Category: In Focus

There are times when, do what we will, we are confronted with goals, values, moral preferences, that are in flat contradiction. We have to choose one and reject the other. Much as we would like to, we can’t blend or compromise or harmonise or take a little from this pot and a dab from that and come up with a nice mix. Doing one thing simply rules out doing the other and that’s all there is to it. Digital not analog, yes or no.

So for instance reasonable and desirable goals of tolerance, understanding, cosmopolitanism, and cultural relativism can clash with equally reasonable and desirable goals of preventing harm to others, criticising unjust laws and customs and traditions, exposing exploitation and oppression, and advocating an end to asymmetrical, unfair, cruel, punitive and destructive instituitions. Sometimes those institutions and practices and customs are in Third World countries, and then attempts of First World people to reform or abolish them will conflict with the laudable goal of not being a cultural imperialist or Eurocentric or self-righteous or intolerant. And then one has to choose.

One obvious (yet strangely easily overlooked) way to deal with this problem is to ask ourselves what we mean by ‘culture’. If we think and say that women shouldn’t be murdered by their fathers and brothers for, e.g., resisting an arranged marriage, only to be told that that’s their culture and it’s arrogant and Eurocentric to judge other cultures by Western standards, then surely the thought is available: what do you mean ‘their culture’? Whose culture? And what follows from that? Is it the culture of the women who are murdered? Or is it only the culture of the men doing the murdering. If the latter, why should their culture be privileged?

In fact it’s quite strange the way a line of thought that’s intended to side with the oppressed often sides with oppressors in the name of multiculturalism. A great many practices could be put in the box ‘their culture’. Dowry murders, female infanticide, female genital mutilation, slavery, child labour, drafting children into armies, the caste system, beating and sexually abusing and witholding wages from domestic servants especially immigrants, Shariah, fatwas, suttee. These are all part of someone’s ‘culture’, as murder is a murderer’s culture and rape is a rapist’s. But why validate only the perpetrators? Have the women, servants, slaves, child soldiers, Dalits, ten-year-old carpet weavers in these cultures ever even had the opportunity to decide what their culture might be?

And this is where the hard choice comes in, where the competing goods have to be sorted out. One can decide that tolerance and cultural pluralism trump all other values, and so turn a blind eye to suffering and oppression that have tradition as their underpinning, or one can decide that murder, torture, mutilation, systematic sexual or caste or racial discrimination, slavery, child exploitation, are wrong, wrong everywhere, universally wrong, and not to be tolerated.

So in this In Focus we provide links to arguments in favor of moral realism and universalism, including this one by Simon Blackburn here on Butterflies and Wheels, and also to information about areas where it is needed.

OB

Internal Resources

The Politics Behind Cultural Relativism: an interview by Maryam Namazie

Azam Kamguian on why Sharia should be opposed by everyone who believes in human rights.

Azam Kamguian points out that human rights and the Sharia are irreconcilable and antagonistic.

Azam Kamguian on what the hijab does to young girls.

Homa Arjomand reports on meeting with Ontario official regarding Shari’a Court

Apposite Quotations

One thing I want to say to all who would dismiss my feminist criticisms of my culture, using my ‘Westernization’ as a lash, is that my mother’s pain too has rustled among the pages of all those books I have read that partly constitute my ‘Westernization,’ and has crept into all the suitcases I have ever packed for my several exiles.
Uma Narayan: Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism

In general, people seek not the way of their ancestors, but the good.
Aristotle: Politics

[W]e must ask how far cultural diversity really is like linguistic diversity. The trouble with the analogy is that languages, as such, do not harm people, and cultural practices frequently do. We could think that Cornish or Breton should be preserved, without thinking the same about domestic violence, or absolute monarchy, or genital mutilation.
Martha Nussbaum: Women and Human Development: the Capabilities Approach

Cultures and religions are not harmless concepts. They are institutions; a part of the organisation of society. Usually, people who advocate those views, reduce it to an individual level and individual choice. But in reality, culture is part of the institution of the ruling class. Religion is an establishment that practises and advocates a certain way of life.
Fariborz Pooya: ‘The Politics Behind Cultural Relativism’

When you talk about the West, it is accepted that there are political differentiations, that people have different value systems, that there are political parties. You don’t talk about one uniform, homogeneous culture. But why is it that when it comes to the rest of the world, suddenly the standards change?
Bahram Soroush: ‘The Politics Behind Cultural Relativism’

Sadly and unfortunately, the setting up of the Sharia tribunals in Canada will be given validity, due to the reactionary politics of multi-culturalism. This is yet another fruit of a policy that causes fragmentation; apartheid based legal system and racism.

