In his recent essay "A Cultural Left," Richard Rorty has noted that the activist and reformist Left of the sixties in the U.S. and the Western world has been eclipsed by the modern cultural Left of academia. This very New Left focuses on the "politics of difference" or "identity." The Cultural Left is deeply concerned about how disadvantaged groups suffer at the hands of those who have cultural or political power. "The system" against which they fight is identified alternately as "late capitalism, "phallogocentrism," or "patriarchy." Although the Cultural Left has been very critical of the Western system, it has been touchingly "sensitive" to the systems of other cultures. Sadly, it has also remained largely uninvolved in the wider political process (though it fights tooth and nail for privileges and perks within academe). These erstwhile leftists (notably cultural feminists) often claim that this is the case because the (Western) system is so corrupt that it must be radically reformed.
Our central contention here is simple: that this Cultural Left makes few serious attempts to evoke a real alternative to super-tolerant liberal pluralism because its theoretical legs have become frozen within bureaucratic and rhetorical structures, paralysing it from acting in the world. Its natural habitat is the academic world of the last twenty years, where it grazes with great relish upon the salaries, power positions, and new curricula provided by the intellectual engines of Foucauldian paranoia about power/knowledge. Yet outside this natural habitat, in the rougher landscapes of the Third World, or of those third worlds within our own territories, the minimum-wage service economy and the world of the undereducated, unemployed, and welfare recipients, it withers and dies, its post-structuralist formulae providing little sustenance to those suffering from real poverty and oppression.
The Cultural Left believes that in order to subvert the system, students must be taught to recognize "otherness." As a result, such new disciplines as "Women's Studies" and "Black Studies" have emerged. The Cultural Left has accomplished many positive goals. For example, it has opened new doors to groups formerly excluded from political and cultural institutions. Nevertheless, as Western societies have become more accepting of otherness, economic inequality has increased in North America and abroad, and more women than ever are suffering from poverty and culturally sanctioned sadism. While leading academic feminists have been busy re-theorizing Lacan's distinction between the imaginary and symbolic orders, according to the 1995 Human Development Report published by the UNDP(1) women now make up 70% of the 1.3 billion people living in poverty. While Western postfeminists are writing about "feminine jouissance" and the "body as text," violence and legal discrimination against women in many countries is still a grim reality. In many countries, women do not have equal property rights, rights of inheritance, rights to divorce, or the rights to acquire nationality, manage property, or seek employment. In Iran and Afghanistan, women's rights have been rescinded, and women are living in conditions much worse than before the revolutions in those countries. While postfeminists are deconstructing the hymen, the lives of many women around the world are scarred by sexual violence. An estimated one million Asian girls have been forced into prostitution, and an estimated 100 million have suffered genital mutilation. The UN Human Development Report Office states:
In 1979, The United Nations approved the Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), a path-breaking charter of the legal and human rights of women. But 41 UN member states still have not signed the convention, 6 have signed without ratification, and 43 have ratified the convention with reservations about some of its provisions. In other words, 90 countries have not yet accepted all the tenants of legal equality for women and men. Even in some countries ratifying the CEDAW, the implementation of the convention has been half-hearted and incomplete. So, even under law, the equality of women is not yet assured in many societies - let alone in practice(2).
Clearly, a step in the right direction would be universal ratification and enforcement of the CEDAW. The UNDP in fact calls for a campaign to be launched for the unconditional ratification by the 90 countries who have not yet signed, stressing the need for candid reports on legal discrimination in countries, suggesting that a non-governmental "World Women's Watch" should keep track of legal discrimination and use these reports to mobilize pressure groups and political lobbies. The UNDP also calls for the criminalization of violence against women as a weapon of war, declaring that such violence should be declared a war crime, punishable by international law. All of these recommendations seem eminently reasonable.
