Cultural Incommensurability

I was drawn to an event at the University of Toronto yesterday. Longxi Zhang, Professor (Chair) of Comparative Literature and Translation at the City University of Hong Kong, was giving a talk entitled "The Fallacy of Cultural Incommensurability."

This impressive label turned out to mean that the idea suggested by Rudyard Kipling's famous line, which Prof. Zhang quoted -- "Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet" -- is wrong. We're all human beings. We can understand each other. And the professor spent over an hour protesting the "fallacy" of thinking otherwise.

I have a rather different viewpoint. While Prof. Zhang believes in the viability of communication between cultures, I believe (and have written) that even internally, some cultures -- namely, our own -- exhibit Irreconcilable Differences.

I put a question to the professor in the public question period that followed. "Incommensurability is an absolute," I noted, "implying a total inability to exchange ideas. It's not difficult to swallow that that's fallacious." (I might have said, less politely, that the notion hardly calls for extended rebuttal.) "But there are cultural differences," I went on. "Could you address the actual differences that might have produced the fallacy?"

"Well," Prof. Zhang responded, "differences are everywhere." He offered the difference between Chinese food and Western food as an example.

"But that wouldn't produce the fallacy of incommensurability," I rejoined.

Some readers may recall my personal encounter with cultural differences -- Inside China's Diplomacy School. Speaking again with the professor in the reception following the question/answer session, I mentioned certain of my observations at that school which had led me (in chapter 29) to reflect:

Fiendish deceit?

Of course not.

It's an apt irony. The student hysteria, which so frequently recurred to my failure to appreciate "Chinese culture," itself provided a vivid illustration of a negative aspect of Chinese culture I'd never realized or seen before.

This is sure to surprise you, dear reader, but the good professor really did not want to go there. Swivelling his head alternately from me to the table of hors d'oeuvres, he said he really should get something to eat -- and he virtually flew away from me.

Now there, I submit, we can see some incommensurability.

So I ended up speaking with Nickolay Gurevich, another lecture attendee at the reception. The subject of my diplomacy school story arose, and I gave him -- I happened to have a copy with me -- a kind of promo sheet I have produced describing the work and inviting visitors to the website.

He said "Thank you! And I have something for you too...." and went off to a briefcase he'd left somewhere, returning forthwith to reciprocate with the gift of an 8-page pamphlet ("self-published," he avowed candidly) with the title, "Totalitarianism and Mass Murder," wherein Mr. Gurevich propounds the view that the two always go hand in hand.

The two unpublished writers in the room had found each other.

The pamphlet's back cover lists additional writings along with their web addresses. One caught my eye: QUOTATIONS from MYSELF. Quotation #14 seems to capture the pathos of the unpublished writer's lot:

You know that you are in trouble when, while talking to yourself, you realize that even you are not listening.

Ah well. I wish Mr. Gurevich well. He probably does not have a Harvard Ph.D. like Prof. Zhang. But while Prof. Zhang bravely leads the charge against "incommensurability" (is anyone actually defending this "fallacy"?), Mr. Gurevich has one or two ideas that at least strike a chord. (#2: "The biggest problem of the world today is that everybody, in one sense or another, seems to be right.")

Anyway, I don't give much of a damn about non-publication anymore, now that Inside China's Diplomacy School has been billed a "classic," surpassing the works of Cervantes and Dostoevsky and indeed rendering those authors' works superfluous.

This belated recognition comes from a Hong Kong-based expat writer with the pen name, Hemlock. His online diary (declared to be, among other things, "Baseless, insulting and heavily biased," in words ascribed to Greenpeace Hong Kong in the diary's "Appreciative Comments from Readers" section) describes his discovery of

the [emphasis added] classic of the AEIOU genre -- Uriel Wittenberg's Inside China's Diplomacy School. English teacher at college in Beijing upsets everyone and knows it's their fault -- and insists you know it too, writing over 120,000 words all about it. Who needs Cervantes or Dostoevsky? No-one can portray madness as disturbingly as the AEIOU.

[Feb. 20 entry, Hemlock diary for Feb. 20-26, 2005.]

Although Mr. Hemlock's kind words are very gratifying, and I do not wish to appear unappreciative, I am compelled to remark certain unfortunate juxtapositions which could inadvertently lead readers to inappropriate comparisons. In the same context as his discussion of Inside China's Diplomacy School, for example, he recalls a Western lecturer at a Hong Kong vocational college who

had been fired for being an insufferable and disruptive paranoid, obsessively disputing everything and everyone. His 100-page mailing [to each member of the Hong Kong Legislative Council] -- words LIBERALLY gilded WITH coloured highlighter to reflect a multi-layered hierarchy of mouth-frothing anger -- was conclusive evidence that he was a nut.

This intermingling of entirely incommensurable subjects apparently provoked an immediate outpouring of criticism from my many devoted Internet supporters, as Hemlock reports in the very next day's entry:

I eat my banana and yoghurt and check my email. I am bombarded with complaints from expat academics past and present, incensed at my callous treatment of their fallen comrades.

[Feb. 21 diary entry.]

The entry continues with a heartfelt recantation of the previous day's item ... and in its course, Hemlock arrives at an astonishing revelation:

Apparently, the insanity [the expat academics] exhibit in their writings is a result of their torment at the hands of bosses and colleagues, not the cause. This puts a new slant on this Uriel character's 93-chapter output. Had he written two more, he would have matched Martin Luther -- whose revolt against authority was considered the act of a madman, and whose persecution by the evil Catholics led to excommunication. And how did Luther publish his 95 theses? By nailing them to the door in the church in... Wittenberg. Cosmic or what?