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V.S. Naipaul’s view of culture

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I read a lot of Naipaul in my youth and see value in his work. But Ian Buruma’s obituary profile reminds me of the main way in which I disagreed with him.

Naipaul believed there were “whole cultures”: comprehensive, harmonious, indigenous, and hermetic. Examples included classical India, England, and pre-colonial West Africa. A whole culture was “wounded” when it was mixed up with foreign elements, usually as a result of conquest or deferential imitation.

Naipaul was politically incorrect in three respects. He admired the “whole cultures” of Europe, such as England, and emphasized their indigenous roots. He saw many interventions as imperialistic–not just European conquests but, for example, the Islamic influence in India or the Arab influence on non-Arab Muslims. And he mocked people in the global South who made unsophisticated efforts to imitate the imperial centers: West Indians pretending to be British, or Malays pretending to be Arabs.

On the other hand, Naipaul was in sync with certain strains of post-colonial thought: he liked indigeneity and opposed cultural appropriation.

It’s true that “cosmopolitan” was a positive word in Naipaul’s lexicon, and he claimed to be cosmopolitan himself. But he insisted that a cosmopolitan was at home in more than one culture, truly understanding and living it. Lightly borrowing some elements of other cultures didn’t count:

[Satyajit] Ray was a Bengali intellectual and artist who was as much at home in European as in Indian culture. He loved Indian art and music as much as European classical music or literature, and had a deep knowledge of all these things. The fact that most of us eat American junk food, or watch Hollywood movies, doesn’t make us necessarily more cosmopolitan. To be cosmopolitan you need to feel at home in various different cultures, as Ray did, and few people do even now. As far as the shrinking world is concerned, this is easy to exaggerate.

For what it’s worth, I believe:

  1. There is no indigeneity. We have all migrated. Not only people but also ideas move constantly. Every group has been deeply influenced by other groups for as far back as we can see.
  2. There are no whole cultures. A culture is an assemblage of ideas about the world (defining both “ideas” and “world” broadly). Since everyone holds at least slightly different ideas, labeling people as members of a culture just means that most of them share some important ideas. It’s a statistical generalization about the beliefs of a population. Furthermore, the ideas that we happen to hold are always badly insufficient, and we are always looking for more. Because of our profound human limitations–cognitive and imaginative–every culture is drastically incomplete.
  3. Mixing is good. India, for example, is not a “wounded civilization” because the original Hindu whole has been rent by Muslims and Europeans. It is a fabulous quilt of diversity, and has been for three millennia. Even the Hindu aspect is massively diverse.
  4. Imitation is good, although you have to do it with creativity, respect, and taste. Some of Naipaul’s most effective criticism was aimed at poor efforts at imitation.
  5. Imperialism is bad. But that’s not because it disrupts indigeneity and cultural harmony or because it introduces ideas that should stay somewhere else. It’s bad because it involves forcibly seizing land and goods while usually also killing, exploiting, and (literally) raping people. The bad part is the violence and exploitation, not the mixing.

See also: what is cultural appropriation?; notes on cultural appropriation after the royal wedding; and everyone unique, all connected.

from classical liberalism to a civic perspective

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Earlier this summer, I was in the van Mises Room in the Friedrich von Hayek Program in the James Buchanan Building at George Mason University, talking about my intellectual hero, Elinor Ostrom, who learned a great deal from Hayek and Buchanan. This is a sketch of how I presented my own position. By the way, the audience was ideologically diverse, and each attendee held nuanced views; but I wanted to say something about the people for whom the space was named.

Hayek objected to thinking about “social justice” for two reasons that I endorse. First, no person or group has nearly enough cognitive or moral capacity to decide what everyone deserves across a whole society. Second, thinking about “social justice” encourages ideas about what the state should do to make the society just and to keep it just. I’ve collected quotations from a wide range of political theorists who move quickly from ideas of social justice to blueprints for states. There’s an interesting “tell” in Philip Pettit’s influential book Republicanism when he distinguishes between the objectives of “the authorities” (people who exercise power in a republican system) from what “we, as system designers” seek. He imagines his readers to be system-designers, but we are not that. We are participants in existing systems. And if we had the power to design and enact a real polity, we should be primarily concerned with humility and with placing limits on our own power to dictate to others. Hundreds of millions of people were shot or gassed in the 1900s by people who thought their job was to design polities and who had opportunities to do so.

