The Agony of Liberalism: Part II posted by Richard Seymour

Review of Steven Lukes, Liberals and Cannibals: The Implications of Diversity, Verso, 2003.

(Part II will be concerned with complementing and answering some of the issues raised by John Gray, discussed in Part I. For that reason I will focus mainly on Lukes’ arguments about universalism, relativism, tolerance and rationality.)

In Woody Allen’s 1996 film Deconstructing Harry, a man is accused by his wife of having killed his former family with an axe. What is worse, she says, in order to conceal the bodies he ate them. He matches her outraged accusations finally by blurting "so what are you making a big fuss? Some bury, some burn, I ate!" Steven Lukes, Professor of Sociology at New York University, understands what the big fuss is. Excerpting an episode from Herodotus’ "Histories", he shows how the Callatiae tribe from India understood that the best way to honour their dead was to eat their corpses. The Greeks, by contrast, burned their dead. King Darius, arbitrating the discussion on behalf of the Persians, knows full well that the Persian method of leaving bodies on high towers to be eaten by vultures is the right way – but nevertheless understands that a wise imperialist must tolerate these ethnic distinctions. Now, this is a kind of ‘tolerance’ which wasn’t really discussed by John Gray in his Two Faces of Liberalism, and it is a tolerance that is not only ethnocentric but has nothing at all to do with any genuine respect for the customs and moeurs of others.

In fact, for Lukes, every observer of such a discussion reads it in an ethnocentric way. It is something we simply cannot help. As Terry Eagleton argues in The Politics of Human Rights (Dobrad Savic, ed., 1999), we are caught between the cultural and the political, between the local and universal. Between body and language. And it was the illusion of the Enlightenment that we could ever escape the particular in favour of the purely universal. Ethnocentrism is a necessary fact of life, because there is no ‘view from nowhere’, no non-perspectival understanding. (To be absolutely clear, the difference of cultures as intended here is in the sense discussed by Mary Midgley: cultures "differ in a way which is much more like that of climactic regions or ecosystems than it is like the frontiers drawn with a pen between nation-states"). But such rootedness is enabling as well as constraining, facilitating certain insights while preventing others. And for that reason, there can be a variety of ethnocentric responses. For instance, an unthinking ethnocentrist today would shriek: "Eeeugh, everyone knows you’re supposed to bury the dead or burn them! Only perverts eat their dead." There is also the committed reaction of the religious fundamentalist who knows the rest of the world is wrong and is either to be saved or damned. There is the evolutionism of the 19th Century, influenced by Comte’s positivism and exemplified by Maine, Spencer & Tylor. According to J B Burrows (Evolution And Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory, 1966), this perspective involved a relativism that was also not relativist. That is, since evolutionism assumed that society evolved in a series of more or less precisely defined stages (for Comte, these were stages of intellectual development - first theological, then metaphysical, and finally positivist, or scientific; for the Scottish Enlightenment, they were stages of technological development – hunter-gatherer, pastoral, agricultural, commercial; for Marx, they were "modes of production" – ancient slave societies, Asiatic, feudal and capitalist), one could speculatively understand ‘non-rational’, reverential, status-oriented societies as previous stages of one’s own society. The ‘noble savage’ could, of course, be understood as embodying a different kind of ethical value, but the evolutionists understood that the way of enlightened Europe was more correct than that of their apparent forebears.

Another kind of ethnocentrism is to assume, with Hume, that human beings are broadly the same in all times and places; or, like Rousseau, to seek to universalise by casting off one’s national or ethnic prejudices and understanding the differences of others as alternative manifestations of the same humanity. What is inescapably ethnocentric for the latter is that, as Lukes has it, one "can only understand the unfamiliar by analogy with the familiar". The rationalist response to difference is to claim that through reasoning and discourse and the exercise of the mind we can reach a common understanding of what is true. This is precisely the idea whose limits John Gray exposed so effectively, since discourse and reasoning can very well deepen our understanding of our differences without actually resolving them. Foundationalism, the idea that we can erect a social order on the basis of shared ideals that is applicable at all times and everywhere, becomes highly problematic once you have acknowledged this. The relativist issues the following challenge to such a view, for instance: what you judge as rational is informed by your discrete local circumstances, and the standard by which you judge another culture as rational is specifically your standard, not that of the culture you are judging. The incommensurability of cultures makes such judgements, if not impossible, fraught with complexity and error. Such a view does not always entail moral nihilism – as Slavoj Zizek once pointed out, relativists are usually only inclined to declaim the incommensurability of cultures insofar as local practises do not contain serious consequences for human rights. At precisely the point that you make such a distinction, you are imposing a standard which is strictly your own, not the local standard etc.

