Cultural Values

The other day, I was talking with some people about foreign education. In particular, do we as Americans step in and give them our own educational system when we see fit? Or do we let them develop their own culture? I tended toward the latter option, and although it would need numerous caveats in a concrete situation (for example, would it be all right to give funding for them to develop their systems, and other issues), it made me think of broader cultural concerns.

Basically, the position I want to put forward is this: every culture has its own genuine vantage point on reality, and we need to work with that (if anyone is interested in listening to theoretical justifications for this, it is based on Parmenides and Neoplatonism – but that is a different post). When Americans champion values of freedom and independence, there is an actual good in that. We have seen something real about the world. There would be no way of subjectively and relativistically realizing anything unless reality allowed it – freedom could not be seen as a good, even "subjectively" - unless it actually does something for human, social reality. But at the same time (as I have been forced to acknowledge against my American intuitions), other societies that champion communal values and concrete regulations for guiding action have their own insights into reality which we often lack and which generally conflict with ours.

So there is room to say that American education should grow American values – there is something there worthwhile – but at the same time there should be, say, Islamic education growing Islamic values. There's good stuff within their own framework, and Muslims should be looking to their own roots (sometimes in recovering what has been left behind, such as struggling/ijtihad over legal canons, but still in a way genuinely Islamic).

Part one of the thesis, then, is that every culture has its own truth, or perhaps its own finite witness to truth if that is better - a truth neither fully absolute nor merely conventional, but real nonetheless. Part two is that it is better to work within a tradition than to syncretically combine them. Different traditions and cultures have spent hundreds and thousands of years melding material together. Sometimes this is done more effectively than others, but there is still more of an organic unity between elements of an established culture than one put together from whatever novelties excite people. Now, cultures are living and growing, and can incorporate new elements. But this still isn't done randomly. New elements must be grafted in to the old tree, worked in so that they work with the whole. Throwing American models of government into the Middle East causes problems, whether or not they are better models of government – they have consonances in the Euro-American system (including thought about the nature of the person, responsibility, role of government, states of nature, dissemination of knowledge, economics, etc.) which are completely lacking in other areas of the world. It is similarly difficult applying insights learned from other cultures to a contemporary American environment (for example, how hard is it to convince people of the benefits of available health care and public transportation?).

Part three is that, since cultures have their own witness to truth by their relation to reality (and so to Being), cultures that negatively define themselves lack a witness insofar as they negatively define themselves. Terrorist groups have relatively little cohesion outside of fighting against some common enemy. There might be some such cohesion, and to this extent they get something about the world, but a negative and merely relative identity keeps them from having anything to develop. Taking ones own race as the master race in opposition to all others is, again, merely a relation against others.