Yet five years later, none have been implemented. The academic Left has remained conspicuously silent on this issue. According to the UNDP, equal rights for women and men are as important as the abolition of slavery and colonialism and the establishment of equal rights for racial and ethnic minorities. Western intellectuals, however, clearly disagree. In the West, university campuses were once the sites of demonstrations and protests aimed at pressuring governments to boycott the apartheid regime in South Africa. Yet few similar demonstrations have been staged in support of women deprived of their basic human rights to property, education, and divorce. Many if not most women in the world suffer some form of legal sexual apartheid. Yet no public outcry from Western academics or intellectuals can be heard on university campuses. There are no mock huts on campuses erected to protest the genital mutilation of little girls, no mock brothels staffed with children to protest Asian girls sold into prostitution. Feminists on North American campuses are not even passing out leaflets to educate the public about these grim realities. We know that American intellectuals can and have taken political action to demonstrate for equality and protest against slavery and apartheid. Why are we not engaged in the very same activity now with respect to these issues? Perhaps it is because Western intellectuals are not teaching their students to think about the plight of women, whereas they were taught to think about the evils of racism and colonialism in the 60's. The general political climate has become more "conservative," more orientated toward the pursuit of private goods. Students are not protesting gross injustices (such as poverty, over-population, and the destruction of the environment), in part because of this climate, in part because their professors do not believe that such injustices are worthy of intellectual attention. While universities have Women's Studies, Black Studies, Colonial Studies, and Cultural Studies programs on their campuses, these programs are not producing organized pressure groups to affect changes in public or international policy. What has happened to liberal Western intellectuals? Why have we become so indifferent to injustice, not only against women, but against all "others"- i.e. all non Westerners? At the dawn of the new millennium, it is time for the Cultural Left to look itself in the mirror and ask itself a serious question: has its cultural critique really improved the lives of the downtrodden outside of academia?
Specifically, cultural post-feminism, with its focus on theorizing and "problematizing" identity and difference (rather than equality and fairness at home and abroad), has been complicit with power structures here and elsewhere. It has contributed to the problem of socially condoned sadism against women all over the world. The notion that it is morally flawed to speak "on behalf" of marginalized groups have made people in a position to speak out, notably academic feminists, unwilling to do so. In Introducing Postfeminism, Sophia Phoca and Rebecca Wright describe the work of Gayatri Spivak, who has argued that Indian native women have been rendered mute under British imperialism:
All efforts to encompass a "situated subject" can only fail to be complete. All attempts to speak "on behalf of" a putative group can only produce conceptual mismatches. Once a society becomes multi-cultural, central institutions begin to choose representatives from various cultural groups to "speak as" a spokesperson for a set of people. Spivak questions the authenticity this process of selection entails.... Postfeminism and postcolonial studies have converged to question the totalizing or colonizing tendencies of Western feminist scholarship. Proper critical attention is therefore paid to the colonial subjects doubly colonized by imperial as well as patriarchal ideologies.(3)
In this passage it is clear that cultural feminism is as worried about its own "colonizing tendencies" as it is about the effects of patriarchy on "subaltern" groups of women, rendered mute, and unable to speak for themselves. While Spivak's point is well taken, from a pragmatic perspective, it is as useless to subalterns as her work deconstructing the hymen. What practical good can come from the notion that nobody can authentically speak for a group of people so oppressed that they cannot speak for themselves? Yet this is the prevalent attitude. It is the "parading of mute victims" approach to social change, one encouraged to evoke pity, but not action. Rather than pointing out the injustices suffered by subaltern groups and the oppressive structures that justify them, cultural feminists studiously refuse to speak for these women to avoid "colonizing" them with Western ideologies. Cultural feminists, who will not speak out on behalf of subaltern native women, are complicit in the forms of oppression they claim to condemn. From a practical point of view, would it not be more humane to "colonize" these subalterns with Western ideologies rather than allowing patriarchal imperialism to go unchecked, preventing women from experiencing life as a human beings rather than as slaves or sexual objects? From the cultural post-feminist perspective, the answer to this question is "no." This position explains, in part, why feminists are not demonstrating on university campuses: they have a morbid fear of "colonizing" the other.
Feminists now believe that women must be understood and respected as fundamentally different from men (as Carol Gilligan famously argued in In a Different Voice, where she claims that young women share an ethics of care, as opposed to young men, who share a rule-governed ethics of justice). They also believe that some groups of women are fundamentally different from others (the reason given usually being race). The result of these claims is a rhetoric of difference, which is, by definition, a rhetoric of exclusion (an exclusion grounded in biological categories). Cultural feminists move forward from this rhetoric of difference to the conclusion that non-Western cultures must be understood and respected as being essentially different from Western cultures. For instance, they may claim that white women cannot speak for black women, especially for black women living in Africa. White lesbians cannot be dumped into the same category as Asian lesbians. And so forth. But to focus on such distinctions is to trivialize the most important achievement of Western feminism, which established that women are human beings and should be accorded the same rights as other people. It is to substitute a rhetoric of biological and cultural exclusion for a rhetoric of emancipation.
