Relativity

I loved the Persian Letters. It made great bed-side reading. Every night, I read a few letters and fell asleep. I don't mean to dismiss the book. I genuinely did enjoy it. It wasn't a complex or dense argument, but the structure allows it to create an argument in a simple, effective way. Irony and humour are great tools. So is fiction. I kept thinking of the resent movie "Borat" as being a step-child of this book. I'm not sure that any film could have outlined the problems and contradictions of America and the "American Dream" in so concise a form as that movie, and perhaps the same can be said of "Letters" in it's time.

I loved the biting analysis of French culture and politics at the time. Letters 26 and 27 are my favorite in this regard. 26 tells of a visit to the theater where the best performances are the wordless ones from the actors in the boxes who "are visible only to the waist, and as a rule, their arms are modestly concealed in a muff." As for the real actors, they are seen to simply exchange insults with the people on the floor. In the end, he receives a letter from an Opera singer he has met, begging him to take her to Persia so she can escape the shame of her rape and illegitimate pregnancy and make a living better than the one she foresees as an aging actress.

In one short letter, he undermines French culture and high society, and underscores the deep hypocrisies faced by the lower classes and women. It reminds me of the opening scene of Cyrano de Bergerac, which accomplishes the same thing in a heroic tale. But that is the question here, is he really condemning French society? It was discussed in class that the whole storyline of Usbek's problems with his Seraglio were a cautionary tale about effect of the vacuum of leadership and repression of the classes that characterized Louis IV reign. But is it also a reminder of the freedoms available to people, especially women, in French society that don't exist elsewhere. In many letters, like 25, he comments through Usbek in a seemingly derisive tone that the women of France have neither modesty or virtue, but he describes an enviable level of freedom compared to the indentured slavery of the women of the harem. Are they truly lacking in virtue? Like much of this book, the definition of virtue lies squarely in the cultural perspective. With these men as our narrators, we develop a sympathy with their point-of-view, especially when they brilliantly and humorously critique the institutions they are witnessing, like the theater of the the church, or even the intellectuals of cafe society. But is their perspective right?

I suppose this is where the idea of relativity comes in... and it's a very Humean idea too: how do we negotiate the differences between cultures? How do we describe virtues, morality and ethics when we are faced with large cultural divides? It's where Hume fails in some respect in that he describes moral agreement among homogeneous cultures. But how do you describe the rights of women, or argue the moral quality of slavery in the gulf between two cultures as different as the Paris of Usbek's mind and the Persia of Montesquieu's imagination? Religion fails us, the law falls short because if it's necessarily local quality.

Perhaps humor is the only way to describe the differences and to undermine authority. As Arendt writes in "On Violence": "The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter" (p. 45).ot