Colonialism Lives! (Part Four)

Parts one, two, and three preceded this conclusion. Here I bring my thoughts together, and the meaning of the title of the series becomes clear.

Part Four

To summarize my argument so far:

Colonialism in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries included the assumption that the values of the Colonials were absolute, and that all subject peoples could and should be judged by them. We rightly rebelled against such totalitarianism and also rejected the idea of absolute values. [I think that these two steps moved in tandem, but I am not arguing that case here. I welcome the insights of those who can combine the field of social change with the field of philosophy and tell me if I am right or not – and to what extent.]

This relativism works when we apply it to the use of language. We must take the meanings of the speaker and hearer into account in order to communicate successfully. Such relativism does not work when we apply it to values, because we tend to elevate our own values to an absolute standard for all people. This is the movement that I have been describing with the image of leaving by the front door and re-entering by the back door. [I did not make the case for this elevation, except by implying it in the example of “Baby, it’s cold outside”.]

The song banned by the CBC serves as a case study of this failure. At one level, it is a simple miscommunication. It is caused by hearing the lyrics as if they were written in 2018, with the meanings that would apply had it been written today. At one level, it is as trivial as someone imposing the meaning of homosexuality on someone 100 years ago referring to a gay time. If all that happened was that people misunderstood the song, I would not have written this column. It is the further colonial move of imposing our values that leads to these reflections.

The odd thing is that postmodernism seeks to set us free from such impositions of one group's values on another group, but it has actually served to force the values of the politically strongest group on the whole of society. Colonialism returns under the guise of doing away with colonialism.

I will not analyze this problem further here, but rather I make a few suggestions of what I would like to see (whether or not it ever happens).

1. I believe in absolute values. I suggest that the best way to establish what they are is to look for the values that cultures and religions in general have accepted. [What C.S. Lewis called the Tao, in his essay The Abolition of Man.] TheJosephson Institute of Ethics has worked at this kind of project for many years now.

2. Such a project will not validate any one culture. Our own society’s conviction that individual rights trump all other rights will not make the cut. A society such as China’s conviction that the right of the collective trumps individual rights will not make the cut. The bedrock shared values of societies in general – what we can call the Dao (to use a modern form of Tao) – is more basic than the specific forms people use to construct their own societies. [I add here that my own understanding of these absolute values relies also on reading and interpreting the Christian Scriptures. I do not make the search for Dao rely on any one religion, but acknowledge where I stand among the religions of the world.]

3. A general relativism that looks for what things mean in context is generally good. Making absolute values too broad is a quick road to totalitarianism. Chinese collectivism and Canadian individualism can both express the general values of the Dao.

4. When we condemn the words or actions of another person quickly, we are likely to have taken a colonial-imperialistic action. The problem with the conversation around “Baby it’s cold” is not the questions it raises – those questions and concerns lead to interesting and fruitful learning. The problem is rather the way that some people shut down both the song and conversation about the song by appealing to “Me Too” and date rape. Both issues are serious issues, and they deserve better treatment than restricting DJs from playing a 1940s song about sex.

5. Rather than condemning quickly – whether the conversation is about transgender rights, or Me Too, or missionaries in Africa, or Black Lives Matter, or any other of our current issues – our first step should always be to understand. There is a strong likelihood that when we dislike the other person’s statement (and therefore begin to dislike the person as well), we have not yet really understood the other. Miscommunication is amazingly easy, and imposing our values based on that misunderstanding is one way that colonial lives today.

In the above comments, when I refer to “we”, I mean all of us. We – all of us – engage in this kind of behaviour, and the winner gets to be the biggest colonialist. Which means that the winner loses along with all the rest of us.

Colonialism Lives! (Part Three)

Part One recounted my own beginnings in the colonial era and wander into the present). See part one here.

Part Two noted how miscommunication happens between cultures quite regularly. See part two here.

The problem, I argue, is that we carry the necessary relativism that applies to language over into values at the level of our stated philosophy, but then act on the basis of a new absolutism in practice.

Part Three

I have been considering these reflections for many years. A recent controversy sparked me to put these brief reflections in writing.

This past week CBC announced that it would not include “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” in its Christmas play list, following the lead of a number of other radio stations. “Baby” is a call and response song, in which the woman sings and the man responds. Here are the lyrics, with man’s voice in parentheses:

I really can’t stay (but baby, it’s cold outside)

I’ve got to go away (but baby, it’s cold outside)

This evening has been (been hoping that you’d drop in)

So very nice (I’ll hold your hands, they’re just like ice)

My mother will start to worry (beautiful what’s your hurry?)

