238. What universality in culture?
To what extent is culture universal? That was a crucial question for the debate on multiculturalism, in item 236.
Finkielkraut[i]
deplored the re-emergence of culture as collective national spirit (‘Volksgeist’),
yielding relativism and loss of universal cultural values. By contrast, I view
the loss of universals, in an absolute sense of applying always and everywhere,
as a blessing. I argued that at several places in this blog.
On the other hand, against relativism, I argued in item 10 that culture
does not have some distinctive, unalterable essence. Both the universalistic
and the particularistic view follow from an obsession with substance, in the
history of Western philosophy.[ii]
Any deviance from one’s own cultural perspective is hysterically
attributed to some stereotype, an essence ascribed to foreign culture.
So, what might be a candidate for an absolute universal, across
cultures?
It is useful to distinguish between universals of fact, descriptively,
and universals of value, normatively, while recognizing that fact and value
mingle or depend on each other. A universal of fact might lie in the nature of
the human being, or surrounding nature, or some logic of society. A universal
of value might be an ethics, such as Kant’s duty ethics.
I also distinguish between universality and uniformity. One can have a
universal that is not uniform, though that may be at odds with a strict
interpretation of universality.
One candidate for a universal of fact would be anything embodied in the
human genome. Perhaps the instinct for ‘parochial altruism’ that I discussed in
item 205. There are arguments from evolutionary logic as well as empirical
evidence that people (and some other animals) have an instinct for some degree
of altruism within the group, at the price of suspicion of outsiders. That is
not helpful for multiculturalism.
Another candidate might be natural science. Regardless of culture,
people are subject to the same laws of nature. Admittedly, there are different views
concerning proper explanatory principles and method. Nevertheless, if we assume
that there are stable natural laws, those provide an objective selection
environment that sooner or later weeds out inadequate theory. In science,
universality of nature yields a universal of culture.
Culture is of a different order, of the symbolic. Society may also be
subject to some kind of regularities (I hesitate to call them ‘laws’) that may
also weed out inadequate ideas and practices, but that yields a far less strict
selection environment than nature. Both democracy and autocracy have limits of
survival, but with political means they have a wide potential for affecting the
conditions of their survival.
Language may have a universal ‘deep structure’ in grammar, in terms of
nouns and verbs, as claimed by Noam Chomsky. That would help but does not by
itself eliminate sticky differences of sense more on the surface.
Death is a universal. Nature again. Is Heideggers’s view of how it marks
‘life unto death’ a cultural universal? I think not.
Is sexism, up to sexual violence, a universal? I think it probably is,
first of all perhaps as being a natural trait. However, and here culture
appears, in all its complexity, its degree of virulence and violence depends on
other cultural factors, such as patriarchy, machismo, religion, history,
emancipation, education, socio-economic conditions of unemployment,
discrimination, isolation, and diligence of the rule of law.
Here, consider the upheaval concerning the intolerable incidents of
sexual assault in Cologne during New Year 2016.
How, then, about respect for women, is that a universal? It ostensibly
is not, as a matter of fact, but it should be, as a matter of value. Physical
integrity certainly should be. But beyond that it may mean different things in
different cultures, with different values. Adversarial argumentation may be a
sign of respect in some cultures and of disrespect in others. Being courteous
may be seen as condescending in some cultures, as a sign of respect in others.
In this blog I have pleaded for a more modest sense of universality, as
temporary and seldom strictly universal. There are similarities and overlaps,
more or less, between cultures. This is not a matter of features being
identical between cultures (see also items 9, 11, 12). In other words: universality
without uniformity.
I discussed respect for women. For another example, markets operate
across the world, but differently between countries, depending on the
institutional and cultural setting. But they also operate differently between
industries, within a country.
Across cultures, phenomena are perceived differently. What for the one
is nationalism for the other is patriotism, what for the one is isolationism
for the other is sovereignty, what for the one is prosperity for the other is
decadence, what for the one is free markets for the other is economic
colonialism, and what for the one is liberation from religious obscurity for
the other is loss of meaning in life.
Here, consider the sharp opposition in Poland between conservative nationalists
and liberals. This also shows how perspectives also vary within cultures.
I conclude that to a fair extent one can extricate oneself from one’s
culture, be open and learn from other cultures. One can do so without claiming,
on the one hand, to grasp and wield some absolute universal or, on the other
hand, that any postmodern mixing is viable.
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