di leonardo, micaela, patterns of culture wars,

6
April 8 996 The Nation. ‘25 who an outsider would describe as a redneck. There he is holding a sign reading ‘King’s Dream Lives ’ After this was all over, I went on retreat with some of the leaders. There was a lot of crying and opening up. M y God, how these men’s values have changed. They talked abo ut how working to rule ’was the most liberating mom ent of their lives, how they were for once in con- trol. They come away from this with values of solidarity and community7 alue s beyond striving only for a few dollars more. They com e away with that which is very difficult t o f ind today: their humanity? It would be nice if that were the end df this story. The next night I meet Pat Buchanan’s local coordinator, 49-year- old Teamster mem ber John (Bob) Patkus. He’ s just gotten som e bad news: A few hours earlier he was told he wo4d soon lose his $6,000-a-year second job. Al3F Freight Company has announced 45’0 layoffs, and after twenty years of work- ing weekends, he’s one of them. He’s also not too happy about the concessions his full-time employer, UR Nabisco, has been demanding as of late. “There are no more real jobs out there,” he says. “Akeric ans are getting squeezed.” Patkus has brought me to his Glad Tidi ngs Assembly of God church, a fundamentalist group that has mushroomed itom a pro-life prayer circle into a 500-strong congregation in the same handful of years as the Decatur labor wars. Here one finds a cradle- tolgrave operati on, providing all the social services and comm unity once offered to im migrant groups by labor organiza- tions. One also finds lo ts of blue-collar workers here, many of them active unio n mem bers. One U.P.I.U. worker from Mueller Company, dressed in the kh a ki uniform of th e Assembly’ s world - wide corps of “God-centered” Royal Rangers-a kind of Cub Scouts for Jesus -s ays he was sympathetic to the Staley workers and fears twelve- hour shifts are com ing his way , too. How is he planning to vote? Anybody B ut Clinton. Probably Bob Dole. pro-life,” he says. I meet another Teamst er, Tom C ampb ell, who says he loves the church an d is prou d of its expansion. What’s the secret o it s growth, I ask? “Pastor has taught us the value of team- work. Individuals are powerle ss, Campbell says. “He has taught w s that i n union the re is strengt h.” TH E RIGHT’S ATTACK O N :CULTURAL RELATMSM’ . S SYNECDOCHE FOR AL,L THAT AILS U S Patterns o f Culture Wars MICAELA DI LEONARD n the public sphere, the New Right having Talking of Boas and Mead and Herskovits. hissy @fits . (with apologies to KS. Eliot) s Jane Austen might have w ritten: It is a truth universal ly acknowledged that a right wing in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a winning ideology. Thu s our Cu lture War s, lit- n rally manufactured since the 1970~~ s Ellen . Messer-Davidow and others have documented, . _-. Far more, however, is being accomplished under the flag of Culture Wars than has been rec- ognized. In particular, since the 198 0s,neoconser- vatives ha ve d eveloped an increasing fascination with anthropological topics. We’ve seen Pat Buchanan’s Zulus, Saul Bellow’s “Proust of the Papuans,” Allan Bloom’s indictment of the disci- pline’s “sex obsession,” Newt ~ ingric~s nnately 3 giraffe-hunting men and the multiple scathing references to Boas, Mead,- Benedict, Herskovits . 8 and a host of contemporary practitioners in Di- throu gh massive, strategic infusion s of cash. For decades, we have been engaged &nearly fbtile wars of positi on in debates on polit- ical correctness, multiculturalism and women’s studies versus “academic standar ds” in the schools; he mo rals of rap music and television serials; public funding of “obscene” rt and the proper public messages to be dissemina ted by museums. This process is a sh ell game, a pre-empting of intelligent public discussion of th e grotesque, federal policy-driven upward shifi in income apd wealth distribution since t he- 19 70 s-th e United States is now the most une qual industrialized state in’the world, with the smallest middle class. It is at the same tinie an attack on public cultural phe- nomena that a re real, and real in their effects. For good reason, then, the buzz inside the Beltway now is that the7 Republicans’ motto for the coming elections is “I t’ s thea& ure, stupid.” Mica ela di Leonard0 i s completing Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity (Chicago). She teaches antliropology and women b studies at Northwestern University. nesh D’Souza’s latest simulacrum of scholarship, The End of Racism. Thus the Culture Wars onslaught means both art, enter- tainment and h igher education, and the “other cultures,” includ- ing dom estic ones, thought to be the province of anthropology. The grow ing negat ive cynosure of the New R igh ts eye, howev- er, is not anthropology as a whole but the anthropological con- struction of cultural relativism, or the attempt to en vision other cultures from within their ’own cognitive frameworks. That knackered old warhorse of the introductory anthropology class- room is up and running again, stung to seeming life with injec- tions of New Right steroids. Coincidental ly, this acade mic year marks the centenaries of two anthropolog ists oday most closely associated with the con- cept-f Fran z Boas’s firs t appo intm ent at Co lumbia Universi- ty and of the birth of his student, Melville,Herskovits, who founded the department of anthropology at Northwestern Uni- versity. And thisfin de si2cle, eerily like the last, witnesse s the perverse combination of rapidly increasing class and race in-

