic summaries by well-meaning authors who ended up depreciating the body of work they sought to celebrate. One of the weird side-effects of all this has been a parade of people who think that they can analyze discourse as a vehicle of power without knowing much about what the discourse is about.

The fact is that very few of us are either Foucaults or Derridas. Furthermore, their writings do not create a dogma that can be taught and followed -- Foucault's program was left unfinished, Derrida always refused to acknowledge deconstruction as a program or method. They knew the stuff they were talking about inside out, and the way they did it was not the point of what they did. The people who think they are doing what philosophers like Foucault and Derrida were doing often cite as their target some aspect of the totalizing world view of Enlightenment philosophy, the idea that Western values and Western culture are superior to all others. Much of Enlightenment philosophy would say precisely that and there might even be pockets of loony people who wholeheartedly believe something like that today, but it's silly to subscribe to the view that all Enlightenment thinkers were so simplistic in their views (not to say anything about what moderns think about such matters).

While it is true that Man in the aggregate and Nature are two totalizing concepts under which most Enlightenment philosophers and naturalists would have operated, our present ideas about what those concepts entailed have to be checked sometimes. They were not necessarily glosses under which, say, British power was foisted upon an unsuspecting world (although that is what very often happened). One can find shades of cultural relativism in some of the very Enlightenment views that are sometimes disparaged by theorists who do not know their own history.

Vic Gatrell's City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London is one of those delightful books that does not yield to this bullshit. It notes a passage from Payne Knight's (at the time) infamous study of phallic cults called The Worship of Priapus.Knight dissociates nature and artifice from the rules by which people conduct their daily lives. He gives our natural urges a biological foundation, a set of dispositions shared by us all by virtue of our natural as opposed to our cultural makeup. Then he says that manners and customs must be considered "relative to the natural causes which produce them." Then he says something very interesting:

Neither are organs of one species of enjoyment naturally to be considered as subjects of shame and concealment more than those of another; every refinement of modern manners on this head being derived from acquired habit, not from nature.

There's a clear division between culturally constructed habits and the necessities of our biological traits. We are animals and the needs of our cultures must be distinguished from the needs of biology. In this work, Knight was commenting on a current debate that was trying to figure out whether or not our common manners concerning our nether regions were the product of nature or culture. Considering this timescale, people who present the idea that cultural relativism is something new and shocking that has the power to strip Emperor Enlightenment of its clothes just seem ludicrous. In fact, it is a part of a long discussion stemming from questions posed even before the Enlightenment, but these questions were re-energized during that period and handed over to us in the form they gained back then.

Funnily enough, Knight's work was admonished for being too French. Something like this has been happening recently as well with postmodern and poststructuralist thought. There have been many attacks on "Frenchified" academic postmodern cultural relativists who, it seems, don't know the first thing about history or reasonable argumentation for that matter. This is one of the better reasons for reading history: seeing things that have been played out play out once more. One of the best reasons not to read history is that unaware of past debates one can throw oneself into the present ones with full enthusiasm without feeling like a tool.