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The Ethics of World History*
CHARLES W. HEDRICK, JR.
University of California—Santa Cruz
| Imagine that you are a British administrator in India around 1820. You hear that a Hindu in a nearby village has died, and that his widow has decided to "go suttee," that is, to join her husband's corpse on the funeral pyre. As a member of the colonial government you have soldiers at your disposal; it is in your power to stop the immolation of the widow, or allow her to die. What should you do? Respect local custom, and even perhaps the wishes of the widow? Or use your soldiers to save the woman? At the beginning of his book The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom says that he uses this example (among others) to challenge what he sees as the rampant and unconsidered cultural relativism of his students.1 |
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Some readers of this journal may find the reference to Bloom incendiary; the book is famous or fatuous, depending on your political point of view. World historians should, however, recognize that Bloom raises a legitimate issue here, which is intellectually interesting and politically fraught. The example is well chosen: few problems are so controversial today as the international promotion of Western-style "women's rights."2 And Americans are citizens of a state that has the power to accomplish much, for good or ill in the world—if it has the will to intervene. But then, who are Americans to interfere in the domestic arrangements of other states? What gives Americans the right to agitate for "women's rights," or for that matter "human rights," abroad? Whose are these "human rights" anyway? The specific problem quickly leads to very general questions: Are all values relative? Does every society have its own particular set, or do some transcend parochial circumstance? Do such things as universal human values exist? And if they do not, should people work to create them? |
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Historians typically do not have much truck with moral absolutes, except to deprecate them; to the contrary, they are typically and rightly held up as the very avatars of cultural relativism. Since the rise of nineteenth-century historicism, the first duty of the historian has been to interpret things "on their own terms," in relation to their circumstances, without submitting them to the test of some transcendental, and hence unhistorical, criterion of judgment. World historians have if anything held themselves to an even more rigorous standard. The field has committed itself to a comparative vision of the world that challenges the primacy of Western civilization—or any civilization—as a standard for judging others. World historians insist on the importance of systems and relationships rather than essential identities; for them, the idea of civilization itself is problematic. The very nature of the project lends itself to charges of moral relativism: world history is amoral and hence immoral. Far from providing students with the ethical spine to stand up and be a force for good in the world, the study of world history can lead to nothing better than dithering academic paralysis, the hair shirts and switches of masochistic, liberal self-hatred. At worst it may positively erode moral character, producing the sort of people who sit inside their barricaded apartment houses with their ears stopped while the Kitty Genoveses of the world scream outside. It is not difficult to find academic writing critical of the ideals of world history; these are usually framed as defenses of the ideals of Western civilization.3 The "heavy lifting," however, is being done in the popular media, in public speeches and discussions on television and radio, and in the proliferating opinion pieces and blogs posted on the Web. Many of these discussions are explicitly directed at the relationship between the West and the Arab world in the wake of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks.4 |
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