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lucian pye = on my bad list.
Oct. 5th, 2007 08:22 pmI am rapidly turning against relativism. I'm still a constructivist, of course, but I'm starting to see a suspicious trend in relativists: basically, blaming the problems (which they insist, condescendingly, are not real "problems" but just "quirks") of developing countries on those countries' cultures, and not, say, on anything anyone else (like their own countries) might have done. Hey, you know who's a relativist? Katzenstein. You know who else is? Samuel Huntington. I tell you, there's Old School Relativism, defined by Huntington, that says, "other countries are poor and decrepit because their cultures are broken, because I say so". Then there's New School Relativism, defined by Katzenstein and now Pye, that says, "other countries are poor and decrepit because their cultures are just 'different', and we should love them despite these differences, the way we love special ed children". Either way it's a brand of racism.
I mean, you gotta love this guy. First he has the obligatory politically correct statement that he clearly doesn't believe in:
LOVE IT.
I mean, you gotta love this guy. First he has the obligatory politically correct statement that he clearly doesn't believe in:
Instinctively we pause before accepting such a conclusion because several generations of Americans, taught by the texts of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, know that it is wrong to be ethnocentric. 28Right, boys and girls, remember, it's wrong *wink wink* to be ethnocentric *wink wink*. Then he tells us that Suharto had "bold and imaginative" policies (332) - such thinking will get you disowned in my family. Here's the clincher, though, his cleansing of his Western guilt and declaration that Asian nationalism (or just all Asians?) are racist:
In the immediate postwar years it was assumed that Asian nationalism was largely a reaction to colonialism and the Western impact, which to a degree it was. Since then it has become clear that the intensity of xenophobia is more closely correlated with the strength of paternalistic styles of authority. The more the culture conceives of authority as being a nurturing force for a ‘family’ collectivity, the sharper the sense of boundary between its members and foreigners. Distrust of the foreigner has resulted not so much from bad experiences with outsiders as from a deeply felt need to repay paternalistic authority and maintain the cohesion of the collectivity. 329
LOVE IT.