Lukes contends that, while each of these views has its strengths as well as its limitations, it is possible to formulate a reasonable synthesis. The essays in this book therefore work through the practical implications of this idea, and these are provocative, enlightening and witty. Lukes is not quite as funny as Terry Eagleton, but he proves at times to be at least as Irish, with such chapter titles as "Liberalism for the Liberals: Cannibalism for the Cannibals", (and then, presumably, rape for the rapists, torture for the torturers, murder for the murderers etc). It is not often you can read an elegant debunking of Hayek’s dismissal of social justice and a languid appraisal of Isaiah Berlin’s political and literary qualities in the same book, and you will rarely find such topics as "Is Universalism Ethnocentric?" quite so entertaining. Ordinarily, a discussion of communitarianism is about as pleasurable as a mild toothache, but Lukes gets to the point with little fuss.

On universalism as a mere particularistic fetish of the Enlightenment, Lukes is suitably concise. There is no contradiction between defending universalism and acknowledging cultural differences. Of course there is a great deal of fun to be had in exposing this or that idea’s pretensions of universality as merely the purview of a particular culture or group. Marx made great sport of exposing the social origins of ideological formations, while Mannheim liked to undermine ‘timeless truths’ by setting them against the clock. Lukes deals mainly, however, with the arguments of Clifford Geertz who argues that not only is universalism ethnocentric, but it can’t be otherwise. "Universalism is ethnocentric because ethnocentricity is universal". Lukes challenges this firstly by interrogating the notion of ethnocentrism. When first used by William Graham Sumner in 1906, it referred to an outlook which measured other cultures from the standpoint of one’s own, and which involved the supposition that my culture is superior to yours and to his. For Richard Rorty, we are all ethnocentric in that in order to participate in a discussion we have to assume that there are enough shared grounds to make the debate fruitful. As Eagleton once put it (in Ideology, 1991), if I think patriarchy is an objectionable form of social domination, and you think it is a small town in New England, we aren’t really disagreeing. However, the trouble with the term is that it seems to refer to cultural groups rather than ethnicities. Moreover, as already stated, Lukes thinks it possible to speak of ethnocentricity in a way that doesn’t involve a presumption of superiority. Indeed, Said’s Orientalism is partially about the kind of ethnocentric view that can involve a presumption of the superiority of ancient civilisations. Lukes opts for the general tendency to speak of ethnocentrism as the attitude of particular cultural groups.

And what of universalism? It involves the view that reason is a universal predicate and that anyone anywhere has the same access to the same scope of rationality, and there are therefore grounds for a global dialogue. Of course, such reason is expressed in and through cultural specificity, but the suggestion is that the reasoning process does not depend on local variables. Secondly, universalism involves the idea that there is some human essence, a common humanity which may be variously defined but which usually refers to the biological basis for cultural expression. Thirdly, it involves a view of moral judgment, the idea that moral concerns extend to the whole of humanity, therefore requiring that cross-cultural judgments be made. The implications of such a view are egalitarian, anti-particularist and cosmopolitan.

