Personal Meaning and Cultural Relativism Aren't at Odds

...Or, Dismantling the Existential Anxiety in Contemporary American Socio-Political Drama that's Getting Really Old By Now.

Coastal wolves in the Pacific Northwest who live off of fish and seaweed and seal carcasses aren't real wolves, they're like, wimpy wolves. REAL wolves are Arctic and Gray wolves and they live off of muskoxen and caribou and elk. So, Coastal wolves should actually hunt in packs and kill big game so that they can be true to what real wolves are.

The above paragraph is clearly psychobabble, yes? Well that's what it sounds like to me when I hear the idea that one denomination or sect of a religion is right and another is wrong, or even when I hear similar squabbling between atheists and theists. Within Christianity or Islam, it's about who is a real Christian or Muslim and who isn't. Within the wider arena of atheism versus theism, it seems surreptitiously about who is the more humanistic (or humanitarian) or who is more true to the original ideals of philosophy and ethics. Because of the ecological diversity of earth, nature requires diverse adaptation of its creatures that seek to survive and thrive. Culture is, somewhere in place and time, bound to the earth; a reflection of earth's geological, biological, and topographical diversity and the uniqueness of place. Homogeneity does not lend itself to adaptation to life on such an earth. If difference is bad and there’s only one truth, I guess the whole earth should go to hell, then? If this is the ultimate conclusion of a particular theology, the benefit of that theology to humanity becomes quite suspect, to say the least. 

 Some fundamentalist interpretations of religion are ideological forms of ecocide because they fail to acknowledge that non-human systems much more broad and encompassing than our individual selves and communities are what give rise, ultimately, to difference. Difference is not something we necessarily choose through rational self-interest or some concept that Ayn Rand wrote about. To some degree difference is chosen for us by systems larger than ourselves, and it is manifested and built upon in various ways throughout our lives. 

Some secular atheist ideologies, at least the positivist and science-obsessed ones, are ultimately ecocidal and just as un-compassionate as what they purport to decry because they, also, cannot acknowledge the ecological component of cultural relativism. It’s not just some “fundamentalist extremists” that have dangerous, dominating views about nature, but it’s also privileged sectors of secular neo-liberal society that do not know how to acknowledge the effect that “nature” has on people because they grew up sheltered from “nature,” or perhaps only experiencing the light, transcendental, wind-chimey side of nature and not the darker, grittier sides. Nature is much more than the context for a spiritual (or, for the secularists out there, extreme) experience.

My hope is not that we can all agree. My hope is that we can work toward ways, within our cultures and worldviews, to acknowledge the “seams” where culture is knit to nature, and honor them (which can look many different ways). And maybe acknowledge that they aren’t really seams after all, but merely transition zones...

I feel like lately I’ve been hearing so much of this extreme caricaturing of “postmodern/cultural relativism” (neo-liberal/progressive caricature) versus “taking a moral stand” (more conservative or libertarian or radical caricature) as if we have to pick one. Well, we don’t, and I don’t, and I don’t get why we can’t be a little more nuanced in our thinking. Acknowledging ecological-cultural diversity doesn’t mean we all have to passively accept, say, when genocide is occurring in another society. You can still take a moral stand, born from compassion and loving protectiveness, and also acknowledge the ecological and resource-based contingency of cultures. Just because diversity, difference, and multivocality are real doesn’t mean personal meaning isn’t. The problem some of us 'moderns' seem to have is that we seem to think that non-action (in terms of foreign policy) equates to not taking a moral stand. Obviously some of us need to read the Tao-Te-Ching, for a little perspective if nothing else. Cultures tend to dictate normative, "right" or "best" ways to enact one's agency, yet it is possible to care, to "take a moral stand," without following the script thrust in your face (just don't expect to be acknowledged for it). If you always need to mark the external world with the track of your values, you will overlook the important skill of remaining true to yourself regardless of external circumstances. People are clearly terrified of the sort of non-action (really inaction) that comes from existential perplexity or overwhelm. They are terrified of the part of themselves that can empathize with the experience of inaction, and eager to smugly crucify those who seem immobilized by it, while what the latter most need instead is likely compassion and empathy since they have at least taken the bold step of beginning to process the grief and trauma suggested by much of post-modern and post-colonial analysis.

The indecision that comes from overwhelm and that often can evolve into apathy indicates that one has been unable to set proper psychic and emotional boundaries. Personal boundaries have long been transgressed and there is potentially repressed anger there that needs to be channeled in a healthy and meaningful way. In this case it is not just personal boundaries that are transgressed, but the boundaries of the heart and soul of the world that some feel called to protect, which have been transgressed by the countless acts of silencing, rape, murder, and dehumanization that one learns about and empathizes with when they begin to see outside one singular story of history. We falsely believe that the solution to this apathy and repressed frustration is an act of heroism or sacrifice, a sort of redemption or insurance policy protecting us from more apathy. But we are being played by the old savior complex. That complex is very entitled and can be a colonizing force that does unpredictable harm. What about a middle road, a hard road that involves learning how to grieve (as Martin Prechtel suggests in Grief and Praise?)  If we have to pick between (selfish) expression and repression, we will never learn this middle path. Grieving is a lost ceremonial art, an endangered ancestral skill along with basketmaking and starting a fire with sticks.

