Oh, you are both so long-winded! ;) Let me boil this down. Because as a wannabe historian I encounter the same, let's say, cross-hairs (not conflict) between understanding a different cultural context and evaluating its ethical reality (where ethical is understood as meaning "how it matches up or does not match up with a sustainable idea of human nature). Because I think it is self-defeating to think that all human nature is socially constructed, at least in a way that excludes ethical judgment. I just don't think that sociological theories exclude individual or social wrong-doing. By trying to exchange judgment for understanding (instead of accepting both) it seems one is making an implicit statement of human nature, which is: Societies function in ways that are equally healthy for them (collectively or individually). It doesn't seem to me that that's a given.
But I really meant to just put forth this question, which I once tried to ask my anthropologist professor, and she sort of awkwardly side-stepped it. But I wasn't trying to grill her, I was just honestly curious. If you essentially "see through" all social structures as inherently malleable and even arbitrary (because I don't think malleable = arbitrary), how do you live in them? It's a sort of detached position. I don't question that when you encounter something horrible you know and feel that it's horrible. But I always remember this one passage in Hume where he's talking about how all the religions and traditions and myths of man are just invented and can't even reliably point to something true, but he's still in favor of them because they're nice and they comfort people and they "work." So my immediate question was: do they "work" for Hume? Once he's seen through to the man behind the curtain, can this do for him what it does for the naive? But let's make this more complicated: What happens when Hume is your neighbor, your teacher, or a writer for TV, or what happens when some 30% of the population is Hume -- what happens to a collective lived experience? What happens to the "social imagination," as it were? Because your suggestion:
we can have a society where I can marry a woman if I want, and my neighbor is equally free to think I'm unnatural for doing it - as long as she doesn't kill me.
does not seem to be what the culture wars are about. Since, like you say, we already have laws protecting people from being murdered, this isn't what's at stake. It's a culture war about who gets to control our "social imagination." (I am stealing this phrase from Charles Taylor btw.) This is why Focus on the Family wants no gay couples on TV and why gay rights movements want to chip away at heternormativity. This is ACTUALLY want the gay marriage movement seems to be about, exactly because of that word, marriage, which everyone wants to define. Nobody actually wants to live side by side with someone who disagrees with them on something important. It used to be that people thought religion was something important, but a lot of that energy has now centered around the family and the individual because of many other factors.
But the central point is: If your idea of human nature is that humans want to believe they have a nature, what does it do to you (or the general you) as a human being to believe that they don't have one? And even if you're willing to accept that as a way of life, is this kind of understanding sustainable if extended to societies as a whole?
no subject
But I really meant to just put forth this question, which I once tried to ask my anthropologist professor, and she sort of awkwardly side-stepped it. But I wasn't trying to grill her, I was just honestly curious. If you essentially "see through" all social structures as inherently malleable and even arbitrary (because I don't think malleable = arbitrary), how do you live in them? It's a sort of detached position. I don't question that when you encounter something horrible you know and feel that it's horrible. But I always remember this one passage in Hume where he's talking about how all the religions and traditions and myths of man are just invented and can't even reliably point to something true, but he's still in favor of them because they're nice and they comfort people and they "work." So my immediate question was: do they "work" for Hume? Once he's seen through to the man behind the curtain, can this do for him what it does for the naive? But let's make this more complicated: What happens when Hume is your neighbor, your teacher, or a writer for TV, or what happens when some 30% of the population is Hume -- what happens to a collective lived experience? What happens to the "social imagination," as it were? Because your suggestion:
we can have a society where I can marry a woman if I want, and my neighbor is equally free to think I'm unnatural for doing it - as long as she doesn't kill me.
does not seem to be what the culture wars are about. Since, like you say, we already have laws protecting people from being murdered, this isn't what's at stake. It's a culture war about who gets to control our "social imagination." (I am stealing this phrase from Charles Taylor btw.) This is why Focus on the Family wants no gay couples on TV and why gay rights movements want to chip away at heternormativity. This is ACTUALLY want the gay marriage movement seems to be about, exactly because of that word, marriage, which everyone wants to define. Nobody actually wants to live side by side with someone who disagrees with them on something important. It used to be that people thought religion was something important, but a lot of that energy has now centered around the family and the individual because of many other factors.
But the central point is: If your idea of human nature is that humans want to believe they have a nature, what does it do to you (or the general you) as a human being to believe that they don't have one? And even if you're willing to accept that as a way of life, is this kind of understanding sustainable if extended to societies as a whole?