Miranda's Question & the Two Cultures

My dear friend Miranda raised this question in an earlier comment:

I was watching the protest on CNN earlier today and I noticed that for some reason, the police in the footage had signs that read, "police". In English. Do you have any idea why? It reminded me of the "baby milk factory" incident.

I didn't know why. But this column in Slate has an answer:

Post-election protests continued in Tehran for the fifth day on Wednesday. In many photos, riot police wear uniforms with the English word police on them. Ambulances, too, bear the word ambulance in English. Why not use Persian words instead of their English equivalents?

Because everyone knows English. Like many capital cities, Tehran has its emergency personnel wear markings that are internationally recognizable. Street signs, too, are translated into English, and police cars are generally inscribed in both English and Persian. That makes the city more tourist-friendly without sacrificing clarity for locals. After all, the Persian word for police is the same: polise. (Persian, or Farsi, is an Indo-European language that uses an Arabic script, but people will often use Latin lettering, also known as Penglish or Fingilish, especially when typing or texting.) It's also the same word in French (police), German (polizei), Italian (polizia), Czech (policie), and many other languages. Iranian students are required to take English classes in high school. So using the English word for police actually maximizes the number of people who will understand it.

This is actually an important philosophical point. It occurred to me once while watching a film of Saddam Hussein reviewing his troops that he and they were dressed in Euro-American military garb. Just then I was reading one of Bernard Lewis's magnificent books on the Middle East. Lewis began by setting a scene: two Arab men sitting at a café, smoking, drinking coffee, and playing chess. He pointed out how much of Islamic culture has been imported (well, not so much the coffee or the chess) from the West.

The idea of multiculturalism has been big of late, but it has been surprisingly weak. The reason is that it is based on a mistake. It supposes that there are a vast number of cultures in the world, when in fact there are only two.

One is the centered culture, centered in our people, our city, here. From the point of view of this culture, everything else is "out there." Everyone else is a foreigner, a stranger, an enemy. The ancient Greek word for stranger was the same as that for enemy.

The other culture is the culture of travel. No matter where you go, there you are. In the plains, the mountains look tall; from the mountains, the plains look low. See Herodotus.

Centered culture was once the dominate culture on planet earth. With the growth of trade, it gradually eroded. Herodotus noticed that in different places, people did things different ways, and that each looked strange and even disgusting to the other. With that kind of insight, travel culture was born.

The word "police" on the Iranian police car is a sign that travel culture is now supreme. For historical reasons, travel culture is almost the same thing as Western Culture. This may be a mere historical accident. But it is an accident that happened.

Comments

[Tomás Rosa Bueno]

You and Bernard Lewis are joking about the coffee and the chess, right? You do know the Arabs invented both, don't you?

They may have been invented *before* Muhammad's time, I'm not sure. But they were *there* when what you call "Islamic culture" arrived.

[caheidelberger]

Interesting! But are you sure you can equate "Western" culture with "travel" culture?

[KB]

Tomás: Late night and poor editing. I have amended the passage. Thanks.

Cory: if the police cars are labeled in English, yes.

[Mac]

It all makes perfect sense. Seriously, inorder for the One World Order to emerge as an effective political system...all "grounded cultures" must be eroded into one "global travel culture," which is occuring before our eyes. Once most of humanity realizes we are one big culture with universal values, than, the soveriegnty of states gradually disolves and the call for a global revolution begins...which would be a "velvet revolution" like you saw when Communism fell in Eastern Europe. Iran's Velvet Revolution is just one more step in the larger game of bringing about a One World Order, which is inevitable in all seriousness.

[Mac]

Oh where...oh where...oh where is Iran's "Supreme Leader?" Oh where art though go? He gives a grand speech and makes some threats and nobody is listening to him. Me begins to think the "Supreme Leader" is not so "Supreme" anymore and then I laugh because the world is watching and they know he has become irrelevant...much like Nicolae Ceauşescu, the former and executed dictator of Romania became back in 1989. The so-called "Supreme Leader" is quickly becomming just another old man with a big beard and a big bark and nobody listens...

