The First Cultural Relativist: Relativism, Nationalism and the Danger of Diversity
by Alexander Zubatov (October 2016)
To be sure, some of the intuitions underlying cultural relativism were around in various forms well before Herder. The most famous doctrine of the Ancient Greek Sophist Protagoras — the great foil in Socrates’ and Plato’s search for universal truths — is that “man is the measure of all things,” but the focus of Protagoras’ relativism was not culture, but rather, the possibility of truth as such. Herodotus’ presentation of events and various peoples in his History is thoroughly (often frustratingly and indiscriminately) non-judgmental, but he articulated no overarching belief or philosophical doctrine to ground his approach. It was perhaps Montaigne, in his essay “On Cannibals,” who came the closest to a direct statement of the cultural relativist position when he wrote that “everyone gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country. As, indeed, we have no other level of truth and reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the place wherein we live: there is always the perfect religion, there the perfect government, there the most exact and accomplished usage of all things.” But Montaigne, though a brilliant writer and essayist, was not a philosopher, not a systematic thinker, and so he could easily contradict himself later in the same essay and proceed to posit the existence of that very higher vantage point that he had earlier contended was impossible to attain — the vantage point of universal reason, above and outside all cultures — from which the cannibals at issue were indeed barbarians: “We may then call these people barbarous, in respect to the rules of reason: but not in respect to ourselves, who in all sorts of barbarity exceed them.” He proceeds to offer yet another path to the same conclusion: “These nations then seem to me to be so far barbarous, as having received but very little form and fashion from art and human invention, and consequently to be not much remote from their original simplicity.”
When a people is left to develop along its natural trajectory, uncontaminated by inordinate outside influence and unsubjugated by other peoples, it progresses along a course similar to that an individual might enjoy as he or she matures from infancy into the full flower of adulthood. In contrast to the vision of a pluralistic, multi-ethnic, multi-religious state emerging from the Hobbesian/Lockean tradition (more on that later) and closer to the counter-Enlightenment tradition of thinkers such as Edmund Burke and Justus Möser (Herder and Möser, along with Goethe, had contributed essays to the same collection in the 1770s), Herder had a vision of the political state akin to Aristotle’s, of the polity as an extension of the family: “A kingdom consisting of a single nation is a family, a well regulated household: it reposes on itself, for it is founded by Nature, and stands and falls by time alone. An empire formed by forcing together a hundred nations, and a hundred and fifty provinces, is no body public, but a monster.” The people, the Volk, are, thus, not an artificially bounded abstraction but a natural emanation, arising out of and rooted in the very earth in which it is bred: “In the first place it is obvious why all sensual people, fashioned to their country, are so much attached to the soil, and so inseparable from it. The constitution of their body, their way of life, the pleasures and occupations to which they have been accustomed from their infancy, and the whole circle of their ideas, are climatic. Deprive them of their country, you deprive them of everything.” Herder himself invokes the metaphor of rootedness: “Though the tree lift its head to the skies, and overshadow whole quarters of the Globe, if it be not rooted in the earth, a single blast of wind may overturn it.”
We are now also in position to put Herder’s anti-Semitism in perspective. If the uncontaminated Greeks represent the height of civilization, then, by contrast, the Jews, those deracinated wanderers and cosmopolites who make their homes everywhere but feel at home nowhere, “were a people spoiled in their education, because they never arrived at a maturity of political cultivation of their own soil, and consequently not to any true sentiment of liberty and honor.” It is clear that Herder, in our own day, would have been a fanatical Zionist: “The Bramin, the Siamese, cannot live out of his own country: and as the Jew of Moses is properly a creature of Palestine, out of Palestine there should be no Jew.”
Although others since Herder — the 19th German political theorist Friedrich List or the 20th century theoreticians of fascism and Nazism — have shared his view that each Volk, each people, deserves its own nation to itself, many of us today live in the very kinds of multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-religious societies that Herder condemns and abhors. We are the descendants of the Hobbesian-Lockean model that takes a plethora of views and ways of life as a given. Hobbes, living in a time of seemingly endless religious wars, understood that if a society is to survive such diversity without descending back into “the war of all against all” that was characteristic of his famed “state of nature,” a powerful central government — the Leviathan — must have the power to limit our pluralistic extravagances, to shut us up and shut us down for the sake of maintaining peace, law, order and the common good.
