gaudior

So, on Friday, I made a post about a thought I'd had about cultural appropriation*. Unfortunately, I got it all down really quickly and ran out the door, so it came out sort of half-baked. (And then I went down to see my wife and my friends for the weekend (yay!), and spent no time online to fix it). And people came and made interesting comments on it, so I don't want to delete that entry, or massively revise it, because then their thoughtful and interesting comments won't make any sense. On the other hand, I think the idea was interesting, and I want to work on it more. So I'm going to leave the original entry there (and respond to the comments presently), and post the revised version here. Cuz it's my lj, and I can re-post if I want to.
****************************************************************************


So, sparked by coffeeandink's useful post on last year's WisCon panel, I've had a thought. I haven't, I'm afraid, read enough to know whether anyone else has had this thought, but I think it's a good one.

Last year, I wrote a post on cultural appropriation trying to answer the question that many White people have upon first hearing the concept-- "Why is this such a big deal?" But what I'm thinking about now is: why, for White people, is it so hard to understand that it is a big deal? A lot of people give the answer of "entitlement," and that may well be true, but I think it's only a partial answer-- and that there are more interesting cultural reasons behind it.

So: in 1015, Islamic Golden Age philosopher and scientist Ibn al-Haytham wrote the book Optics. This was the first text I know of to use what we now think of as the "Scientific Method"-- a way of understanding the universe through observation, hypothesis, and experimentation. Over the next few centuries, the idea spread, and in 1620, Sir Francis Bacon wrote the Novum Organum, followed by Renes Descartes' A Discourse on the Method in 1637. Together, these two books laid out the scientific method for Europeans in clear, precise language. It became one of the many ideas of the European Enlightenment, which went on to become so a part of American culture that we now have difficulty distinguishing Enlightenment ideas from plain common sense.

Now, the scientific method-- the idea that anything can be learned by observing it, playing with it, and thinking about it-- is an interesting concept. But it is not a universal. Most traditional religions-- including most European ones-- have the idea that some things are meant to be mysteries. Christianity has plenty of these-- transubstantiation, the Trinity, etc. In fact, the only religion I can think of with anything approaching empiricism is Buddhism, where the Buddha tells his followers to investigate everything for themselves, through meditation and practice. That's a very foreign concept for most faiths. The idea that everyone should be able to know everything, all the time, is not only not universal, it's not even universal to Westerners. Nor is it just a Western idea-- it's a modern one, and everyone lives in the twenty-first century.

So for modern Americans, raised in a country steeped in the offshoots of the 17th century, the idea seems like a matter of course. I was raised to believe that I should approach everything with questions-- to never accept what I was told, but to try to find it out for myself. I was taught that the best thing I could do was to gather all the evidence I could, to consider it, to throw out whatever didn't fit-- all in the belief that, by so doing, I could eventually figure out The Truth of Everything.

Now, the interesting thing about that (as rushthatspeaks pointed out this weekend, thank you, belove), is that it's not true. Not just that I could eventually figure everything out, but that I don't believe anything should be off-limits. Because there are things that Americans don't believe we should know-- that are "too much information." A whole lot of biological functions, social interactions, etc-- we've decided that these are not useful in our quest to find things out, and we try not to learn them. They may or may not actually be useful, but we believe that they aren't, on a level so deep it feels like instinct.

And that's the main point, really-- that it's not that we're really trying to find out everything in the world, but that we believe we are. It is, oddly enough, a devoutly religious belief of secular, intellectual Americans, that everything should be questioned, considered, and judged with logic.** And that, I think, is why we become so outraged by the idea that cultural appropriation is a problem. For people raised like me, who are secular because no religion can satisfy our logic, saying "there are some things you do not have the right to write about" is not just setting limits-- it becomes a threat to our ability to make sense of the universe. We believe, deep down, that we need to have the freedom to taste everything, think about everything, understand everything, work with everything (and writing fiction about something is a major way of trying to make sense of it). Otherwise, we'll fail in our lifelong quest: to integrate all knowledge so that we can somehow find answers that help us to live meaningful lives.