[Mac]

The so-called "Supreme Leader" changed the entire equation of this from a stolen election with his speech on Friday in defense of it. Now, it is no longer an issue of who one the phony Presidential Election, but, whether the "Supreme One" and his regime will last a coming Velvet Revolution. The "Supreme One" made the issue all about himself on Friday. My support is with the protestors and bringing an end to this evil regime once and for all!!!

[caheidelberger]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the thrust of the comparison, but Western culture, which comes from those ancient Greeks you mention, has plenty of its own "centeredness," doesn't it? I am intrigued by this dichotomy; I'm just wondering if it maps as neatly onto West-East or other categories as your line suggests.

[Erik]

KB:
As usual, thought provoking post. Your two cultures thesis is interesting, and appropriately takes us back to the ancients. Just curious, would confucian culture be a "centered" culture or a "travel" culture? My best guess is "centered", but then you have the great Chinese navy that traveled the oceans before the Portuguese ruled the seas. What is your take?
e2

[Mac]

VIVA GREEN REVOLUTION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!DOWN WITH THE SUPREME LEADER AND HIS PUPPET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Mac]

Viva Green Revolution and down with the Supreme Leader and his puppet!!!!

[KB]

Good questions from my esteemed participants. Let's call the two cultures Unicentric and Polycentric. Cory thoughtfully mentions ancient Greece, which is ground zero in the transition. There is some evidence that the Greek polis, or independent city, was purely Unicentric in its early stages. The polis emerges when familial gods are moved into the city center and shared among a number of villages and clans. That city temple was the center of the universe. Everything else was out there.

But the Greece that is expressed in the great literature that survives has made the transition to polycentric thinking. In Aristophanes CLOUDS the rustic Strepsiades enters Socrates think tank and notices a map on which Athens and Sparta (bitter enemies) are very close together. "You'd better move them further apart," he warns. Strepsiades can't imagine a way of looking at the world in which distances are simply objective and political peril is irrelevant. But Aristophanes' audience was sophisticated enough to know that this was laughable.

Eric asks about Confucian culture (meaning China, I suppose, up to very near the present). China famously regarded itself as the "Middle Kingdom," i.e., the people at the center of the world. One Emperor felt sorry for the Queen of England, as she was so far "out there." That is certainly unicentric thinking.

But the transition from unicentric to polycentric culture didn't happen all at once, or at the same time in different places. And peoples who lose their grip on the unicentric view still maintain a lot of unicentric habits of thought. I think that the unicentric culture is very strong so long as it resolutely maintains itself, but very weak the moment it lets in polycentric ideas. See Things Fall Apart.

The test is this: suppose someone asks why our ways are our ways? Why do we sing these songs, observe these taboos, worship these gods? You might say: these ways are our ways because they are good and the best. Your interlocutor might then ask: why are good and the best? If you reply: because they are ours, then you are a person of unicentric culture. Your argument is circular, and therefore invulnerable.

But in Plato's Euthyphro, Socrates and his young interlocutor agree that what is Holy is what God loves. Okay. But does God love it because it is Holy, or is it Holy because God loves it? If you say the latter, then you can maintain unicentric culture, even against the assaults of a polycentric world. That is tough. So tough, it may take a certain kind of orthodox Jew to keep it up. If you say that God loves it because it is Holy, then why is it Holy? That question leads you away from the center.

The three imperial (= transcultural religions), Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, have done a lot to break down the barriers to polycentric culture. Look at the history of each one, and you will see a close connection to trade routes. But the rise and spread of Western culture has racially accelerated the process. As I said, this may be regarded as an historical accident. Whether it is a happy one or not, is a profound philosophical question.

[Miranda]

Thanks again, Dr. Blanchard for taking the time to respond. I rather like the answer. It's sort of neat that countries that are so dissimilar do share some words and traits.