We, however, have retreated far back from Hobbes’ authoritarian precipice, and we have done so with especial vehemence in recent decades. We have cultivated pluralism. We have celebrated diversity. We have transformed it from what Hobbes saw as a weakness to be combatted to a strength to be exalted. In recent decades, we have moved from a model of society as a “melting pot,” where individual differences are dissolved in a centrifuge that processes us and sends us back out homogenized and made more or less uniformly American (or, as the case may be, uniformly British, French and so on), to the model of the “salad bowl,” in which we are taught to be proud of our differences and to put stock in our particularized labels. These labels — racial, ethnic, religious, sexual (what Max Weber would have referred to as “status groups”) — have come to define us, have become ubiquitous boxes we check as employees, employers, applicants, students and patients, essential lenses through which we process our experience and primary resources we draw on in framing our allegiances and in hankering after economic and political benefits, social status and cultural caché. They have divided us, pitted us against one another and blinded us to more fundamental economic distinctions between rich and poor. More than ever, they are tearing us apart, creating a zero-sum society in which blacks and whites both feel like besieged victims of racism, in which Christians and Muslims both feel demonized, in which immigrants and the native-born both feel persecuted by the powers-that-be.
Hobbes and Herder offer us two contrasting poles that should orient our thoughts about the problem of diversity. The Hobbesian pole is harmony achieved at the cost of enforced integration, stifling our diversity by molding us all into good citizens of our adopted nations. The Herderian pole is harmony achieved at the cost of total separation, letting each human lineage live freely within its own borders, its nation given to it by providence. We have rejected both of these solutions. In America and much of Europe, in nations founded or re-forged under Hobbesian principles (filtered, of course, through the far more palatable Locke), housing many human families under one roof, we have strayed ever further from the Hobbesian system that makes such diversity work. We have started taking the peaceful coexistence of these many peoples for granted and directed them to be fruitful and multiply, each howsoever it may. We have stopped judging and powered down the crucible that would mold us into a single people. The result is precisely what we should have expected. The war of all against all is back with a vengeance, and the pendulum is swinging back in Herder’s direction. Nationalism, the assertion of the distinct spirit of each people, the Herderian Volksgeist, is on the rise again.
In our pluralistic societies, nationalism is an object of fear. It stirs up animal passions, leads to cleansings, crackdowns and pogroms and shatters empires. It is the fascist theorist Carl Schmitt’s drawing of the line in the sand between friends and enemies. But what if nationalism did not have to be always and everywhere a destructive force? What if a flowering of nationalism could represent an alternative path to the kinds of pluralism and diversity we as a society seem to be increasingly embracing? This is the path a reconsideration of Herder opens to us, a positive, pacific vision of live-and-let-live. In opposition to Hobbes’ negative conception of the state, tasked with keeping the war of all against all in check by deploying its machinery to prune the field and pick would-be flowers while they are still small, unopened buds, in Herder’s exalted, poetic vision, so long as they stay in separate fields, a thousand flowers can bloom, each beautiful in its own way:
Time was — not so long ago, in fact — when we as a society counterpoised the competing values of segregation and integration and recognized that integration has the moral high ground. Since then, however, we have forgotten that to integrate, we actually have to integrate. We have to become one people, and, regardless of what our private creeds and beliefs may be, we must, at least in public, start acting again like one nation under God, as it were, pledging allegiance to the same flag, teaching a common canon and tradition, being unafraid of taking pride in what we are, retreating from universal tolerance and agnostic relativism and affirming in their place the positive values of freedom, democracy, equality of opportunity, Western humanistic culture and the rest. And we must be unafraid to tell those who challenge these values and traditions as oppressive exercises in hegemony that they are always free to go elsewhere.
By the look of things, we no longer appear to believe in integration. We believe instead, as I have said above, in emphasizing the superficial qualities that distinguish us from each other. This experiment in voluntary segregation is failing, pulling us all in different directions. If we have chosen to go along this dangerous path, let us take the final step. Let us save ourselves the pain of more struggle, conflict and disintegration and draw up what borders we can, leaving each racial and religious group to its own devices, so that blacks and whites, Muslims and Christians and everyone else can determine their own unique destinies, with no one but themselves to blame for any failures they should encounter along the way. Achieving such separation may be far more difficult in a globalized society than it was in Herder’s day, and yet it cannot be more difficult than the schisms and tremors we are presently enduring. We should have learned this lesson by now: a house divided against itself cannot stand. A segregated society is not an option. We must integrate or separate. I continue to believe in the former, but I much prefer the latter to a balkanized society, to a republic being torn asunder, to a nation in decline.
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Alexander Zubatov is a practicing attorney specializing in general commercial litigation. He is also a practicing writer specializing in general non-commercial poetry, fiction, drama, essays and polemics. (In the words of one of his intellectual heroes, Jose Ortega y Gasset, biography is “a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”) In addition to his prior work published in New English Review, his work has appeared in various publications, including The Federalist, Acculturated, PopMatters, The Hedgehog Review, The Fortnightly Review, nth position, The Montreal Review, The New English Review, Culture Wars, Senses of Cinema and the Bright Lights Film Journal. His interests include literature, literary theory, philosophy and metaphysics. He makes all-too-frequent appearances on Medium (https://medium.com/@Zoobahtov) and occasional, unscheduled appearances on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Zoobahtov).
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