Cultural Relativism

A few days back, Beth Donovan posted a list over at We The People, entitled What this convservative stands for. Jack at Random Fate has taken the list and posted his own point-counterpoint list: What this Centrist stands for.

All in all, I can both Beth's and Jack's points of view. But I did find Jack's counterpoint to Beth's point #4 about the superiority of Western culture and within Western culture of American culture interesting and also in disagreement with my own beliefs.

Now Jack eventually comes to the same judgment as Beth (and me, also), but he certainly goes about it in a much more roundabout way.

I agree that not all values/cultures/morals are equal, but I also get angry when people proclaim how superior Western culture is when a very short examination of even very recent history will show how many of the things we decry about fundamentalist Islam were very much a part of Western culture even within the last 100 years. (PLEASE NOTE: I am NOT saying here what Beth believes, do not think I am speaking about her views in any way here, I am referring to a general trend I have observed in the blogosphere.) It is still less than 50 years since people were lynched for being the wrong color in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is still less than 50 years since we had laws enforcing the relegation of people to the back of the bus or to certain water fountains because of the color of their skin. It is less than 100 years since Western civilization unleashed chlorine gas on a battlefield to indiscriminately kill enemies. It is less than 65 years since a significant part of Western civilization had a program to kill Jews, a program that was set up by an elected government that turned murder into a horror on a mass-production scale with the acceptance and active participation of the population. Women did not have the right to vote in the United States until 1920, well into the twentieth century, and even now in the twenty first century women are not treated completely equally as men. You don't even have to look back 10 years to find an instance in Texas where a black man was chained and dragged behind a truck by two white men because of the color of the victim's skin. If we are going to argue cultural relativism, we should look to our own history and how our culture evolved before we pronounce the death sentence on another culture. I do believe Western civilization has evolved and is now better than it was before, and I believe it is better than fundamentalist Islamic culture.

There is nothing wrong with Jack's analysis. Everything he says is true (although I would argue that the despicable actions of two men in a pickup truck a culture does not make). I just think that there was a lot of extraneous thought that went into his determination.

All of the evils he speaks of did happen here. All of the evils spoken of here, have been, generally, evolved out of our culture. We don't treat women like property. We don't indiscrimiately gas people anymore. We don't lynch or execute people for being the wrong religion, color or creed. This things simply are not a generally accepted part of our culture anymore. Can we say the same about the fundamentalist Islamic cultures? Of course not.

See, I believe that there is a certain threshold of civility that a civilization should have to achieve before this kind of analysis is warranted. The French have achieved this minimum threshold, which means that we could justifyably debate the relavtive merit of their culture. Islam, which hasn't evolved in the few centuries does not meet my minimum threshold. Therefore, I find this kind of examination superfluous.

For cultures that are constantly changing and evolving, a kind of relativist examination of similar cultures can be an important part of the process of evolution. It is how we examine new ideas that might make our own culture better.

But relativism only works to better culture when the two cultures being compared are on a similar plane. Medieval western society could be legitimately compared to modern Islamic fundamentalism, but modern western culture has discarded so many of its less desirable traits that it is no longer on the same plane. It is superior, without question or need to defend, than Islamic fundamentalism.

It is really telling when in comparing the plight of inequality towards women, we discuss the ownership of women against unequal pay. Abortion rights vs. honor killings. How much more divergent can you truly get?

Again, I have nothing against Jack's assessment, I just believe that such an assessment vis-á-vis Western culture vs. Islamic fundamentalism is unnecessary. Until such time as Islamic culture moves into at least the late nineteenth century, I don't see even a modicrum of a need for a relative comparison.

All cultures are not equal, and for some, there is simply no question of their inferiority.