The Ethics of Ethnocentrism

Ivan Strenski

University of California, Santa Barbara
eui9ias@mvs.oac.ucla.edu

 

Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

 

Intellectual historian-cum-literary critic Tzvetan Todorov has given us a series of thoughtful essays on a cluster of issues of wide current concern: ethnocentrism, humanism, scientism, racism, nationalism, universalism, cultural relativism, exoticism, and the like. Todorov seeks further to identify the leading French thinkers on these subjects, and in doing so to identify the main proponents of what he believes are the key “ideologies” or “justifications” of French “colonial conquests” (xiii). Partly because of the luster of French thought, Todorov believes that this study will constitute nothing short of “research into the origins of our own times” (xii).

 

These ambitous intentions may well go unrecognized in America, however, where the book’s publishers have created a false impression of the author’s aims and of the scope of his work. In translating the original French title, Nous et les autres: La Reflexion francaise sur la diversite humaine, as On Human Diversity, the editors at Harvard have pushed aside Todorov’s broadly dialectical and dialogical purposes in favor of their much narrower concerns. A nuanced and thoughtful book that seeks to guide our thinking about how we should behave toward one another has been served up as yet another contribution to the banal and stifling American conversation about “diversity.” Readers of the book will perhaps be amused by the irony here: a foreign book dealing with ethnocentrism is given a very specifically American (i.e., ethnocentric) packaging before being offered to a domestic readership. But in any case, the book itself should come as a pleasant surprise, addressing as it does a refreshingly broad range of us/them questions and offering a number of provocative theses.

 

To begin with one of the book’s more important themes, Todorov asserts that perhaps the first error we should eliminate from our thinking about the us/them issue is the dichotomy of “us” and “them” itself. He points out that these categories are highly provisional and unstable in any event, and that one of “them” may be felt to be a lot more like me than one of “us.” (We see this instability at work in the tendency of white suburban men to identify more closely with murder suspect O.J. Simpson than with murder victim Ron Goldman.) Todorov’s aim is to have us judge in terms of “ethical” principles, not in terms of some presumed membership in one or another group of “us.”

 

Todorov also threads his way through such issues as the relation of colonial domination to humanitarian universalism. In chapter one, “The Universal and the Relative,” he slides from one end of the dialectic to another, covering a range of opinion on the question of the purported unity or diversity of the human species and its values. Are we one or infinitely many? And, if many, of what significance are the differences? Is there a “universal scale of values,” and “how far does that scale extend”? Here, Todorov performs a useful service for this and future discussions by stipulating the usage of key terms. Thus, for him, “ethnocentrism” is taken to name the “most common” version, indeed a “caricature,” of universalism. This holds that we all are one, because the “other” is basically just like “us.” It affirms both the form of universality and a “particular content.” Thus, it has been a commonplace of French ethnocentric universalists to claim both that the human species and its values are essentially one (and thus, universal), and that these values happen to be best embodied in France. All men seek liberty, equality and fraternity, n’est ce pas?

 

Todorov brings out the clever strategems by which universalism often masks ethnocentrism. This is notoriously so in the way French imperialism often justified its expansionist ventures in terms of bringing (French, of course) “civilization” to the “savages.”

 

But Todorov is too wise in these matters to let the facile critique pass that universalism always hides a more sinister ethnocentrism. Sometimes nations can act in behalf of humanity. Sometimes they can rise above national interest. Had he written this book more recently, Todorov might have had something in mind like the French humanitarian and military actions in Rwanda. Compared to the sorry parade of supposedly shrewdly calculated self-interested American inactions, Medicins sans Frontieres acted in behalf of humanity, despite their specific national origins. Is it only accidental that they should be French? One also thinks of the French rushing in troops (in the name of humanity) to prevent greater loss of innocent life in Rwanda. Despite the cynicism which attended this military action, the French succeeded in turning the tide against further genocide. They also acted in effect to seal the victory of the Anglophone Tutsi minority over the Francophone Hutu, thereby opposing what would seem to be their own national interests. Was it only an accident again that it should have been France who behaved in this way? Many a self-interested and narrowly national evil has been perpetrated in the name of humanity. But, if they are habituated to thinking about the larger human species, perhaps some nations can at times overcome their own interests.

 

Todorov argues further that universalism is not the only villain in perpetuating colonialism. Any available justification will serve colonialist ambitions: if not universalism, then Lebensraum. Besides, Todorov argues, ideologies such as (ethnocentric) universalism seldom, if ever, “motivate” colonial enterprises; they merely serve as post-facto “self-legitimations.” Indeed, for Todorov, universalism isn’t even the primary legitimating mechanism for colonial violence–scientism is. “Scientism,” he says, is the most “perverse” and the most effective ideological weapon in the armory of ethnocentrism and racism, because it so easily passes undetected. People are rarely “proud of being ethnocentric,” whereas they often “take pride in professing a ‘scientific’ philosophy.” Here, Diderot becomes a major exemplar of “scientific ethnocentrism,” as do Renan, who makes a religion of science, and Gobineau, with his fully elaborated scientific racialism. Todorov’s discussion of this aliance between the scientific and the colonial is on the whole fully persuasive. Certainly science has served the needs of modern racialism all too efficiently; both Hitler and Stalin, we must recall, boasted that their ideologies were strictly scientific.

