Conflicting Moralities Continued

It was pretty clear from the beginning of Todorov's The Conquest of America that the book was going to have a lot of connections to what we took away from The Sparrow. On the very first page, Todorov writes that his subject is "the discovery self makes of the other." While he is talking about separate human cultures that come into contact with one another, it doesn't take much of a leap to reframe his arguments in terms of alien species. And, as I wrote about in my last blog post, at the time of the "discovery" of the American continent, the Indians and the Europeans were about as alien to each other as you could get. In this light, their encounters offer an interesting comparison for The Sparrow and the other first encounter books we've read so far.

A topic that I found to be really interesting in Todorov's book is his discussion of the difficulties that the Europeans have in seeing the Indians as both different and human; in many cases different means inhuman or bad. This has serious implications when it comes to our discussion of imposing morality upon the Jana'ata. The relevance of Todorov is abundantly clear. He writes, "...admitting that one is to impose 'the good' on others, who...decides what is barbarity or savagery and what is civilization?" (150). He continues with this line of thought, writing that the theory behind the actions of the Europeans was that "one has the right or even the duty to impose the good on others...without concern as to whether or not this is also the good from the other's point of view" (154). This is exactly what I argued against in my last blog post. It is impossible to say that our moral view is superior over the "other's" because, as mginsberg wrote in his last post, each side comes from different reality with different norms. His post presents an interesting debate about cultural relativism and how that plays into human/other interactions (even if the other is another human culture).

Mginsberg makes the important point that since we cannot choose which system of morality (or lack thereof) is "correct," the way forward is difficult to determine. So, although I believe that we can't impose our own ways on the other, I, like mginsberg, do not have an answer for how to approach such a situation. Cultural clashes continue to confound scholars and world travelers alike. And simply taking a Cross-cultural Communications class does not make such questions any easier to answer.