308. Where's the Payoff, English Teacher?

"No student is going to keep making a troublesome new distinction unless he sees a payoff.  So where's the payoff on your distinction between the senses of 'civilized' (Post 306)?"

I think there's a payoff right away, in the review immediately following the one that raised the need for a distinction (on Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, in The New York Times Book Review, 8-2-15).  In it Ian Buruma says, of our destruction of Nagasaki,  "it's hard to refute [the argument that] that killing a massive number of civilians with a radiating bomb is an act of barbarism."  There we are,  "barbaric" in only one sense of "uncivilized."  (The two senses of "civilized" were "highly developed" and "humane.")

 The sense in which Buruma takes it makes the Greeks and the Romans and all the "advanced" people of the ancient world barbarians.  After becoming aware of the two meanings I don't want to do that so I say, "Wait a minute, Mr. Buruma,  I'm not going along with your 'hard to refute.'"  The payoff is in what you avoid, going along with something you can't agree with when you think about it.

"But all your thought does for you is change 'barbarism' to 'cruelty,' the accurate word you'd have to accept.  A pretty small payoff, I'd say."

I don't think it's small.  With 'cruelty' you become an adult, able to assess how much inhumane behavior is necessary to build and maintain your civilization and how much isn't.  A necessary moral calculation.

"And how do you distinguish necessary cruelty from unnecessary cruelty?"

Not easily, but it can be managed. Looking back we can say that the inhumane killing of the Cimbri at Vercellae was probably necessary to build and preserve the Roman civilization we know and have benefited from.  Whereas the killing of the inhabitants of Mycalessus was not at all necessary to preserve Athenian civilization. 

"I see the difference, but for those who withhold 'civilized' from the inhumane the Romans and the Athenians are both disqualified.  They each were committing 'acts of barbarism' — though I've learned that there were extenuating circumstances at Mycalessus."

You've made my point, letting me make the larger one (this is English-teacher salesmanship now): close attention to words pays off.  Take this word in just one sense and you're standing there accepting the benefits of civilization while calling the givers of those benefits 'barbarians,' indistinguishable from those who would take them away.  You look like — forgive me — a dope.

"Whereas those who see both senses look like what?  Geniuses?"

No, simply adults experiencing the embarrassment they have just privileged themselves to.  "Me, the beneficiary of inhumanity?  Just as I thought I had purged myself of it, civilized myself."

"You don't have to explain the embarrassment to me.  I'm a Christian.  I'm always purging myself, or supposed to be purging myself, of inhumanity."

But you're not always able to do it under the name of civilization.  And before the Age of Enlightenment, the age of the Man of Feeling, you didn't need to.  You could be "civilized" in the classical sense, which carried no "humanity" clause.  The Eighteenth Century, with its expansion of sensibility — and, don't forget, of wealth, which allowed such luxuries — gave us the clause, giving us a new compliment and a new source of embarrassment.

"And gave Christianity it's great chance for a breakthrough.  I have to exult.  All those years hemmed in by the need for survival, victory in worldly competition, with the testosterone necessary to achieve it, finally ended by enough affluence to afford a few Christian feelings.  Oh blessed Enlightenment!"

But not blessed if you let it replace the first meaning of "civilized."  Do that and you forget the givers of this great expansion of humane feeling, the ones who toiled and fought, inhumanely, simply for development — without which you'll have a hard time accounting for the expansion in sensibility.  Forget the givers and you look like an ungrateful child.

"Ah, the Man of Feeling unaware that he stands on the backs of thousands of unfeeling men.  A dope."

No, "child" is the right word.  You've regressed into one-meaning simplicity.  Cut off your education in historical (and moral) complexity.

"It's so hard not to do that.  Life must have been a lot easier before we had these two senses."

Before Christianity came along, you want to say.  I do too.   But I'm not so sure.  I picture pagans happy in their inhumane development of a society, an empire, and then I read Virgil.

