Humility unto Culture, or Humility unto Truth? The Crisis of Method in Cultural Conflict Mediation
Andre Chavez, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO
Popular ‘cultural humility’ methods in clinical ethics attempt to resolve cultural conflict through a neutral method that adjudicates rich cultural or religious worldviews. One popular method is Carter and Klugman’s Cultural Engagement Model, which uses ethnographic questioning to address the underlying values in a cultural conflict. Proponents of this approach believe that cultural conflicts are not moral questions to be answered but opportunities for mutual understanding—misunderstandings to be clarified. Conflicts are not resolved by upholding one account over the other but are instead dissolved as parties either find themselves in agreement after better understanding each other or are more willing to compromise or accommodate each other’s practices. In this presentation, I will argue that a reliance on neutral methods such as this one undermines the project of genuine cultural engagement in clinical ethics mediation.
Methods like the Cultural Engagement Model, in their claim of neutrality from which to weigh particular religious or cultural moralities, assume a position of secularity. A position removed from the sacred in general—a desacralized domain—is needed as a condition for the possibility of casting a light on the religious in particular. According to John Millbank, the secular originates historically as a domain of specialized knowledge—the factum—held in the context of human artifice, a space from which to enact an understanding of secularity as ‘pure power.’ Its understanding of power is grounded in its participation in the artifice it has constructed, and the power in its scientific knowledge derives from the infallible knowledge of artifice guaranteed by the method it enacts. Secularity’s artifice of knowledge-as-power is essentially brought about by its own formality and predictability. The resulting notion of ‘pure power’ is akin to absolute sovereignty, active right over property, and certain knowledge. We see this already in the Cultural Engagement Model’s method of processing cultures which exerts power over them by claiming knowledge over their propositional beliefs—more fundamentally, its consistent way of framing culture creates the discrete, predictable, and reducible values upon whose existence the method is predicated. And in creating the conditions for its own truth, it exerts a claim right on secular knowledge of particular cultures, from which mediation proceeds. Whether or not the mediator or hospital recognizes them as such, methods of mediation which proceed in this way are secular by the kind of knowledge they seek and the manner in which they seek it.
Furthermore, Matthew Vest has argued that scientific, secular construals of a common morality or scientific ethics—such as the one motivating approaches like the Cultural Engagement Model—enjoy a status of being suspended amidst a self-referential language game disconnected from ontology, theology, history, and narrative. In espousing to be the metalanguage by which cultures are adjudicated, mediators qua secular scientists wear a veil of legitimacy and neutrality which is sufficiently vouchsafed by the credentials of the secular, scientific ‘medical community’ that sees itself as an elite, removed sector within larger society.
Together, Millbank and Vest’s accounts explain how professionalized clinical ethics creates the conditions for the legitimacy of its quasi-scientific methods and the authority of the scientist-consultants who enact them. In turn, the prominence of their use and the facility of the infallible knowledge it produces—knowledge of the artifice they constitute—entrench the institution as a monolith.
Drawing from these, I argue that there is neither a metalanguage nor neutral ground from which cultural conflicts may be truly resolved methodically. Cultural mediation is not the adjudication of two particular, religious worldviews by a universal, secular one, but, rather, a tension between three particular, religious or quasi-religious moralities as they try to persuade each other of the reasonableness of their particular commitments. Without a neutral measure, the only hope for conflicting parties to reach a true resolution is not to look horizontally but vertically, that is, to acknowledge the common pursuit of truth in which they are equally engaged. With cards on the table, they are free to agree, disagree, and persuade honestly—not as subjugating powers but as seekers of truth engaging in the common practice of speculation. I conclude that although humility towards another’s culture is foundational to resolving moral disagreement, without a neutral method to adjudicate it, its measure will always be humility unto the reality of Truth itself.
Methods like the Cultural Engagement Model, in their claim of neutrality from which to weigh particular religious or cultural moralities, assume a position of secularity. A position removed from the sacred in general—a desacralized domain—is needed as a condition for the possibility of casting a light on the religious in particular. According to John Millbank, the secular originates historically as a domain of specialized knowledge—the factum—held in the context of human artifice, a space from which to enact an understanding of secularity as ‘pure power.’ Its understanding of power is grounded in its participation in the artifice it has constructed, and the power in its scientific knowledge derives from the infallible knowledge of artifice guaranteed by the method it enacts. Secularity’s artifice of knowledge-as-power is essentially brought about by its own formality and predictability. The resulting notion of ‘pure power’ is akin to absolute sovereignty, active right over property, and certain knowledge. We see this already in the Cultural Engagement Model’s method of processing cultures which exerts power over them by claiming knowledge over their propositional beliefs—more fundamentally, its consistent way of framing culture creates the discrete, predictable, and reducible values upon whose existence the method is predicated. And in creating the conditions for its own truth, it exerts a claim right on secular knowledge of particular cultures, from which mediation proceeds. Whether or not the mediator or hospital recognizes them as such, methods of mediation which proceed in this way are secular by the kind of knowledge they seek and the manner in which they seek it.
Furthermore, Matthew Vest has argued that scientific, secular construals of a common morality or scientific ethics—such as the one motivating approaches like the Cultural Engagement Model—enjoy a status of being suspended amidst a self-referential language game disconnected from ontology, theology, history, and narrative. In espousing to be the metalanguage by which cultures are adjudicated, mediators qua secular scientists wear a veil of legitimacy and neutrality which is sufficiently vouchsafed by the credentials of the secular, scientific ‘medical community’ that sees itself as an elite, removed sector within larger society.
Together, Millbank and Vest’s accounts explain how professionalized clinical ethics creates the conditions for the legitimacy of its quasi-scientific methods and the authority of the scientist-consultants who enact them. In turn, the prominence of their use and the facility of the infallible knowledge it produces—knowledge of the artifice they constitute—entrench the institution as a monolith.
Drawing from these, I argue that there is neither a metalanguage nor neutral ground from which cultural conflicts may be truly resolved methodically. Cultural mediation is not the adjudication of two particular, religious worldviews by a universal, secular one, but, rather, a tension between three particular, religious or quasi-religious moralities as they try to persuade each other of the reasonableness of their particular commitments. Without a neutral measure, the only hope for conflicting parties to reach a true resolution is not to look horizontally but vertically, that is, to acknowledge the common pursuit of truth in which they are equally engaged. With cards on the table, they are free to agree, disagree, and persuade honestly—not as subjugating powers but as seekers of truth engaging in the common practice of speculation. I conclude that although humility towards another’s culture is foundational to resolving moral disagreement, without a neutral method to adjudicate it, its measure will always be humility unto the reality of Truth itself.