In the essays “The Language of Discretion” by Amy Tan, “Civilize Them With a Stick” by Mary Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes, and “The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met A Girl Named Maria” by Judith Ortiz Cofer the authors depict and evaluate problems of racial differences and racism, cultural stereotypes and cultural conflict. Three essay portray that cultural differences require people to assume that there are intellectual standards to which all reasonable men and women have access and to which they therefore may be held.
In the essay “The Language of Discretion”, Amy Tan portrays that women obtain low roles in society because of gender differences and historical roles. Since each person represents the meeting point of a slightly different family of cultural traditions, multiculturalism collapses into individualism. The same is true of cultural conflict, since each individual can be seen as the bearer of a unique culture. Because common standards of rational discourse are necessary if dialogue among diverse men and women is to be possible, weak multiculturalism collapses into humanism.
Similar to Amy Tan, Mary Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes shows that the most common form of collapse has been the neglect of the fact that rival cultures contain mutually incompatible pictures of how things are and ought to be. Some people take as their model for understanding cultural diversity experimentation with exotic cuisines. Academic discussions of religion often speak the language of preferences and market shares rather than competing claims to truth.
In the essay The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met A Girl Named Maria”, Judith Ortiz Cofer portrays her experience and relations with the world. She underlines that many people retain some lingering hope of an afterlife, but even the most zealous believers also find it necessary to mitigate the prospects of death by identifying with family lineages, national and religious communities, cultural traditions, and political movements that will continue in existence after they die. In order to confront death in its fullest sense, we must therefore consider the possibility that nothing we value will be transmitted to anyone who lives after us. The extermination of the human species (or the violent destruction of our civilization) is one version of this prospect.
But limitless cultural decay also provides us with a useful diminished similitude. Cofer portrays that a sense of being sexually objectified created an increased sense of vulnerability. She writes that since early age girls are subjected to cultural norms and stereotypes. “As young girls, we were influenced in our decisions about clothes and colors by the women—older sisters and mothers who had grown up on a tropicalisland where the natural environment was a riot of primary colors, where showing your skin was one way to keep cool as well as to look sexy. They were protected by the traditions, mores, and laws of a Spanish/ Catholic system of morality and machismo whose main rule was: You may look at my sister, but if you touch her I will kill you” (Cofer n.d.).
It is possible to say that cultural confusion seems now to be the order of the day all over the world. The emergence of culture is on any account mysterious, but when new cultural traditions arise, they usually at least owe their existence to charismatic figures. A man expects strengthened democracy to create a common culture: he seems to believe that attempts at cooperation among people holding contradictory views.
This situation generates the normative framework required to sustain it cultural confusion seems now to be the order of the day all over the world. Following Mary Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes, it is a natural contingency that human beings are roughly equal in their natural capacities, just as it is a natural contingency that each of us has a certain array of gifts and limitations. There could be a world in which there was a multitude of more or less intelligent species, relations among which would be governed by principles we can barely imagine.
Even believers in an immortal soul, or some other transcendent source of human dignity, cannot escape empirical questions, since it is an empirical question whether the creature before me is a human being with transcendent capacities rather than a beast.
But if there is something about human beings, however limited their capacities, that places limits on what we may do to them, then we need not be so apprehensive about statistics that tend to show that some groups, on the whole and for the most part, have greater capacities than others. There may always be environmental explanations of such phenomena, but our failure to find them will not throw our morality into disrepair. We can continue to affirm that human beings have a right to be treated as individuals rather than as members of races or other categories.
The authors vividly portray that cultural differences and stereotypes trivialize diversity, while others give it so much weight that war is the only possible relationship among unlike individuals and groups (and indeed among the various tendencies that exist within the same individual). The resulting perplexity haunts feminist thought, which sometimes portrays men and women as “persons,” whose sameness has been obscured by a sexist or patriarchal society; and sometimes as so alien that the sex war is a permanent and inescapable reality. In America, diversity issues often take a racial form.
African Americans, Asian Americans, European Americans, and Hispanic Americans all, it seems, dislike one another and are prepared to assert their identity at one another’s expense. Other cultural groups, for example, homosexuals, are also demanding a place at the table. Moreover, each of these groups is internally diverse, and subject to internal conflict about both cultural issues and questions of material advantage. An “orthodox” feminism centered on the advancement of upscale women claims to speak for all women, but in fact neglects the material and moral interests of working mothers.
A social pressure to be politically correct negatively affects different cultural groups and create a conflict between them. When we think of human diversity, we should think not only of black people and male and female homosexuals. Next to differences of wealth and power, the form of diversity that is the most serious source of conflict is difference of outlook. On thoroughly diversitarian premises, there can be no question of equality among communities.
A government having the power to redistribute wealth and power among them will end up invading their space in countless ways. Even the formal equality implicit in, for example, a scheme of proportional representation will survive only as long as no other stable way of apportioning power among communities emerges. There will be as much or as little equality within these communities as their governing principles allow. The result of proceeding in this way ranges from political quietism to fascism, depending on how bellicose a disposition informs our reasoning and how difficult we conceive the task of establishing order to be.