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7/25/2019 Di Leonardo, Micaela, Patterns of Culture Wars,

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April 8 996 The Nation. ‘2

who an outsider would describe as a redneck. There he is holding

a sign reading ‘King’s Dream Lives ’ After this was all over,

I went on retreat with some of the leaders. There was a lot of

crying and opening up. M y God, how these men’s values have

changed. They talked about how working to rule ’was the most

liberating moment of their lives, how they were fo r once in con-

trol. They come away from

this

with values of solidarity and

community7 alue s beyond striving only for a few dollars more.

They come away with that which is very difficult to f ind today:

their humanity?

It would be nice if that were the end df this story. The

next night I meet Pat Buchanan’s local coordinator, 49-year-

old Teamster mem ber John (Bob) Patkus. He’s just gotten som e

bad news: A few hours earlier he was told he wo4d soon

lose his $6,000-a-year second job. Al3F Freight Company

has announced 45’0 layoffs, and after twenty years of work-

ing weekends, he’s one of them. He’s also not too happy

about the concessions his full-time employer, URNabisco,

has been demanding as of late. “There are no m ore real jobs

out there,” he says. “Akeric ans are getting squeezed.”

Patkus has brought me to his Glad Tidings Assembly of Go

church, a fundamentalist group that has mushroomed itom

pro-life prayer circle into a 500-strong congregation in the sam

handful of years as the Decatur labor wars. Here one finds

cradle-tolgrave operation, providing all the social services an

community once offered to immigrant groups by labor organiz

tions. One also finds lo ts of blue-collar workers here, many o

them active union members. One U.P.I.U. worker from Muelle

Company, dressed in the

khaki

uniform of the Assembly’s world

wide corps of “God-centered” Royal Rangers-a kind of Cu

Scouts for Jesus-says he was sympathetic to the Staley worke

and fears twelve-hour shifts are com ing his way, too. How is h

planning to vote? Anybody But Clinton. Probably Bob Dole.“

pro-life,” he says.

I

meet another Teamster, Tom C ampbell, wh

says he loves the church and is proud of its expansion. What’s th

secret o its

growth,

I ask? “Pastor has taught

us

the value of team

work. Individuals are powerless,” Campbell says. “He has taugh

s that i n union there is strength.”

T H E RIGHT’S ATTACK

ON

:CULTURAL REL AT MS M’

.

S SYNECDOCHE

FOR AL,L

THAT

AILS

US

Patterns

of

Culture

Wars

MICAELA DI LEONARD

n the public sphere, the New Right having

Talking ofBoas and Mead and Herskovits.

hissy@fits

.

(with apolog ies toKS. Eliot)

s

Jane Austen might have written: It

is

a truth

universally acknowledged that a right wing in

possession of a good fortune must be

in

want of

a winning ideology. Thus

our

Culture Wars, lit-

n

rally manufactured since the 1 9 7 0 ~ ~s Ellen

.

Messer-Davidow and others have documented,

.

_-.