As a result of the current tendency to focus on difference in academia, Western intellectuals now often argue that it is wrong to form moral judgments outside of one's own culture. They stand idly by while non-Western women around the world are enslaved and mutilated. Not only are they careful not to criticize such practices, many take great pains to be "sensitive" to them. We in the West are behaving as if we believed that all people are not human beings and should therefore not be treated with equal consideration. The consequences of this belief have been disastrous for many people in non-Western cultures. Western feminists have privileged the perceived moral necessity to accord respect for hateful, tyrannical, patriarchal, and oppressive belief-systems over their respect for the inherent worth and dignity of all people, including women. Theorizing "women's ways of knowing" or "non-Western ways of thinking" has done nothing to alleviate (and much to perpetuate) the real suffering of women in less developed parts of the world, where they are enslaved by men, shackled by poverty, and humiliated by their cultures. Feminism has done much to improve the lives of Western women (although academic feminists have done little to address problems of American women living in poverty who work for minimum wage, or to create affordable childcare). Yet we, for the reasons stated above, have abandoned our impoverished sisters of colour to the mercy (or lack thereof) of testosterone-drenched cultures that show little interest in living up to an even minimal commitment to a Western notion of fundamental human equality. The simple fact is that in many cultures, women are not considered fully human.
Recently one of us(4) presented a paper arguing that our tendency to theorize difference and otherness has been complicit with cultural relativism and the current vogue of considering the mutilation and oppression of women and children around the world as justifiable within the context of a given culture. Heidi's paper was meant by great hostility in certain quarters, a hostility that transcended mere intellectual objection. This was in part due to the fact that she argued that cultural imperialism is a lesser harm than some forms of cultural abuses of women and children around the world. Her critics fervently felt that it is inappropriate to take a firm moral stand against abuses condoned by the cultures that practice them. It is fashionable to "contextualize" such practices to be "sensitive" to the culture in question. It should be noted, however, that relativists typically do not condone the enslavement of one culture by another (there was much protest over apartheid in South Africa, for example) or military or cultural imperialism. Such practices are accurately enough called "imperialist." Yet "imperialism" has become an overused term within the cultural left (for example, in post-colonial studies), paralyzing it from acting on its better egalitarian impulses in the international arena.
Imperialism has become the greatest evil - greater than any evil a culture can inflict upon members of its own group, especially if those members happen to be female. Yes, imperialism is evil. But the enslavement and mutilation of women, and the nefarious poverty in which most people in the world live, is equally evil. The excessive sensitivity to "otherness" within the cultural left creates a situation where Western university faculty and students are afraid to protest against the treatment of women in Iran, Kuwait, or Afghanistan, or the practice of female genital mutilation around the world, or against the fact that a third of the population of Africa will eventually die of either starvation or AIDS.
Alan Bloom was right: most university students start out as relativists (in the lazy and uncritical sense of that term). Outside of radical fringe groups like those who fought the Battle in Seattle aimed at disrupting the 1999 meetings of the World Trade Organization, students of the 21st century are afraid even to criticize each other in the rarefied atmosphere of the classroom, much less to form moral judgments on issues outside the context of their own culture. As a result, they tacitly support the oppressive practices of other cultures. Perhaps we can understand this indifference to the plight of the oppressed in other cultures by the fact that these people are so "other" (they are foreign, impoverished, often female, and of color) that their fate isn't of any interest to "us"(i.e. educated, white, wealthy Westerners). The ritual mutilation of a black African child for the purposes of sexual purification, an unspeakably painful operation that can lead to infection and death, is of no concern to enlightened Westerners, while the mutilation of a white North American child would certainly capture our attention. This is because enlightened Westerners are "sensitive" to the child's culture. But how sensitive are they being to that child? Does the propensity for enlightened Westerners to "contextualize" this ritual torture not make the contextualizer a party to the atrocious patriarchal systems within such cultures? In the same way, doesn't our refusal to confront corrupt governments who let their populations starve, and the West's unwillingness to forgive debt and alleviate starvation in Africa, not implicate the West in the disease and starvation of Africans? Have we not disregarded our moral obligations (as defined by our own egalitarian principles) to this or that human child because she is black, African, or female?
In his essay, "Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance," Richard Rorty argues that within the context of a democratic society, we have no moral obligations except to our fellow human beings, and thus talk of responsibility to the Truth or to God should be abandoned. Of course this responsibility (like all other metaphysical and moral ideas) is a construct, designed above all else to reflect our basic sentiments. Nevertheless, our concept of responsibility to others is manifested in our commitment to democracy and our belief that all people, women and men, are human beings and should thus accorded equal rights.
