Compelling article on Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the New Yorker. Though I understand where she's coming from in her critique of Islam - considering her very brutal upbringing - I don't like what she's saying: that one culture is better than another, that Muslims should embrace "Enlightenment", Western, even Christian, values. This is a profoundly naive approach to take.
As the writer puts it:
her life experiences have yet to ripen into a sense of history. The sad truth is that the problems she blames on Islam—fear of sexuality, oppression of women, militant millenarianism—are to be found wherever traditionalist peoples confront the transition to an individualistic urban culture of modernity. Many more young women are killed in India for failing to bring sufficient dowry than perish in “honor killings” across the Muslim world. Such social pathologies no more reveal the barbaric core of Hinduism or Islam than domestic violence in Europe and America defines the moral essence of Christianity or the Enlightenment.
1 comment:
It is a good article.
The crux of what you're saying is something I struggle with. It got my writing way more than I intended about something only tangentially related to this topic. Nothing below should be construed as applying to any culture specifically, except where noted.
Anyway. First, I wouldn't say that one culture is better than another in any abstract sense, so there I certainly agree with you. I think we're both more or less in agreement about the meta-ethics.
I do think it's fair to say that some cultures are better than others in the sense that I prefer them over others, and so for practical purposes I do think they're better. But I'm probably more careful than most people to actually say this. This, I think, is what you're getting at, isn't it? That we need to be careful before we say this?
Case in point: I was arguing about a TED talk on a friend's Facebook page a few days ago. Sam Harris, who I don't really like, was arguing for the conclusion that science can answer moral questions--something that I don't really agree with.
As an example, Harris claims that corporal punishment is obviously morally wrong. I'm not convinced of this. It just doesn't make sense to me to say that the vast majority of parents in human history have abused their children, or that the majority in East Asia continue to do so--and to say this even if almost no one there believes it to be abuse? It doesn't even strike me as harmful in that context.
Of course, after I said this, I was immediately attacked as a moral relativist. And I am, at the deepest level. That's not really what drove me to make the argument, though: I'm just not convinced that corporal punishment is always abuse in every culture. To be honest, I think it's sort of crazy to think that. But I only think that because I've lived in a culture that uses it routinely. I have this empathy for the culture gained from understanding it.
It's still not something I would want to do, even if I lived in East Asia, but that's more because of what it would do to me. Still, it's not something I have moral objections to per se. In certain contexts, yes; but not as a general rule.
Take the example of a society in which private property isn't recognized. Virtually no one considers it special in this society. In that society, theft wouldn't be a crime. And it wouldn't deserve to be because no one would care much about it. It seems to me that corporal punishment in East Asia is a bit like this (though this is changing as the cultural meanings attached to it become more Westernized).
In fact, I think many cultural differences are like this: they look fine from the inside, within the culture they're embedded into, not so much from the outside, from another culture. And this is really because of the meanings attached. Nevertheless, even knowing this, there are some practices--even some cultures--that I just don't like. I really, really don't like them, and there's probably nothing that'll change my mind. In my mind, we should be careful about saying this, but I think it is something we're entitled to say.
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