Sure sounded like a rant to me! He threw in everything but the kitchen sink, so it is hard to unravel examples of opera and theatre from genital mutilation and martyrdom (though we have our own forms in Western culture).
I don't know much but music, so will pick on that. Western ears prefer the tonality of Western music. Eastern music, based on totally different scales, rhythms, and intervals, is foreign to our ears. It's definitely an apples and oranges kind of comparison and "rating" them has no meaning except for personal preference. Without education and exposure in that area, any assumption of cultural "superiority" is based on our own ignorance. A lot of people find opera distasteful-- even Turandot :)--because their musical education is based on familiarity with Johnny Cash.
I remember watching the Beatles on Ed Sullivan with adoration while my father insulted them roundly, and then when Cab Calloway came on, he said with great satisfaction, "Now THAT's music." Heidy heidy heidy hey? What? That's music?
Standing on principal when you are talking mutilation or burning widows is far different from looking down on Kabuki and claiming Shakespeare's superiority. I think he weakens his argument (whatever the heck it was) bringing in the arts. I don't want to see all the old white men exiled and diminished, but I have no problem adding women and other cultures to the mix, because only by studying the whole of a culture can we form opinions with integrity, rather than ignorance. He seems to jumbled it all together as if our curiosity to understand somehow implies approval and an abandonment of our own culture. It's up to us to discriminate the Ward Churchill's from the legitimate. Saying that genital mutilation is an "authentic manifestation of the culture of the Muslim women concerned" doesn't mean we don't find it barbaric and terrible, does it?
We see that a lot around here-- that assumption that understanding implies approval.
Paul Lang wrote in his History of Western Music that "we seek the human being in the plenitude of his always new and yet typically related creations, because we find that every tone from the past raises an echo in us today."
That seems to me applicable to more than just music. |