Far more, however, is being accomplishe

under the flag of Culture Wars than has been rec

ognized. In particular, since the 1980s,neoconse

vatives have developed an increasing fascinatio

with anthropological topics. We’ve seen Pa

Buchanan’s

Zulus,

Saul Bellow’s “Proust of th

Papuans,” Allan Bloom’s indictment of the disc

p line’s “sex obsession,” Newt ~ i n g r i c ~ snnatel

3

giraffe-hunting men and the multiple scathin

references to Boas, Mead,- Benedict, Herskovi

. 8

and a host of contemporary practitioners in Di

through massive, strategic infusions of cash. For decades, we have

been engaged &nearly fbtile wars of position in debates on polit-

ical correctness, multiculturalism and women’s studies versus

“academic standards” in the schools; he morals of rap music and

television serials; public funding of “obscene” rt and the proper

public messages to be dissemina ted by museums. This process is

a shell game, a pre-empting of intelligent public discussion of the

grotesque, federal policy-driven upward

shifi

in income apd

wealth distribution since the- 1970s-the United States is now the

most unequal industrialized state in’th e world, with the smallest

middle class. It is at the same tinie an attack on public cultural phe-

nomena that a re real, and real in their effects. For good reason ,

then, the buzz inside the Beltway now is that the7Republicans’

motto for the coming elections is “It’s thea& ure, stupid.”

Micaela di Leonard0 is completing Exotics at Home:

Anthropologies,

Others,American Modernity (Chicago).She teaches antliropologyand

nesh D’Souza’s latest simulacrum of scholarship, The End o

Racism. Thus the Culture Wars onslaught means both art, enter

tainment and h igher education, and the “other cultures,” includ

ing dom estic ones, thought to be the province of anthropology

The grow ing negative cynosure of the New R igh ts eye, howev

er, is not anthropology as a whole but the anthropological con

struction of cultural relativism, or the attempt to envision othe

cultures from within their

’own

cognitive frameworks. Tha

knackered old warhorse of the introductory anthropology class

room is up and running again, stung to seeming life w ith injec

tions of New Right steroids.

Coincidentally, this acade mic year marks the centenaries o

two anthropolog ists oday most closely associated with the con

cept-f Franz Boas’s firs t appo intment at Columbia Universi

ty and of the birth of his student, Melville,Herskovits, wh

founded the department of anthropology at Northwestern Uni

versity. And th is f in de si2cle,

eerily like the last, witnesse s th

7/25/2019 Di Leonardo, Micaela, Patterns of Culture Wars,

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26

The Nation.

April 8 199

equalities, resurgent racism miied with voyeuristic denuncia-

tion of sexual “perversity,” xenophobia, institutionalized femi-

nism under duress and tempted toward bourgeois and racist

interests-all coexisting with the most bathetic romanticization

of The Primitive.

In

order to fig ht this century’s Culture Wars

more effectively than we did the last, we would do well to a ttend

to both senses of “culture.”

Sheer volume is one good index of cultural relativism’s

growing importance in the public sphere. A Lexis/Nexis

search reveals scattered but

ture-and so is used again and again. (Even the radical Villag

Voice columnist Ellen Willis recently blamed it for the Amer

can leR’s incoherence on Bosnia.) “Secular humanism,” for ex

ample, which was attacked frequently in the early Reagan year

was found to have no appeal outside the already committ

Christian right, and has been largely jettisoned. But newly re

spectable racism a nd anxieties about an increasingly multiraci

America and the diminished place of the United States in th

New World Order have combined to give the concept treme

dous negative salience.

increasing-and almost all

For the.New

Right,

cultural yelativisqg

is simply “cultural relativism as stig

negative-references to the

ma” were a movie, we’d hav

duringthe 1970s and into the

.quiver that successfully reaches

ts

mark. But what exactly animat

mid-1980s. At first, in the

topic in the popular press

one

of

the many arrows in

its

Culture Wars

to say it’s got real legs.

Carter years, the references are made by moderates, and are

used to indict straw people, jus t off-camera, who are “going too

far? Christopher Jenclts, for example, complains in 1978 in The

Washington

Post of a “kind of spongy cultural relativism that

treats all id eas as equally defensible.” The New York Times, in a

1980 editorial against execution by stoning in Khomeini’s Iran,

thunders, “Cultural relativism has its limits, and at som e point

tolerance.become s complicity.” But then the gloves come off

and all pretense of reasoned debate is abandoned. The Heritage

Foundation announces with ho rror in 1981 cultural relativism’s

“deep and,

it

would seem, lasting inroads into society.” Leonard

Kriegel in 1984 approvingly cites William Bennett, and complains

of American education that “cultural relativism was i n he tra-

ditional literary canon was out’?; while Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle

Forum comes out against “secular humanism a nd cu ltural relativ-

. ism” in the schools. Note the slipperiness of “culture” across

these references, the way tha t app reciating Toni Morrison and

wu ssbg out onjudging cruel and unusual punishment (and us t

exactly where were these Western cheerleaders for Khom eini?)

