The myths that legitimated their hierarchies
Bernard Williams says some things relevant to this idea of ‘betraying your community’ in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, which I was re-reading a couple of days ago.
“The dispositions and reactions that are exercised within one culture are not merely diverted or shown to be inappropriate by the fact that its members are presented with the behavior of another culture. In any case, it is artificial to treat these matters as if they always involved two clearly self-contained cultures. A fully individuable culture is at best a rare thing. Cultures, subcultures, fragments of cultures, constantly meet one another and exchange and modify practices and attitudes. Social practices could never come forward with a certificate saying that they belonged to a genuinely different culture, so that they were guaranteed immunity to alien judgements and reactions.” [p 158]
“Never” is putting it a little too strongly – which is why I said that tropical islands are a somewhat special case, and isolated groups are a somewhat special case, and that it depends, in a recent discussion of moral relativism. That’s because I think groups that really have been entirely isolated from competing ways of thinking may be a somewhat special case – and also because I think it depends for instance on what people within the groups think about their lives. If some people in the groups are being, say, beaten or raped or mutilated or forcibly married to people they dislike, and they are unhappy and know they are unhappy and say they are unhappy – then I think outsiders can make moral judgments. In the absence of those conditions, it’s trickier, though that doesn’t rule out further inquiry and investigation. But that seems to end up at the same place Williams ends up at: whether or not social practices could ever come forward with a certificate saying that they belonged to a genuinely different culture, we both think they could not be guaranteed immunity to alien judgements and reactions.
Williams goes on, a few pages later:
“There is no route back from reflectiveness…This phenomenon of self-consciousness, together with the institutions and processes that support it, constitute one reason why past forms of life are not a real option for the present, and why attempts to go back often produce results that are ludicrous on a small scale and hideous on a larger one. This can be seen, above all, with reactionary projects to recreate supposedly contented hierarchical societies of the past. These projects in any case face the criticism that their pictures of the past are fantasies; but even if there have been contented hierarchies, any charm they have for us is going to rest on their having been innocent and not having understood their own nature. This cannot be recreated, since measures would have to be taken to stop people raising questions that are, by now, there to be raised.
But if the questions are there to be raised, should we not – or, at any rate, may we not – raise them about those societies as they existed in the past? In particular, may we not ask whether those societies, however unaware they may have been, were unjust? Can a relativism of distance put them beyond this question?”[p 164]
He adds: “They may not have been wrong in thinking that their social order was necessary for them. It is rather the way in which they saw it as necessary – as religiously or metaphysically necessary – that we cannot now accept. Where we see them as wrong was in the myths that legitimated their hierarchies. We see our view of our society and ourselves as more naturalistic than their view of themselves. This naturalistic conception of society, expressed by Hobbes and Spinoza at the beginning of the modern world, represents one of the ways in which the world has become entzaubert, in Max Weber’s famous phrase: the magic has gone from it. (The current attempts by Islamic forces in particular to reverse that process – if that is what those attempts really are – do not show that the process is local or reversible only that it can generate despair.)” [p 165]
That was in 1985. He was paying attention.
There seems to be two separate questions: can we judge past cultures and can we judge other contemporary cultures? They are very different.
If absolutely no thinker in ancient times condemns slavery, is it a mark against Aristotle that he justifies it? However, in the case of contemporary cultures, there is, just for starters, a UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights that is accessible to any literate person and quite probably accessible in audio form for the use of illiterate persons. That is, unlike Aristotle, the contemporary apologist of, say, slavery or patriarchy has no excuses. Our contemporary Islamist has a multitude of sources at hand which affirm the equality of the sexes, affirm religious tolerance, etc.
Yes, he was paying attention! This was the chapter I referred Kees to, if you recall.
Read in conjunction with the last story, about the almost unbelieveable abuse of ‘Hannah Shah,’ and the idiocy displayed in Luton recently (as well as, it is only fair to add, the madness in Brazil), it is just about time that the archbishop of Canterbury woke up! The man is a blind man leading the blind. He’s not paying attention!
And yet so determined are Christians to have their voice heeded in public space, that they are prepared, like the archbishop, to disregard all the evidence of the harm that the fatal idea of multiculturalism does, and to support the culturicidal ravings of the Islamists. If this process cannot be stopped, we are looking at very serious problems ahead.
If I were Hannah, I wouldn’t stay in Britain, and for sure I wouldn’t be an Anglican. What is really sad is to see her playing the same game that the archbishop is playing, when no one should be playing these games at all. But she can get mileage out of her outrage that Christians cannot ply their trade only by allowing her former religionists the right to ply theirs. And this is precisely the problem!
Time to tell people that religion is fine, so long as it doesn’t force its beliefs in public space, doesn’t abuse human rights, and people are completely free to come and go as they may. Public space is essentially entzaubert: there are too many competing magics. But private space has to be un-magicked too, to a certain extent, otherwise it gives permission to religious leaders to subordinate women and abuse little boys and girls. But if we can’t keep the magic out of public space, religion is the clock on a particularly nasty bomb.
They’re different but they’re related, and Williams discusses them together.
The UDHR…well it’s available in some sense, but in many places it’s not in others, for the simple reason that people don’t know about it. You can’t look for what you’re not aware of. So it’s not really reasonable to assume that everyone in, say, NWFP is fully conversant with the UD. But it’s also a mistake to assume that no one in NWFP has ever heard so much as the faintest rumour that there are places on earth where women have equal rights – as you say, multiple sources.
Anyway – there are thinkers in ancient times who at least have the kinds of thoughts that could prompt reflection about slavery. And after all, Diogenes questioned every custom there was.
I’ll have to take a look at Finley’s book again to see if anyone did question slavery before Ari.
