In Search of the Good Life: A Pedagogy for Troubled Times

Appendix B: Modalities of Intercultural Dialogue: UNESCO at Sixty

246 appendix B modalities of Intercultural dialogue UNESCO at Sixty No better topic could have been chosen to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the United Nations educational, Scientific , and Cultural organization (UNeSCo) than the theme “Cultural diversity and Transversal Values.” our world today is being pulled apart by two conflicting tendencies: global uniformity and local fragmentation . The first trend is propelled by the forces of globalization, to the extent that globalization is identified with economic, scientific, and technological unification. The second trend is manifest in the continually erupting fissures and conflicts between cultures and traditions —what is known as the looming “clash of civilizations” (which would be better termed the clash of militant creeds). The theme of this symposium stands in opposition to both trends by recognizing the worth and legitimacy of cultural diversity and the importance of fostering standards, values, or beliefs that are shared “transversally” (rather than uniformly or universally). This dual recognition has been the task of UNeSCo since its founding, when it was charged to promote the educational, scientific, and cultural endeavors of humankind and to do so not by imposing a uniform pattern but by stimulating cross-cultural interaction and dialogue on a global scale. my intent here is to discuss the idea of cross-cultural or intercultural dialogue by pointing out different types of dialogical interactions . To be sure, not all relations between societies and cultures are dialogical or communicative. at a minimum, dialogue implies a UNeSCo at Sixty 247 mutual exchange of views. one can place intercultural relations along a spectrum ranging from complete monologue to genuine dialogue, from radical unilateralism to full-fledged multilateralism (and perhaps cosmopolitanism). In one of my writings, titled Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter, I discuss this spectrum, paying particular attention to the monological end, where one can find such prominent examples of nonmutuality as military conquest, forced conversion, and ideological indoctrination. In Beyond Orientalism I use the Spanish conquest of the americas as the model exemplifying the convergence of conquest, conversion, and indoctrination, but the model has continued to reverberate in later episodes of Western imperialism and colonialism. In the same study, I also refer to more limited types of unilateralism, such as cultural borrowing, partial assimilation , and the like. The entire overview of the spectrum leads to the high point of genuine mutuality: intercultural dialogue. In that category, I take my bearings from Tzvetan Todorov, who, in his Conquest of America, writes of a relationship “in which no one has the last word” and where “no voice is reduced to the status of a simple object” or mere victim.1 Today, I want to concentrate on the communicative side of interactions . at that end of the spectrum, I distinguish three (or maybe three and a half) different possibilities. I draw initially from an essay by Jürgen Habermas titled “on the Pragmatic, the ethical, and the moral employments of Practical reason” (the opening chapter in his book Justification and Application). In that essay, Habermas differentiates among three distinct uses of “practical reason,” or a reason geared toward practical interaction: the pragmatic, the ethical, and the moral. The first type derives from utilitarianism and finds expression in the confrontation between, and the possible accumulation of, individual interests. The second (ethical) type draws its inspiration from aristotelian ethics, as filtered through Hegel’s dialectical philosophy . It was Hegel, Habermas notes, who “tried to achieve a synthesis of the classical communal and modern individualistic conceptions of freedom with his theory of objective spirit and his ‘sublation’ (Aufhebung ) of morality into ethical life (Sittlichkeit).” Those thinkers who emphasis the ethical use appropriate “the Hegelian legacy in the form of an aristotelian ethics of the good,” while abandoning “the universalism of rational natural law.” The third (moral) type operates “in 248 appendix: modalities of Intercultural dialogue a Kantian spirit” and accentuates “the unavoidable presuppositions” of argumentation and the “impartiality” required of anyone judging from “a moral point of view.” for Habermas, adopting a rationalist stance, the third type is “grounded in the communicative structure of rational discourse as such.” His own moral theory, called discourse ethics, “forces itself intuitively on anyone who is at all open to this reflective form of communicative action.” In this manner, discourse ethics “situates itself squarely in the Kantian tradition.”2 Here, I want to dwell a bit longer on the distinctive features of Habermas’s three categories of...