The I of the Relativiser 
I suppose it could be argued that every generation has a few internalised dogmas. By an internalised dogma, I mean a pervasively held opinion or belief which either explicitly or implicitly guides (or, in some cases, even ‘determines’) the ways in which those who accept it think, act, and experience the world. What is usually called ‘relativism’ is surely one such internalised dogma of our generation. To see this, one has only to reflect on how frequently such statements are made : ‘But it is all relative’, ‘Unless you accept relativism, you will be intolerant of other people's views’, ‘There is truth in everything, it all depends on how you see things’, ‘Once you accept relativism, you can become truly tolerant’, ‘You do your own thing, I do my own thing’, and ‘You have to see the world from different perspectives, what is true for Us may not be true for Them.’
I will not extend this list. I believe that there is a genuine concern that people are trying to articulate through such statements, and it reflects the need for patience, humility, care and caution before we try to understand another culture/religion/society. What most forms of relativism reject is an argument of the following type : ‘Though different cultures seem to exhibit different moral standards, at the deeper core of all of them, there is only one set of universally applicable standards, and this set can be discovered through rational means.’ History itself has made us very wary of accepting such arguments. Not that there are no takers for this argument today, but even those who accept it are usually forced to substantially nuance it because it is often the case that one culture imposes its own home-grown version of the ‘deeper core’ as the universally applicable one. In other words, there is currently a deep suspicion of any claims to have discovered such universally valid standards to which everyone can (or, more strongly, should) conform. Hence the strong appeal of relativism : it is apparently much more ‘tolerant’ and ‘liberal’ (nice catch-words these ones, ‘tolerant’ and ‘liberal’) than a discourse based on putative universal norms. However, what I want to show is that there are many patterns of relativism, and we should be clear about which versions we may wish to accept and which we may not. In other words, it is because I consider myself a relativist that I want to show which arguments stemming from a relativist position I would reject.
Let me give the following as a broad definition of ‘relativism’ :
(1) There is a pluralism in the manner in which different cultures operate with different moral standards/values.
(2) Different societies have standards that have to be understood within the broader contexts of their cultures. That is, there is no trans-cultural ahistorical mode of evaluation. Enlightenment appeals to hypostatized entities such as ‘Human Reason’ or ‘Human Nature’ will not do anymore, because it often turns that this Human Reason/Nature reflects only the ratio or the natura of white male Europeans.
(3) Therefore, such standards are bound to the wider pattern of cultures they are ‘embedded’ in.
Much of (social) anthropology revolves around this understanding of relativism : it is claimed that the moral adjudication of 'right' and 'wrong' should be left to members who belong to a different culture, and we are wrong to condemn the moral beliefs of the ‘others’. Therefore, the anthropologist should simply report, so goes the argument, what she has learnt about another culture without commenting on the 'rightness' or 'wrongness' of the moral values of the group of people she has studied and observed. Though as a methodological stance this is a useful starting-point, there are some problem-cases involved with adopting such an approach. Take the case of Sati (the now-prohibited Hindu practice in which widows immolated themselves on the pyre of their dead husbands), and let us say that a British anthropologist in 1801 undertakes an anthropological study of women who shall ascend the funeral pyre. Should she simply report some observations and leave the matter at that, under the assumption that the moral values of Victorian society and traditional Hindu society are ‘incommensurable’, so that it is 'none of her business' what Hindus do to their widows? This is a difficult question to answer. However, historically speaking, we do know this : if the British anthropologists had remained true to such an 'agnostic methodology', Sati might not have been banned for a much longer time. Indeed, an Indologist called H.H.Wilson argued that the British should not ban Sati because the value-system of traditional Hindu society should not be upset, so he claimed, by the imposition of the norms of a Western society. At first sight, we might be tempted to say that Wilson was a ‘liberal’ colonialist, but I shall try to show why his was the wrong kind of liberalism.
These arguments about Sati also apply to cases of human sacrifice, headhunting, the experiments of the Nazis and so on. All of which implies that we need to take a fresh look at the understanding of relativism that we started with, because if we stick to it a British anthropologist would not be allowed to condemn Sati, a non-Nazi to oppose Hitler, and a non-Marxist to protest against the excesses of the Stalinist regime. As for headhunting, the most those who think it is wrong will be allowed is an argument such as : ‘There are some tribes which practise headhunting. Though it is ‘wrong’ in the context of our moral beliefs, this practice can be located and understood in the broader context of their value systems. Therefore, we cannot condemn it since we do not happen to live in that society.’ It is, of course, possible to leave the argument at that, but those who do not wish to do so will have much harder thinking to do : for them, the game has only started.
