Topics Justice

Question I live in Ireland where it is obligatory for students to learn the Irish language while in both primary and secondary education (for a period of 13 / 14 years) The reason for this obligation being that the Irish language is part of our heritage / our national identity. My question is should we be obligated to our heritage / national identity and if yes to what degree?

Accepted:
February 13, 2009

Comments

What a fine question! But a very difficult one.

In a nutshell, I'm inclined to defend the thesis there are wideareas of experience that cannot be understood to be possible if weconsider the self as in some way detachable from its culturalcontext. There aren't many philosophers who even raise suchdetachment as a possibility, much less something desirable. In this'wide area' I would include at least all the arts, many of thenuances of emotion or expression, certain varieties of inter-personalrelations (e.g. some familial relations), and probably also bigchunks of politics and religion. Assuming then that it were possibleto forget or never acquire culture, one's life would be considerablyimpoverished. On this way of thinking, it is feasible that one shouldfeel grateful to one's culture; and, moreover, preserving it is aspecies of moral service to others. In the case you describe, part ofparticipating fully in traditional Irish culture is learning thelanguage – in this way one gains access to those dimensions ofhuman experience that belong to the Irish 'national identity'. Ofcourse, such 'gratitude' can go to far: nationalisms can becomepolitically or ethically odious, excuses for prejudices or worse.Fortunately, it doesn't seem to be impossible to take up a criticalattitude towards culture even while being a part of it.

However, even if the above thesis can be defended, that stilldoesn't explain why I should have any such relation to myculture – that is, the cultural context I happen to be in –rather than just upping sticks and going native somewhere else. Oneculture is not interchangeable with another, to be sure, nevertheless(according to the above thesis) all function in this way with respectto the self; cultures are functionally equivalent. (I suppose itmight be argued that some cultures are richer than others, but wecan't all crowd into France now can we!)

The issue seems to be why should an accident of our birth have anyprivileges from me in this regard. Now I cannot eliminate certainaccidents of birth – whatever I do it will always be the case thatI was born in X, son or daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Y. But I certainlycan choose to annul the effect that these accidents have upon me, byleaving X far behind and sending Y little more than a postcard. Whyshouldn't I? And, if I do leave (note than in many cultures this is accounted a good thing) should I at least try tomaintain some contact with my roots?

The answer to the above questions is not obvious. At best we cansay it would be a curious situation to partake of the advantages of aculture while at the same time feeling antipathy towards it – onemight suspect a certain element of self-loathing. And yet, this is asurprisingly common situation. Because I can take up a criticalattitude, I know that there are aspects of my culture that I love,others to which I am indifferent, and others I believe to be in someway wrong.

I suspect the problem is less about the individual psychology ofcultural beliefs than about the politics of culture, whichencourages us to believe a culture is unified. To acknowledge thelack of unification is to remove one good reason for the veryexistence of the state. Even if a country declares itself to be'multicultural' it will often do so by declaring just this to be partof its culture – the most famous example is the 'melting pot'metaphor in the United States. However, we know that sometimes cultural unity is, factually and historically, just nonsense, invented as partof a political discourse for political ends. Not that there is nosuch thing as culture; but rather that it is not (or not necessarily)a unified thing, with all that entails for the nature of one'sgratitude to culture.

I hope this goes some way to answering your question.