It reminded me interesting ponderings by David Brin, Sci-Fi author in essay preceding his book Otherness. I did not find it online, but here is his explorations on struggle between different mentalities: http://www.davidbrin.com/newmemewar1.html and http://www.davidbrin.com/newmemewar2.html It's long and here is just an EXCERPT. It's interesting that he wrote this in 1989 and that variation I read (not this one I just found on his website) was much more skeptical about the whole idea. Looks like he was taken aback a bit later with fetishisizing of Otherness worshiping. The Dogma of Otherness is a worldview that actually encourages an appetite for newness. A hunger for diversity. An eagerness for change. Tolerance, naturally, plays a major role in the legends spread by this culture. (Look at the underlying message contained in most episodes of situation comedies!) A second pervasive thread, seen in the vast majority of our films and novels, is suspicion of authority.
Historically, this is a very strange meme, one which encourages such art forms as science fiction, and is in turn spread quite effectively by such forms. Its notion of a Golden Age, for instance, does not reside in some lost, lamented past but in a future that our children may create, if we hand them tools and a better world to work with. The importance of this reversal in the perceived timeflow of wisdom cannot be overstated. It represents a sea change in the human relationship with time.
Naturally, this way of looking at the world was rare in the past. Even today, it would be an exaggeration to suggest that this meme "owns" territories like Europe or America. Even where it is strongest, it must contend ceaselessly with any other forces inimical to its goals. There are lots of Californians, for instance, who personally emphasize macho, paranoiac or homogenizing values, instead of tolerance and otherness.
What we can say, nevertheless, is that Otherness has become powerful in the official morality of most western societies. Look at the vocabulary used in most debates on issues concerning the public. So-called 'political correctness' can be seen in ironic light, as a rather pushy patriotism in favor of the tolerance meme! But even the other side often wraps itself in phrases like "freedom," or "color blindness," or "individual rights."
Even more important, though, is the fact that millions accept the deeply utopian notion that our institutions must be improvable, and that active criticism is one of the best ways to elicit change.
Now imagine if aliens made contact with people brought up in the fourth way I mentioned -- under the Dogma of Otherness. Forget Hollywood pathos about nasty CIA types and trigger-happy rednecks. Try to picture a flying saucer setting down in today's Los Angeles. The National Guard might be called out to encircle the vessel, but they wouldn't face inward. They would be far too busy facing in the opposite direction, protecting our alien visitors from autograph hounds, groupies, and hordes seeking novelty. The jury is still out whether the tolerance meme -- or other-fetishism -- is really any saner than older, paranoiac ways. No tribe ever before had the guts to make tolerance and individualism paramount themes, especially in the messages they feed the young and poor and powerless. Traditionally, the aristocracy would rally those below by pointing to some outside threat, thus making conformity a principal virtue. The whole existence of many tribes was based upon "It's them against us, and us should win." All right. That remark was intended to be ironic and I'm certainly glad most of you in the audience laughed just now! I would have felt a shiver if you hadn't!
The first thing that Californians would ask aliens is -- "Have you got any new cuisine?"
This fourth worldview is related to what we started out discussing this evening... the Look Forward way of conceptualizing truth and knowledge. The notion that, while some theories may be better than others, all can profit from criticism and experimentation.
Emphasizing diversity, this meme even welcomes a little disturbing eccentricity, now and then. You can earn a living as an iconoclast in the West today, especially if you make it entertaining. One gets ego points for being different, if you do it with style.
No guarantees.
And yet, I know where I stand. My preference cannot help coming out in my writing. Not just a shaman or an entertainer, I'm also a propagandist in this war. I'd like to think that people come away from my books feeling just a little more tolerant than before, or a little more eager for change and diversity in the future of this world.
In fact, I think that we should go forth and crush every other worldview that doesn't promote tolerance!
Let's check though... how many of you, despite your laughter, agree at least in part with what I just said?
As I expected. You are intolerant of intolerance... and at the same time amused by the paradox this puts you in!
Well, I'm not surprised. The fact that you are capable of laughing at yourself means, by my reckoning, that you are members of a worldview that says "Don't take yourself too damn seriously." Yet another emblematic trait of this new meme.
While sounding very enlightening, its goes too far. In practical terms it projects similar enlightenment on The Other. The only problem with it is if The Other is not as enlightened, it leaves us defenseless.
In other words, its so protective in guarding The Other's individuality, that it denies a possibility that this individuality will be really nasty.
They are unified only by a single opposite, which is itself a straw man - his past monolithic authority as us against them and us should win. With nothing imagined as a consequence of "winning" but survival for one and disappearence for the other. Measured by that straw man - itself a piece of 19th century pseudoscience - anything that allows the survival of multiple types appears as one thing.