I want to start by looking at the notion of ‘culture’. What the above argument about relativism assumes is two things : (A) every culture is (or, more strongly, must be made) a homogenous whole, and (B) every culture is (or, more strongly, must become) curved inwards into itself. Since I cannot consider every possible culture here, let me consider traditional Hindu society during the time when it was first being exposed to Western education (that is, from the early nineteenth century). A little bit of reading into the ‘life and society’ of those times will reveal that there was no entity called ‘essential’ Hinduism at that time. (There never was one monolithic entity called ‘Hinduism’ at any time, but that is matter for another place.) Within such a context, Raja Rammohun Ray was able to launch an internal critique of Sati : it was internal because he was able to sufficiently distance himself from his local community, and it was also an immersed one because he was able to show that no Hindu texts (directly) supported the practice. Note the two qualifiers here : it was an internal critique which was also immersed within the tradition. Therefore, in the case of Rammohun ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Western civilisation’ did not belong to two watertight compartments to be kept insulated from each other. Rather, through their interaction, his understanding of both became modified and richer. This, however, is not quite the same thing as reaching a ‘common ground’; the common ground itself was shaky because what Rammohun was involved in was a dialectical relation between two civilisations.
In other words, it is historically incorrect to say that members of the Hindu Renaissance were responding to Western values and super-imposing the latter onto Hindu social norms. Rather, these people were living in an interface between two traditions in which an interaction between them was possible and was clearly happening. This is not to claim that what resulted was an unreflective mixture of the two, for what was argued by them was that the Hindu traditions, correctly understood, were not incompatible with some (not all) of the values of Western civilisation. Once again, it was an internal criticism, from thinkers from within the system who were immersed in the traditions they were trying to change; therefore, it would be a misunderstanding of the whole process if we attach to it labels like ‘assimilation’ or ‘grafting’ or the like. It was not a mechanical adoption of certain Western moral values and an extrinsic implantation of them into some Hindu world-view. Rather, what was involved in the process was a thorough re-searching of the Hindu traditions, a re-evaluation of the moral beliefs that had come to be accepted as the correct ones, and the consequent understanding that it was possible to learn from a tradition that, at first sight, had seemed alien. That is, it would be wrong to assume that Western values were blindly juxtaposed or superimposed onto traditional ones. Moreover, this living interface was not totally an asymmetric one or a one-way road, for some Europeans too were able to enter into a deeply reflective and sympathetic understanding of various facets of the Hindu traditions. We have here the figures of Madame Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Sister Nivedita, Henry Olcott, Arthur Avalon (alias John Woodroffe), Paul Brunton, Margaret Noble, Mira Ben, Charles Freer Andrews, and others.
One must therefore question the notion that every culture has an immutable core or essence, a notion that usually arises because of a lack of sufficient engagement with the relevant historical texts. In truth, cultures are not monolithic self-enclosed groups but are patterns of behaviour which are continually being subject to influences which do not emerge from within themselves. However, I must point out, at the same time, that because of varying power-distributions, the story is much more complicated than this. To put it simply : people belonging to different cultures are rarely so well-behaved. One culture may be subdued to another for long periods of time. Cultural encounters always have a darker side to them and underlying them there is often a history of struggle and brutal oppression. My point here, however, is that a culture is like a living organism and it grows and changes with respect to various environments. Though there is (almost) always an asymmetry between two cultures marked by relations of violence and aggression, what is crucial is that we should not think of two cultures as inhabiting two totally different worlds across which no communication can ever take place.
To come back to the question of relativism, then, what I think this shows is that to say that moral standards are embedded in larger cultural contexts is not the same thing as to say that all of these standards are timelessly fixed. This is because living cultures are constantly involved in a process of engagement with others and various moral norms are continually being challenged, questioned and reinterpreted. Not that this process is painless and easy-going : it might take several generations before such an engagement is understood properly by people belonging to either culture. When two cultures A and B are interacting, it is possible that the knowledge of culture A in the members of culture B might lead the latter to a reappraisal of their traditional moral values and in certain cases to a transvaluation of them. In this way, it may be possible to attain a certain degree of cross-cultural agreement on at least some moral values.