Azam Kamguian: Islamism & Multi-culturalism: A United Camp against Universal Human Rights in Canada

Inequality is an old and vexed issue. Isaiah rebuked Israel for grinding the faces of the poor, Thersites got himself beaten up for complaining about Agamemnon, and so it has gone ever since. From Marx to Rawls to Michael Young, equality and meritocracy, justice and opportunity, class and race, money and taxes, jobs and immigration, education and tuition and top-up fees, have been debated and re-debated.

Education, especially higher education, is one area where tensions and disagreements about inequality play themselves out with extra passion. Many citizens, parents, students, employers, thinkers would like to see higher education available to more people and especially to a wider range of people: more women, more non-white people, more poor people. The difficulty is in the question of how this is to be accomplished. Is it enough for universities to recruit students energetically? Or should universities lower some barriers to admission? Should they take into account the better education middle class and upper class children get, and thus accept lower test scores and marks from applicants without such useful backgrounds? Or should they be strictly impartial when allocating points and grade all comers in exactly the same way?

It’s a complicated issue, and there are drawbacks and advantages to either policy. It’s an exasperating aspect of the debate that neither side is generally very good at noticing or facing up to the drawbacks of the policy it favours. But it is true that a decision to give applicants extra points for coming from a bad school or being a racial minority or growing up in poverty, will mean rejecting applicants with higher marks. This not only seems unfair on the face of it, it also subtly denigrates the academic learning and hard work that education is meant to be about. And on the other hand it also is true that students who have grown up with books in the house and a quiet place to do lessons and small classes in safe schools have had fewer obstacles than students who haven’t grown up that way. But then are those advantages themselves unfair, or the result of parental choices and sacrifices that shouldn’t be punished? But should poor parents be punished for not having the chance even to make such choices? And so on. Naturally, the sides do have to choose one position or the other in order to act, but the debate might be less acrimonious if both admitted the complexity of the issue.

The policy of helping disadvantaged students to get into universities is called Affirmative Action in the US, positive discrimination in the UK, and in both places it can kick off firestorms of recrimination and anger. There is a case from the University of Michigan before the US Supreme Court now, and there was another in 1978. Individual states have passed ballot measures outlawing Affirmative Action. The issue does not go away. In the UK it flared up in the first week of March 2003 when the University of Bristol acknowledged that it admits some state school students ahead of better qualified private school ones. The main public schools associations, The Headmasters Conference and Girls Schools Association, declared a boycott of Bristol, claiming that their pupils were being treated unfairly, and the newspapers had a field day.

So we thought it would be useful to pull together some links on the subject. And add some definitions. In the US, public schools are free and open to all, private schools charge fees and often have selective admissions. In the UK, public schools charge fees and often have selective admissions, state schools are free and open to all, and independent or private schools charge fees and often have selective admissions but are generally less expensive and less selective than public schools.

The Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty, a branch of the Danish Research Agency, issued a report on January 7, 2003 that Bjørn Lomborg’s book The Skeptical Environmentalist was ‘dishonest science’. The seventeen page report explaining their reasoning provides a fascinating case study in the workings of science: it’s a small education in itself.

One thing it teaches (in case we didn’t know) is how difficult and complicated such questions are. There is no eureka moment, no Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot pacing the hearthrug while he explains how All was Revealed, no conclusive proof. There is only a huge and complex variety of evidence and the hard slog of interpreting it, there is only probability and ‘if…then’ and statistics. There is the need for caution, and alertness, and remembering to notice all the implications.

Another lesson is the reminder it gives of how difficult, though necessary, it is for non-experts to form opinions on such subjects. We are forced to trust authority and rely on experts. Even scientists have to do that outside their own fields, and the rest of us have to do it across the board. The lucid explanations of the reasoning behind the report offer some training in how to think about such subjects.

It remains very difficult, of course, for an outsider to judge such questions, and yet as citizens and as polluting, consuming, devouring beings, we have to. The report seems to make a good case that Lomborg simplifies complex issues, omits secondary literature that doesn’t support his case, relies on optimistic views of future trends, and misrepresents the arguments of environmentalists he disagrees with.

One bizarre argument in attempted support of Lomborg from Tech Central Station is strangely reminiscent of the self-defense offered by the editors of Social Text after they published Alan Sokal’s satire of Postmodernism under the mistaken idea that he meant it literally.

Along comes an associate professor of statistics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus – a man who does not present himself as a natural scientist and who has written a popular book, not a peer-reviewed article – to challenge their assumptions.

