This is the introductory post to this thread:
BubbaGumbo wrote:Is it not possible for a culture to be backwards and immoral? I understand the importance of respecting the rituals and nuances of other cultures but some beliefs/behaviors are immoral any way you try to spin it.
Why do you have to a practicing member of a culture to pass judgement on it?
It baffles me why criticism of aspects of other cultures is so taboo.
To which Lil' Kay responed with a question:
littlek wrote:Hey Bubba, can you throw us an example to work with?
After a few exchanges between Patiodog and Lil' Kay, BubbaGumbo answered her as follows:
BubbaGumbo wrote:"Hey Bubba, can you throw us an example to work with?"
Sure. The other day I was discussing the continued plight of African Americans with my friends. At one point in the debate, I began putting some of the blame on the immature/regressive culture of African American youths. Specifically, the culture is extremely materialistic, mysoginistic, and violent. My friends immediately jumped on me and called me racist and ignorant which is absurd. Obviously, this is a personal anecdote but I've witnessed similar events in public venues and on TV.
I think BubbaGumbo's point is well taken, although not stated at the outset, but rather, doubtlessly to encourage discussion--presented in the form of rhetorical question (rhetorical in the sense of relating to discussion and debate, rather than predicated upon foregone conclusions).
Several posts thereafter addressed the topic intended by the author. My first contribution was to take notice of the movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s among "militant" groups (civil rights, feminist, quasi-socialist, egalitarian) to define unacceptable speech in the effort to gather everyone into a cohesive group to "fight the man." That was what i consider the birth of "politically correct" speech, which accepts no condemnation of any aspect of what can be ascribed to culture.
Others have, of course, offered opinions on the matter. I disagree with Mr. Thomlinson's thesis referred to just above by Shapeless. For example, during the first crusade, in desparate hunger, and with due contempt for Muslims, some crusaders killed and ate some of their captives. We know this because christian clerics who accompanied them recorded the event, and described their horror. This, i think, falls in the category of what BubbaGumbo refers to in writing:
. . . some beliefs/behaviors are immoral any way you try to spin it.
Now, one could argue that that was exceptional behavior, indefensible because it was not commonly condoned in the society from which the crusaders came. However, there are other examples, and the Spanish come to mind. Ferdinand and Isabella successfully completed the
Reconquista (the "reconquest" from the Muslims) of Spain in 1492. They immediately issued an edict expelling by a certain date all Muslims and Jews who had not converted to Christianity. They were given precious little time--a matter of weeks. Muslims who converted were known as
moriscos, and Jews who converted were known as
marranos--and they were all known as
conversos in the aggregate. However, conversion did not end their troubles. A common practice throughout Europe at the time was to award a portion of the estate of anyone condemned and convicted of a capital offense to the person or persons who had denounced them. Despite being a common practice, it was officially condemned by the church which Ferdinand and Isabella purported to support. In Spain, the result was that the conversos were closely watched, and frequently condemned. Anyone whose conversion was considered false was condemned to death as were those who had not converted or left Spain by the deadline imposed in the original edict. Simply because the practice was encouraged in Spain does not mean that we should accept it as the cultural norm--it was in fact carried out putatively in support of the Church (the Reformation had not yet taken place, so there was only "one church" recognized in western and central Europe at the time), despite the condemnation of the practice by the Church.
