Does the isolating barrier between cultures block praise as well as blame?
Our next question is this: Does the isolating bar- rier between cultures block praise as well as blame? If I want to say that the Samurai culture has many virtues, or to praise the South American Indians, am I prevented from doing that by my outside status? Now, we certainly do need to praise other societies in this way. But it is hardly possible that we could praise them effectively if we could not, in principle, criticize them. Our praise would be worthless if it rested on no definite grounds, if it did not flow from some under- standing. Certainly we may need to praise things which we do not fully understand. We say ‘there’s something very good here, but I can’t quite make out
what it is yet’. This happens when we want to learn from strangers. And we can learn from strangers. But to do this we have to distinguish between those strangers who are worth learning from and those who are not. Can we then judge which is which?
This brings us to our third question: What is involved in judging? Now plainly there is no ques- tion here of sitting on a bench in a red robe and sen- tencing people. Judging simply means forming an opinion, and expressing it if it is called for. Is there anything wrong about this? Naturally, we ought to avoid forming—and expressing—crude opinions, like that of a simple-minded missionary, who might dis- miss the whole Samurai culture as entirely bad, because non-Christian. But this is a different objec- tion. The trouble with crude opinions is that they are crude, whoever forms them, not that they are formed by the wrong people. Anthropologists, after all, are outsiders quite as much as missionaries. Moral isola- tionism forbids us to form any opinions on these mat- ters. Its ground for doing so is that we don’t understand them. But there is much that we don’t understand in our own culture too. This brings us to our last question: If we can’t judge other cultures, can we really judge our own? Our efforts to do so will be much damaged if we are really deprived of our opin- ions about other societies, because these provide the range of comparison, the spectrum of alternatives against which we set what we want to understand. We would have to stop using the mirror which anthropology so helpfully holds up to us.
In short, moral isolationism would lay down a general ban on moral reasoning. Essentially, this is the programme of immoralism, and it carries a dis- tressing logical difficulty. Immoralists like Nietzsche are actually just a rather specialized sect of moralists. They can no more afford to put moralizing out of business than smugglers can afford to abolish cus- toms regulations. The power of moral judgement is, in fact, not a luxury, not a perverse indulgence of the self-righteous. It is a necessity. When we judge some- thing to be bad or good, better or worse than some- thing else, we are taking it as an example to aim at or avoid. Without opinions of this sort, we would have no framework of comparison for our own policy, no
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chance of profiting by other people’s insights or mis- takes. In this vacuum, we could form no judgements on our own actions.
Now it would be odd if Homo sapiens had really got himself into a position as bad as this—a position where his main evolutionary asset, his brain, was so little use to him. None of us is going to accept this sceptical diagnosis. We cannot do so, because our involvement in moral isolationism does not flow from apathy, but from a rather acute concern about human hypocrisy and other forms of wickedness. But we polarize that concern around a few selected moral truths. We are rightly angry with those who despise, oppress or steamroll other cultures. We think that doing these things is actually wrong. But this is itself a moral judgement. We could not condemn oppression and insolence if we thought that all our condemna- tions were just a trivial local quirk of our own culture. We could still less do it if we tried to stop judging altogether.
Real moral scepticism, in fact, could lead only to inaction, to our losing all interest in moral questions, most of all in those which concern other societies. When we discuss these things, it becomes instantly clear how far we are from doing this. Suppose, for instance, that I criticize the bisecting Samurai, that I say his behaviour is brutal. What will usually happen next is that someone will protest, will say that I have no right to make criticisms like that of another cul- ture. But it is most unlikely that he will use this move to end the discussion of the subject. Instead, he will justify the Samurai. He will try to fill in the back- ground, to make me understand the custom, by explaining the exalted ideals of discipline and devo- tion which produced it. He will probably talk of the lower value which the ancient Japanese placed on individual life generally. He may well suggest that this is a healthier attitude than our own obsession with security. He may add, too, that the wayfarers did not seriously mind being bisected, that in principle they accepted the whole arrangement.
Now an objector who talks like this is implying that it is possible to understand alien customs. That is just what he is trying to make me do. And he implies, too, that if I do succeed in understanding them, I
shall do something better than giving up judging them. He expects me to change my present judge- ment to a truer one—namely, one that is favourable. And the standards I must use to do this cannot just be Samurai standards. They have to be ones current in my own culture. Ideals like discipline and devotion will not move anybody unless he himself accepts them. As it happens, neither discipline nor devotion is very popular in the West at present. Anyone who appeals to them may well have to do some more argu- ing to make them acceptable, before he can use them to explain the Samurai. But if he does succeed here, he will have persuaded us, not just that there was something to be said for them in ancient Japan, but that there would be here as well.
Isolating barriers simply cannot arise here. If we accept something as a serious moral truth about one culture, we can’t refuse to apply it—in however dif- ferent an outward form—to other cultures as well, wherever circumstance admit it. If we refuse to do this, we just are not taking the other culture seriously. This becomes clear if we look at the last argument used by my objector—that of justification by consent of the victim. It is suggested that sudden bisection is quite in order, provided that it takes place between consenting adults. I cannot now discuss how conclu- sive this justification is. What I am pointing out is simply that it can only work if we believe that consent can make such a transaction respectable—and this is a thoroughly modern and Western idea. It would probably never occur to a Samurai; if it did, it would surprise him very much. It is our standard. In apply- ing it, too, we are likely to make another typically Western demand. We shall ask for good factual evi- dence that the wayfarers actually do have this rather surprising taste—that they are really willing to be bisected. In applying Western standards in this way, we are not being confused or irrelevant. We are ask- ing the questions which arise from where we stand, questions which we can see the sense of. We do this because asking questions which you can’t see the sense of is humbug. Certainly we can extend our questioning by imaginative effort. We can come to understand other societies better. By doing so, we may make their questions our own, or we may see