A Rose by any Other Name.......

Monday's Financial Times has a multicultural screed on its editorial page entitled "Divergence from the values of the west is not deviance."
The author is Patrick Chabal, co-author of a book "Culture Troubles: politics and the interpretation of meaning." I could not find the article on-line.

Any phrase employing "interpretation of meaning" summons to mind the famous Clintonism on "it depends on what the word 'is' is," and brings me back to a course in epistomology I took in the late-middle of the last century.

But I digress. Chabal takes us on an explanatory excursion through the clash of "western values" with Al-Qaeda's ethics, Iraq's political morality, and African governance issues.

Interestingly Chabal concentrates on the Middle East and Africa, disdainfully rebuking the "Group of Eight" and implicitly the West for being convinced of the superiority of its own political system and cultural values.

The West's skepticism of Muslims' inability to assimilate because of their 'creed,' the Middle East's aversion to democracy, and Africa's lack of civil society are all seen as parochial cultural narrowness on the West's part.

Chabal then trots down the path of how dangerous it is that the West regard the Middle East and Africa as holding the wrong beliefs. This would be "rigid reductionism" and lead to "simplistic policy decisions."

Chabal explains in a somewhat condescending fashion how we can find a path out of the "ethnocentric trap" by

considering culture not as a set of values, but as the shared logic used by people to tackle issues important to them. What we regard as corruption in Africa often results from widespread and well-respected relations of reciprocity, which form the bedrock of social integration. The same goes for Iraq's tribal politics.

And so on for dress codes and language of European immigrants being "an assertion of distinctiveness in the face of dissaffection and poor opportunities."

Corruption also exists in Sicily from widespread and well-respected relations of reciprocity, which form the bedrock of social integration and is called Cosa Nostra or the Mafia. The government of Italy is trying to stamp out this corruption. Should Africa, according to Chabal's special pleading, be given a pass and call its corruption "social integration?"

Is the reason that no African airlines can service their planes in Sub-Saharan Africa in hangars due to pandemic thievery and non-existent work ethic or because of "well-respected relations of reciprocity" which require planes to be serviced in Europe or Latin America or the Middle East? Is this a question of culture or ethics?

And what about East Asia and the sub-continent? Why is India developping at a rapid pace on track to become an economic superpower while Pakistan languishes in relative penury? Are comparing development rates in East Asia and India with those in Muslim and African countries one of our Western "ethnocentric traps?"

Chabal finishes his piece by reverting back to Europe. Rather than commissions on French citizenship or Islamophobia, assimilation must be a matter of "empirical research into questions of identity among young people from ethnic or social groups that feel divorced from the society in which they live."

Governments and politicians must realize that making policy without understanding culture is doomed to failure, but they must also see that equating culture with values is a dead end. This entails a change in mindset: culture is what people share, not just what they believe.

Are we back to those "social relations" based on "well-established relations of reciprocity" as in sub-Saharan Africa? Bantustans in Birmingham or little Sicily in Vitry?

Chabal has an answer. Buy his book and hire himself as a consultant, along with his co-author. I'm sure some Brussels Eurocrat is considering that solution at this very moment.

Down with values. Up with "social relations based on well-establish systems of reciprocity!"