The Cage: Must, Should, and Ought from Is

CHAPTER SIX: Cultural Variation

Cultural Variation Needs and interests are generic and determinable. Hunger is a need, and satisfying it is a value, though cultures differ in the means they prescribe: their rice, our wheat. This chapter describes both the variability of norms across societies and cultures and the generic constraints that limit these differences. It locates norms in two considerations: determinable needs or interests and the particular satisfiers that cultures or societies provide. 1. Generic Needs and Their Determinate Expressions Nothing would be valuable to us if we had no needs or interests. Forever complete and self-possessed, we wouldn’t look beyond ourselves for company or support. We would also be simple (like Leibnizian monads1), because complexity implies parts and the need to stabilize their relations in a dynamic world. Autonomy would also require that all things needed to maintain us—energy, materials, and information—be present and accessible within us. But they are not. We need regular inputs of all three. We sometimes replenish these resources by foraging for ourselves, but more often, we get them by communicating and cooperating with other people within systems that satisfy mutual needs and interests. And tellingly, we usually satisfy them in terms prescribed by these systems: the goods we seek—energy, materials, and information—are socially created and approved. 221 C H A P T E R S I X Normativity has two expressions that exhibit the difference between generic needs and their culturally or socially sanctioned satisfiers. One is determinable; the other is its situationally appropriate, determinate expression. The generic norm is a biological or social need, a need one would have irrespective of his or her culture, or a need that is consequent on living in circumstances or societies of a kind: as a fisherman or farmer, for example. Wanting nourishment is normative and common: it regulates behavior, requiring particular successes and satisfactions if a person is to live. But cultures use different materials, styles of preparation, and techniques to satisfy the need. Using a knife and fork is a norm in Western cultures; chopsticks or a spoon are the rule in the East. The implements have the same purpose: both respond to the need that there be something with which to feed oneself when eating with one’s hands is a clumsier alternative. Needs become interests when, for example, the need for food becomes the refined taste for foods prepared and presented in a culture’s style. But refinement, too, satisfies the generic need: good restaurants nourish their clients, even when this isn’t their principal aim. Determinables can be represented graphically. Imagine a blackboard covered with sixty-seven random marks. Each mark represents one of the sixty-seven cultural universals acknowledged by anthropologists.2 (I ignore questions about the accuracy of their count.) Each is a generic practice—a norm—that satisfies needs divers as food, cooperation, protection , and information. Suppose, too, that we connect all the marks in ten or a thousand different ways. Each pattern of marks and connecting lines signifies that a culture has a distinct expression for each of the determinables, and that each expression is related normatively to the sixty-six others, directly or by way of intermediaries. Dance may have few significant relations to other practices within one culture, but many direct and vital relations in others.3 The idiosyncrasies of a pattern—diagonals, swirls, or a lattice of squares—obscure the identity of determinables across cultures. A culture ’s members are mystified by another’s ways, or confused because they can’t discern its style of relating the determinables. Yet, the determinables and their relations are discernible amidst the welter of idiosyncratic detail. So, friendship is a determinable, and Aristotle described three of its variations: friendships of pleasure, utility, or mutual esteem.4 Other kinds of friendship are also conceivable: those based on kinship, shared belief, or partnership in a system, for example. Each style implicates different, companion determinables. Utilitarian friendships impli222 THE CAGE cate work; those of pleasure promote marriage. But there is a constant. Friendship is mutual reliance in personal affairs. It invokes the duty of mutual loyalty and assistance, irrespective of cultural or social differences . Why are there variations that couple it to any of several other determinables? Because of circumstantial reasons that include the disparate environments where practical life evolved, hence each culture’s distinctive ways of managing its affairs. Could there be cultures where friendship is...