I still think there are multiple cultures. But I suppose that depends on how the word "culture" is defined. What exactly IS a culture?

I disagree with Mac. Republicans and Democrats share a culture and we even have some shared values, but most of the time we fight tooth and nail over the differences we have. James Madison says in Federalist #10 that, "The latent causes of faction are sown in the nature of man." I agree. While many would probably like to create a "One World Order," I do not believe it is possible to do so.

I also think Tomás may be mistaken. Coffee is thought to have originated in Ethiopia and Chess in India.

[KB]

Thanks Miranda. At first glance it seems easy to say that there are lots of cultures: Chinese culture, Japanese Culture, left handed Lithuanian lesbian culture. The trouble with that the boundaries are amorphous. What is my native culture? American, Southern, but Mid South, not deep South, and delta rather than hill country. Middle class single housing rather than rural or trailer park. Methodist, but late twentieth century Methodist,after all the color had been washed out. Is that a culture? If so, then how many are in it and how many such cultures are there? I became suspicious of the usual way of talking about "cultures" as entities, for it seemed to me impossible to draw a coherent circle around one or say how many there are.

Culture in this sense is not a group of people, it is just the habits of thought and behavior we acquire from other people, and each person has his or her own set of these.

I started thinking about unicentric and polycentric cultures when I was attending a meeting of the American association of ethnic studies. We were told constantly that people from different cultures would bring new ideas, new ways of looking at things to the table. Then a bunch of scholars from different cultural backgrounds got up to demonstrate. Each one of them told exactly the same story about his origins and how it felt to leave home and go off to college. Despite the different colors and textures and melodies that their mommies sang to them, they all seem to have been raised in the same place, and to have arrived at the same place. Apparently, there are only two places.

[Mac]

NEDA!!! Hey, Puppet Dictator...Ahmadinejad: The World continues to watch and Carla Del Ponte has a prison cell waiting for you and your "Supreme Leader" boss at the World Court in the Hague. You will eventually have to answer for your crimes against the Iranian People. The more murders the more counts of murder Ahmadinejad will have to answer for in the World Court.

[Erik]

KB:
Do you think the technological revolution of the last twenty years (let's call it the "computer" revolution) have broken down the unipolar cultures. I think the question answers itself;-) The Soviet Empire collapsed, in small part, because it's subjects could see how far they lagged behind the western bloc. Now, we are seeing stirring amongst the Persian people, in a very small part, due to technology. What are your thoughts about that?
Erik

[Mac]

The Iranian Revolution is going to happen over night or in one week...but I have faith it will happen...it already has begun and it shows that these things take time, maybe even a few years. I have no doubt that this weekends events were a precursor of more upheavel in the future. The "Supreme Leader" and the legitimacy of his regime is now in question worldwide.

[Miranda]

Dr. Blanchard:

Your theory is certainly interesting and really quite brilliant - but I think I still disagree with it.

You're right that there is is often no clear boundary to a culture. But I don't think something stops existing merely because we can't explain or define it. If I own a piece of land and my neighbour owns a piece of land next to it, but we don't clearly mark the boundaries of our parcels, someone walking by might not be able to tell which part of the land is mine or which belongs to my neighbour, but we still own our parcels.

Similarly, I might not be able to tell you how many people belong to a meat-eating culture, but there are certainly people who do and people
who don't. It is nice to have a broad word to explain shared behaviours and customs so that we don't have to list every shared practice when we speak.

Furthermore, I'm not sure that you can count how many people are in the cultures you've spoken of. How many people belong to the culture of travel and how many to the centred culture?

[Mac]

I think our President is handling the affair quite wisely. We must not play into the "Supreme One's" game. Instead, our President is letting us the people give spiritual support to those in Iranian who want freedom to live their lives the way each of them want to. This revolution from with in Iran will play more effective. We must all be patient. The General Strike is on and a huge protest has begun in Mousavi's hometown.

