How to grapple with complex dilemmas especially when some actions really offend one’s moral sensibilities
THE LAST WORD | ANDREW M. MWENDA | Recently, a friend told me an intriguing story. His friend, a doctor, was once working at a hospital in northern Uganda. A male patient was brought to him in critical condition. His family did not think he could survive. This doctor handled the patient with dedication and skill. The man recovered. Some days after he was discharged, the man returned with a very pretty lady aged about 16 or 17. He told the doctor that no amount of money would be enough to reward him for the miracle of saving his life. “I have brought you this, my daughter, as the reward. You can marry her.”
The doctor was stunned. The young lady looked on in
approving silence, perhaps recognising that this was the part she was supposed
to play. The relatives of the man gave approval, satisfied that the right
reward had been given. Sadly, the doctor declined the offer on grounds that it
was not right. The family were shocked; first that he could turn down such an
offer but also because of the reason he advanced – that it was not the right
thing to do.
In this particular community, as has been custom among many
peoples around the world, marriage was a union of two families. The reasons for
handing over one’s daughter for marriage could be social, economic or
political. Love was too frivolous and fleeting a sentiment to be the basis of
such a weighty institution. In 1810, Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, 41, married
Marie Louise, 17, daughter of Emperor Francis 11 to seal an alliance between
France and Austria. Louise had been raised to hate both Napoleon and
revolutionary France. But such personal sentiments were not allowed to get into
the way of weightier matters of international politics.
I listened to the story from Northern Uganda with some
degree of moral detachment. I wondered whether I have become a moral relativist
or a moral pluralist. Relativism as a doctrine believes that morality or truths
or knowledge are not absolute. They exist in relation to society, culture and
historical context. Human beings do not just walk onto the stage and act as
they wish. Our actions are shaped by our upbringing. We are born into a family,
raised in a community where we attend school, church and other social events.
During this process of socialisation, we drink from a rich well of values,
norms, traditions, mentalities and attitudes that make us see the world in
particular ways, able to judge what is right and wrong. Moral pluralism is the
recognition of other moral worlds beyond one’s own. Moral monism is the belief
in one moral standard for everyone.
I was born and raised in an African cultural setting but
which had been deeply penetrated and affected by Western cultural norms and
values. So often, we indulge in cultural practices that offend Western moral
sensibilities and/or practice acts that offend traditional African values. I
think this mixture makes us moral pluralists; we are able to pick and choose
what suits us depending on circumstance. Therefore when I say that people’s
moral values and norms are inbuilt into their cultural psychology through
upbringing, I am not denying their ability to create (or adopt) new ones and
break old ones. I am only asserting that people do not walk onto an empty stage
and fashion their moral values and norms at random.
The man who inspired this column did not act randomly. He
had a clear idea of how to show gratitude to someone who had saved his life.
The community around him approved, and the girl did not see anything wrong with
that. I write this article as a conversation with my friends from the Western
world – and indeed from other parts of the world who embrace Western norms
uncritically. A lot of Western pressure on poor countries assumes that society
to be a tabula rasa on which one can easily construct new cultural
norms through summons, lectures, hectoring with a spice of diplomatic pressure,
economic threats or military invasion. The aim, we are always told, is to
“liberate” or “emancipate” supposed victims of political repression or cultural
oppression.
The moral psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, wrote a really great
book, The Righteous Mind, where he grapples with this subject. He grew up
in a liberal environment in the U.S. where society emphasised individual
liberty, autonomy and equality. This had always made him resentful of
conservatives for opposing abortion, welfare programs and supporting tax cuts
seeing them as oppressive, racist and selfish. But when he went to do research in
India, he found himself in a society that emphasised values like community,
divinity and honour, a factor that made him begin to imagine other moralities.
“I dined with men whose wives served us and then retreated
to the kitchen not speaking to me the entire evening,” Haidt writes, “I was
told to be stricter with my servants and to stop thanking them for serving me.
I watched people bathe in, and cook with, visibly polluted water that was held
to be sacred. In short, I was immersed in a sex-segregated, hierarchically
stratified, devoutly religious society and I was committed to understanding it
in its own terms, not mine. It took only a few weeks for my dissonance to
disappear, not because I was a natural anthropologist but because the normal
human capacity for empathy kicked in.
“I liked these people who were hosting me, helping me and
teaching me,” Haidt goes on, “And when you are grateful to people it is easy to
adopt their perspective… Rather than automatically rejecting the men as sexist
oppressors and pitying the women, children and servants as helpless victims, I
began to see a moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic
unit of society, and members of each extended family (including servants) are
intensely interdependent. In this world, equality and personal autonomy were
not sacred values. Honouring elders, gods and guests, protecting subordinates
and fulfilling one’s role-based duties were more important.”
Therefore, Haidt concludes, when you grow up in a liberal
society (what he calls WEIRD – White, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and
Democratic) you become so educated in the ethic of autonomy that you begin to
detect oppression and inequality even where the supposed victims see nothing
wrong. It is easy to harshly judge the father who offered his daughter’s hand
in marriage to the doctor for saving his life – as being backward and
patriarchal. But whose morality would you be using to judge him?
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amwenda@independent.co.ug
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