In short, there is a lot of truth in the above definition of relativism when it implies that an individual cannot claim to have found the bird's-eye-point of view from which she can adjudicate between moral values and claims from people belonging to different cultures. We have no straightforward access to such an Archimedean point. Or to put in more ‘picturesque’ terms : there is no view from No-where, and this implies that an individual is always a member of a specific tradition which has a certain set of moral values and goals and in interacting with people from other cultures, it is these that she starts with. She cannot simply ‘make up’ her own values and criteria for judging moral behaviour de novo. The claim that such a thing is possible is that Promethean streak of European 'individualism' which is its most misleading aspect for it gives rise to the wide-spread illusion that the solitary and monadic individual can spin out her own set of moral values ex nihilo. Rather, morality is always a social and communitarian enterprise, and this is the aspect of relativism that we need to hold on to.
However, I would disagree with an anthropologist who claims that we must give up our own moral values before studying another group. As noted above, this would mean that a British anthropologist can study the phenomenon of Sati but must refuse to condemn it. Instead, she should bring her own understanding of moral values into the very process of investigation. A society or a group is not quite the same thing as a mineral under a chemist's microscope. An anthropologist does not merely look at a group : she also speaks for it, and we must therefore give up a spectatorial model for richer and more involved forms of interpersonal encounters. And for this to be possible, she must not abandon her moral values but enter, with these values, into an engaged dialogue with members belonging to the group about the latter's values. That is, I disagree with the implicit assumption in much of relativism that we live in ‘incommensurable worlds’ that are closed to one another. This assumes too readily the dubious notion that people belonging to the other group being studied have one uniformly understood, applied, and practised set of moral codes. (As is well-known to contemporary scholars, the construction of entities such as 'Hindu-ism' and 'Buddhism' was the work of Victorian anthropologists who believed that they had isolated an 'essential core' corresponding to the above entities. This is a warning against pinning down a certain group onto a label by ignoring the multifarious dissenting voices within it.)
It is mistaken assumptions of this sort that go along with certain forms of relativism that result in misguided patterns of thought. To end, however, let me summarise by pointing out that what I am arguing for is a correct understanding of relativism which on the one hand recognises that different cultures have their own socio-historical narratives that must be understood carefully in any encounter with them, and on the other does not break off the conversation but maintains a never-ending zeal to reach out to the Other. The Other is not an optional extra in this matter : through facing the Other and by being responsible for the Other, the Self comes to a deeper understanding of itself.
I suppose it could be argued that every generation has a few internalised dogmas. By an internalised dogma, I mean a pervasively held opinion or belief which either explicitly or implicitly guides (or, in some cases, even ‘determines’) the ways in which those who accept it think, act, and experience the world. What is usually called ‘relativism’ is surely one such internalised dogma of our generation. To see this, one has only to reflect on how frequently such statements are made : ‘But it is all relative’, ‘Unless you accept relativism, you will be intolerant of other people's views’, ‘There is truth in everything, it all depends on how you see things’, ‘Once you accept relativism, you can become truly tolerant’, ‘You do your own thing, I do my own thing’, and ‘You have to see the world from different perspectives, what is true for Us may not be true for Them.’
I will not extend this list. I believe that there is a genuine concern that people are trying to articulate through such statements, and it reflects the need for patience, humility, care and caution before we try to understand another culture/religion/society. What most forms of relativism reject is an argument of the following type : ‘Though different cultures seem to exhibit different moral standards, at the deeper core of all of them, there is only one set of universally applicable standards, and this set can be discovered through rational means.’ History itself has made us very wary of accepting such arguments. Not that there are no takers for this argument today, but even those who accept it are usually forced to substantially nuance it because it is often the case that one culture imposes its own home-grown version of the ‘deeper core’ as the universally applicable one. In other words, there is currently a deep suspicion of any claims to have discovered such universally valid standards to which everyone can (or, more strongly, should) conform. Hence the strong appeal of relativism : it is apparently much more ‘tolerant’ and ‘liberal’ (nice catch-words these ones, ‘tolerant’ and ‘liberal’) than a discourse based on putative universal norms. However, what I want to show is that there are many patterns of relativism, and we should be clear about which versions we may wish to accept and which we may not. In other words, it is because I consider myself a relativist that I want to show which arguments stemming from a relativist position I would reject.
Let me give the following as a broad definition of ‘relativism’ :
(1) There is a pluralism in the manner in which different cultures operate with different moral standards/values.
(2) Different societies have standards that have to be understood within the broader contexts of their cultures. That is, there is no trans-cultural ahistorical mode of evaluation. Enlightenment appeals to hypostatized entities such as ‘Human Reason’ or ‘Human Nature’ will not do anymore, because it often turns that this Human Reason/Nature reflects only the ratio or the natura of white male Europeans.
