This is a fascinating story in The Atlantic on the scholarship (and, inevitably, politics) of “experiential relativity” — the hypothesis that human emotional and affective experience differs dramatically, perhaps almost incommensurably, between times and places, and that only in globalized Enlightened modernity do we take for granted that, say, “sadness” or “pain” is the same everywhere and always. (Indeed, something like this is a core presupposition of globalized Enlightened modernity.) Two notes:

1. Gal Beckerman does pretty well, I think, with the philosophical and historical issues at play, but there is at least one howler: “The universalism that Boddice [the profiled scholar] mistrusts is a relatively new concept in human history. It comes to us from the Enlightenment. The presumption that all people share a common nature was dreamed up by European intellectuals sitting in their salons.” No, this presumption most proximately comes to us from the New Testament, interpreting the Old Testament datum of humanity created “in God’s image” (Gen. 1:26) by way of the classical humanism expressed in, say, Terence’s dictum, as “God hath made of one blood all the nations of the earth” (Acts 17:26). Yes, there is a signature Enlightenment refraction of this. No, they did not “dream it up.”

2. One wonders what the late Alasdair MacIntyre, with his interest in the incommensurability of traditions, would have made of this.