My father will be pacing the floor (listen to the fireplace roar)

So really I’d better scurry (beautiful please don’t hurry)

But maybe just a half a drink more (put some records on while I pour)

The neighbors might think (baby, it’s bad out there)

Say what’s in this drink? (no cabs to be had out there)

I wish I knew how (your eyes are like starlight now)

To break this spell (I’ll take your hat, your hair looks swell)

I ought to say, no, no, no sir (mind if I move in closer?)

At least…

Heard today, the lyrics are problematic in several ways. I highlight two:

1) She said “No”. No means No. In the era of “Me too”, the man’s voice is asking for trouble.

2) “What’s in this drink?” sounds creepy in the aftermath of so many date rape situations.

A bit of internet surfing, however, turns up women’s voices, warning us that in banning the song we may have overstepped the bounds of reason. They point out that she appears to have surprised him by dropping in on him in his apartment. They observe that her protests sound a bit like someone covering themselves from “slut shaming”, even as she makes it clear that she is as willing as he is. As one column [not by a woman writer, at least I don't think so] put it, “These legends of song skillfully and melodically wrung such laughs out of the song’s doth-protest-too-much dance of foreplay that it was surely clear even to a 1940s listener that these two characters were about to have a long night of fireplace-hot and — yes! — deeply consensual sex.” (From Variety)

The problematic line “What’s in this drink?” turns out to be a common line people used when getting ready to do something they weren’t supposed to do. (Although I heard another explanation: that women were often served alcohol-free alcohol and might protest at what is left out of the drink.)

Slut-shaming is bad, and I do not advocate consensual sex outside of a lifelong committed relationship. Those values, however, speak against a great deal of popular music, both from the last century and from our own time. Not to mention much-loved madrigal music from Elizabethan England: “Now is the month of maying, when merry lads are playing ….”

Where did the instant condemnation come from, leading CBC to ban the song from its playlist? I suggest that we have fallen into a habit of judging others by our standards – and, fatally, assuming that our standards are absolute. Colonialism and Imperialism redux. We expelled them through the front door, and they have returned through the back.

[To be concluded.]
Part Four brings a preliminary conclusion to these musings.

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]

Colonialism Lives! (Part One)

The title is not quite fair. I want to discuss colonialism only tangentially, but the headline, “Colonialism Lives” is a fair one. My thesis is simple: Like almost everyone before us, we measure other people and cultures throughout space and time by our own values and on our own terms, however unfair that evaluation is, and we would understand our world better and that each other more rightly if we would stop doing so.

I understand Colonialism as a political construct in which technologically stronger societies occupy technologically weaker societies and force the latter to live on the former’s terms. I grew up in a British Colony, Southern Rhodesia as it was then called. I was born in its near neighbour, Northern Rhodesia. Today these countries are Zambia and Zimbabwe. They run their own affairs, free of the colonial yoke, but they are not free of their colonial past. One can observe the negative results of colonization in modern Zambia and Zimbabwe in a variety of ways.

We live in a post-colonial age. I am not sure all the implications of this statement. I take it to be a reversal of the Euro-centric view of the world common to the North American academy of my youth. In my high school days, we were taught history as a construct of White European society, and especially a construct of White men. Today, we view history more fully, seeking perspectives from a variety of ethnic and political sources, and looking again at the old stories to discern women’s voices as well as other voices that were ignored in the old tellings of those stories.

I remember the way that the stories of the founding of Rhodesia were told in my youth. Because I am a White male, I heard stories about how “Europeans” and especially European men settled Rhodesia in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The stories assumed that European society – which meant especially English society – was the pinnacle of progress within the evolutionary scheme. It was taken for granted that Black Zimbabweans (whom we called “Africans”) would want to become like us. Those White politicians of the 1950s who thought that Africans could join White society were seen as liberal, but of course their liberalism still assumed that White European Men should run the whole show.

The story of how the colonial period came to an end is a long story, which we can read in many other places. I note just one small piece of what helped to bring it to an end. The biggest piece, of course, was the fact that Black Zimbabweans knew that their country needed to be liberated from White dominance. Others have told that story at length, throughout the countries of what was British Africa.[1]

The smaller piece I refer to is the rise of what we call postmodernism, and especially the way that modernism and postmodernism combined to undermine belief in absolutes.[2] When I was a university student, the rejection of absolutes was in full flow. I went to a Christian College (Messiah College), which stood against that flow, but we all lived fully in the events of the 1960s, when the Baby Boomers sought to put the era of wars behind and to usher in the Age of Aquarius.

We sang songs like “All you need is love”. We marched against authority figures, feeling that they were destroying the earth. We preached an ethics of relativity, in which the seeking self stood above the fray of absolute values and absolute authorities, synonyms in our mind with totalitarianism. [All of this is, of course, potted history – my own impressions of living through that time – and I hope that I am not misrepresenting the picture too much.]

