The fact that individual and social human development are not unilinear does not mean that development doesn’t or can’t exist. It means that any simplified interpretation of development will focus on certain aspects and ignore others. This means that any interpretation can be improved. But some interpretations are clearly more valuable than others. Some interpretations make failure unavoidable; some may be adequate but open to improvement. The latter are preferable even though success cannot be categorically guaranteed.
Traditionalist interpretations leave us locked into past structures. Avoiding comparative judgements by avoiding cultural assimilation is the demand that flexibility remain implicit. (Even in societies that propose totally closed and circular myth structures, change occurs between generations and each individual inarguably gets older; there may be wisdom in those myths, but they are incomplete, just as scientific descriptions or explanations of the world are incomplete.) The demand that flexibility remain implicit, coupled with the process of habituation, begins in ignorance and remains in ignorance. This is more than the denial of any particular wisdom; it is the denial that wisdom is possible. Such an insistence seems unwise.
Ruth Benedict wrote, “The great arc along which all the possible human behaviors are distributed is far too immense and too full of contradictions for any one culture to utilize even any considerable portion of it. Selection is the first requirement. Without selection, no culture could even achieve intelligibility, and the intentions it selects and makes its own are a much more important matter than the particular detail of technology or the marriage formality that it also selects in a similar fashion.” (Patterns of Culture, 237; 1934).
Achieving a comprehensive or intelligible perspective on anything requires an attentional effort. Without that effort, stimuli come along and affect us, but we do not understand. There is a mammalian or primate tendency perhaps, certainly a human tendency, towards achieving comprehension. Achieving comprehension may also be a conscious effort. Either way, conscious or not, it is a purposeful activity; when conscious, it is also intentional. Comprehensive purpose, then, may be written over–or ascribed to–an activity by an observer, from the outside; unified intention takes personal commitment, from within. If “intelligibility” means ascribed purpose, that’s fine, but it cannot be pretended to be the same as unified intention.
Culture is only provisionally intelligible then; only when we appear to be comparing discrete and unified wholes (supposedly individual cultures imputed to supposedly individual societies) do we need to take a relativistic perspective in order to deal with the comparison and the multiple wholes equitably.
Comprehensive purpose may be written into the comparison, but it will evidence one’s personal commitments. Awareness of personal commitment shows the feed-forward nature of the human endeavor towards comprehension. Only when one has overly invested belief in some abstract stability is this type of feed-forward change seen as problematic for “intelligibility” or comprehensiveness. Ascribing intelligibility shows at least provisional or tacit purpose; it shows at least one connection between myself and whatever I observe; it describes myself to the extent that it is evidence of my understanding and purpose.
More adequately than being taken merely as a relativistic critique, this understanding may celebrate creative ability and potential. We may incorporate the observer without denying the value of the observer’s understanding if we avoid dominator status or an imbalance of validity. Relativism then, instead of being only a denial of comprehensibility, becomes a justification of dialogue or shared purpose.
No culture, global or otherwise, is absolutely intelligible, though, because human potential is not biologically or historically determined. More is possible than that which has been achieved so far. We are not limited to one way, then, but by communicating and negotiating intentionality, we may move forward as a global culture, as a human species.
An adequate understanding of relativism may show the limitations of traditional interpretations, logical interpretations, single interpretations, belief in stability and universal applicability–all without denying the possibility of negotiated agreement and the deepening of understanding. The point is merely that, between cultures, no single particularist culture–the same as within-society sectarianism (try thinking if the Presidential campaigns as representative of “the American people”)–provides standards that are globally adequate. The point is that adequacy may be quite possible without being exhaustive. Our current understanding of global culture and of humanity appears to be both inadequate and inexhaustive.
Achieving some form of global adequacy, rather than denying the possibility of comparative values, points towards a change in scale. Physics does not explain or exhaust the rules of chemistry, and yet chemistry is comprehensible and so is physics. In the same way, the social values I was raised with, the arguments and agreements I have within my family, do not explain or exhaust global cultural differences, but those social values within my family are relevant to global problems.
Privileging abstraction over diversity doesn’t work, but neither does privileging diversity over abstraction. One doesn’t deny the other; taken together, they are both more valuable than either one alone. But working with diversity and abstraction together soundly denies stability.
“Value-free” cultural relativism makes the same mistake as “value-free” scientific observation. Making cultures or worldviews “intelligible” provides closure, making change more difficult if the “intelligibility” is not applied to some purpose other than the comfort–the justification of attentional avoidance, support of the status quo–which comes from embracing a certain “intelligibility”. Without applying any understanding, that understanding fossilizes–a merely theoretical understanding is nothing more than a dead cultural artifact. A fossilized understanding or belief is not what we want if our purpose is to enjoy this world and appreciate humanity.
Recognition of individual difference is not commensurable with a fossilized belief in stable cultural “intelligibility”–whether the fossilization comes from traditionalist, scientific, or postmodern explanations. The individual psychological “physics” are similar to cultural “chemistry” but changes unique to either cannot be fully expressed by the laws of the other. Both, though, are incomprehensible without speaking of particularization and movement. The physics/chemistry analogy may acquire human/social depth through understanding the two truths doctrine and the nonduality of the two truths.
To avoid personal and social stagnation and amputation, we work with provisional intelligibility in order to actualize real potential, appreciate the process, and allow or encourage development. Concentration and awareness. Form is not other than emptiness; emptiness is not other than form.
Copyright Todd Mertz