Bad Legacy
A reader sent me the link to this interesting item in the Guardian. The subhead starts things right off – ‘Colonial attitudes linger, finding their most xenophobic expression among liberal defenders of free speech.’ Uh oh.
The argument is basically a ‘taboo’ argument. Every culture has some sacred things, which should be beyond criticism, and certainly beyond mockery. In the UK, it’s the Queen that’s sacred; all cultures have ’em.
Neither is rationalism alien to eastern cultures. Science and mathematics thrived both in the great age of Hindu civilisation and Islamic ascendancy. Eastern cultures have long traditions of theatre, reform movements and of absorbing criticism. But when a creative work offends the sacred, it loses its message.
Well, that’s debatable.
Sikhism believes that the rational is as speculative, variable and subjective as any other construction of belief. From that philosophical premise, the sacred cannot be dismissed. Jacques Derrida similarly analyses the subjectivity of rationalism. Further, Sikhism holds that language is limited. The Guru Granth Sahib uses several tools of communication including poetry, music and pragmatic symbolism. Again, a 20th-century western philosopher – Foucault – has also articulated the limits of language.
And therefore ‘Behzti’ had to be stopped? Not sure I get the connection.
The sacred may not make sense in the constructed paradigms of rationalism, but it sustains people through traumatic times, as well as giving strength to the successful. Offending the sacred wounds those whose hopes and culture are orientated around the subjective inscrutability of sacred icons. Fifty years after the end of colonialism, most British people are comfortable living with people of different colours. But many are still uncomfortable with different cultures. The legacy of colonialism lingers, now disguised as a defence of “free speech”. Ironically, it finds its most xenophobic expression among liberals.
What if the defence of free speech is actually not disguised colonialism but in fact a defence of free speech? How can you be sure it’s the one rather than the other? Are you sure you can tell the difference? Or are you in fact using the dread phrase ‘legacy of colonialism’ as an intimidation-device.
Now if you want to see someone else, this time a ‘Westerner,’ take on the dratted old legacy of colonialism, here’s a fun item. It’s at Salon, so that means clicking through an ad, but it’s worth it. The item you get is really quite staggering. This link was also sent by a reader. The item is an advice column, the question is from a guy in love with a woman who can’t bring herself to introduce him to her family because he’s not of the right religion or ethnic background. The columnist pins his ears back. The columnist gives that man what for. The columnist is a piece of work.
Consider how you have been indoctrinated since birth in a secular, scientific, cosmopolitan faith. Cosmopolitanism teaches us to be broad and accepting, but it’s easiest to be broad and accepting of others who are also broad and accepting. When the other seems genuinely narrow and parochial, we see that narrowness and parochialism as a barrier to some other higher, truer reality — our Western reality.
Very true. It is easier to be broad and accepting of others who are also broad and accepting. I’ve noticed that myself. Similarly it’s easier to be kind to people who are also kind, and polite to people who are also polite, and considerate of people who are also considerate. In a like manner it’s easier to be a pissy rotten bastard to people who are also pissy rotten bastards.
In order to see things a little differently, try to imagine that she is not being held prisoner by a narrow-minded family and culture but rather is struggling to preserve her identity against the onslaught of your intoxicating Western-ness, your powerful banjo of I, your hypnotic gaze, your KitchenAid mixer of desire and promise, your Cadillac and your Camels, your plantations and riding mowers and frontier hats, the echo of imperial riches in your thick, sweet voice, your arrogant swagger…
Wha…? Cadillac? Plantations?? The guy didn’t mention any Cadillac or riding mowers, let alone any plantations. I like purple writing now and then, if it’s done well, but there is a limit.
For the sake of argument, consider how innocently our genocidal forefathers went about curing the world of its savagery, and consider how harshly they later were judged. Consider how with progressively fine gradations each generation codifies its righteousness. Consider even the possibility that you may be in fact a wretched criminal in the eyes of history…You don’t need to lie to yourselves or to anyone else. If you do the hard work of accepting how closely she, her family and her culture are knitted together in one collective, diffused identity, you may come to feel a little differently about what we in the West revere as “telling the truth.”
Aaarrrggghhh! The kind reader who sent the item said this: ‘I’ve been enjoying b&w on and off for a while now. I made the mistake of reading this, was completely deflated with revulsion – and thought “what would Ophelia Benson think?”‘ Well, that’s what I think – a loud guttural inarticulate scream of disgust, that’s what.
It’s not that I think there’s no such thing as a legacy of colonialism, or that I think ‘Westerners’ are never arrogant or intolerant. But – oh well. You get the idea.
The Queen is supposed to be beyond criticism? We clearly just don’t get worked up about taboo breaking and criticism of our culture as much as.. er.. some people do–I didn’t even know we weren’t supposed to criticise the queen!
The example given about the queen is when the aussie prime minister put his arm around her – I don’t remember this leading to violent street protests and death threats, but maybe they just weren’t reported – more of the ‘legacy of colonialism’?
There was a letter in response to this article a couple of days later (http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,1392552,00.html), which included the interesting assertion that “The freedom of speech principle which claims to be democratic is, in fact, deeply racially coded.”
“Personally I find some ‘cultures’ quite odious and have no desire for them to be accepted as part of the British way of life.”