Very well, he is not a natural scientist. Does that mean he gets a free pass? Why shouldn’t others who are natural scientists point out where he gets the science wrong? He may not claim to be a natural scientist but he is writing about natural science, so why should he escape peer review? Even a popular book ought to be accurate, one would think. I daresay Alan Sokal would agree.

In 1994, Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt published Higher Superstition,
and the pigeons have still not recovered from the shock of that particular cat.
Higher Superstition is a funny-painful ‘deconstruction’ or rather demolition
of an array of trendy anti-science ‘studies’, stances, branches of putative
scholarship: Postmodern, cultural constructivist, feminist, sociological, environmental.
Most of these orientations are on the left, although it has been frequently
pointed out (e.g. by Richard J. Evans in his article on Postmodern history on
this site) that PoMo is at least as useful to the right as it is to the left
and that there are indeed right-wing Postmodernists. But the majority of the
attacks on science come from the left (and could be seen as a kind of displacement
activity, at a time when the non-theory-driven variety of leftist work seemed
moribund), which to old-fashioned leftists can be a very puzzling turn. Yes,
naturally, science can be turned to exploitative or sinister uses, but so can
many good and useful things; the solution would seem to be to expose and resist
the misuses, not smash the thing being misused. And frivolously confusing issues
like the is-ought gap or how evidence is to be evaluated, is a weapon that can
be very quickly and decisively turned against its user.

Higher Superstition is not only an eye-opening and hair-raising expose
of various fatuous anti-science critiques or broadsides, it’s also a very good
read. There’s a certain pomo-ironic hilarity in the fact that this book by a
mathematician and a biologist, in addition to flattening the pretensions of
the anti-science crowd, is witty and eloquent and lucid beyond the wildest dreams
of their literary opponents. So unlike the old ‘Two Cultures’ debate between
Snow and Leavis, in which Leavis was able to make much play with Snow’s lack
of talent in the rhetoric department. No fear of that with Levitt and Gross!
They escort us, Virgils to our Dante, through the antiscience “arguments” of
cultural constructivism, postmodernism, feminism (or one branch of feminism–one
could argue that they paint with too broad a brush there), and ‘radical environmentalism’
or deep ecology. The first two are the funniest, the most replete with non-sequiturs
and grandiose claims based on non-understanding of Gödel’s incompleteness
theorem, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and the like. In the chapter on Cultural
Constructivism we see Stanley Aronowitz misunderstand the uncertainty principle,
translating it into “a kind of epistemological and spiritual malaise”. We see
Bruno Latour leap from observations of laboratory politics to the notion that
science reaches its conclusions via wheedling and agreement. We learn that Steven
Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump converts Hobbes’
mathematical ineptitude into an episode of the class war, and that Wallis’ math
and Boyle’s physics were not superior knowledge but the unfair privilege of
an excluding elite. We see Jacques Derrida pontificate about topology under
the mistaken impression, apparently, that’s it’s just a slightly grander word
for topography. We see N. Katherine Hayles claim that the Zeitgeist did
Einstein’s work for him:

“If we think of these projects as attempts to ground representation in a non-contingent
metadiscourse, surely it is significant that the most important work on them
appeared before World War I. Einstein published his papers on the special theory
of relativity in 1905 and the general theory in 1916; the Principia Mathematica
volumes appeared from 1910 to 1913; and logical positivism had its heyday
in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. After World War I, when the
rhetoric of glorious patriotism sounded very empty, it would have been much
more difficult to think language could have an absolute ground of meaning.”
[N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound]

And Andrew Ross portray scientists as an arbitrary cabal of all-powerful snobbish
pedants:

“How can metaphysical life theories and explanations taken seriously by millions
be ignored or excluded by a small group of powerful people called ‘scientists’?”
[Andrew Ross, Strange Weather]

In 1995, a year after the publication of Higher Superstition, the New
York Academy of Sciences held a conference titled ‘The Flight From Science and
Reason’, and the papers that were read at the conference were collected in a
book of the same name. It is a rich source of fascinating examinations of the
subject from participants such as Susan Haack, Janet Radcliffe Richards, Gerald
Holton, Mary Lefkowitz, James Trefil, Frederick Crews, who discuss history and
evidence, feminist epistemology, Freud, social construction, education, and
many more subjects. The book makes it all the clearer that attacks on science
and reason in one discipline amount to an attack on them in all.