And all the distinctions between versions of it thus disappear. This amounts to posing an exclusive disjunction between totalitarianism and relativism - when the evidence of the entire past, down to quite recent times, refutes the idea that the two exhaust the possibilities. It predicts that as you scan history you will either find one monolithic block, or will find full blown relativism. And this isn't remotely true, as mere historical fact.
Tolerance is not relativism. Relativism denies the existence of one truth. Tolerance does not. Relativism denies that anyone's notions of right and wrong could actually be mistaken. Tolerance does not. The hidden minor premise of this totalitarian-relativist dicotomy is that the truth would deserve to be made mandatory if it existed and were accessible, while error would deserve to be exterminated. The thesis of tolerance, to the contrary, is that error is not crime, and that truth can only be the subject of an invitation, not of a command.
Tolerance expects many views to exist indefinitely. There is nothing annihilationist about it. From the standpoint of the real principle of tolerance, the relativists aren't remotely tolerant enough. They only tolerate where they cannot show error. Tolerance is tolerance of error, real full blown known-to-a-certainty error, or it doesn't deserve the name. On the side of the tolerated, it is not an imperfection in ruling truth claims that it all hangs on. No, tolerance is a right to be wrong.
In the sense of mistaken, incorrect, or uninformed. In lesser matters, also in the moral sense, as weak, timid, or flawed. Beyond error there is a different category entirely, the category of crime. And error is not crime. Crime is also possibly from a position of correctness or truth. The two concepts are in fact at right angles to one another. One concerns the justice of our behavior toward our fellows. The other concerns not justice, but the adequacy of our mental representations and systems of symbols to the rest of the world, to the real relations they point toward.
Why are they so frequently confused? Because historically, certain sects at definite times and places attempted to criminalize what they regarded as errors of doctrine. They imputed all mistakes to willful error.
There is a marvelous passage in a medieval Islamic book that brings this out. Averroes objects to holding philosophic writers responsible for their mistakes about recondite matters of metaphysics (by banning their books or worse), pleading that giving one's assent to an indication within the soul is involuntary. This is as close as Islamic thought came to the later principle of tolerance. Then in less than two pages he turns clean around and declares that error by anyone except a learned philosopher while dealing with the most difficult subjects, is "sheer sin".
That is on the subject of theoretical error. Moral error is in a way more serious. It is moral judgment that gives the relativist types the willies. When Bush calls evil men and regimes evil as a matter of course, they freak. They don't understand chastising something to improve it - despite Brin's claim that relativist pluralism is open to that, the reality is you can't chastise anything without a definite standard for it to fail to live up to. Only moralists can chastise things. Pluralists just slink away and start a new fashion. Which might make a few more flowers bloom but does nothing to improve the older ones that aren't blooming.
To improve something, you have to be moralist enough to condemn its present state. But you also have to be attached enough to that thing that you consider it worthy of the trouble. The relativists of Brin's variety, or the young woman in my anecdote, aren't moralist enough to condemn the present state of Islamic political culture. The state department cynics who think tyranny is the natural government of Muslims aren't attached enough to any of it to think it worth any effort. A Bernard Lewis, on the other hand, sees the contrast between a once flourishing civilization and the present moral squalor, and chastises. He has an attachment not to their present state, but to what he thinks it could be.
Which is where all real moral reform must come from. But does our own culture teach this, successfully? It does not. It teaches it more successfully in practical life than in philosophy, but it falls short in both places. Academic types are short changed on the former and get triple doses of the latter.
The relativist left has been on a mission for several decades now, to rid us all of the scourge of power by first taking away our power of conviction. Emphatically it does not work. But the attempt leaves behind a peculiar trail of moral cripples, and a peculiar sort of moralized divide within the society that has attempted it.
Half of our people that by training and temper should be pillars of moral purpose, are at best useless and frequently worse than useless. Every instinct that young woman had was just. All her personal conduct was spotless, generous, even chivalrous. And it was all ashes, because of this prior error. The heart was sound, the head was broken, and the result was a maimed thing where there should have been a wonderful thing.
Notice that this is the opposite of the diagnosis others often have of us, or of much of the modern left, or of intellectuals in particular. Too sophisticated and not moral enough, middle America imagines. In one sense of "sophist-icated", a fair enough charge. But in many cases, not half sophisticated enough, intellectually.
Now notice, here too the principle of tolerance applies. These people are in error, but many of them aren't at all criminal. It would be ruin to follow their cracked heads, to be sure. But we must tolerate their error while trying to correct it. That means chastise them and call them to something better, but with an underlying attachment to them as fellow citizens and as people. Of exactly the same sort Lewis shows toward the Muslim world.
Conversion of the adversary is the missing term in Brin, above (and with it, human unity). At bottom, it is not a competition or a fight. At bottom, we are allies, in a war with our own limitations, both moral and intellectual. The "we" in that statement does not stop at the water's edge.
It is a pleasure to be able to talk about these things...