[caheidelberger]

unicentric vs. polycentric: KB, I like how your dichotomy moves the discussion of cultures away from particulars of race and religion (which are certainly interesting in themselves) and focuses on a fundamental difference in outlook. Identifying points of conflict between unicentric and polycentric cultures seems more broadly instructive than identifying points of conflict between Americans and Iranians, or Serbs and Croats, or whites and Indians. All of those conflicts warrant study, but your dichotomy seems a better basis for broader theory... or at least richer blog discussion. :-)

[Mac]

Both the Republicans and the current Iranian Regime underestimate President Obama. We will certainly wait and see, but, we have to have patience until this entire thing pans out.

[KB]

Miranda: I am certainly not arguing that cultures don't exist as objects because they have undefined boundaries. That would be to commit the fallacy of the beard. But I don't think that, for the most part, cultures work well as defined social units. I prefer to focus on socially and politically organized groups like tribes and cities when I am looking for social objects. Culture in the common sense is a set of tastes, behaviors, and ideas that people share with one another.

Archeologists used to do this odd thing where they would identify some style of pottery or something and give it a name: say, Mayan or Mycenaean. Then they would say: okay, these people (who used this artifact) were the Mayans! We've discovered the Mycenaean! But common housewares is no reason to consider think of a group of folks as a social unit. Sometimes this kind of aesthetic reification this has important political consequences. European scholars studying Indian religion found a name for the vast web of Gods, sacrifice cults, sacred scriptures, etc. They called it "Hindusim." With that, the people who practiced countless religions suddenly became Hindus. This was not an altogether good thing.

But I digress. Culture, understood as socially learned patterns, is indeed useful so long as you realize you are speaking about different ways of thinking and doing things, and not different kinds of people.

My argument about the two cultures suggests that something more fundamental was going on in the transition from unicentric to polycentric cultures. Contrary to your suggestion, I think it is easy to tell when someone is still a person of genuine unicentric culture. Jacob Klein tells the story of a tribe (South America I think) whose members could count the number of their own war boats, and could count the number of their enemy's war boats, but could not or refused to add the two numbers together. It wasn't that they couldn't count high enough. It was rather than they could not conceive of the fact that "our" boats and theirs were commensurate quantities. It would be like adding cats and stars and asking how many cat-stars you have. Find me someone who thinks like that, or like Strepsiades in the Clouds, I will show you a person of unicentric culture.

Of course, habits of thought that originate in unicentric culture survive to the present day, as exemplified by tribalism. Erik may be right that these are being broken up by modern technology. But modern technology also promotes unicentric thinking, as when it allows the Indian people to think of themselves as a nation.

There may be not a single unicentric left on earth. If there is, it is one of the few isolated pockets of Machijuanga, or maybe a handful of Yanomamo. Or maybe a few isolated daughters of some particular isolated village in the Ivory Coast. Unicentric culture is very strong so long as its members never step outside the sacred circle. Once they do, there is no going home. In Achebe’s great Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo realizes that his world is gone when his fellow tribesmen do not kill the Christian missionaries. He takes his own life rather than live in this new, polycentric world. What is lost cannot be recovered. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. I like the world that has room for science and accurate maps. But it did have its costs.

[Miranda]

Thanks for clarifying. In that case, I agree with you. I just detest reductionism.

[KB]

I won't say I detest reductionism. Without it, who would Aristotle have had to refute? But as the Philosopher said, because there isn't one thing doesn't mean that are lots of things. In explaining simple change, he made do with three basic principles.

[KB]

One final comment, unless there is more discussion. I was thinking about this while I drove to work today. The multicultural argument views cultures as positions from which one views the world. Thus a Lebanese Christian looks at the world from a different point of view than a White Baptist raised in Alabama, and so on with all identifiable cultures. That is what I am arguing against. There are, to be sure, differences in points of view from place to place. But as I suggested, people from vastly different places and cultural background turn out to have remarkably similar points of view. Colors and tastes change, but they are looking at the world from the same place. Unicentric and polycentric cultures represent genuine and existentially distinct positions from which to view the world.