And at the same time, shocked after reading Higher Superstition, Alan
Sokal came up with his famous hoax. He read another great pile of books and
articles (which was a noble sacrifice of time and effort), wrote his article
‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum
Gravity’, and got it published in the 1996 Spring-Summer issue of Social
Text–even though the editors, at least so they later claimed, found it
a tad ‘hokey’. Then he published a follow-up article in Lingua Franca declaring
the hoax…and the fur flew. Sokal’s article is full of blatant mistakes and
transparent parody; but not quite blatant or transparent enough to get it rejected.
The Science Studies crowd has never quite recovered. The editors of Lingua
Franca put together an excellent collection of journalism and essays called
The Sokal Hoax, and Sokal and Jean Bricmont co-wrote the book Fashionable
Nonsense[US]/Intellectual Impostures[UK]. Finally the work is continued
in the 1998 book edited by Noretta Koertge, A House Built on Sand, another
excellent collection of essays.

Norman Levitt tells Butterflies and Wheels in his interview with us
that the situation is a little better in some ways. In particular, “the ultimate
ambition of many postmodern science-studies enthusiasts–that is, to become
the primary mediators between science and political institutions (the commissars,
as it were, of science and technology)–have largely been squelched. Embarrassing
questions were raised far too early in the game, well before any successful
infiltration of the corridors of power.” This is good to know. But ill-founded
nonsense has not by any means been laughed out of town yet, so there is still
work to be done.

OB

Second wave feminism has always had a radical strand. It has always been about
more than equal pay. It was also, for instance, about exposing and then discarding
banal conventional unreflective ideas that led to banal conventional unreflective
behaviour. Ideas about cooking and cleaning being somehow naturally women’s
work, for example, which led to men cheerfully lounging about while women put
in what Arlie Hochschild calls a second shift. And even more than that, unexamined
ideas about what women are like, what they want, what they should be and do.
David Lodge once remarked that women became much more interesting after feminism,
and his own novels bear this out, as do those of Michael Frayn and other male
novelists who started writing in the ’50s or ’60s. The pre-1970 female characters
are non-entities, the post-1970 ones–Robyn Penrose in Nice Work, Kate
in Headlong–take up a lot of space. The very way women are perceived
and noticed and thought about changed with feminism, and that would not have
happened if mere institutional reform had been the only goal.

But there are radical ideas and then there are radical ideas. One of the less
helpful ones was difference feminism. The foundations of this shaky edifice
were laid in the ’70s, when a popular rhetorical move was to label many usually
well-thought-of attributes and tools–reason, logic, science, “linear” thinking,
abstract ideas, analysis, objectivity, argument–as male, and dub their opposite
female. So by a contortion that defies “male” logic, it somehow became feminist
to confine women all over again to intuition, guesswork, instinct, feelings,
subjectivity, and arm-waving.

This school of thought became mainstream in 1982 with the publication of Carol
Gilligan’s highly influential In a Different Voice. Gilligan claims that
women have their own special version of morality rooted in relationships and
caring rather than abstract notions of justice and equity. This of course sounds
startlingly like the patronizing pat on the head with which women were barred
from public life in the 19th century, because the dear creatures were simply
too good for that mucky arena. It is quite a feat of legerdemain to take what
had been thought a classic bit of sexist mystification and turn it into new
feminist wisdom.

But however perverse or odd it may seem, and though her research has been sharply
criticised,[1] Gilligan’s views were and are indeed popular.
The criticisms were in small academic publications, while Gilligan got an admiring
profile in the New York Times Magazine in 1990, complete with cover picture.
In the wake of In a Different Voice came epigones such as Nell Noddings’
Caring, Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking, and Belenky, Clinchy,
Goldberger and Tarule’s Women’s Ways of Knowing. The last-named book,
based on interviews with 135 women, claims that women are uncomfortable with
argument and disagreement, and that they have a different approach to knowledge
that emphasizes collaboration, consensus, mutual understanding. Women’s Ways
of Knowing declares in the final paragraph, “We have argued in this book
that educators can help women develop their own authentic voices if they emphasize
connection over separation, understanding and acceptance over assessment, and
collaboration over debate…if instead of imposing their own expectations and
arbitrary requirements, they encourage students to evolve their own patterns
of work based on the problems they are pursuing.” What a flawless recipe for
infantilization and mental abdication. If it were in a book dated 1886 we would
all point and laugh, but tragically it is dated a century later.