Absolutely Relative

Relativists like Peter Winch or Thomas Kuhn who believe that cultures or rationalities are varied and incommensurable, while objecting to the wholesale universalism of the French and Scottish Enlightenment nevertheless hedge their objections with important qualifications. Not so, postmodernists like Jean-Francois Lyotard, who believes that "to speak is to fight", because cultures are so radically incommensurable as to make agreement in any deep sense impossible. For Richard Rorty, "there is nothing beneath socialisation", it "goes all the way down", and so there can be no ‘common humanity’. Relativism is based on a "recognition of the force of enculturative conditioning in shaping thought and behaviour", according to Herskovits, which is its enduring strength. However, such an acknowledgment does not prevent relativists, even in their hardened postmodern form, from engaging in persuasive activity, reasoning, argument etc. Additionally, even Rorty bases much of his thought on such common human capacities as that to feel pain, love, speak a language etc. And he involves himself in another strange contradiction when he argues for a version of humanism based not on a notion of ‘common humanity’ but on an ever-expanding ethnos, with greater and greater variegation. Norman Geras retorts (in Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind: The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty, 1996) that either the ethnos must expand to include all of humanity, or it must stop somewhere (and thereby exclude certain human beings, like Africans or Russians), or it must finally expand to include a common humanity. If it does not, then presumably the excluded groups can be massacred or starve and you won’t be too troubled. "Strange humanism," Geras observes. "Strange human rights."

Another objection to the prevalent anti-universalism is that its proponents misconceive their idea of culture. Culture is not, says Isaiah Berlin, a "windowless box". Indeed, the multicultural idea that there are discrete local cultures which are not transmissible, do not mingle well, do not cross-fertilise is probably one of the most pernicious in political culture today. When Nick Griffin can announce that the correct response to racial tensions in Burnley is to segregate the cultures so that whites can have their culture and Muslims can have theirs, he is directly appropriating one of the major tropes of postmodernism. Borrowing Benedict Anderson’s phrase, Lukes notes that "culturally defined communities are ‘imagined communities’", not impermeable solids. Cultures interpenetrate, overlap and procreate as well as militate against one another as they sometimes do. Cultural difference is understandable to us because of this, and because we do share a great deal in how we reason and understand the world. In respect of this, Lukes has what I think is an unfair pop at Donald Davidson’s "Principle of Charity" in which human beings are held to broadly agree about the most directly important things in life, and that this is a sufficient ground for communication. By this, Davidson does not mean that we agree on the pressing issues of the day, merely that we can infer that most people are right about most things since these are things they have to be competent in to survive. We can get it so wrong about the flatness of the earth or the criminality of refugees because understanding these issues does not bear immediately on our day-to-day survival. Now, Lukes’ counter-point is that by "maximising our shared beliefs we minimise our chances of identifying our differences". Do we? Surely the point about the Principle of Charity is that our shared understanding gives us a ground to understand our differences?

Significantly, John Gray argued against egalitarianism and against universalism in his pursuit of modus vivendi. He thought that such values were incompatible with cultural understanding and tolerance. The assumption he most objected to, of course, was that there was anything like a sufficient shared ground for making universalist projections about the kind of life it is most suitable for human beings to live in. There are many goods, and many of them are incommensurable. Now, where Gray goes wrong, I think, is in identifying universalism by reference to its most extreme and unresponsive variants. This makes it all too easy for him to dismiss universalist values as rigid dogmas replete with culturally specific assumptions. In reality, however, we cannot do without some kind of universalism. There are enough things that human beings do share to make it possible for us to talk, and to understand why we disagree, and to see why two ‘goods’ may be incommensurable. And there is enough in our shared capacity for pain and pleasure to make moral concerns cut across cultural boundaries. Finally, his valorisation of tolerance above all other things, is all too compatible with injustice (albeit that such a notion may not have the same ring in the minds of torturers as it will in the minds of victims). I’d like to quote from Batty ’s contribution to a Slavoj Zizek meeting at Marxism 2001 in order to make my point:

"Tolerance, per se, is not a virtue. It just means putting up with something. And to promote it as a virtue suggests that somehow other people are a burden."

I think we should be for tolerance inasmuch as it means putting up with cultural manifestations and such that irritate us but which we have no legitimate complaint against. We should be for tolerance so long as it means accepting that others are just as sensitive and imaginative as ourselves, and yet may come to radically different conclusions. But there is no reason in principle to tolerate economic, social or political injustice. There was no reason to have tolerated any of the atrocious regimes of the 20th Century, whatever –ism it chose to grace itself with. Nor, and I touch this nerve deliberately, is there any reason to tolerate either local thugs or imperial interlopers posing as masked ‘liberators’.