The question to ask at this point is, "Why do democratic societies feel they have a moral responsibility to stop the massacre of Jews in Nazi Germany and the Albanians in Kosovo, yet feel no responsibility to even question the enslavement of women in Islam or the mutilation of little girls in Africa and Asia?" In a democracy, the question of justification of one's beliefs to one's community rarely arises, unless one's religious or moral beliefs, and the actions that ensue from them, interfere with others' rights and needs. If religion is restricted to the private realm, it need not interfere with others' rights or beliefs (an exception to this rule is when faith-healing parents refuse to immunize or medically treat their sick children). The price that believers pay for religious liberty is religious privatization.
However, in societies in which religion plays a part in politics, the result is often the mistreatment of women. Women all over the world are routinely sequestered, mutilated, sold into arranged marriages or prostitution, denied educations, and otherwise abused because religious belief justifies such "special" treatment. Practitioners of Islam and other religions theorize that women are essentially different from men and should therefore be denied the same rights. These cultures reject the liberal and social democratic heritage of the West, the intellectual space occupied by Locke and Paine, Rousseau and Wollstonecraft, Mill and Marx. It is no surprise that they reject their conclusions: that there is no good reason to see one part of the human race as innately superior to another, that we have the right as ordinary citizens to overthrow tyranny, that social and political oppression isn't natural, but a human product.
Insofar as religious or cultural beliefs can be used to enslave and mutilate others, it is in direct conflict with democracy, with our fundamental belief in the equality of all human beings. We can argue within our own culture that Islam is not upholding its primary responsibility to human beings. We could probably even reach a consensus in our group, and use this consensus as the basis for our disapproval or intervention. In fact, we do this all the time. Western nations routinely intervene in the affairs of other nations when it is deemed that their practices are cruel and undemocratic, as was the case in Nazi Germany and Kosovo (and was conspicuously not the case in the Hutu/Tutsi conflict in Rwanda, no doubt because the conflict took place between unthinkable impoverished black people)(5). Peace-keeping troops are routinely deployed by the U.N. to maintain peace between warring factions within a single nation. Nevertheless, it is unthinkable to intervene in a country's cultural practices, even when it can be shown that these practices are exceptionally cruel and unfair to girls and women.
This is in part due to our tendency to excessively theorize difference and identity. But perhaps this "theorization" is merely a mask for deep-seated sexism and racism within our own culture. Like oppressive cultures around the world, we theorize differences between cultures and genders in order to justify our own criminal indifference to cruelty against "others" (like the unthinkable, impoverished Tutsis in Rwanda). Liberal academia further justifies this indifference by focussing on such arcane issues as lesbian separatism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and semiotics, while ignoring issues that really matter to oppressed women. The celebration of difference and identity has co-operated with patriarchal discourses of moral relativism, effectively condoning cultural sadism against women. It has also been complicit with the service economy in North America and its promotion of a large female underclass of minimum-wage workers, who, since they work in non-unionized environments, are largely deprived of their labour rights. Refusal to use academia as a forum to protest real cases of economic and cultural oppression of women around the world has turned the Cultural Left into a theoretical side-show, mocked by more analytically inclined thinkers, and largely ignored by the mass media and popular culture. By promoting discourses of difference and identity, academic feminists have disunited and castrated the feminist movement.
Academic feminism has become impotent because devotion to theorizing and "problemetizing"difference and identity have prevented feminist women and men as a group from uniting in a powerful front to end oppression and sadism. Women now identify with their sub-groups (black lesbians, for example) before they identify themselves as women and human beings. While it is reasonable and therapeutic for oppressed groups to identify themselves as lesbians, women of color etc., insofar as identification with these sub-groups prevents one from uniting with others to combat cultural sadism, such divisions constitute a political disaster. Difference should be celebrated, but not to the exclusion of recognizing the common humanity of all people. As Habermas and Rorty have suggested, we should not be too hastily abandon the Enlightenment push for political progress and human rights, even if we have given up on grounding them in an independent metaphysical order.