In the early days of the 1960s, John Kennedy could say, in his inaugural address, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” There was a great deal of idealism in our rebellion, and we responded – in the Peace Corps, for example. But there was also a great deal of simple self-centeredness in our rebellion. In the 1970s and 1980s, the call for love gave way to getting married (and divorced), pursuing careers, raising our own children, and generally living out the implications of having rejected absolute values.

Jean Twenge has described the results in Generation Me. Her concern is less with my note of absolute and relative values and more with the loss of other-centeredness in a self-centered age. My contention, however, is that, by abandoning absolutes in our worldviews, we have escorted imperialism and colonialism out the front door and they have sneaked again by the back door.

[To be continued]

[1] See the work of people like Eliakim Sibanda writing on the history of ZAPU, or Wendy Urban-Mead on the history of the BIC in Zimbabwe, or the writings more generally of Terence Ranger (as a historian of Zimbabwe) and of John and Jean Comaroff (social historians, setting missionary work in southern Africa in its colonial setting). I assume that the reader can google these sources and do not give further information here.

[2] There are many sources for understanding modernism and postmodernism. Within my own discipline, I can recommend Paul Hiebert in Transforming Worldviews.

More Election Reflections

We are not quite at the official action of the electoral college, and the inauguration of Donald Trump follows soon after. I expressed some of my thoughts after the election here, and we have all had time to reflect more on what lies ahead.

I remain cautiously hopeful that the next four years will work out—at least so far as life in North America is concerned, but I admit to increasing anxiety as new directions take shape. So here is a brief sample of my thoughts (as much to allay my own fears by expressing them as by a sense that anyone else need read them).

1. I said before that I am concerned with the way that we the people have validated bullying and vulgarity with our choice. That sense has not decreased. An account of the Michigan recount suggests that the Republican playbook is made up primarily of using political and legal might to force the desired outcome, rather than any real desire to do what is right.

2. The recounts are an interesting idea—not because they might change the outcome (I don’t think the outcome is in doubt; the hanging chads from Bush-Gore were far more serious), but because how people respond to the idea shows again what they think. Trump’s response was to say: No recount; the only true result is that I won (the popular vote too, not just the electoral college). Clinton’s response was to say: We’ll co-operate. What else would she say? The real opportunity was for Trump to show that he believes in the basic integrity of the state officials running the elections. Clearly he doesn’t. Which suggests that he believes that he was the only honest person in the election. That attitude troubles me.

3. Trump’s lack of concern for facts continues to bother me. I am not sure that he is actually any different in this regard than most Democrats. We have adopted the idea as a country that perspective is truth. If that idea is correct, we have no grounds for saying that Trump is not speaking the truth, just because we don’t like his ideas. Both sides of the aisle tend to applaud the facts when the facts support the truth they want. Both sides of the aisle tend to pretend the facts aren’t there when the facts support the truth they don’t want.

This last point is perhaps where we could begin a national conversation [not national: big conversation involving lots of people, but national: lots of small groups of people talking and trying to understand what’s going on]. We need to decide what to do with facts. It is a fact that biologically we have two genders. It is also a fact that a small minority of people are biologically mixed. We have ignored the facts on both sides: one group of people ignores the fact of people born with two sets of genitalia; one group of people ignores the fact of gender entirely and makes it all a matter of how one feels inside. But if we go only by how we feel inside, on what grounds do we refute Trump’s positions. That we don’t like them? Then “might makes right” becomes our national motto.

Similarly with global warming. The facts are clear [the globe is warming, and we are helping make it so]. How we interpret those facts, what we do with them, is a further and vital conversation. I could continue with most of the hard conversations in our society. We retreat too quickly into calling names (homophobe; radical; whatever name you think of for those people you don’t like). Many people have observed that we need a return to civility in public discourse. Such civility, I believe, requires also that we admit both the factness of the data of life, and the importance of perspective and interpretation in handling that data.

The question of who hacked whom during the election is one such arena. The CIA says, “The Russians.” (I think the CIA is right on this one.) The FBI says, “Not so fast.” Okay, let’s acknowledge that good and intelligent people regularly disagree, and let’s abandon the defensive response that says, “Your interpretation can’t be right, because I disagree.”

In my own field of study we call this process of trying to understand the world around us “critical realism”, a recognition that perspective matters, and an admission that reality remains beyond our limited perspectives. We need each other to cope with an increasing complex real world. Trump’s administration is set to roll. I hope they open up their ears and minds for the journey, and I hope we do too.