get equated in the new all-purpose rightist indictment.

t mid-decade, with Reagan’s second term, the pattern of oc-

cgrrence takes on the mathematical neatness of the wren-tit’s

call: deliberate notes, each incrementally faster than @e next,

until a ll individuality is lost in a buzz ing trill of noise. Refer-

ences are not as frequent as those to O.J. or Madonna, of

course, but from the early 4990s into the p resent, no week has

passed without one or two snide print med ia swipes, part of

oui-

rodomontade of xenophobic babbittry. The New Republic whines

in 1987 hat “cultural relativism stops

us

saying that

our

ways are

best.” William Pfaffcomplains n 1988 hat cultural relativism al-

lows universities (Orwell is turning in his grave) “ to shove truth

down the m emory hole.” Digby Anaerson in Nation al Review in

1991, not to be outdone, excoriates “repe llent cultural relativism”

that says “that any culture is as good as any other, you know, black

Afiicans had a Renaissance which outshone the West’s, it’s just

that the West has ob literated t with colonialism.” William Henry,

in In Defense of Elitism (1994), favorably reviewed in The New

Yovk

Times, actually writes that “it is scarcely the same thing to

put a man on the moon as to pu t a bone in your nose.”

For the New Right, obviously,,cultural relativism is simply

one of the many arrows in its Culture Wars quiver that success-

-

those legs? The diatrib

against “cultural relativism” is an extraordinary one-stop .sho

for a bricolage of New Right causes. Consider: It links parochi

American notions of the “heathen ways” of foreigners and do

mestic racial minorities to the w idespread public sense that, i

spawning civil rights, feminism, gay rights and “entitlemen

(economic ‘democracy), the 1960s “went too far,” “denied ou

Western traditions”

in

favor of a “permi~siveness~~onnecte

somehow to exactly those “heathen ways.’’

Thus

the rightist fee

ing frenzy surrouhding Derek Freeman’s 1983 attack on Ma

garet Mead’s Sam oa research.

’Souza, inspired by Allan Bloom’s diatribes against it, see

cultural relativism as the product of anthropology’s earl

century dominance by Franz B oas, whose leftism and Jew

ishness he finds reason to mention repeatedly. He mounts

broad-based indictbent of the “culturally relativist” work o

Boas and

all

his students, which somehow also indicts f e m s

and gay rights . He interprets cultural relativism in typical kitchen

sink fashion as the heresy that “denies that race is a.mean ingf

natural category and holds that all cultures are equal.. .group di

ferences are largely the produc t of environment and specifical

of unjust discrimination.. the mission of sound policy is not t

civilize the barbarians, but to fight racism and discrimination..

According to^ the relativist paradigm, the apparently outrageo

customs of other cultures were to be politely overlooked, or ex

plained as ingenious and necessary adaptations to the speci

needs o i a particular environment.”

Not only is this a ridiculous set of statem ents-e ven as pa

ody it is a mush of three separate arguments: the mode rn scie

tific understanding of race as contingent gene frequencies, no

permanently bounded populations; classic liberal political plu

ralism; a‘4d the radical demand that culture be considered in th

context*ofwealth and political power. But there is strategy in in

teliectual mushiness, and this potpourri of criticisms reahimat

the dominant Victorian view of race; culture and civilization.

This vision is nowadays, as my c hildhood family physicia

Doc tor Sal used to say of viruses, “goin’ around.” Despite th

fact that his egregious racism was bare-faced enough to prom

black neocons Robert Woodson and Glenn Loury to resign in

huff from the Am erican Enterprise-Institute,D’Souza is clear

part of a larger rightist attempt to s iphon off diffuse but grow

ing nostalgia for the style and certainties of the Victorian

and Edwardians-M asterpiece Thea tre, Victoria. magazin

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April 8 1996 The

Nation.

MerchantAvoryproductions-for its

own

agenda. Paul Johnson’s

call fo r Etiropean recolonialization of the Third World, Samu el

Huntington’s absurd racist pronouncem ents about the “coming

clash o f civilizations,” Arthur Schlesinger’s trumpe ting of

Eu-

rope as the “unique source” of all liberating ideas in world his-

tory, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s fervent approval of the starving

pro letk at and workhouses of the Victorians, Murray and H e m -

stein’s racist revanchism in The Bell Curve and D’Souza’s at-

tempts to rehabilitate the old racist,. imperialist traditions of

nineteenth-century anthropology and to vilify their twentieth-

century anthropological detractors are all part of this well-

remunerated rightist campaign.