This is all coming up because of how we're relating to ISIS and militant Islam, and it's forcing the West to have something of an identity crisis as it tries collectively to reconcile the disparate results of some of its cultural ideals and still maintain a stable identity. I.e. Western cultural ideals produced the liberal-academic intelligentsia with its views on cultural relativism, but those same ideals also produced ideas about what a free society looks like that seem at odds with the former. Well, Good. I'm all in favor of initiation. All the hallmarks of it are present.

"And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand."

• Mark 3:25. Good comment on the necessary death that initiation (of communities, of cultures, of individuals) requires.

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I am guilty of having conjured up the caricature of the abstract postmodern hipster-philosopher who doubts any claims to truth or meaning. Let's start holding ourselves accountable for this polemical caricaturing. For me, this critique is at its root directed at inner aspects of myself (perhaps my past self or a possible self that I can identify with) as well as external examples. The thought that we can 'so easily' slip down a rabbit hole of meaninglessness and despair (and out of what were initially good intentions too) is pretty scary and threatening... We need as scholars, educators, and visionaries, to track our own inner journeys of grappling with the complexities of analysis and methodology and pay attention to how they affect our perspectives, otherwise we'll always be caught in these cycles of differentiating ourselves from others who trigger us. Perhaps that kind of discursive identity formation is somewhat inevitable but that doesn't mean it should go unacknowledged.

Unfortunately some theoretical lenses get taken to an extreme a lot. That's what happens with potent ideas. They run; they even fly. It’s unfortunate that this reflects a lot of people's experience in academia (including mine to some extent, though I think that often when we encounter examples of people who take certain methods of analysis to extremes within our academic community, we disproportionately remember them because the experience is emotionally upsetting. Well, it should be...We've gotta get jolted into 'speaking our truth' somehow. We need to stop shying away from meaningful confrontation and writing it off as oppressive "conflict.") I've learned so much from poststructuralist, post-colonial, and derridean criticism, but to me they are merely tools in a toolbox... I don't identify with them. To paraphrase something the anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan wrote, an extreme postmodernist analysis can ultimately (emotionally) destroy the subject doing the analyzing. Is it truly a surprise to any of us that that sort of ironic methodologically-driven apathy and inertia has been generated? It's as predictable as the weather if you read the last 100 years of Western history with an attunement to the trauma that has occurred, and the subsequent attempts at recovery and healing. In that vein, there is a great article by the medievalist and historiographer Gabrielle Spiegel that would by all accounts be considered high theory, but it discusses the theory of Derridean deconstruction as emerging from the context of the trauma of the holocaust. Yet the article's methodology is not Jungian or the like as one might expect, but thoroughly (in my view) post-structuralist and "post-modern" and in fact an exemplar of the amazing abilities of these theoretical lenses, because it turns the theory back in on itself--it uses the theory to hold the theory-makers accountable. It remains one of my favorite academic articles of all time. Does that make me a postmodernist-or-whatever? Ah, I don't know or really care. Getting caught up in labels belies the unsettling reality that groups that need to distinguish themselves from each other are, in the scheme of things, really quite similar, and perhaps share a lot of common resources and territory (ecological, cultural, or both).

That is to say, our culture is pretty entrenched in cycles of trauma, addiction, and escapism. I think certain theoretical lenses can absolutely be commandeered to serve 'escapist' needs, rather like how some spiritual philosophies can be utilized by people to escape from suffering in ultimately immature and irresponsible ways. There was a great book written recently on the latter phenomenon called "Spiritual Bypassing" by Robert Augustus Masters, and I think some of his critique could of course also be applied to philosophy. To me the main points of the postmodern theoretical lenses are cultural relativism and the situatedness of meaning. I myself have grappled with the concerns that this brings up--namely, how do we achieve things like liberation, initiation, community resilience, etc., in light of some of the ramifications of postmodern thought? At this point I feel that it is only ourselves we have to blame if we cannot acknowledge both meaninglessness and the relativity of meaning along with the deep personal meanings in our own lives. To me postmodern thought shouldn't have to  suggest that there is no ultimate meaning, it just suggests that meaning and truth is ecologically situated—in other words it changes the definition of what "ultimate meaning" is (a nice trick!) This doesn't invalidate meaning or truth, but actually highlights it in a way. But a lot of that theory is incomplete because it threw out the importance of myth. In my view I hope these theories come around to a new understanding of myth, meaning, and symbol, otherwise it'll remain a half-truth. At this point I'm as tired of the endless rhetorical crucifixions of Joseph Campbell and Eliade as I am of the dismissal of pomo thought.