"You mean the great celebrator of Rome's bloody victories?"

Yes.  When he looks back on them in the Fourth Eclogue (42 BC) he apparently feels some guilt, what the coming Golden Age will "remove the last traces" of.  He's feeling what "civilized" in sense two would make him feel.  Where did that feeling come from?  It's one sense muscling in on the other, before chronology allows it.

"Ah, but human nature would allow it.  If it's down in there, waiting its time, whatever the religion."

Well, we'll certainly have to allow for the possibility.

221. Our word "Democracy": How serious is the wound in Egypt?

 
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I know, I know.  What we have done to our political vocabulary by supporting the Egyptian generals who took power from the elected Muslims is too obvious to comment on.  Everybody knows that our word "democracy" no longer means "power to the majority of the people through elections."  Everybody knows that if it doesn't mean that then it has no spine.  And everybody knows that the next time we use it to go nyah nyah to the Russians we will fall on our asses.  But still.

And here's something else everybody, including word-picky English teachers like me, knows: that your linguistic ass is sometimes the last thing that needs protection.  Anybody who doesn't know that should read Michael Gordon and Mark Landler's story in Thursday's New York Times (10-10-13), identifying what currently most needs our protection in the Middle East: the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.  The generals are our best guarantee that the treaty, and therefore Israel, and several hundred American Congressmen, will remain upright.  Gordon and Landler point to what every patriot old in statecaft knows: the political comes before the linguistic.  But still.

But doesn't the ethical come before the political?  If it does then we've put the linguistic further back in the line.  I tell myself that it would be unethical to betray Israel now, after so much support, so much common interest, so much sympathy after the Holocaust.  And betrayal, man that's what Dante said was the worst sin, to be punished on the floor of Hell.  And Dante was speaking for Thomas Aquinas, who spoke for Aristotle, who in ethics spoke for all of Western Civilization.  If you've got that kind of support for your move on the Muslims how can you hold back?  And, more to the point, what excuse do you have to whine about word use?

Well, you might have an excuse, the ever-ready realpolitik excuse, if you were persuaded that what you see as ethical behavior is really tribal behavior.  Loyalty to the Judeo-Christian tribe, upped to Western Tribe, is what drives our actions in the Middle East.  It's a war of tribe against tribe out there, and words are soldiers in that war.  We had some pretty stout ones — like "democracy" and "human rights," with "Enlightenment" backing them up — that are no longer standing up so well.  For the strength of the tribal army alone our generals (word-generals, PR guys) need to know that.  Telling them of the reality is not whining.

But even habitual whiners are making no comments.  Might it be like commenting on a cripple?  After Secretary of State John Kerry, said, right after the coup, that Egypt’s military leaders were “restoring democracy” (NYT 8-1-13) everybody looked away from the word — as they surely will do again after the statement he made Thursday, that "the United States will consider resuming aid to Egypt 'on the basis of performance' that encourages democracy through elections" (Reuters, 10-10-13).  I have no doubt that, as he keeps flogging the poor, broke-back word along, we will keep averting our eyes.

And I suppose we will keep biting our tongues because only the socially clueless, the out-of-it prof, would speak in such poor taste.  That's it, I guess, but maybe not all of it.  There is another reason: consistency, unwillingness to contradict oneself.  This is the way you play the tribal game once you have committed yourself to it.  Tribes fight pragmatically, with rhetoric.  Their test is not, "Is it true?" but "Does it work for us."  When an untruth works better (or in this case, less disastrously) than a truth you use it.  Pointing out that your tribe's spokesman speaks an untruth keeps it from working.  That weakens the tribe.  Good tribesmen don't weaken their tribe.  Ethics again, plus logic.

But there's a remaining question, still realpolitikal, still intra-tribal: what weakens a tribe more, breaking the backs of its words or calling attention to their brokenness?  And, as so often with that kind of question, we have to look long-term and short term.  For the short term I think we might well say that it's best not to call attention to the fact that our finest word-soldier is crippled.  But we can't forget the long term.  Broken backs don't heal quickly, and we don't know what battles lie ahead, what regimes we'll have to claim a difference from.