The main question that confronts us is what should we do, not what regime should we live in. If I could choose which country I’d like mine to resemble–Denmark, Burkina Faso, or North Korea?–I would vote for Denmark. But I don’t need an elaborate theory to help me answer that question, nor do I need a theoretical rationale for my choice. Interestingly, everyone from a classical liberal to a social democrat would concur. It appears that well- designed, balanced regimes that rest on strong civic cultures optimize both freedom and equality.

I can vote on whether to make the US a little more like Denmark, and that is the way I usually choose to vote (i.e., for candidates of the left or center-left in our system). But my vote is far from the most consequential civic decision I make, and those candidates won’t redesign our regime. Like me, they are embedded in complex systems that they seek to adjust from where they are.

However, none of the above means that we should cease assessing the justice, fairness, and desirability of the situations that we observe around us. In fact, we must not only assess but try to remedy the injustices we see. That is our duty as ethical persons. We can think about social justice as members of a society, not as designers of it.

In a polycentric world, we are participants in many overlapping and nested political, economic, cultural, linguistic, and natural systems, all at once. We are immanent in these systems but we can influence them. We have moves to make in the “games” that we find ourselves in, but we can also change the rules or shift to different games. We are public entrepreneurs who can choose where and how to exercise leverage.

As such, we have much to gain from Vincent and Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington School of Political Economy. First, we obtain the concept of polycentricity itself and a theory of ourselves as a participants in numerous interrelated systems. Second, the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework gives us a way of identifying the “action arenas,” “contexts,” “actors,” etc. that we must understand in order to be effective. Third, the list of design principles that Lin Ostrom and colleagues gleaned from experiments and observations is not only useful for practice–which it is–but it also exemplifies a process of gleaning rule-of-thumb guidelines from complex reality.

Yet the Bloomington School does not suffice. It focuses on certain problems that confront groups of people–e.g., how to encourage contributions and discourage free-riding–but not on other problems, such as how to deal with disagreements about principles or about the justice of boundaries among groups. The School offers a response to power asymmetries (basically, the classical liberal response of reducing concentrated power and encouraging people to manage their own concerns at the local level). This response is important but it doesn’t satisfy me as way of dealing with massive disparities in wealth and power or oppressive mentalities and norms.

Finally, the Bloomington School’s concrete suggestions (when abstracted from its philosophical background) are too value-neutral. The design principles, for example, would be just as useful for fascists as for democrats; just as useful for a cocaine cartel as for a community hospital.

We need to know what is right. As human beings, we lack direct access to certainties about ethics and justice. Our intuitions and are badly fallible. Most of our forebears had terrible values, and we are also subject to error for the same reasons they were. The best we can do is to listen and learn from people who have different values and interests from our own. Under the heading of “listening and learning,” I include not only discourse and deliberation but also art and narrative.

Thus we need a theory of communication, a theory that helps us to avoid propaganda and ideology, to distinguish good rhetorical moves from bad ones, and to design good formats for discussion (broadly defined). For that theory, I’d look to the Frankfurt School more than the Bloomington School, to Habermas more than the Ostroms.

And both the Frankfurt School and the Bloomington School are most helpful for relatively stable situations in which a community exists and faces problems of collective action or of disagreement. These schools are less helpful for moments when a community needs to be formed, when some people are excluded from a community that they have a right to join, or when some people want to exit a system that they find oppressive. For these situations, we need the tradition of nonviolent civil resistance represented by Gandhi and King. I come to that tradition without a fixed commitment to pacifism (I happen to think that some wars are just). Instead, I believe we can learn general principles from cases in which people forego violence yet still confront power.

The Bloomington School offers a framework: a cluster of theories, models, theses, and findings. I think we need a larger framework that encompasses the Bloomington School plus theories of deliberation and of nonviolence.

See also: social justice from the citizen’s perspective; against state-centric political theory; the legacy of Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington School; and Habermas, Ostrom, Gandhi (II).

how philosophy is supposed to work

(Posted during the Social Ontology 2018 Conference, hosted at Tufts) We live in a positivist culture in which many smart people hold fairly simple views of science and believe that all rigorous thought is scientific. Their objection to highly abstract conceptual questions and to questions of value (moral, political, or aesthetic) is that these matters cannot be scientific; hence progress is impossible. Endless debate must result from the brute fact that we hold different opinions.