So the problem here is not that exactly that White, upper-middle-class Americans are trying to own the entire world (as it often seems to be portrayed), or that people from other cultures are being ridiculously touchy in saying that we can't look at and use aspects of their cultures (as it also often seems to be portrayed). The problem as I see it is that intellectual (which often, though not always, = upper-middle-class) White Americans feel that it is our right to investigate ideas in order to fit them into our theories, and that we have a sacred obligation to do so-- where people from other cultures feel that those particular ideas are mysteries, and are meant to be. It basically comes down to: my culture's beliefs and obligations conflict with other cultures'. And that, while it's very disturbing, is the core conflict at the root of any attempt at true multiculturalism-- so any ways of dealing with that conflict could be applied here just as well.

However, three partial solutions specific to this form of the conflict leap to mind. The first is to acknowledge that our feeling that "people are being unreasonable to complain about cultural appropriation" is, in fact, a feeling strongly based in our culture. It is not an entirely rational feeling, no matter how much we want to think it is-- it is based on assumptions about the world which are native to our culture, not universal. This takes us out into the really scary place, where "multiculturalism" becomes not just about eating different spices, but about really questioning the basis of why we hold things to be self-evident. Which is challenging, and hard to do-- but which will, I think, very much help in this debate.

The second thing is to be aware of a major difference in viewpoint, which is: while most White people see ourselves as borrowing ideas, I think many people of other cultures see us as taking them. They point out that it is deeply unfair that a White, upper-middle-class person can write about/sing about/sell something from another culture and profit enormously from it, while someone from the culture that s/he's using probably couldn't-- especially since said White, upper-middle-class person's misunderstandings of the context are likely to come through in the finished product, and so spread misinformation about the original culture. This, honestly, seems like more of a problem for informed consumers to work on than writers-- it is, for example, up to the readers to buy more books written by people of different cultures, so that there can be more of a market for them. White American writers can help by doing their research well, citing their sources so that others will read the original, and not getting in the way of their colleagues of color who are trying to sell their own books.

And, for the love of all the gods, by not assuming that White Americans "have no culture," so need to borrow someone else's to make their books interesting. I think it's worthwhile for a White writer to think hard before setting a book in an unfamiliar culture about why that book needs to be there/then. I'm not saying it shouldn't be-- books that are about all White people, all the time, are not a true representation of the whole world, and I think most writers want to write as much truth as they can. But it is worth thinking first, to figure out one's reasons for writing it.

Overall, my solution here really is: think. If someone makes an argument which brings up a strong emotion in you, think about why it makes you feel so strongly. Because you'll probably find something more interesting by looking inside you than you would by proving the other person wrong.

--R


*cultural appropriation: the use of other cultures' creations and ideas for one's own purposes, sometimes without much understanding of their meaning in the original context

**It is reasonable for people to look at my langauge here and say, "That's not religious! The entire point of the word "secular" is that it means "not religious." Which is fair. But I would argue that a major purpose of a religion (besides generally keeping social order and providing community) is to answer the big questions of life-- why are we here? What is our purpose? Why do we die and suffer? etc. And that among the secular intellectuals of my culture, while we may have a religion our parents taught us (mine was Judaism), when we try to really understand the meat-and-bones of the world around us, we use logic. "Faith" is not a satisfying answer for me about how gravity works, and why (as it would have been for my ancestors)-- I want empirically provable facts and theories to tell me these things. And I would argue that a belief in science-- that, for example, the same thing will happen twice if you exactly reproduce the circumstances-- is something which we believe on a much deeper level than the teachings of Christianity, Judaism, etc. I need to wrestle with the idea that God chose the Jews to be His people-- I just accept the idea that observation can prove or disprove hypotheses.