My advisor recommended a book to me by a comparative lit theorist by the name of Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, called Theory in an Uneven World. Like the bulk of literary theorists, he is an unashamed Marxist, but I've been reading that type since I arrived here at grad school. It's proved to be an enlightening intellectual exercise to try to read this kind of theorist, holding their false premises in suspension in my mind and thinking through only their internally justified and internally logical merits until it becomes appropriate to remember the false premises and sweep away the entire theory. It's a sort of coping strategy I've developed that I think actually helps me engage with theories I'll have to deal with as an academic, while maintaining my core conservative values and principles. In a way, it's a bit of a Sun Tzu "know your enemy" kind of way of studying, but I find it fruitful. Anyway, Radhakrishnan is concerned with making Marxist theory work in a global context that Marx didn't imagine: that of the postcolonial world where inequalities between the West and the Rest are stark and seemingly intractable. From his position of solidarity with formerly colonized peoples, he views the industrial capitalist expansion of the West in the modern period as having been possible only on the backs of the colonies who supplied raw materials and slave or near-slave labor. This modern period, besides raping Africa, Asia, and South America to fuel its fantastic growth and greed for more, also sought by dominance to impose Western modes of thinking on the Rest, which had their own indigenous understandings of how the world was organized already.
All this is obviously biased, but seems an accurate enough description from one side at least. Anyone who's watched Disney's Pocahontas can at least understand how differing systems of thought on the issue of personal ownership of property, for example, could mutually enrich each other if studied as equals. Is it not valuable to retain a reverent respect and profound knowledge of the natural environment that surrounds one? Surely English settlers could learn this from their American Indian neighbors, rather than obstinately insisting upon a notion of property that didn't often care as much for how things were as for who they belonged to. Now never mind the fact that this is fabulously romanticizing the American Indians of the day and their closeness with nature, and never mind the fact that this closeness also included pagan rituals and sacrifices that at times were also violent and led to lawlessness, and never mind the fact that the British DID have a respect for nature so deep that it pushed their curiosities to experiment and theorize and remain for centuries on the forefront of scientific achievement—we can still learn deep truths about nature from how the American Indians understood it, if we're open to learning. I use this example to demonstrate that while the principle is true that we can learn much from the study of other cultures as they are, we should not fall into a relativistic trap of claiming all cultures of equal value. In the context of study--observing something with the purpose of understanding what it is or how it functions--some things cannot be compared without first removing from the comparison the student's own personal value judgments. You have to act AS IF the things you are comparing are of equal value in order to accurately weigh them. But study is NOT the ONLY context possible in the real world. Some things have USES that go beyond their internally observable descriptions. For example, linguists have described what is often termed Black Vernacular English (BVE) as a separate language based on English. When viewed this way, an interesting and rather insightful logic becomes evident, and the language, as a system in and of itself, not only makes sense, but does an effective job of making communication clear and concise. It has its own rules, which sometimes diverge from standard American English, but which nevertheless are quite consistent. You would never be able to discover any of that about BVE unless you were willing to treat it as though it were more than just some bastardized or corrupted or even just imperfect English. On the other hand, when it comes to the marketplace, there IS value, and it is simply less valuable to speak BVE than to speak standard English in the American business world.
So with that aside made, let's get back to Radhakrishnan's reading of global modernity as imposing a certain manner of thinking, a certain mode of "knowing", an epistemology. The implication is that there are many alternative epistemologies available, and that it is oppressive and patently evil to try to impose the Western one on the Rest. He later makes it more explicit that Hinduism, for example, is not merely a religion, but a system of belief for understanding the world, even an epistemology, in a way that is completely Restern (non-Western--my neologism). His argument, while Marxist, is rather contra-secularism. He's claiming that since the secular humanist West treats its own epistemological system of belief as universal it both ignores the value of alternative systems (by denying them) and coopts them as cute little ethnological oddities that have no impact on the "truth" of the "progress" of the West.
Now I must make clear that the term "system of belief" in the previous paragraph is MINE, not Radhakrishnan's. I use the term because it demonstrates the point at which his term "epistemologies" conflates belief with knowledge. Of course one can respect other belief systems, but to claim that each has an equal purchase on explaining reality is absurd. Now again, for the purpose of study, one may posit the idea that there is no universal mode of knowledge or even that there is no reality (only perception/interpretation), but it becomes dangerous when such a denial of universal reality and truth (claims to knowledge) is carried over into the political realm (for one). You may end up, for example, accepting as workable a form of centralized governmental control that claims to be able lift everyone in its jurisdiction out of poverty, but that has never done anything more than imprison its citizens in a state of equal misery (except for the few that rule and are therefore more equal than the others) here in the real world.
I don't think it's wrong to criticize the West for ethnocentricity, for arrogance, and for a seemingly systemic ignorance of other cultures (other than exoticizing them, making them seem attractive as a tourist destination, but as irredeemably foreign in essence). In that sense the West DOES assume a whole lot in imposing its own epistemology as universal. But isn't it also assuming a whole lot to deny that there ARE universal epistemological truths and realities?
Radhakrishnan's major point is that there needs to be a dialog between West and Rest about reality, and there he has my complete agreement. Where we disagree is on not throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The West DOES have a cultural understanding of more of the keys of reality than does most of the Rest--this should be self-evident, if not from the fact of economic and military dominance, at least from political systems that allow freedom to their citizens (from which economic and military dominance flow, BTW). That the West has much to learn from the Rest should also be self-evident, and I don't mean "learn" as in from the National Geographic channel, but from an actual investment of SELF into seeing as the other sees BEFORE comparing and retaining the good for use in the real world.
Not that Radhakrishnan does this himself, but I also find it interesting how leftists in general can work so hard to disqualify any manifestation of faith when it comes from a Western Judeo-Christian tradition in the name of secularism, and yet grant a privileged status to Restern belief systems even if they are utterly mythological or politically oppressive and dangerous.
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