208. "Enlightened" and "Benighted" in Egypt

 

In Egypt, see, you've got these benighted people who don't believe in democracy or any of the other things the people of the West came up with in their Age of Enlightenment.  They still think in the religious terms — "godly"-"ungodly," "believer"-"non-believer," "good"-"evil"— people used before they became enlightened, and began to speak only of the "reasonable" and "unreasonable."  These benighted people are now in power.

"And how did they get in power?"

Oh, in the most enlightened way, through an election.  They were the majority.  But now they are doing, and threatening to do, and saying, very unenlightened things.  The enlightened people are so eager to get rid of them that they say they'll welcome a coup by the generals.

"But isn't that a very benighted thing to do, bring in the army to get rid of elected officials?"

I know.  But these people in power are really evil people.  They have killed in the name of religion.  They'll impose religion in daily life.  They'll stamp out the Enlightenment in Egypt, the few flames that are starting to rise.

"So if people are really evil you can set the benighted on them.  But you'll still be enlightened yourself?"

I know.  I've gone benighted on you.  But don't you see, I have to do that in order to defend the Enlightenment.  It's the reasonable thing to do.

"You know, your confidence in what's reasonable strikes me as almost supernatural.   You just know that these benighted people are not going to permit you to throw them out in the normal, democratic, enlightened way.  You just know that their imposition of benighted things in daily life assures their imposition of themselves as unelected rulers.  You just know that the people of Egypt can't bring off the traditional Western way of throwing rascals out.  You just know that there's something besides elections that defines democracy.  You just know you'll do less damage to democracy by turning tyrant yourself than by waiting to see if somebody else will turn tyrant.  I don't see how anybody with a reasonable, secular conception of knowledge could know those things.  Are you sure you don't believe in a higher power?"

177. "Conquered territory" vs. "occupied territory."

Oh how much depends on the word you use for land your country's armed forces have won.  Call it "conquered territory" and nobody objects (with words, anyway) to what you do with it.  Call it "occupied territory," though, and you're in the stew.  "Hey, that land belongs to somebody else."  Occupation, unlike conquest, is not legitimate.

Conquest is legitimized by history.  This is the way the world has gone. The conquering country is a member of a very large, very ancient class.  Challenge what it's doing and you're challenging all of them.  Hell, you're practically challenging the foundations of the earth.  Very few of today's people are living on land that hasn't, at some time, been conquered for them.

The Israelis are paying the price for accepting "occupied" as the word their newly acquired Palestinian Territory in 1967.  Constantly being criticized.  Why didn't they insist on "conquered territory"?  They'd have freed themselves of so much flak.  Besides, isn't "conquered" a better fit with the way they have been treating the land, or have shown, by their tolerance of the settlers, the way they want to treat it?

Well, there were a lot of reasons they didn't use "conquered," beginning with the fact that conquest would have incorporated enough non-Jews in their country to make the Jews a minority, but a very big reason was that by 1967 conquest wasn't legitimate any more.  International law had changed.  In the early days of the Zionist movement "conquest" was in international law recognized as a "right" — meaning, like most things in international law, "something we're not going to argue about."  Unless you were willing and able to take the land back from the country that took it there was no point in opening your mouth.  The word "right" gave nations victorious in war the feeling of legitimacy that people victorious in lawsuits had.  It was a very useful term at the end of the 19th century, when Europeans were taking African land.

But "right of conquest" didn't hold up.  Though it was riding high in 1897, when Theodore Herzl first envisioned a homeland for the Jews in the Middle East, and still had plenty of momentum in 1917, when the British government blessed Herzl's vision, by 1946, at the Nuremberg Trials, it was dying and by 1974, with United Nations resolution 3314, the word was dead.  The "right" of conquest became the "crime" of conquest, called "aggression."

