On the necessity of cross-cultural dialogue

http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/2011/06/when-zulus-produce-tolstoy-we-will-read.html

Framing humanistic learning as such, Taylor vehemently opposes the racial arrogance of the statement supposedly uttered by Saul Bellow: “When the Zulus produce a Tolstoy we will read him.” Taylor works against Bellow’s supposed stricture not only on the grounds that the Zulus might have produced a Tolstoy that is yet to be discovered, but also from the standpoint that Zulu culture might evaluate merit differently and that we would benefit from learning their evaluative system. This is what he means by replacing our narrow horizons with a vision formed from cultural fusion, what he calls the dialogic process. 

“There is perhaps a moral issue here. We only need a sense of our own limited part in the whole human story to accept the presumption [that other cultures have merit and value]. It is only arrogance, or some analogous moral failing, that can deprive us of this. But what the presumption requires of us is not the peremptory and inauthentic judgments of equal value, but a willingness to be open to comparative cultural study of the kind that must replace our horizons in the resulting fusions.” Charles Taylor on the value of studying other cultures. http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/2011/06/when-zulus-produce-tolstoy-we-will-read.html