Thiscampaign takes place, as i t were, with and without foot-

notes-largely purged of its anti-Semitic base .by and for the

Commentary crowd, or not. Witness the extraordinary paralle ls

between D’Souza and others and the anonymous filth that showed

up recently in faculty mailboxes at NorthwesternUniversity (and

that also has been circulating on the Internet). “Anti-Semitism-

Found”

rambles on, through eigh t &y-print pages, about Jews

as the “eternal enemy of mankind” who endanger America

through their ownership of all mass m edia, using them to pro-

mote “the Jewish doctrines of race mixing, feminism, homo-

sexual rights, etc.” Franz Boas bulks large in the narrative as “a

European Jew who came to dominate the Anthropology Depart-

ment at C olumbia University in

1896

when that science was in

its embryonic stages.” Boas’s students-among them Margaret

Mead and Ruth Benedict (“two Gentile ladies whose books and

field studies became mandatory reading for a whole genera-

tion”)-“spread like a cancer across our land and began indo

trinatingAm ericans with their Jewish Liberal point o f view.” I

herent to this doctrine is cultural relativism, which declar

“there can be no objective standards by which any cu lture c

be judged.

A

skull sucking aborigine is exactly equivalent

Thom as Jefferson.” The only c lear difference between the

anonymous fascists and the other rightists higher on the ladd

of respectability is simply which national and global popul

tions they strategically include, in historian David Hollinge

phrase, in “the circle o f the we.”

espite chimerical portraitsadram from without and withi

anthropology’s historical circle of the we has never be

exactly global. Founded within the c rucible of Victorian im

perialism, the discipline was Janus-faced from its ince

tion-involved both in the repeated discovery of the “psych

unity” of all humans, in E.B. Tylor’s phrase, and in the tortur

racist circumlocutions

of

skull-meashing biological anthropo

ogy, a tradition only ended after World War II.and recent

revived under the banner of sociobiology. Anthropo logic

practice in every decade of

this

century, like that o f all intelle

tual disciplines, has reflected the changing Zeitgeist and co

temporary politica l contestations.

So whose “cultural relativism” 4s being dissed here? T

term, like many of those adopted into popular culture from anthr

po1ogy-‘‘cu1tuye” itself, ethnocentrism, culture shock, ethno

raphy-is a political and historical Rorschach blot. Whimsic

popular comm entatorsgloss it in Cole Porter terms: “anythi

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28

The Nation.

April 8 199

goes”--or, for the baby boom set, la Sly Stone, “different

strokes for different folks.” Clearly the term bears some con-

nection to Einsteinian relativity, and to other High Modernist

schools of thought recognizing the .intersubjectivity of knowl-

edge. But anthropologists have meant, by and large, something

rather narrower and more technical by the term. Despite popu-

lar imaginings, romantic visions of “the primitive” have been

produced largely outside the discipline, and many anthropolo-

gists have warned of the inherent connections between “noble”

and “nasty savage” representations.‘Moreover, in the name of

science or of social ustice, a significant group of anthropologists

has always energetically rejected cultural relativism.

Franz Boas was a socialist in the nineteenth-century Geman

tradition whose evolving concerns reflected both belief

in

a broad-based “science”-scholarly rigor-and intellectual or-

ganizing against racially restrictive immigration and eugenics

movements, ult&ately against fascism. His early ethnological

experiences with Baffinland

Eskimos

confirmed his socialist

humanitarianism. “The idea of a ‘cultured’ ndividual

is

merely

relative,” he wrote, and “a person’s worth should be judged by his

Herzensbildung

[formation of the heart].

. All

that man can do

for humanity is to M h e r he truth, whether it be’sweet or bitter.”

Margaret Mead departed considerably from her -adviser.

A

child of the Progressive Era; despite the many twists and p m s

of her half-century career, she was fundamentally a social engi-

neer who envisioned Others as “natural laboratories” from whom

“we”-she, explicitly meant the Anglo-Saxon bourgeoisie and

petite bourgeoisie-might borrow bits of culture to improve the

mechanics of our own civilization. Neither Mead nor Boas,

in any event, self-consciously articulated cultural relativism as

a concept.