If only Israel had won the Palestinian territory 70 years earlier!  Things would have been (linguistically) so simple.  "We got it, boys.  Legitimately.  Might as well quiet down."

That's words for you.  You get one you can take shelter under and, whooosht, somebody takes it away.  Who took "right of conquest" away?  Well, grandchildren (this blog isn't just for profs), they are called "humanitarians" and they have taken a lot of the old words away.  They did it by changing our attitude toward the thing the word referred to.  Invading a country was bad.  And not just bad where it had always been bad, in the eyes of the invaded country, but in the eyes of the world community. If that community thought something was bad you couldn't use a good word, like "right," for it.  Not for long.  

The world community had begun to count for something at the time the humanitarians got together (the 18th century) and they made use of it.  Get those first public intellectuals, get those gabby philosophes, get everybody in the Republic of Letters, talking in a disapproving way about conquest (or slavery, or prisons, or insane asylums, or child labor) and you could change the attitudes of the literate world.  (That's what you finally had in the 18th century, a big, literate, middle-class world.)  The change succeeded, children, and we call the change "the Enlightenment."

I offer that name, not for your use on a quiz, but for your understanding of Israel's pain, its linguistic pain.  The words that fit its actions, and were once acceptable, cannot be used.  The enlightened community has replaced them with other, more humane, words, and Israelis must use them.  One must debate in the style (some would say "fashion") of the times.

153. Balkans: Checking for Cool.

You don't want to know what the professors are saying in their books and lectures.  You don't want to know what the pundits are saying in their columns.  You want to know what the students are saying in their drinking places.

That's what will determine the future.  Politicians and wise men can talk up something all they want but if the next generation of college students doesn't think it's cool it's dead.  A zero in the historical force column. 

I had heard this said but was suspicious until I heard a man, a successful modern poet, tell of his literature classes at Vanderbilt in the twenties.  The Mighty Romantics and the Great Victorians were still all the rage then with the profs, but the students, even as the room resounded with Tennyson's mighty lines, were passing around mimeographed copies of "The Waste Land."

Can you feel that, the cool of it?  If you can't, picture one of those graduate seminars in Southern universities attended after the war by second-tier New York intellectuals squeezed south by the GI competition for Eastern schools.  CCNY types.  Deliver your opinion and they say, "You sure of that?"  Then they're there with the goods.  Out of Morris Cohen (Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method), who taught at Columbia.  Those guys are cool.  Over beer afterward one of them, about to say the word "God," pauses and says, "if you'll pardon the expression."   Atheism becomes cool.  Marxism and Freudianism follow.

That's what I mean by cool and that's what it was in 1947 Louisiana.  It doesn't have to be subversive and it doesn't have to be outside the curriculum.  When Cleanth Brooks arrived at Yale with the New Criticism the students greeted him warmly ("Mistah Brooks, he come" headlined the student newspaper) and ate up his teaching.

What's the equivalent of that now in Ljubljana and Zagreb and Belgrade?  Sean O'Hagan says that Slavoj Zizek is now "the thinker of choice for Europe's young intellectual vanguard."  Is that true?  Could I confirm it by listening in on student talk?  I, a two-week tourist?  Not a chance.

But I know what I'd be looking for.  First, the student who says what students (or anybody, really) can say in a hundred different ways in a time of crisis: "Are you with us in the movement?"  Second, the student who says, "Are you sure of that?"  I'd look at the listening students.  If they think the first one is cool they (and their country) face one kind of future; if they think the second one is cool they face an entirely different kind.

It's not obvious which one is better.  Everything depends on where you are, when.  You're marching for civil rights in '63 (or for independence in '76) you want to know who's with you and who isn't.  You want them charged up.  You're sword-fighting in a phalanx you want your buddy on your left to be super-charged.  That's your unprotected side and your life depends on it.