Don’t invoke the name! He’s gone – I don’t want him coming back. No, I didn’t remember you’d referred to the chapter, but I always like reading Williams.
That 17:56 comment was answering amos, by the way; I hadn’t seen yours yet.
I can kind of understand her attraction to Christianity, if she went to a church where there really was a lot of talk of love. It must have seemed terribly welcome…
Poor Nicholas…Jesus said ‘Be nice’ therefore Christianity ended slavery. Uh huh…
I think we can still say that ancient slavery was wrong even if we don’t think the ancients were blameworthy.
I’m not an expert on Greek history, so let’s subtitute Homer for Aristotle.
As a matter of fact, the Iliad begins with a fight between Achilles and Agamemnon over a slave girl, and we can hardly fault Homer for not emailing Amnesty International or for not denouncing traffic in women slaves. As Jakob says above, ancient slavery was wrong, but the codes for understanding that were not available to Homer. However, even if today there are people who are unaware that treating women as sub-human is wrong, in almost all or in every environment, there are leaders who are aware of Western values (which are also Chinese values, Japanese values, etc,) about women and who reject them. All Islamic leaders are completely aware that the rest of the world does not share their values about treating women. So they have no excuse.
Hm. (I’m not being nitpicky! Just trying to pin down the truth.) One of the features of the Taliban at any rate was that they were all extremely ignorant. And observers often comment on the extreme ignorance of the imams who come from Pakistan to the UK – who then become leaders of a sort (and were/are perhaps village leaders in Pakistan). I take your point but I think in the detail there are some variations.
Anyway I actually think it is possible to fault Homer, in a sense. There’s no need to blame him, and not much point either; but I think we can notice what he takes for granted (the killing of the female slaves at the end of the Odyssey, the incident where Odysseus and his crew land at a settlement and kill all the men and enslave all the women) and register the brutality of the past.
I’m no classicist but I do teach the Odyssey to my special needs students (usually following up with ‘Oh Brother Where Art Thou’ just for fun.) and I always got the impression that among all the heroics Homer was subtly recognising that the guy was little more than a pirate and brigand who brought his misfortunes on himself. Not to mention decimating two generations of his kingdom’s youth.
Ah that’s interesting.
In a way all the Homeric males come off as bullies and brigands – but I’ve always thought that was my 20th century female reaction as opposed to Homer’s. But who knows – maybe Homer was a nerdy bard who hated all these muscular blowhards.
Hektor has some very good moments – and his role is defensive, which makes him seem less brigandish.
(I’m no classicist either, I’m just interested. As an amateur.)
It’s impossible to make Homeric heroes seem entirely sympathetic to a modern audience, because their value-system, their judgments on what constituted arete, or excellence, are alien. It’s like trying to explain to modern teenagers that Louis XIV was not joking when he described how important it was to condescend to people, who would love you more if you did… Might as well be a Martian…
OB: there are interpretations of Homer by Greek scholars which basically take it for granted that his poems are anti-war polemics, and that part of the *point* is how horrible the women’s suffering is.
But I don’t think we should somehow say Aristotle wasn’t blameworthy, or Homer either, because while they might not have had access to John Stuart Mill or anything, they still had eyes and ears and brains. They were surrounded by women and slaves, and could observe their violations and indignities and suffering.
And indeed, many thinkers *did* come to object to sex inequality, for instance, because of the aforementioned eyes and ears and brains. It seems silly to say that Aristotle had no access to criticisms of sex inequality when PLATO, his own teacher, criticized it harshly.
Hector comes off best in the Iliad, and he’s the warrior closest to a contemporary ethical ideal: he’s a good husband, a good father, not afraid to show his feelings, not afraid to be afraid. Achilles is a brute, a killing machine. There are certainly anti-war passages in the Iliad, although it’s hard to read the whole book as an anti-war polemic. It’s not a Rambo movie or a video war game either: that is, it’s not a glorification of brute killing. War is hell, Homer makes that clear, as he makes clear how horrible it is to die in battle. If it weren’t a complex work, we still wouldn’t be reading it today.
And yet for roughly 3000 years, the name of Achilles has resounded through the halls of fame – and continues to stand as a symbol of might, as in VD Hanson’s Shield of Achilles.
Meanwhile, Hector survives as a name no-one would dream of giving their kid [esp. in the UK, where it recalls a dopey puppet dog on TV in the 60s]; and as a particularly unpleasant verb.
Just goes to show, literary scholars don’t run the world.
And how many Anglophones name their kids Achilles? Or Odysseus?
Hector is fairly common name in Chile. There is nothing strange about it: it’s not a pretentious or literary name. A well-known construction union leader was named Hector Cuevas. No one is named Achilles or Odysseus.
Hector isn’t a common name among Anglophones, but it exists; Achilles and Odysseus don’t.
Come on Dave! Admit!
It reminds me of the time a friend said musingly ‘There’s no word for “blue sky” in [some language].’ He was disconcerted when I pointed out that there’s no such word in English either. Yeah very few people call their kid Hector, but nobody calls a kid Achilles or Odysseus.
Just goes to show, historians can have a sleepy moment.
:- )
Achille is a name, in French, Italian… I can get 4 million hits on Google for it… But I never said people called their kids Achilles, I said his fame is eternal – it stands exactly as his ethos, portrayed in Homer’s work, would have desired. He is remembered, as the badassest badass dude of all time. The bit about hiding in girl’s clothes gets overlooked… ;-)
And Hector’s still a silly name. Trust me on silly names, I’m stuck with one.
You’re stuck with one?! What do you think I am!?! I might as well be called Odysseus.
And I know you didn’t say in so many words that people call their kids Achilles, but the bit about Hector suggests that Achilles would be a more viable name than Hector would. No good trying to eel out of it now.
Fair point about Achille though.