(3) Therefore, such standards are bound to the wider pattern of cultures they are ‘embedded’ in.
Much of (social) anthropology revolves around this understanding of relativism : it is claimed that the moral adjudication of 'right' and 'wrong' should be left to members who belong to a different culture, and we are wrong to condemn the moral beliefs of the ‘others’. Therefore, the anthropologist should simply report, so goes the argument, what she has learnt about another culture without commenting on the 'rightness' or 'wrongness' of the moral values of the group of people she has studied and observed. Though as a methodological stance this is a useful starting-point, there are some problem-cases involved with adopting such an approach. Take the case of Sati (the now-prohibited Hindu practice in which widows immolated themselves on the pyre of their dead husbands), and let us say that a British anthropologist in 1801 undertakes an anthropological study of women who shall ascend the funeral pyre. Should she simply report some observations and leave the matter at that, under the assumption that the moral values of Victorian society and traditional Hindu society are ‘incommensurable’, so that it is 'none of her business' what Hindus do to their widows? This is a difficult question to answer. However, historically speaking, we do know this : if the British anthropologists had remained true to such an 'agnostic methodology', Sati might not have been banned for a much longer time. Indeed, an Indologist called H.H.Wilson argued that the British should not ban Sati because the value-system of traditional Hindu society should not be upset, so he claimed, by the imposition of the norms of a Western society. At first sight, we might be tempted to say that Wilson was a ‘liberal’ colonialist, but I shall try to show why his was the wrong kind of liberalism.
These arguments about Sati also apply to cases of human sacrifice, headhunting, the experiments of the Nazis and so on. All of which implies that we need to take a fresh look at the understanding of relativism that we started with, because if we stick to it a British anthropologist would not be allowed to condemn Sati, a non-Nazi to oppose Hitler, and a non-Marxist to protest against the excesses of the Stalinist regime. As for headhunting, the most those who think it is wrong will be allowed is an argument such as : ‘There are some tribes which practise headhunting. Though it is ‘wrong’ in the context of our moral beliefs, this practice can be located and understood in the broader context of their value systems. Therefore, we cannot condemn it since we do not happen to live in that society.’ It is, of course, possible to leave the argument at that, but those who do not wish to do so will have much harder thinking to do : for them, the game has only started.
I want to start by looking at the notion of ‘culture’. What the above argument about relativism assumes is two things : (A) every culture is (or, more strongly, must be made) a homogenous whole, and (B) every culture is (or, more strongly, must become) curved inwards into itself. Since I cannot consider every possible culture here, let me consider traditional Hindu society during the time when it was first being exposed to Western education (that is, from the early nineteenth century). A little bit of reading into the ‘life and society’ of those times will reveal that there was no entity called ‘essential’ Hinduism at that time. (There never was one monolithic entity called ‘Hinduism’ at any time, but that is matter for another place.) Within such a context, Raja Rammohun Ray was able to launch an internal critique of Sati : it was internal because he was able to sufficiently distance himself from his local community, and it was also an immersed one because he was able to show that no Hindu texts (directly) supported the practice. Note the two qualifiers here : it was an internal critique which was also immersed within the tradition. Therefore, in the case of Rammohun ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Western civilisation’ did not belong to two watertight compartments to be kept insulated from each other. Rather, through their interaction, his understanding of both became modified and richer. This, however, is not quite the same thing as reaching a ‘common ground’; the common ground itself was shaky because what Rammohun was involved in was a dialectical relation between two civilisations.
In other words, it is historically incorrect to say that members of the Hindu Renaissance were responding to Western values and super-imposing the latter onto Hindu social norms. Rather, these people were living in an interface between two traditions in which an interaction between them was possible and was clearly happening. This is not to claim that what resulted was an unreflective mixture of the two, for what was argued by them was that the Hindu traditions, correctly understood, were not incompatible with some (not all) of the values of Western civilisation. Once again, it was an internal criticism, from thinkers from within the system who were immersed in the traditions they were trying to change; therefore, it would be a misunderstanding of the whole process if we attach to it labels like ‘assimilation’ or ‘grafting’ or the like. It was not a mechanical adoption of certain Western moral values and an extrinsic implantation of them into some Hindu world-view. Rather, what was involved in the process was a thorough re-searching of the Hindu traditions, a re-evaluation of the moral beliefs that had come to be accepted as the correct ones, and the consequent understanding that it was possible to learn from a tradition that, at first sight, had seemed alien. That is, it would be wrong to assume that Western values were blindly juxtaposed or superimposed onto traditional ones. Moreover, this living interface was not totally an asymmetric one or a one-way road, for some Europeans too were able to enter into a deeply reflective and sympathetic understanding of various facets of the Hindu traditions. We have here the figures of Madame Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Sister Nivedita, Henry Olcott, Arthur Avalon (alias John Woodroffe), Paul Brunton, Margaret Noble, Mira Ben, Charles Freer Andrews, and others.