Those who have been in those situations will tell you: you're not going to do a Ph.D. oral on what did the charging.  The British spin experts doctor a picture of Hitler to make him more hateful.  It fires us up and we fight harder to defeat his armies.  Anything that gets us home quicker is cool.

Academic cool can be ugly.  Picture the places where it's most easily maintained: in America with 3,000 miles of ocean on each side and 1500 missiles securely in their silos; in Scandinavia, with all that water around and a homogeneous population. It's easy to look at the Balkans and forget the mixed-up population and close, over-the-mountain borders — with wall-mounted rifles on the other side of them.

What kind of cool is the right kind is always going to be a close call there.  Times and situations change so.  Outsiders, even when they're willing to risk ugliness, can hardly ever speak positively.  "Let's just quit talking about cool.  We'll never be able to say anything helpful.  Forget the whole category."

At this point I hear one of my profs breaking in.  Sam Monk.  "You think there's no cool any more.  You want to know cool?  I'll show you cool.  My period.  Early 18th century.  England is looking back at a bad religious war.  The Western continent is looking back at worse ones.  The Holy Roman Empire, with its little states, has torn itself into Protestant-Catholic shreds.  Here's Jonathan Swift's Gulliver explaining it to the leader of the Houyhnhnms:

Difference in opinions hath cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire; what is the best color for a coat, whether black, red, white, or gray; and whether it should be long or short, dirty or clean; with many more.  Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long continuance, as those occasioned by difference of opinion, especially if it be in things indifferent.

That's cool.  Enlightenment cool."

Is it always and everywhere cool?  It doesn't have to be, not for anybody who feels sorry for the sweet people locked into those Balkan situations.  If it's occasionally helpful that's enough.

120. English Composition über alles.

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Why do you want to squash German Romanticism?

"Because it's behind postmodernism and the flatter we squash postmodernism the better life in American universities will be."

What do you mean, "squash"? You're in a university. You're supposed to "refute."   And you don't refute isms, you refute arguments.

"I know, ism-talk isn't our thing.  And refutation is our big thing.  But postmodernists don't do or say things you can take down by refutation. There it is, right in Wikipedia: 'Postmodernism is not a method of doing philosophy, but rather a way of approaching traditional ideas and practices in non-traditional ways.' So. You go after their relativism and you run into Barbara Herrnstein Smith: 'The relativism exhibited by this study is not a 'position,' not a 'conviction,' not a set of 'claims' about how certain things — reality, truth, meaning, reason, value and so forth — really are. It is, rather, a general conceptual style or taste.' All you can say about a taste is that it's bad. All you can do about the tastemakers is squash them."

But those tastemakers were academics. Surely you could argue with them.

"Believe me, I tried. The visiting postmodernist said, 'I don't recognize your categories.' Another visitor (we had to be instructed in the new theories) denied that there was even a relative objectivity. He (Stephen Mailloux) must have believed that there was no difference between 'You are fat' and 'You weigh 310 pounds.' I gave up."

I sympathize, but how is German Romanticism responsible?

"By reacting against the Enlightenment so successfully. The Enlightenment, as Isaiah Berlin described it for my generation, stood for rationality, universality, and empiricism. That is, it stood for reason, epitomized for us in the scientific method, universal values, epitomized in the Declaration of Independence (all men are created equal, with inalienable rights), and experience-based knowledge, epitomized in the work of primarily British philosophers (Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Hume). The German Romantics doubted reason, universal truth, and, if not experience itself, the claim that it was the base for all knowledge. In the end (to take a liberty) their opposition to the Enlightenment gave us Martin Heidegger and all those French intellectuals and American professors who brought about the revolution in English departments in the 80s and 90s."

Sounds like a big philosophical enterprise, squashing all that.

