The Cultural Left: Making the World Safe for Fundamentalism

[Ben Kenobi]

As the Brits were already in India, and prepared to stay long, minor tweaks in the traditions of the population were probably practicable.

Under cultural relativism, or are you importing other values, such as liberal democracy.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by obiwan18


Remember all moral values are supposed to be equivalent, so why should your nation take precedence over another?

Relativism, for all it's faults, cannot sanction Might makes right.

I'm sorry, I wasn't clear enough.

Relativism cannot sanction any moral value over any others since because of it morality becomes a mere matter of taste.

What this means is that you can't offer any compelling objective or intersubjective reasons to anyone else to stop them doing anything. So what happens is that we have no way of speaking truth to power and power then does whatever it likes (or whatever it can get away with).

That's all I meant to say.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by obiwan18
Under cultural relativism, or are you importing other values, such as liberal democracy.

I have no problem with importing other values. I have a problem with forcing these values on a reluctant population. That's wholly different.

If Indian women, thanks to the prolonged contact with the English, came to think of Suttee as a barbaric tradition, I'd have been very glad of it. If the English had forbidden suttee and done punishments about it despite the willingness of these women to commit suicide, I'd have been against.

[Ben Kenobi]

I have no problem with importing other values.

Sorry, import has a second meaning in English.

You can import values into the discussion, not just values across the ocean.

To be consistent in Cultural Relativism, you cannot favour liberal democracy, regardless of your personal inclinations.

Agathon:

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by obiwan18
To be consistent in Cultural Relativism, you cannot favour liberal democracy, regardless of your personal inclinations.

I am not a big cultural relativist, and I certainly don't belong to the "cultural left" decried in the article. As per my previous posts, I'm all for having (well backed) judgments over other cultures. However, I don't think action should be taken on these other cultures unless there is a push for change within it.

I am not opposed with helping the push for change to happen, through exposure to your own culture. However, this exposure must neither be forceful nor overwhelming : it has to leave a choice in the target culture : either change their ways in the light of foreign cultures, or keep theirs.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
Is that your counterargument?

No. I just grow weary of your one line posts that are completely irrelevent to the topic you respond to.

Besides, not all communists are marxists.

The comment applies just as well, if not more so, to Trotskyists.

[Giant_Squid]

Azazel:

But why? you're just judging him according to your postulates, who told you that your ethics are correct and his are wrong? you're an evil and close-minded person.

You're assuming that just because something is subjective it doesn't exist. Metaphor: in the "real" relativism, Einstein's theory of relativity, he proves conclusively that speed, as classically conceived of, does not exist and is a subjective perception. Everyone agrees with Einstein on this. However, if you were to go 90 down the freeway and tell the policeman it's all right because speed is a subjective concept, I highly doubt you'd get out of a ticket. (note that this is a metaphor, and I'm not saying in the least that the situations are exactly alike)

My morality is entirely subjective. I like it because it's elegant, it's well-thought-out, it contains no contradictions, it accords with the natural and inbuilt views I have on the subject, and it presents a clear goal and leads towards it. I believe the deontological position contains several logical errors, which I hope to point out on that thread. If I turn out to be right and can prove it, then people can still hold it if they really want, but holding it will be inconsistent with logic, which is something most people wish to be consistent with, as well as inconsistent with some of the most deeply rooted human beliefs on morality.

You see? Now I know that there are almost no cultures that are so velhemently anti-utilitarian, but, many of them are anti-utilitarian. Why is it wrong to oppose, fight and resist them? Why is it wrong to decry them as things that should pass from this world?

I believe that the whole argument about not wanting to force stuff on cultures against their will is based on the desire not to want the people in these cultures to be unhappy (which I would sure be if someone else forced their culture on me). That being said, it's entirely utilitarian to not do so, unless the people in this culture hate the culture and want to change, in which case it's hardly forcing, is it?

I agree with that. I am a Utilitarian, it is my postulate, to us GS's phrase, however I am not objective, therefore I cannot say that it is better, merely that I believe it is.

I'm not sure if that's such a "merely". Take the postulates of geometry. Considered in isolation, any set of postulates are equally good. We have the standard Euclidean postulates, which work great. We have the Riemannian ones, which work well too. Or we can make up totally random and absurd postulates like that every straight line intersects itself exactly seven and a half times. Since these are postulates, none of them can be necessarily better than the others, but if we start working with that last one, we'll run into major contradictions, and we usually use an unspoken rule that logical contradictions are bad. If we use Riemannian, we get a consistent system, BUT we kind of already knew what we were aiming for (at least if we were aiming for something that described the world well enough to build a pyramid or something) and this isn't it. Even though a system may work right, if it tells us that we can never make a decent pair of parallel lines then it's never going to be helpful in engineering. So we keep the Euclidean postulates, which as postulates aren't any superior to the others, because we happen to like where they lead.