There is no particular way that the world is, no "right" description of it. Ethical paradigms are as bound to change as models of physics. As any ethicist worth her salt will tell you (at least in her more honest moments), all efforts to ground moral knowledge in the Eternal have failed. Ethical and physical descriptions of the world will change, just as life on earth will slowly evolve into forms unimaginable to us now. This is so because knowledge is nothing more than an empirical explanation of the causal connections between elements of the world. These causal tensions can be described in many different ways, for many different purposes. According to thinkers like Wittgenstein and Rorty, we should think of knowledge not as a representation of reality but as a way of using reality. There is no one way that the world can be accurately represented. But there are ways to act so as to minimize human suffering and to augment human pleasure. The question to ask at this point is: Does this pragmatic world view commit one to anti-imperialist moral relativism? Does the fact that there is no metaphysical moral tribunal to which we are all accountable, commit one to the view that it is our moral duty not to interfere with the cultural practices of others?
In our view, the answer is obviously "no". The stance of the moral relativist is not closer to representing the way the world "really" is than that of the morally committed activist social democrat or the bloodthirsty Nazi. There is no reason to prefer the moral relativist view over the morally committed view. How, then, are these stances to be distinguished? It is clear that human suffering and cruelty are greatly augmented under the rule of the Nazis, Taliban, in societies that practice female genital mutilation, and in all cultures that invent reasons to create significant differences between human beings. Suffering is obviously decreased in democratic societies that practice a broad-based egalitarianism. Societies that focus on otherness and difference, however, use these differences to justify cruelty toward the "other." Societies that attempt to overlook differences (or deny that there are relevant or significant differences between human beings) and which try to treat all people equally, cause less pain and promote greater pleasure to humanity as a whole. If we take knowledge to be a way of using reality rather than a way of representing it, there can be little doubt that societies that theorize difference and otherness among their members, use their moral knowledge (or cultural beliefs) to oppress or exclude members of their group. Throughout history this has meant that women and racial minorities, because they are different, have been be sequestered, mutilated, or otherwise used for the pleasure of the dominant caste.
Democratic societies (those that believe that there are no interesting differences between men and women, blacks and whites, adults and children) should take issue with oppressive societies (apply real pressure on them to change) because they are inflicting pain on members of their group. To equity democrats, the enslavement of women in Islam is identical to the enslavement of blacks in America or South Africa. It is not our moral obligation to be "sensitive" to these beliefs. Rather, it is our moral obligation to be sensitive to the oppressed.
Pierre Bourdieu has speculated that in addition to economic capital, we can talk about how social and cultural capital circulate through human institutions. People's lives are based in and underwritten by the systems of capital they use. Our socio-cultural world defines what counts as liberty and equality for us, so it is not surprising that for cultural feminists, the widespread practice of female genital mutilation, or the religiously sanctioned enslavement of women in Iran, seems meaningless or irrelevant, yet a dubious case of sexual harassment by a male professor can arouse angry passions, leading to newspaper articles, marches, and sit ins. The social and cultural capital of bourgeois academic feminists clearly centres on the power struggles within academia. The suffering of women around the globe does not impact upon our sources of capital, so bourgeois cultural feminists selfishly choose to ignore it. Men and women are equal. Because theorizing difference causes so much pain, it is our moral obligation as members of democratic societies to oppose those who disagree. Philosophy must be knowledge used in the service of all human beings, used for change, used to alleviate pain and to promote the well being of all (or, at, least, to open the avenues to this well being so that they might pursue it). We must say goodbye to that idle style of philosophy which has traditionally been used as a reactionary tool to preserve the status quo of those with cultural and economic capital. The point is not just to theorize about the world, but to change it.
Academic feminist "capitalism" must be transcended. It, like economic late capitalism, has proven to be insensitive and abusive to those who have been born with little or no capital (whether social, cultural, or economic). We urge cultural post-feminists to abandon their tired formulas and unite as a group with others, to fight for equality and fairness for all women, not just those in academic life. And we appeal to the fine minds of the academic Left as a whole to abandon their cultural Laputas and to unite against injustice both in the West and elsewhere by suggesting and supporting real and effective change, to take up the banner of civil society against oppressive cultural and political regimes in the Third World, and against the dark armies of a cold and indifferent globalized capitalism at home.
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Footnotes
1. United Nations Development Program-http://www.undp.org/hdro/
2. UN Development Report, 1995: http://www.undp.org/hdro/e95over.htm
3. Sophia Phoca and Rebecca Wright, Introducing Postfeminism (New York: Totem Books,1999), pg. 114.
4. Namely, Heidi Nelson Hochenedel, in her paper "You Will Comply: The Prime Directive, Moral Relativism and the Noble Borg," posted at http://www.aracnet.com/~hochened/borg.html
5. Despite the best efforts of a real modern-day hero, Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, to use the peacekeepers under his command to save lives.