Colonialism Lives! (Part Two)

Read Part One (in which I recall my own beginnings in the colonial era and wander into the present) Here.

The rejection of absolutes, then, helped enable the setting aside of authorities and colonial structures. The divine right of kings from an earlier stage in English political history was replaced by the power of nobles, which in turn gave way to a broader democracy, elevating the right of individuals to decide for themselves what is right and what is wrong. [I note here that I am positing a link between a political movement and a philosophical position. I invite those who know these fields better than I to evaluate that link, if it indeed exists.]

I take this broader political movement to be mostly good. Totalitarianism is, I believe, evil (at least on the stage of human relations). But I take the accompanying (and perhaps enabling) philosophical movement to be unsustainable. It opens the front door for us to expel the tyrant, and then opens the back door for us to put on the tyrant’s mask and re-enter the room.

To make my case, I consider the field of communications. We know that communication between people requires a speaker, a medium, and a hearer. [Of course, there are other forms of communication than speaking, but I must narrow the field to describe what I see happening.] Many problems in communication come from the communicator having one meaning in mind when he/she speaks, while the hearer has a different understanding of the same symbols.

We recognize such miscommunication when people speak from two different cultural perspectives. In colonial Rhodesia, one can see a situation in which an Ndebele worker might ask his European (English) boss for time off to go to a funeral, “because my father has died.” The employer gives the worker leave to go to the funeral. Two years later, the same thing happens again. The employer may assume that he misunderstood the last time, but he is surprised. When the worker asks for time off to go to his father’s funeral for a third time, the employer assumes that the worker has been lying.

Consider the meaning of father in Ndebele and English culture. Among the Ndebele, one uses the term “father” for one’s biological father and his brothers. In English usage, we use “father” and “uncles” to describe the same group of people. Because the Ndebele learned that the English colonialists did not understand Ndebele usage, they accommodated to our intellectual weakness and learned to say, “My father died” and then “my Uncle died”. But there is in the original scenario no necessary intent to deceive. The disjunction between Ndebele culture and English culture was responsible for the original miscommunication.

As evidence that my scenario above is not fanciful, I recall a conversation in 1992. I had asked an Ndebele elder in the church about the history of the Brethren in Christ Church in Bulawayo, my home town. He said, “Well, when your father Arthur was Bishop, we began the work there. Then when your father David was Bishop, we added more new churches.” He knew well enough that Arthur is my Uncle and David my father, but he used traditional categories – which would have confused me if I had not known what he meant.

Another simple example – quite trivial. When we read that someone in the 1920s “had a gay old time”, we do not assume homosexuality. Rather we recognize that language changes, and that “gay” has taken on a meaning today it did not have in earlier times.

Language is one obvious place in which meaning is relative. Relativism is a good doctrine in linguistics. Meaning is contextual – created within the time and place and community in which the text was created and interpreted within the time and place and community of the hearer. The problem begins when we assume that this same relativism works in relation to values.

[To be continued]