With morality, I already know what I want, in an entirely irrational sense - I want the world to be a better place in which to live. I could just as well want the world to be a worse place to live or a place with more things colored purple, but I don't hold those desires and see no reason to find logical systems that work on those principles.

[The Templar]

Originally posted by Spiffor

I am not opposed with helping the push for change to happen, through exposure to your own culture. However, this exposure must neither be forceful nor overwhelming : it has to leave a choice in the target culture : either change their ways in the light of foreign cultures, or keep theirs.

I can't agree. You have to look at power and material relations between people. The Wahhabist Imam who says keeping women barefoot and pregnant and the Southern Baptist Preacher who says gays should be punished will often claim they have a right to their culture/religion/heritage/whatever. Most of the time, the tradition being defended is the very sort of thing that keeps a group of *******s in charge and keeps the regular people oppressed. This is why I shed no tears for the loss of the Taliban. Good ****ing riddance. (Which is not to say I like what's going on in Afghanistan right now - the US did its usual **** job of managing the peace.)

Oh, and a Marxist would never be a cultural relativist. We recognize a bad power structure when we see it. (BTW, Marxisim started in the west - so it can't be anti-Western. Duh! But we welcome the input of other cultures. Just because the west has some good ideas doesn't mean it has a monopoly.)

The left - the real left - is all for feminism, gay rights, equal rights, material distributional justice (Marixist or not) and keeping the church as far away from the state as possible. These are positive values and often conflict with the culture of non-western and western areas. That article is just another product of a right wing idiot tilting at strawmen.

The question on the left is how to accommodate different attidudes without riding roughshod over other cultures without compromising our quest for equality.

[St Leo]

Is it just me or does this Cultural Left sound a lot like the NeoCons?

[DinoDoc]

It's just you.

[The Templar]

Originally posted by St Leo
Is it just me or does this Cultural Left sound a lot like the NeoCons?

Gee, are you saying the Taliban didn't need a spanking? Besides Bush wants to bring them back. Guess he figures as long as the Religious Right (aka the US branch of the Taliban) likes him so much ...

Besides, NeoCons want to preserve sodomy laws because "communities have a right to impose their own sexual morality" or something like that. NeoCons also want to preserve the right of mousy housewives everywhere to stay barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. NeoCons also want to protect the rights of African Americans to pick cotton. The NeoCons are a cultural heritage that should be run roughshod over.

[Dr Strangelove]

Which cultural lefties eschew rendering judgements? AFAIK most of them are somewhat opinionated and rather judgemental.

[Boris Godunov]

Re: The Cultural Left: Making the World Safe for Fundamentalism

Originally posted by Lung

1.) extreme relativism,

Neither I nor anyone of my leftist friends that I know is a moral relativist. Imran, a conservative, is, however. Go figure.

2.) hostility to traditional Western culture, and,

Blanket generalization. What is the definition of Western "culture?" I, for one, love the cultural institutions of the West above all others. There's a difference between wanting to change what are anachronistic and bigoted societal values and despising a culture.

I hate, say, Aztec culture, though, because it was murderous.

3.) the view that academia, scholarship, education, science, culture and the arts are nothing but weapons for use in political and ideological warfare.

Again, who says? I revere all of the things above for what they are, not how I can use them. It's also contradictory to no. 2. How could leftists be using culture and the arts as a weapon for their beliefs, if their beliefs involve hating that culture?

Generalized horsehockey.

[Ben Kenobi]

There's a difference between wanting to change what are anachronistic and bigoted societal values and despising a culture.

Since you seem the expert, which values in Western society are anachronistic and bigoted?

[Lung]

It looks like Lung has created a monster!

I can't say i agree with it entirely, just that it highlighted the folly of taking moral relativism to the extreme. Sure, he tends to rant, but "the cultural left", as he puts it, certainly seems to be losing ground to the rise in religious fervour (to varying degrees in Islam and christianity).

As much as i think most lefties are hypocritical elitists, if they balance out the loonies on the right, then they're doing something worthwhile. However, poor me in the middle (like the silent majority) just wants to live in peace, while extremists everywhere keep trying to impede me

My grandmother was right - people just shouldn't stick their noses into other people's business. She never mentioned governments, churches, business, etcetera particularly, but i think it applies to the lot of them.