Liberals have characteristic problems explaining why it is that the present generation is obliged to continue the institutions and practices that their moral and physical ancestors created. They also have difficulty with parent-child relationships: small children are unable to make decisions for themselves in the way liberals want us to do, and in particular to measure the obedience due their parents by some philosophically defensible standard.
Amy Tan depicts hat any attempt to resolve the problem of human diversity in liberal terms will encounter a deadly ambiguity in the idea of self-determination of peoples. It is systematically unclear what entities count as “a people,” entitled to determine its own destiny. The alternative to destructive diversity is the attempt to recover a common culture, at least within an existing nation-state.
The building of a world civilization, however vital a project, will prove futile if its component national units dissolve into chaos. Amy Tan and Judith Ortiz Cofer show that one ground for hope is that our very diversity will prevent the formation of a majority large and determined enough to repress minorities effectively. Another is a political tradition, widely admired outside the United States as well as within it, that begins with a ringing affirmation of the claims of our common humanity. Not only the creation-evolution dispute, but many other cultural issues as well, can (and must) be resolved through a mixture of mutual tolerance and pragmatic compromise.
Even the United Nations can agree on a moment of silent reflection before beginning its business. Hence a moment of silence at the beginning of the public school day, during which each student may pray or meditate as his conscience (or that of his family) dictates, should meet the legitimate concerns of every party to the school prayer dispute-assuming for the moment that we retain enough of a common culture to render public schools workable institutions otherwise. Those who require more content should reflect on the difficulties of finding formulas that satisfy even all Protestants (let alone Roman Catholics, Jews, and so forth).
But families and religious communities can and should conduct fuller religious education at home, in church, or in voluntary after-school meetings. To them will fall the task of explaining to children the purpose of a moment of silence, thereby preventing pressure on children to conform to a state-sponsored theology. “Mixed cultural signals have perpetuated certain stereotypes—for example, that of the Hispanic woman as the “Hot Tamale” or sexual firebrand. It is a onedimensional view that the media have found easy to promote. In their special vocabulary, advertisers have designated “sizzling” and “smoldering” as the adjectives of choice for describing not only the foods but also the women of Latin America” (Cofer).
Cultural stereotypes create a barrier between cultural groups and prevent effective communication and positive relationships between them. Following Mary Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes, many cultural conflicts call for reciprocal norms of privacy and reticence, so that men and women can pursue diverse modes of life without invading one another’s moral territory. Standards of dignity and courtesy, a shared sense that certain things are “not done”.
A revival of the classical American pattern of a multitude of local communities, each with its distinctive conception of the good life, from which disaffected individuals are free to depart, could accomplish a great deal. The resolution of cultural conflicts requires more than anything else a recognition of the shared humanity of everyone involved. At one time nationalism provided a sufficient bond among the citizens of the same nation-state. But the nation-state has now become vulnerable, both to transnational influences and to regional separatism, as well as to forms of nationalism that do not support its boundaries.
A conspicuous feature of contemporary political life has been a revived tribalism, which “orthodox” liberalism has found itself unable to combat effectively, 5 of which moral and conceptual relativism are the intellectual correlates. No one has ever come up with a definition of who counts as a nation capable of resisting the forces of political opportunism. The simplest and best response to tribalism is that underneath our differences we are all human beings, and as such we have a common core of rights and duties (and can aspire to practice a common core of virtues).
In sum, the essays portray that many people have an emotional commitment to defining themselves as men and women of the Left, and to rejecting at least traditional forms of religion. They believed in a common human nature, though one concealed under capitalism, which would enable human beings to thrive in mutually supportive ways, once socially entrenched obstacles to its realization were removed.
Guided by these premises, they undertook to expose the ideological defenses of the status quo, and to support the working class as privileged agents of social change. But they came to see the belief in a common human nature, and even more so in the existence of laws of history, as matters of faith and hope, incapable of surviving the sort of debunking they directed against traditional religious and moral ideas. In contrast, modifications of the human organism are the routine business of the medical profession, athletic trainers, and those who perform ritual practices such as circumcision.
We may contrast those changes that are transmitted through the gene pool, because they arise from mutation and selection, whether natural or artificial; and those that are not so transmitted. In furthering the needed conversation, lessons can also be drawn from history as well as from philosophy. Some experiments in individual or collective living prove disasters–and not just by my personal code or some preferred moral theory. The abortion and animal rights issues are not merely politically difficult: they also have immense theoretical importance. A man or woman’s view of the world affects, among other things, his or her conception of what data have evidentiary force (and how much).
Where background pictures differ, therefore, disputes will be particularly intractable. Communities need to define their identities, and the source of their claims on their members, while giving these members reasons to believe that their individual good is in harmony with the good of society. These problems become particularly intense in times of war and economic stringency, but they are also acute when a society has been deprived of a familiar enemy.
Works Cited
Dog, Mary Crow. Erdoes, R. Civilize Them With a Stick. in Susan J. Ferguson (ed.), Mapping the Social Landscape: Readings in Sociology. 4th Edition. McGraw Hill 2005, pp. 573-581.
Cofer, J. O. The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met A Girl Named Maria. Web.
Tan, Amy. “The Language of Discretion.” The State of the Language. Eds. Christopher Ricks and Leonard Michaels. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990: 25-32.