A Visit to the Slovak Foreign Policy Association, Continued

THE QUESTION PERIOD (draft)

To the credit of the Slovak Foreign Policy Association, they did allow a generous amount of time for discussion. I did not stay for the entire period because I just didn’t have the patience to hang around. However, as is usual in these situations, the discussion was illuminating.

One point that was made during the discussion period was that the United States government used to classify the KLA as a “terrorist organization”.

Dr. Lyon’s response to that remark was, quite simply, breath-taking. After a brief definition of terrorism as violence for political aims against non-combatants (or something similar) Lyon suggested that, with a few minor exceptions, the KLA did not engage in terrorism.

The problem with Lyon’s response is that it was too easy. If it was really so obvious that the KLA was not a terrorist organization, how did it ever happen that the USA mistakenly classified it as one? There’s a clear suggestion that the US policy of classifying this or that group as terrorist is not based on reality, but political expediency. One recalls the anthropologist Scott Atran’s article a
few years ago in
Science,(2003, “The Genesis of Suicide Terrorism”, 299) in which he pointed out that according to the US government’s definition of terrorism, the US government has engaged in terrorism.

And Lyon’s unwillingness to even consider the question why there was a change is an example of what I meant (in an earlier posting) by “arrogance” and shabby scholarly methodology. Only answering the questions that are easy and ignoring the difficult ones is not honest scholarship. It is the intellectual equivalent of bullying. But perhaps it is only in this forum, a public one, where time considerations forced Dr. Lyon to over-simplify.

I did not hang around to pose a question. In fact, I had no questions, only comments which I would have made had I been more patient.

I would have liked to have made three specific, but related, comments:

1. You’ve no right to talk about the ethnocentrism of Kossovans until you’ve done some comparative research about prejudice and out-group hostility in other countries. Until you’ve got some basis for comparison, your sincere impression that people in the region violate your American or Anglo rules for polite speech count for nothing in a serious scientific forum. Alternatively, they do count for something. They are a sort of anecdotal evidence, but they don’t deserve the weight you gave them in Bratislava. And, again, I say that this confidence that one’s unsupported or examined impressions were weighty and correct, deserves the label “arrogance”. Other possible labels are cultural insularity or imperialism.
(An antidote might be reading Wierbiczka’s recently published: English: Language and Culture.)

2. A second, related, comment concerns the claim that people in the region are “primitive”. Presumably their open vocalizations of negative attitudes about out-groups is part of the evidence. Other evidence was the fact that they have no symphony orchestra or opera. When the speaker expressed this point of view, I interrupted him to point out that before World War Two Germany certainly had such cultural institutions.

My point is (and should have been) plain: it’s no guarantee of culture in a moral sense--the sense relevant to discussion of how to create a multi-cultural and democratic society in Kosovo. I find it hard to believe that Dr. Lyon couldn’t understand my comment, but his response to me at the time seemed totally irrelevant and misleading, even sophistical.

Lyon’s response was to say that Germany had cabarets as well. I don’t have any idea what he meant by that. I have considered the possibility that his remark was intended as a “put-down”, to ridicule my comment. Whatever his intentions, he failed to address the serious point being made. However, in any case, his notion of which culture is and isn’t “primitive” will not, I suggest, stand careful examination.

The problem with Lyon’s naive approach is that it ignores a significant tradition in the social sciences which examines the emotional underpinnings of our moral attitudes, our ideas about justice and fairness.
And, that literature suggests that there is a universal sense of fairness, and it’s not in any way dependent upon the possession of high tech, let alone high culture. It’s not that everyone thinks exactly the same way. Rather, even people living in pre-industrial societies certainly have ideas about reciprocity and fairness, ideas with sufficient weight to be called upon in a serious attempt to negotiate between two parties in a dispute.

But Lyon has either never dipped into the relevant anthropology and economics, or has failed to appreciate its significance.

Recommended readings:
Chandra Sekhar Sripada and Stephen Stich, “A Framework for the Psychology of Norms”,
(esp. 294 ff, see references therein), in The Innate Mind (Oxford UP 2006), ed. Carruthers, Laurence, and Stich. Their specific interest is in punishment, but for our purposes, the point still holds good. The presence of moral emotions cross-culturally counts against swift diagnoses that one culture is “primitive”.

Another relevant book: Foundations of Human Sociality, ed. Henrich, Boyd, et al., (Oxford 2004)

A related additional, pragmatic, observation is that so long as Lyon regards other people as his cultural inferiors, it will be unlikely that he can actually assist them.

A final comment points to research about emotions. Until you’ve got a base-line value for someone’s expressivity, you cannot measure how intense their emotions are. The point came out in a nice way when Amy Tan’s narrator in Joy Luck Club thought that her Italian neighbors were fighting and were likely to be killing each other. They weren’t; they were just being Italian.

A similar point concerns Lyon’s naive reactions to Balkan culture. He gave no indication that he had ever examined his own impressions to consider whether he approaches the world with a bias based upon his English mother tongue status ( an Anglo bias) and/or an American cultural bias. Comparative research in emotions makes it clear that you can’t tell whether someone is just talking or fighting unless you’ve considered the settings of your own language/culture and how they may differ from the speakers you overhear. (see Aneta Pavlenko, Emotions and Multilingualism, (Cambridge UP 2005)

The net result of my visit to the Slovak Foreign Policy Association was to increase my suspicion of so-called experts in foreign policy. I remember a Slovak biologist/philosopher friend once saying to me with a laugh that international politics just wasn’t a serious scientific subject. After witnessing Lyon’s performance, I am inclined to think my friend was right. But there is a further moral point to be made about how a pseudo-expertise is connected to political power. The bottom line is not argument, discussion, evidence, dialectic, but brute force. Those with the most nuclear weapons always win the “argument”.