Exactly so. I am fed up of hearing about different “cultural values” whenever another cultrue is critised. And I wish the people who use such a defense were honest about which of our cultural values they find are luxuries which can be dispensed with in the course of being trendy and appreciative of “other”. (Now there is a wanky term if ever there was one!!).
Is equality of opportunity for women, just some cultural value of ours, which it is OK for other cultures to dispense with if it is not part of their culture? Or the right to be homesexual? Or the right to not beleive in a god? Its all very well going on about “different” values (as if they are merely differnt, and not “worse”). Perhaps many such people do actually belive that values such as there are dispensible artifacts of one culture. In which case they should be honest about it and say “some cultures think that women are property and gays should be killed, but that is just their different values, and we should celebrate the difference”. And after that they should say “I am a good liberal” with a straight face.
So Hindus are spectacularly tolerant are they? Tell that to the hundreds of Muslims killed after what turned out to be an accidental fire which killed a few Hindus on a train – killings encouraged, incidentally, by the obviously highly tolerant local Governor.
Nick S.
“(Oh, and is it all this sort of ranting that’s getting N&C a bad reputation ?”
Its only ranting when the ranter says something I disagree with. Otherwise it is called “talking sense”. ;-) (Tongue firmly in cheek).
ChrisM
Glad that’s cleared up then !
I think Dr Rai’s article is quite refreshing. Open hostility to free speech makes a change from the more common ‘I’m totally in favour of free speech but it doesn’t give you the right to criticise sacred stuff’ attitude that is normally taken. I find appeals to this variety of ‘free speech’ very annoying; at least Dr Rai is honest.
Can somebody explain what the word sacred actually means? I just looked it up on dictionary.com, here are two of the six entries ‘Worthy of religious veneration: the sacred teachings of the Buddha’ and ‘Worthy of respect; venerable’. I saw a ‘sacred’ section in a cd store the other day and since it didn’t include anything by Beethoven or Radiohead I assume ‘sacred’ is used in the first sense. Does this influence the kind of reviews one can write about it?
Funny, I found Dr Rai’s article sophistic, and a tad self-deceptive. Any one quoting Derrida as evidence that subjectively holding any phenomena we like as sacred is undergrad common-room piffle; unfortunately he’s a senior theologian and that therefore apparently excuses him.
Beethoven and Radiohead ? Probably shouldnt describe them as sacred; that’s just asking for some ironic conceptual tosspot to come along and subvert their beauty… better than Blue though, and probably even Britney…
OB – Purple prose indeed:
“your powerful banjo of I”
– sounds like something written by Lawrence Ferlinghetti !
“Any one quoting Derrida as evidence that subjectively holding any phenomena we like as sacred is undergrad common-room piffle”
Your batting a 100 in my book today!! However, I would go further, and suggest that anyone who quotes Derrida as evidence for anything is seriously undermining their case.
That “your powerful banjo of I” phrase has been running around my brain all morning.
I want one.
That is a good phrase, isn’t it! Plinka plinka plinka.
Nick, well, that’s how it looks to me – the Age of Theocracies thing.
As for N&C, it doesn’t really have a bad reputation that I know of. The ‘school of thought’ thing was a slight exaggeration – the school is only one person. (I mean, I’m sure there are several people who dislike it, among the several people who read it. But the one-person school of thought carries a lot of weight, so I try to mollify it when I can.)
Last word on the matter – then I’ll pop off and do something useful – this is from Eric Hobsbawm in the Guardian
“In defence of history. (It is fashionable to say ‘my truth is as valid as yours’. But it’s not true) “
Saturday January 15, 2005
“The major immediate political danger to historiography today is “anti-universalism” or “my truth is as valid as yours, whatever the evidence”. This appeals to various forms of identity group history, for which the central issue of history is not what happened, but how it concerns the members of a particular group. What is important to this kind of history is not rational explanation but “meaning”, not what happened but what members of a collective group defining itself against outsiders – religious, ethnic, national, by gender, or lifestyle – feel about it.
The past 30 years have been a golden age for the mass invention of emotionally skewed historical untruths and myths. Some of them are a public danger: I am thinking of countries like India under the BJP, the US, Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy, not to mention many of the new nationalisms, with or without fundamentalist religious reinforcement.
This produces endless claptrap on the fringes of nationalist, feminist, gay, black and other in-group histories, but it has also stimulated interesting new historical developments in cultural studies, such as what has been called the “memory boom” in history.
It is time to re-establish the coalition of those who believe in history as a rational inquiry into the course of human transformations, against those who distort history for political purposes – and more generally, against relativists and postmodernists who deny this possibility. Since some of the latter see themselves as being on the left, this may split historians in politically unexpected ways. “
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1390980,00.html
Have a good weekend !
Why is defending free speech a ‘legacy of colonialism’? I think he means that free speech as practised in the UK is the ‘legacy of colonialism’. In which case it should obviously denied to former colonials, otherwise imperialism will live on.
The person is sacred
(BLACKSTONE’S COMMENTARIES PRIVATE WRONGS.BOOK III. CHAPTER THE EIGHTH.
OF WRONGS, AND THEIR REMEDIES, RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF PERSONS.
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/blackstone/bk3ch8.htm)
The leaft touching of another’s perfon wilfully, or in anger, is a battery ; for the law cannot draw the line between different degrees of violence, and therefore totally prohibits the firft and loweft ftage of it : every man’s perfon being facred, and no other having a right to meddle with it, in any the flighteft manner.