"Yes, and 25 years ago that's what I thought it would take. Now I know there was a simple alternative. All I had to do was take my course in English Composition, the course nearly everybody had to teach one section of, with philosophical seriousness. What did my textbook tell students to do when they were writing an argumentative essay? 'Cite evidence.' That is, appeal to experience. 'Anticipate objections.' Yes, test, probe, look for counter-examples, respect the law of non-contradiction — just as in the scientific method. 'Watch out for absolute generalizations, beware of catch-all explanations, don't evade the question.' Yes, reason well. 'Don't sneer.' Yes, keep attitude out. Remain objective. When I explain these things to students I'm promoting care in establishing belief, just as those trying to free themselves from medieval superstition did. Just as scientists now do, though much more systematically. The more thoroughly I explain the more deeply I commit myself to the values of the Enlightenment.

"That's what English Composition teaches the teacher. Learn its lessons and you'll see that you can't be a postmodernist any place but in your office, writing articles. Go to your Parking Committee meeting. Try to decide which department has the better claim to a lot. You're stuck with the need for facts and logic. Do you believe in academic freedom? You're stuck with the need to be objective. Professorial objectivity was a condition of its recognition in the 1940 Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure by the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges. Do you want tenure? Your main argument for it (made by your representatives) is that it's necessary to preserve academic freedom.

"One great thing about Composition is that it shows you (as you show your students) what sticks you with what. Fling down a general statement and you're stuck with its implications. Roll out a beautiful first paragraph and you're stuck with the expectations it raises. All must fit together. And the glue (which you learn to use in argument essays) is logic. The other great thing about Composition is that it pulls you into the practical world, the one the people you're trying to inform or influence live in.

"All right, you learn that in your classroom and then you go back to your office and what do you find? That you're as stuck with reason, universal truth, and experience-based knowledge (the heart of the epistemology that Stanley Fish said was "lying in ruins around us") as your students were with their own topic sentence. You are stuck with the rationality required in the practical world. You were stuck as soon as you described the course in the catalog.

"Finally, after you follow all that your practice implies, you get to your theoretical foundations, the ones your feet are really stuck in. You see that nobody, no German Romantic, no Heidegger, no Derrida, has kicked them away, nor, as long as you're crossing the hall to teach those freshmen, can they kick them away."

As long as the glue holds. If logic is relative — and it's going to be for those who let pi itself be relative — then the structure falls apart, the implications of practice for theory fail to hold, and the postmodernist can remain comfortably in his office.

"I know. That's why I say 'squash' instead of 'argue.' I hope to make him uncomfortable there."

Note: When I speak of "universal truth" above I have in mind only what the 19th century mathematician William Kingdon Clifford had in mind when he said, "It is wrong, always, everywhere and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."

96. Complimenting Middle Easterners: "Liberal"

"Liberal" is still a compliment-word when a Westerner is talking to a Middle Easterner about changes in his country. It's sort of a handclasp: welcome to democracy, to tolerance, to progress, to freedom, to equality, to human rights, to the rule of law — welcome to the Enlightenment.

I'd like to use the word, if the occasion ever arose, but I have some problems with it. It's clear that I can't apply it to authoritarian Islamist regimes imposing Sharia on their people, or to secular despots putting the clamps on everybody, but beyond that it gets difficult, especially when regimes are changing.

Consider Egypt now, where thousands demonstrated yesterday against the despotic military council. The Times tells us that "most liberals stayed home" (11-19-11). Why? Because they "looked to the military council to act as a hedge against a religious takeover." They feared that liberal democracy would bring an illiberal party to power. So who am I to compliment for their liberalism, those who support the generals for wanting to keep the illiberals out, or the demonstrators for wanting the democracy that lets them in?

I think that instinct, or long school training, moves most of us Americans to declare for the demonstrators simply because their opposition is, like that of King George III, despotic. And reflection commonly justifies this in Enlightenment terms — the "liberal" cluster.