Ruth Benedict, far more politically attuned to Boas, also

made use of the natural laboratory model a creative amalgam

with. Gestalt psychology and a’ deeply egalitarian concern.

Benedict did indeed articulate the notion that “the diversity of

the possible combinatiofis of culture-traits

is.

endless, and ade-

quate social orders can be built indiscriminately upon

a

great

variety of them.” But she also grasped the nettle of cultural dif-

ferenke in

a

world of power politics, arguing that “world-wide

[white] cultural diffusion.. has given to our culture a massive

universality.. .which we read off.. .as necessary and inevitable.”

Melville Herskovits could be considered the discipline’s ur-

cultural relativist. He did write in

1955

hat-“morality s univer-

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sal, exact.forms are relative.” But he explicitly confined

this

or

entation to fieldwork, rejecting the “moral relativism” his a

tackers accusedhim of espousing.

The cold war-era anthropology that Herskovits represente

the array of structures of feeling,and practices that James Cli

ford has labeled “ethnographic liberalism,” reflected a specif

orientation o politics in a specific historical conjuncture.‘Man

anthropologists in,

this

period found their niche in describin

“culture7’ urely as shared,cognition-and in defining their di

ciplinary place

beneath

the structures of state power.

A

maj

theme of such work was the illumination of alternativkcultur

logics, ways in which differing languages, kinship systems, n

tions of health and healing, legal practices, religious cosmol

gies, functioned together,in other cultural settings. Such wor

rarely engaged with contemporary politics. Rather, anthropol

gists as a whole (with noteworthy radical exceptions) attempte

to describe “culture change” in decolonizing and neocolonizin

states as if the tumultuous political shifts of the postwar era ha

little to do with

U.S.

imperialism and Big Power politics.

lassic “cultural relativism,” then, is a fascinating oxymoro

an exercise

in

powerful powerlessness.In its heyday it was

toothless liberalism that spoke judiciously and tolerantly o

the varying “ways of mankind”-while remaining large

silent

on

both the role of Western power in the politica

economic settings of these shifting practices and on the com

fortable evaluative position of the Western (or non-Westen

ethnographer viewing them. For a form of relativism,

in

oth

words, it wasn’t very bloody relative. ).

In

fact, contrary to the new conservative apologists for “o

humanist traditions,” cultural relativism is actually the descen

ant of our

own

precious Western belletristic heritage, a recurre

trope in the learned armchair essay in cuimal criticism. Mon

taigne, in the sixteenth-century “Of Cannibals,” famously ad

jures us to “take care not to cling to common opinions.. .[to

judge by the way ofreason, andnot by common report,” He note

of Brazilian Indians’ cannibalism hat.f‘there s .more barbarity i

eating a man alive [by European torture] than ip eating

him

dea

We may, then, well call these people barbarians in respect to th

rules of reason, but not in respect to ourselves, who, in all sor

of

barbarity, exceed them.” Montaigne allows the Indians to

tur

the tables on French society: “They observed that there we

among us men full and crammed with

all

kinds of good thing

while their [fellow citizens] were.begging at their doors, emac

ated with hunger and poverty; and they thought it strange th

these needy [citizens] were able to suffer such injustice, and th

they did not take the others by the throat and fire their houses.”

Rightists, i fact, have made lavish use of this venerab

trope. They simply reverse the evaluative arrows-as in “black

and ’Arabs profited from the slave trade to 0’~-0rplit relativi

hairs in stigmatizing some while lauding other Others. Soci

thought is innately comparative, finding grounds for emulatio

and avoidance in the practices of temporal and geograph

“other countries.” For conservatives, t has always been a case o

cultural relativism for me, but not for thee.

The attackoncultural relativism, then, is of a piece with the e

tire New Rightist program: the hypocritical attempt to rewrite th

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April

8 1996 The N ation.

the m ote in O thers’ eyes while ignoring the beam in one’s own.

Certainly, moral principles are important. But c laiming that “cul-

turd relativism tellsus there a re no ultimate moral principles’’ is a

canard. All that most of the practitioners of my benighted

disci ^

pline have ever advocated is the attempt, from the bedrock of

one’s own encu lturation, to empathize with the m oral logics of

others. The pla nks o f a progressive program, in any event-co-

nomic democracy, antiracism, feminism, gay rights, etc.-rest

precisely-on the invocation of ultimate moral principles.

