Killing the Competition by Daly Martin;

Author:Daly, Martin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published: 2016-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

Cultural Diversity

At this point, we need to take a little detour to consider in detail what it means to blame violence—or anything else—on the prevailing culture. What is this thing called “culture,” anyway? The first definition that the Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary offers is this: “the beliefs, customs, arts, etc., of a particular society, group, place, or time.” That’s not bad, but it leaves something crucial unstated: the social acquisition of those beliefs, customs, etc.

“Culture” is etymologically akin to “cultivate.” It originally referred primarily to the care and nurture of plants: to the arts of agriculture. Its meaning was eventually extended to the refinement of human tastes and manners, a meaning that has not entirely vanished. (You might still hear boorish behavior disparaged as “uncultured.”) But when anthropologists took custody of the culture concept, they turned it into something that encompasses everything about how we think and act that we derive from experiences with our fellow human beings.

Here’s a definition that captures more of what people have in mind when they decry the “culture of violence” in the United States: Culture is “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” This was the definition concocted by the English anthropologist Edward Tylor in his 1871 tome Primitive Culture, and apart from Tylor’s politically incorrect use of “man” to encompass women, it still sounds quite modern.7

Like all of us, Tylor was shaped by his natal culture, namely that of Victorian England, and like other Victorians, including Darwin, he did not doubt that each society fell somewhere along an “evolutionary” trajectory from savagery to civilization. But while he referred explicitly to the evolution of society, there was nothing truly Darwinian in Tylor’s claims. He did not suggest that natural selection had created cultural diversity or culture itself, nor did he propose that the differences between “savages” and civilized Englishmen reflected distinct biological natures. What he did mean by societal evolution was that as any society accumulates knowledge and technology, social practices change in ways that are to some degree predictable and repetitive, and that some societies have progressed farther along this shared trajectory than others.

Ethnocentrism is the presumption that the attitudes and values that prevail in one’s own society are superior to everyone else’s, and by the twentieth century, views like Tylor’s stood accused of that sin. Under the influence of Franz Boas and others, decades of strenuous efforts to eliminate every sort of overt or latent value judgment from cross-cultural analysis followed, and it became the mainstream view of anthropologists and other social scientists that cultures cannot usefully be called more or less advanced, higher or lower. This “cultural relativism” has subsequently come under fire in its turn, for in its more extreme versions, it often seems to entail an odious moral relativism as a sort of corollary: If no society can be considered more “advanced” than any other, and if civilizing trends are therefore ethnocentric

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