If we here deny those terms to the Egyptian military council, though, what are we going to do with them when we come to the many despots in Western countries that our history books have for years called "enlightened"? How about Catherine the Great, and Joseph II of Austria, and Frederick II of Prussia? Prussia, for heaven's sake. Yet in that country we see industry promoted, schools established, religious freedom protected, prejudice discouraged. And then there's Napoleon, forcing French enlightenment on the countries he conquered — feudalism ended, peasants freed, church courts abolished, Inquisition ended, the great Code established, legal equality of all individuals assured. Everything but representative government. Unless you're an impossible Anglophile, grant Napoleon a piece of the word "liberal."

I think I'm left without options for a sincere handclasp over the Tahrir Square demonstrations. To those who stay home I'm saying, "Thanks for your help in preventing a retreat (with Shariah) into darkness. Congratulations on your progress. Welcome to our tradition of enlightened despotism." I'm complimenting them for murdering democracy. To those who demonstrate I'm saying, "Thanks for your help in advancing your country into the democratic light. Congratulations on your faithfulness. Welcome to our tradition of representative government." I'm complimenting them for democratically risking loss of every feature of the Enlightenment, including democracy. Either way, there's no escape from irony.

And what is my Egyptian, hearing it, going to say? "This man (or maybe the entire West) is as confused about the Enlightenment as we are." Of course. The word I used, "liberal," is just one of those words that calls up a confusing cluster. That's what I'm stuck with.

77. "My culture's better than yours."

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A lot of people, citing cultural anthropologists, tell me that I can't say that my culture is better than somebody else's. I am expressing an ethnocentric prejudice.

Yet cultural anthropologists, if the summary of their position in my History of the Modern World is correct, actually do let me say such a thing.  To them, according to Palmer, Colton, and Kramer, "no culture or society was 'better' than any other, all being adaptations to an environment." The permission taken away in the first part of the sentence is restored in the second. I can say, "This culture has adapted better than that one." Better.

For support I point to Chinese culture. Its emphasis on education has filled the awards lists of American high schools with the names of its young. Note the number of graduates high in Silicon Valley. The Chinese have adapted better than anybody to the California environment.

So, we have another reminder (after Post #56) that as soon as we contemplate a particular end, as soon as we abandon categorical assertion, we are entitled to, we are obliged to, discriminate among means. (See Post # 8. "Discrimination," Rational and Irrational.) Here cultures provide the means. And with all the other ends people may have in a mixed society we may do the same.

All right, I move through a mixed society — the U.S., and more and more the world — with a permit to use the words "better" and "worse" with respect to cultures. Holding the permit is not enough, though. You've got to get somebody to honor it. And in today's universities you'll have a devil of a time. "Value judgment" is still a put-down word in science lounges. Look as if you're going to make such a judgment and a sociologist will snort like a spooked horse. You've violated an axiom: "There are or can be no value judgments that are true, that is, objectively justifiable, independent of specific cultures."

So with many of my colleagues listening I still can't say what I want to say to people who force women to have clitorectomies. What do I want to say? This: "You stink. Your culture stinks. Any culture that encourages doing this to little girls stinks."

There was once a way of placing that statement (tempered, of course) under an acceptable category: possible truth. If mankind were one, if sympathies were universal, and if some sympathies were so beneficial that, if shared, they improved the life of all mankind, then there was the chance that any individual, at any time, might express one. If history showed that life was indeed improved when the displayed sympathy was shared then the statement had all the verification needed to be called a "truth."

That way of placing value statements was developed in the 18th century, during the Enlightenment, a period now in bad repute. Its universalism has not stood up under the poundings of relativism. And verification of its "truths"? That comes so far in the future. You have to believe in "progress."

Oh that we Enlightenment types could live for that verification. Oh to be there to see relativists put down. Oh that the Enlightenment had a God who could bring us all together after time has run its course.

I see a representative of the offending culture, surveying the full sweep, seeing where it ended, reflecting for a while and saying, "Clitorectomy, you know. That really did stink."

But God has arranged it so that we're still human. The enlightened offender reproaches me: "Why didn't you tell me?"

And I, savoring my revenge, say, "Because the cultural relativists wouldn't let me."