But we must figure out what to value and what to believe about conceptual issues. Given our cognitive and moral limitations as individuals, our best way to think about such matters is with other people–learning from their perspectives and testing our beliefs with them. Words are not our only tools for thinking together–mathematical notations, diagrams, images, music, and bodily movements also work–but words are awfully helpful and usually play a role even when we make heavy use of the alternatives.

Therefore, human beings talk about conceptual and normative matters. We always do, everywhere and in every era. But a literal conversation has drawbacks. Since an actual, oral dialogue must involve a small number of people, the cognitive resources are limited. It lasts for a finite amount of time–too brief to address all the relevant questions and issues. And it proceeds in a linear fashion, with one comment or question occupying attention at any given moment, followed by the next one. Although people may make discursive moves like saying, “Let’s go back to your earlier point P, because I disagree with it,” the participants can barely explore the whole network of potentially connected ideas. A conversation is one walk through one part of the network.

A discipline like philosophy is an effort to improve the conversation by institutionalizing it. Many people can participate in a discussion that is organized in the form of journals, books, symposia, and reviews. Participants publish their claims and reasons, leaving them on the record to be picked up by others. They take time to make each point carefully, offering reasons and considering objections. If someone claims P, other people are supposed to read and cite that claim before they say P or not-P. If you criticize P, then other people who begin by believing P are supposed to read and consider your objection to P before they use it as a premise in their arguments. The debate still continues permanently, but it is supposed to become increasingly organized and refined in a process that is just as cumulative as a “normal science” is. Moreover, the strictly philosophical debate is not insulated from other intellectual work but is constantly informed by developments in the sciences, humanistic thought, and actual events in the world.

This is all idealized. I am perfectly aware that not everyone can participate in a professional discipline’s discussion; in fact, the vast majority of human beings are excluded, for a whole range of reasons. Nor would everyone want to join even if that were easy for them. Those who participate act imperfectly, showing too much deference to certain authorities, demonstrating group-think, etc. And ethics (in particular) still suffers from myopia about cultural diversity and empirical data that Owen Flanagan well describes in his new book, The Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibility.

Still the ideal has significance as a heuristic. It draws our attention to Robert Merton’s four CUDOS norms, which he developed for science (per Wikipedia):

  • Communalism all scientists should have equal access to scientific goods (intellectual property) and there should be a sense of common ownership in order to promote collective collaboration, secrecy is the opposite of this norm.
  • Universalism all scientists can contribute to science regardless of race, nationality, culture, or gender.
  • Disinterestedness according to which scientists are supposed to act for the benefit of a common scientific enterprise, rather than for personal gain.
  • Organized Skepticism Skepticism means that scientific claims must be exposed to critical scrutiny before being accepted.

These norms also apply to philosophy, and we can add more values, such as 1) the norm of citing and addressing previous contributions to the same discussion; 2) the principle that academic discussions should ultimately (but not always directly) benefit public life; 3) the value of being permeable and connected to other discussions in other fields; and 4) an affirmative effort to incorporate people and perspectives that have hitherto been marginalized.

See also: is all truth scientific truth?, does naturalism make room for the humanities?, why social scientists should pay attention to metaphysics, and adding democracy to Robert Merton’s CUDOS norms for science.

civics in the very early grades

I’m far from an expert on civics for young children, but I bump into the subject in various capacities–as an author of the College Career and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies, which covers grades k-12; as an evaluator of a pilot civics program in Ukraine, which includes a first-grade curriculum; as a proud board member of Discovering Justice, which focuses more than other nonprofits do on the early grades; and as the director of CIRCLE when we commissioned “Indicators and Measures of Civic Outcomes for Elementary School Students” by Bernadette Chi, JoAnn Jastrzab, and Alan Melchior.

If I’m asked what little kids should learn about civics, this is my working answer. Mostly, they should learn how to relate appropriately to other people: sharing resources fairly, taking turns, resolving conflicts peacefully, and addressing common problems. They should also begin to see that the same issues arise at larger scales and for adults in formal roles. Just as they should they help a classmate who’s crying on the playground, so “neighborhood helpers” like firefighters should help citizens in need. Just as they should resolve disputes with words, so should national leaders. Just as their classroom has rules, so does the society. At some point in the early grades, they should begin to realize that just as kids may fail to treat each other right, so may adults who hold official roles; and when that happens, it requires remedies. These analogies should be represented in the materials, such as historical narratives, that children read and otherwise study academically.