It’s

not

a case of conservative tradition versus present-day license or re-

bellion, .nor of “Western” civilization versus barbarism. We all

have histories to ex tol and deplore; and, thanks to c olonialism,all

our histories are interm ixed over the la st half-millennium. It’s

their choice of globally produce d traditions versus ours.

No,

a self-conscious, politically engaged cu ltural relativism

describes the intellectual process, as in the reception o f

art

of

willful suspension of disbelief for the purpose of g aining acce

to alternative ways of apprehending the universe-because th

are &ere; because we are heirs to long (distinctly but n

uniquely) Western traditions of stigma tizingOthers that need

be unraveled if we are to know ourselves properly; becau

Western colonialism has affected even those customs we thin

of as most O ther, and vice versa; because, in the L atin tag, not

ing human is alien to

us.

Such a process is always partial: A s t

postmodernists

are

finally figu ring out, relativizing is a liber

tory technique that must always arise from a contingent, b

nevertheless real, Archimedean standpoint. That standpoint

the investigation of the complex contours of political power f

the purpose’s of fu rthering economic and po litical democrac

We need to judge, as Montaigne advised, “by the way of reaso

and not by comm on report.” Only in this way can we gain acce

to Boas’s sweet and b itter truth.

‘CORPORATE CAMPAIGNS’ HI T BUSINESSES WH ERE T HEY

LNE.

SO

THEY’RE CRYING ‘FOUL

Union

Do’s:

‘Smart Solidarity’

Thank

God

we have a system

of

labor where .

there can be a strike. Whatever the pressure,

there is apoin t where the workingman may stop.

-Abraham Lincoln, 186

can Trucking Association; Ga ry Hess, head

Associated Builders and Contractors; and Pa

Huard, a senior vice president of the N ation

Association of Manufacturers-gathered at t

Marriott H otel in ‘Washington o. demand th

Cong ress take imm ediate steps toward makin

g these campaigns illegal.

“This

kind of repr

hensible conduct has no place in Am erica an

8 is totally beyond the bounds ofthe time-honor

traditions of labor-management relations

g

thundered Donahue. A m onth later, Represe

tative Peter Hoekstra of M ichigan obliged with the first of w h

may be m any hearings on what is to be done. “We must ma

sure that the American workplace

is

a constructive arena

,w hich h e em ployee i d he employer can work together,” sa

Hoekstra, who chairs the House subcommittee that is inves

gating the matter.

.

Although labor’s record with anticorporate campaigns

mixed (where they are used to the exclusion of or as a substitu

for mass action they can demobilize the rank and file), what

worrying business now is a v ersatile and relentless offensive d

rected,outof La Place, Louisiana, by U nited SteelworkersLoc

9121 aga inst Bayou Steel and RSR, one of the world’s large

secondary lead smelters:

“This issue has reached the ideological boiling point f

business,” says Ed Keyser, representative of the Steelworke

corporate cam paign department. Keyser began helping. th

Steelworkers in 1993, when the L ocal struck Bayou, rejecting

contract proposal that called for

no

pay increases for

six

yea

and gave management the freedom to contract out any jo

Since, hen the Steelworkers have attacked’Bayou every whi

By striking they’ve quit their obs.

-Ronald Reagan, on the PATCO strikers, 1981

ifteen years after Rona ld Reagan fired the air

traffic controllers, strikes in America have

dipped to a fifty-year low, a me re one-eighth

the leve l of

two

decades ago. If you t W t h a t business lead-

ers no longer worry about the power of workers to take’direct

action, though , think again. With laws already on the books al-

lowing tempo rak and permanent replacements, with the threats

of dow nsizing and c orporate flight further casting shadows over

labor militancy, business leaders are neve rthelesspress ingahead

to

win

one added advantage over their employees. They now

want C ongress to ban organized labor’s m ost effective recent tac-

tical innovation-the antico rporate campaign.

Often called a “corporate campaign,” its objective is

‘to

hit

powerful and highly diversified companies on all fron ts by in-

vestigating their affiliates; scrutinizing their environmental and

investment records, organizing consumer boycotts, submitting

shareholder resolutions, complaining o regu latory agencies and

doing whatever else it takes to pressure management into a fair,

settlement.

.

On September

21

of last year a h ost of prom inent business

leaders-including Thom as Donahue, president of the Am eri-

Eyal ress

s

New

York-based

journ list who writes ?equ ntly on

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