Women’s Ways of Knowing raises questions about the evidence its findings
are based on, and about what to do with those findings. Critics have duly pointed
out that the interview subjects were told in advance that the topic was women’s
different approaches to knowledge, which is not quite the way to elicit uncontaminated
testimony. But even apart from that, even if their findings were really findings
rather than self-confirmed prophecies, there would still be a problem with the
conclusions the authors draw. If the evidence truly supported their idea that
women prefer to maintain “connectedness”, make everyone feel good, and promote
understanding and acceptance over judgment or assessment, then clearly the response
ought to be loud and urgent demands for remedial education for women starting
yesterday. In morality, ethics, social life, friendship, there is something
(though far from everything) to be said for preferring understanding and acceptance
to judgment and assessment, but in epistemology or “ways of knowing” there is
just about nothing. Critical thinking is widely recognised to be a basic tool
for cognitive work, and surely the whole point of critical thinking is to know
what not to accept, to know how to judge and assess. It is all about
rejection, separation, negation, being “judgmental”; tolerance and love and
sympathy and sensitivity are the wrong tools for the job. A favourite move for
the different ways of knowing crowd is to quote an aphorism of Audre Lord’s,
“the Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house”, which fact perhaps
demonstrates the result of eschewing logic. Why on earth would the Master’s
tools not dismantle his house? If he goes to town or gets drunk and falls asleep
in the corn crib, his tools will work very nicely. But in any case feminists
need to resist any rhetorical move to hand those tools over to the Master, that
is, to claim that logic and reason and evidence and “linear thinking” and judgment
belong to men, and women should claim what’s left over. Carl Sagan used to like
to say, echoing Hume, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,
and we should demand very very good evidence indeed (better than 135 women summoned
to describe their different way with knowledge) before accepting the notion
that logic is male.

And the evidence is not particularly good, to put it mildly. The notorious
1990 American Association of University Women study of the putative fall in
self-esteem of adolescent girls was assailed from all sides for its flawed methodology,
but it got a flood of media attention all the same. It inspired more studies
and books such as Peggy Ornstein’s Schoolgirls and Mary Pipher’s best-selling
Reviving Ophelia, and wasted the time of countless girls in “self-esteem”
classes when they might have been learning history or math. Bizarre claims resting
on flawed evidence generated even more bizarre claims resting on yet more flawed
evidence, in a spiral of epistemological breakdown. If only everyone had done
less accepting and more judging. Susan Haack sums the matter up:

“But even if there were such a thing, the case for feminist epistemology would
require further argument to show that women’s ‘ways of knowing’ (scare quotes
because the term is tendentious, since ‘knows’ is a success-word) represent
better procedures of inquiry or subtler standards of justification than the
male…[W]hat my experience rather suggests is that the questions of the epistemological
tradition are hard, very hard, for anyone, of whatever sex (or gender),
to answer or even significantly to clarify.”[2]

We have certainly gone to a great deal of trouble in order to come back to
where we started. Women are sweet, women are soft-headed, women are nicer than
men and don’t like all that pesky judgmental science and logic and reason and
argument and disagreement. If this were true it ought to be changed, but there
is little reason to think it is true. We thought we had escaped the tyranny
of low expectations for women, we thought we had crashed that prison and freed
ourselves to be as tough and hard-headed and autonomous and wide-ranging as
men–and now here come the beaming Ed School professors to tell us No, no, that’s
all wrong, that’s the male way of doing things. We are women and we have to
park our brains at the door and be nice and warm and caring and empathic and
fuzzy. That’s the sort of thing that makes a self-respecting feminist want to
be as opinionated and cold and uncompromising and downright ruthless as she
can find it in her to be. Janet Radcliffe Richards puts it this way:

“It is hard to imagine anything better calculated to delight the soul of patriarchal
man than the sight of women’s most vociferous leaders taking an approach to
feminism that continues so much of his own work: luring women off into a special
area of their own where they will remain screened from the detailed study of
philosophy and science to which he always said they were unsuited, teaching
them indignation instead of argument, fantasy and metaphor instead of science,
and doing all this by continuing his very own technique of persuading women
that their true interests lie elsewhere than in the areas colonized by men.”[3]

Feminists need to keep their eyes on the prize, as the saying goes, and resist
with every fibre of their being attempts to persuade them that the most fascinating,
inspiring, exhilarating, productive, truth-generating fields of intellectual
endeavour are the private property of men and that authentic women are too maternal
and caring and touchy-feely to be good at them. A more perverse, backward-looking,
destructive idea is hard to imagine, and the fact that it comes from friends
rather than enemies is one of the surrealistic jokes of modern life.

Footnotes
1 Colby, Anne & William Damon. “Listening to a Different
Voice: A Review of Gilligan’s In a Different Voice.” Merrill-Palmer Quarterly
29, 4 (October 1983). Walker, Lawrence J. “Sex Differences in the Development
of Moral Reasoning: A Critical Review.” Child Development 55 (1984).
2 Haack, Susan. Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate The
University of Chicago Press (1998).
3 Radcliffe Richards, Janet. “Why Feminist Epistemology Isn’t”.
The Flight From Science and Reason ed. Paul Gross, Norman Levitt, Martin
Lewis, New York Academy of Sciences (1997).

OB