Murderous Spanish zeal did not end there. In France after the Reformation, Henry IV had converted to Catholicism in order to become King, commenting that "Paris is worth a mass." Being formerly (and secretly very probably continuing to be) a Protestant, he worked carefully to preserve the peace in France without prejudice to either confessional community. He issued the Edict of Nantes guaranteeing religious tolerance (it was revoked by Louis XIV less than a century later). That he did so in Nantes is significant. The western portion of France, and in particular the seaports, was a stronghold region for the French Protestants. Even before Henry became King, his predecessors took note of this and sought to take advantage of the Protestant population without enraging the Catholic population by sending the Huguenots (the French Protestants) to overseas colonies. This being before the establishment of the colony of New France, they weren't sent to what would one day be Canada, but were sent to the West Indies. In 1562, Huguenots attempted to establish a colony at Hilton Head, but those left behind grew despondant over the winter, and returned to La Rochelle. In 1564, René Laudonniere established a colony near Cape Canaveral in what is now Florida, naming it Fort Caroline, in honor of Charles IX, then King of France. Pedro Menendez de Aviles (who founded St. Augustine) learned they were there after the French rescued two Spanish seamen from the local Indians, with whom they enjoyed cordial relations. He repaid that generosity by sending an expedition against the "heretics." We know the exact details of what happened because his subordinate, Nunez, wrote a detailed account of what he had done--he was proud of himself. His expedition was probably doomed to failure, when nature intervened. The French got word of his approach from their Indian friends, and Laudonniere put to sea with the three small ships his colony possessed. Just at that time, they were hit by a terrible storm (possibly the passage of a hurricane nearby) and scattered. Nunez and his men suffered horribly, but arrived at the fort. Even though they were outnumbered by the French left behind, Nunez bluffed them into surrender, and promptly slaughtered most, but not all of them. The three French ships were driven ashore. Nunez proceeded down the coast, and each time he encountered a French party, he would send forward a prisoner (who didn't know of the slaughter at Fort Caroline) to convince them to surrender. Then he would bind their hands, and take them off behind the sand dunes in small groups, where they would be murdered. But he was impatient and in a hurry, and he did not manage to kill all the prisoners in each party he captured. Incredibly, he let Laudonniere live, and Menendez eventually allowed the survivors to sail back to La Rochelle, where they told the story in France, and it quickly spread to the rest of Europe.
Nunez may have been proud, and Menendez may have rewarded him for his efforts, but the event was roundly condemned throughout Europe, by both Protestants and Catholics. It lead to an estrangement between the French and Spanish Kings, which probably had a great deal to do with them eventually going to war with one another in the era of Richelieu, an on-again, off-again war which did not end until the era of the Thirty Years War in the mid-seventeenth century. This was not an isolated event, either. The French, English and Dutch all profited from smuggling to the Spanish Main from their little island colonies in the West Indies. But only the French Protestants went into the territory of the Spanish themselves. They set up colonies in the Florida Keys, and they set up a very profitable little operation on the north coast of the island of Hispaniola (modern day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) at the island of Tortuga. On Tortuga, the French profited both from smuggling, and selling ships stores to passing ships. One commodity with which they did well was the smoked meat of game they hunted on the main Island. The Spanish at Santo Domingo had never been able to interest any of their people in colonizing the western end of the island, which was low-lying and swampy. The French went into the forests there and hunted wild boar and the small deer native to the island, and smoked the meat on green-wood grills known by a name from the Indians which the French rendered as
boucane. The men who did the hunting and meat smoking became known as
boucaniers (and hence, the origin of bucaneers). When the Spanish learned of it, a body of mounted volunteers raised from among the idle young men of the large estates near Santo Domingo was sent after them, and because they used the lance they were known as the
Lanceros. The French hated and dreaded the Lanceros, who by policy killed any Frenchman they found (considering them all to be heretics). One of the most feared of the French pirates in the great age of piracy in the West Indies, which was the seventeenth century (despite the reputation of such as Blackbeard in the eighteenth), was l'Olonnais. He had been a
boucanier in the interior of the island, when all of his party was murdered by the Lanceros, and he only escaped by smearing himself with blood and crawling under a pile of bodies--a trick he would later use to escape the Spanish in Mexico. L'Olonnais became one of the most dreaded pirates in the West Indies, and routinely slaughtered any Spanish captives who fell into his hands.
Nevertheless, l'Olonnais was as roundly condemned and despised as Nunez had been for his slaughter of "heretics" a century earlier. Just because such slaughter was commonly practiced does not mean that it was a cultural norm which ought not to be condemned today, and more especially as it was condemned in Paris and Rome in the era in which it occurred. I agree with BubbaGumbo that some acts are so heinous that they are worthy of condemnation regardless of appeals to cultural norms. And i consider the Mr. Tomlinson's thesis is naive and based on an ill-informed view of history.