 

Perhaps the most compelling recurrent theme of the book is that of the “tragic duality” between humanism or universalism and nationalism or patriotism. The “man” is not the “citizen.” Humanitarian patriots, epitomized by those who sought to spread universal humanism after the French Revolution, bear a heavy responsibility for the wars that raged in Europe from the late eighteenth century to the end of the First World War: “these wars were accepted all the more easily in that they were presented as invested with the prestige of the French Revolution and the humanitarian ideal.” Those who try thus to reconcile humanity and patriotism court disaster, because they inevitably bend humanity to the interests of the particular nation.

 

But the radical separation of “man” and “citizen” is tragic in its own way, since it locks us into moral relativism. Are there, asks Todorov, no “crimes against humanity”? Can we no more than shrug our “ethical shoulders” at the Nazi extermination camps, viewing them as legitimate expressions of German culture? Is the tribal custom of clitoridectomy a cultural practice which, rather than judging in their typically self-righteous way, Europeans should try better to “understand from the native’s point of view”? Or, is it a fearsome affront to the very humanity of women?

 

Some sort of reconciliation is necessary between humanity and particularity. Todorov believes that this reconciliation is not possible at the level of empirical human nature, but rather at the level of how we think–at the level of “culture.” Culture, he argues, is something close to being “natural” in the sense that it is “given” and thus pre-exists the individual, but it is also something like a contract (since it is willed), and can be acquired or affected by education. But while we can specify these universal contours of culture in general, there is no unity of the species on the level of a particular cultural feature. What is universal is “not one quality or another, but the capacity to acquire any of them.” “The French language is not universal,” observes Todorov, but “the aptitude for learning a language is.” We need, he argues, to become critical of the particular features of our own culture without ceasing to recognize that it is culture itself that enables us to become “human.”

 

In listing these key themes which are woven through Todorov’s essays, I am also indicating that On Human Diversity lacks a single strong central thesis or major argument. This is a deliberate feature of Todorov’s writing–he conceives of it as a process, as offering an “itinerary” rather than a blue print. To be sure, those who are looking for a single-minded and tightly organized discussion will be disappointed by such an approach. The book is in places too cursory, in places too digressive. But Todorov’s intentions show a wisdom of their own. Because he eschews heavy documentation and a strict architectonic of argument, On Human Diversity seems able better to maintain a compelling and powerful moral compass. The book’s unity is moral, rather than logical or thematic. What holds the various essays together is Todorov’s insistence on always inserting ethics into the analysis and the practice of politics. Todorov realizes that ethics cannot replace politics, but he also believes that ethics can exercise a crucial restraining function within the political field.

 

This ethical orientation amounts to a kind of neo-humanism, and Todorov concludes his volume with an ethically-inflected defense of humanism against its various unnamed French detractors (Levi-Strauss? Derrida? Foucault?). Instead of seeing humanism as generating its own auto-toxins, Todorov argues that it has been distorted and undermined by irrepressible holistic impulses. Nationalism, racialism, and totalitarian utopianism are all monstrous reinventions of ideals originating in holistic ideology. Citing the seminal and often misunderstood work on the Hindu caste system of French anthropologist and social thinker Louis Dumont, Todorov urges that we must learn to “temper” the humanitarian ideal of the Enlightenment by putting it into play with “values and principles from other perspectives.” Only in this way will we find “new [benign] expressions for the repressed holistic values” whose subjugation to individual freedom was part of the price we paid for the triumph of humanist individualism.

 

Aside from elaborating, in his loosely-structured way, this humanist articulation of ethics with politics, Todorov reflects autobiographically on both the personal and the institutional contexts from which his particular orientation has emerged. In his preface, Todorov recalls his experiences as a zealous young “pioneer” living under a Stalinist regime. During this time, he remarks, he “came to know evil,” even while he was inhibited from acting against it. The more formative moment came, however, after Stalin’s death, when relief and hope gave way to an awareness that things would not really change. Todorov confronted with increasing frequency the “vacuity of the official discourse,” a lofty Orwellian language whose real function was to mask the apparatus of domination. The “evil” he had come to know was not to be located in the dictator after all, but in the whole social and discursive system of which the evil dictator was but a symptom. In the wake of this recognition, even Todorov’s strong faith in Marxist principles would wither. Fortunately, he was able to migrate to France, where he resumed his studies in the human and social sciences in Paris.

 

Todorov’s honeymoon with the West was, however, soon over. Among his politically obsessed French academic colleagues, he found the same absence of “an ethical sense” which he once thought peculiar to the Stalinist East. Of these Western intellectuals, Todorov observes sarcastically that the “goals that inspired them were most often variants of the very principles I had learned to mistrust so deeply in my homeland.” Almost as frustrating as this sclerotic and inhumane Marxism among his French academic colleagues, however, was the petit-bourgeois professionalization and the crabbed compartmentalization of the modern university.

 

Todorov’s institutional goal, therefore, has been to map out new approaches to matters that he believes have been avoided or mishandled by intellectuals more rooted than he in the particular political postures and disciplinary arrangements of the Western academic system. Instead of adjusting himself to the contours of this system, he has rebelled against it. On Human Diversity is something like a culmination of that rebellion, a book written from a totally deviant point of departure, one that, in its unfashionably humanist ethics and in its declared preference for the “moral and political essay” over conventional scholarship in the human or social sciences, must offend both the radical left and the conservative defenders of disciplinary specialization.

 

It is hard in a few lines to celebrate how well the episodic and thoughtful meditative style of this extended moral essay works to heap, bit by bit, a weight of historical evidence onto the reader about the moral implications of the issues coming visibly to a head in our time. But it does.