I don’t think we know whether experiencing high-quality civics at age 7 matters at age 17 (or 70). You might expect that it only matters if the experience is reinforced in between, but that’s an empirical question. In 1999, Sir Bernard Crick observed that, “there is no political Piaget,” and longitudinal research on civic development before adolescence is sorely lacking. Thus I base my advice on accumulated classroom experience and theory, not on statistical data.

empathy, sympathy, compassion, justice

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I’d posit the following definitions:

  • Empathy: Feeling a similar emotion in response to someone else’s emotional state. Your friend is mad at her boss because he treated her unfairly. That makes you mad at her boss. Your anger is probably different in texture and intensity from hers, but it’s the same in kind, an imperfect reproduction of her mental state.
  • Sympathy: Feeling a supportive emotion in response to someone else’s emotional state that is not the same as that person’s original emotion. She is mad at her boss, so you become sorry for her, or committed to fairness, or sad about the state of the world, or nostalgic for better times–but not angry at her boss. Then you are sympathetic. (NB You can be both sympathetic and empathetic if you feel several emotions.)
  • Compassion: A species of the genus sympathy. Another person’s negative emotion causes you to have a specific supportive feeling that is not the same as her emotion: you sincerely wish that her distress would end without blaming her for it.
  • Justice: A situation or decision characterized by fairness, goodness, rightness, etc. (These are contestable ideas and may be in tension with each other.) The English word “just”–like dikaios in classical Greek–can be applied either to a situation or to a person who cares and aims for justice.

There is an old and rich debate about which character traits and subjective states are best suited to pursuing justice. One answer is that you should be a just person, one who tries to decide what is fair or best for all (all things considered), who desires that outcome, and who works to pursue it. A different response is that we are not well suited to defining and pursuing justice itself. It’s better to cultivate other emotions, such as empathy, sympathy, compassion–or loyalty, aversion to harm, or commitment to specific rules–in order to deliver more just outcomes, all things considered.

I haven’t yet read Paul Bloom’s new book, Against Empathy, but based on this interview and other secondary material, I take it to be an empirically-based contribution to this debate. Bloom marshals evidence that empathy is a highly unreliable guide to justice, probably more likely to mislead than to inform. We should cultivate justice itself, not settle for a substitute, and certainly not the poor substitute of empathy.

For instance, Donald Trump can make people feel empathy for a small number of individuals whose families were allegedly victimized by undocumented aliens, and then use that emotion to build support for deporting millions of people who have harmed no one. A famous example is Edmund Burke’s outrage at the mistreatment of Marie Antoinette, which obscured any concern for the countless people tortured, executed, or “disappeared” by the ancien regime that she represented. (By the way, I happen to respect Burke a lot–and I don’t think it was fair or smart to execute the Queen–but this passage is still a good example of misplaced empathy.)

Empathy can also substitute for justice, as I argued on a visit to Israel in 2013. You congratulate yourself for feeling some version of a suffering person’s emotion and excuse yourself from fixing the problem.

Compassion may be better than empathy. Instead of feeling the same emotion as the other person, you feel a combination of beneficence and equanimity that may be a more reliable guide to acting well. But it’s possible that compassion only clears the deck for reasoning about what you should actually do.

For its part, justice can be emotional. You can feel a powerful urge to make the world more just. That is helpful insofar as the feeling motivates you and insofar as people obtain genuine insights from our emotions; but it is dangerous because the emotion of desiring justice can be misplaced. You can feel great about improving the world when you are actually harming it.

Justice is also necessarily discursive. You must put into words–at least inside your own head–what is good or fair, and why, and make yourself accountable for that position. Therefore, much hinges on whether we human beings can reason explicitly about justice in ways that improve upon our strictly affective reactions to particular situations.

See also: empathy: good or bad?; the limits of putting yourself in their shoes and looking with their eyes; an alternative to Moral Foundations Theory; structured moral pluralism (a proposal); and how to save the Enlightenment Ideal.