One must therefore question the notion that every culture has an immutable core or essence, a notion that usually arises because of a lack of sufficient engagement with the relevant historical texts. In truth, cultures are not monolithic self-enclosed groups but are patterns of behaviour which are continually being subject to influences which do not emerge from within themselves. However, I must point out, at the same time, that because of varying power-distributions, the story is much more complicated than this. To put it simply : people belonging to different cultures are rarely so well-behaved. One culture may be subdued to another for long periods of time. Cultural encounters always have a darker side to them and underlying them there is often a history of struggle and brutal oppression. My point here, however, is that a culture is like a living organism and it grows and changes with respect to various environments. Though there is (almost) always an asymmetry between two cultures marked by relations of violence and aggression, what is crucial is that we should not think of two cultures as inhabiting two totally different worlds across which no communication can ever take place.
To come back to the question of relativism, then, what I think this shows is that to say that moral standards are embedded in larger cultural contexts is not the same thing as to say that all of these standards are timelessly fixed. This is because living cultures are constantly involved in a process of engagement with others and various moral norms are continually being challenged, questioned and reinterpreted. Not that this process is painless and easy-going : it might take several generations before such an engagement is understood properly by people belonging to either culture. When two cultures A and B are interacting, it is possible that the knowledge of culture A in the members of culture B might lead the latter to a reappraisal of their traditional moral values and in certain cases to a transvaluation of them. In this way, it may be possible to attain a certain degree of cross-cultural agreement on at least some moral values.
In short, there is a lot of truth in the above definition of relativism when it implies that an individual cannot claim to have found the bird's-eye-point of view from which she can adjudicate between moral values and claims from people belonging to different cultures. We have no straightforward access to such an Archimedean point. Or to put in more ‘picturesque’ terms : there is no view from No-where, and this implies that an individual is always a member of a specific tradition which has a certain set of moral values and goals and in interacting with people from other cultures, it is these that she starts with. She cannot simply ‘make up’ her own values and criteria for judging moral behaviour de novo. The claim that such a thing is possible is that Promethean streak of European 'individualism' which is its most misleading aspect for it gives rise to the wide-spread illusion that the solitary and monadic individual can spin out her own set of moral values ex nihilo. Rather, morality is always a social and communitarian enterprise, and this is the aspect of relativism that we need to hold on to.
However, I would disagree with an anthropologist who claims that we must give up our own moral values before studying another group. As noted above, this would mean that a British anthropologist can study the phenomenon of Sati but must refuse to condemn it. Instead, she should bring her own understanding of moral values into the very process of investigation. A society or a group is not quite the same thing as a mineral under a chemist's microscope. An anthropologist does not merely look at a group : she also speaks for it, and we must therefore give up a spectatorial model for richer and more involved forms of interpersonal encounters. And for this to be possible, she must not abandon her moral values but enter, with these values, into an engaged dialogue with members belonging to the group about the latter's values. That is, I disagree with the implicit assumption in much of relativism that we live in ‘incommensurable worlds’ that are closed to one another. This assumes too readily the dubious notion that people belonging to the other group being studied have one uniformly understood, applied, and practised set of moral codes. (As is well-known to contemporary scholars, the construction of entities such as 'Hindu-ism' and 'Buddhism' was the work of Victorian anthropologists who believed that they had isolated an 'essential core' corresponding to the above entities. This is a warning against pinning down a certain group onto a label by ignoring the multifarious dissenting voices within it.)
It is mistaken assumptions of this sort that go along with certain forms of relativism that result in misguided patterns of thought. To end, however, let me summarise by pointing out that what I am arguing for is a correct understanding of relativism which on the one hand recognises that different cultures have their own socio-historical narratives that must be understood carefully in any encounter with them, and on the other does not break off the conversation but maintains a never-ending zeal to reach out to the Other. The Other is not an optional extra in this matter : through facing the Other and by being responsible for the Other, the Self comes to a deeper understanding of itself.
posted by The Transparent Ironist @ 11:24 am
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