Neither do I disagree that notions like coercion and torture, or
pain and violence, are either in general or in what we take to be
instances of them, culture-free. Certainly my own moral
judgements about the nastiness of controlling other people by
hurting them (unnecessarily, or mainly in your own interest) are
very much spoken from within my own cultures.
But I was trying to advance a notion that cultures differ in the
degree to which people within them take an interest in
controlling fewer or more of the repertory of behaviors of other
people recognized in those cultures, and that they differ in the
degree to which pain is inflicted as a means of doing this. My
_interest_ in pointing this out comes from a meaning-focus in my
own cultures. _Foregrounding_ it as a dimension of difference
becomes possible with the concepts of my cultures. But as I have
no choice but to see others from where I can stand, and as my
interest is in better understanding and judging my own community
by the comparisons I can make to other communities, it seems
reasonable to me to advance the view that across cultures (as
seen from here and with these interests), there are some
communities where such nasty matters are relatively minimal, both
as I see them, and as best I can tell as members of these other
communities see them (though they may not care about such things
as I do), and that there are others that seem to go well beyond
this minimum.
Is this minimum a 'universal'? no, for neither its formulation,
nor any measure of it could be, and the actual level of control-
by-pain-for-gain which is 'necessary' for a given community would
be specific to its circumstances. I suppose one could say that a
culture-and-community simply has the level it has, and that if it
had a different level it would be a different community, its
cultural norms different. But if my agenda is to understand how
my own community could get by with less of this nasty business,
then I am in fact concerned with its covariation with other
aspects of culture, which I can only apprehend cross-culturally
(and/or historically). How different, and in what ways different,
would my cultures have to be if they were to support and sustain
substantially less of this sort of coercive control?
I think it also matters whether control is felt-to-be-coercive or
not. Of course we are 'constrained' by culture in innumerable
ways most of which we are unaware of. Such constraints are not
_painful_ to people, while coercions (by my definition) are. No
doubt there are many specific invisible and unfelt (but
effective) cultural constraints which are complicit with people's
willingness or eagerness to control others in specific respects
by painful means, etc. I would like to understand better what
those are.
But I cannot be a cultural relativist about my own cultures. I
cannot simply say that they are as they are and people in them
behave as they do because they are constrained by this culture. I
have a responsibility to also be a critic of my culture, to judge
it according to values available within it, to condemn aspects of
it, and seek with others to change it. I would never do that with
a culture I was not a member of, because I am quite sure I would
misconstrue too much, would intrude where I could too easily
avoid the negative consequences of my intervention, etc. But for
my own, for just such reasons in reverse, I must. I condemn the
'scientific' perspectives of my own cultures for their abdication
of 'domestic' moral responsbility, as much as I do for their
imperializing universalism toward Others. I want cultural-
historical perspectives that provide grounds for moral critique
of my own cultures' evil. And I want this very much _within_ the
moral framework of my own cultures, and in hopes that some parts
of these cultures will change for what many of us (also changed)
will take to be the better. JAY.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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