Limits of Cultural Relativism
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Is one culture superior to another? It was certainly thought so in the days of the British Empire.
With the growth of anthropology since Victorian times and the nihilistic ethical movements that have arisen since the world wars, cultural relativism has gained strong ground, reaching its peak expression in the extreme movement of postmodernism, where all values are ultimately culturally or subjectively based.
In late May, 2006, Alice Springs Crown Prosecutor Nanette Rogers, with a long and unassailable record of supporting indigenous causes, broke the conspiracy of professional silence and revealed to the media the high rates of physical and sexual abuse of women and children in indigenous communities.
What middle class Australia is now saying in effect is: no, not all cultures are equal. A culture that protects children is in that respect superior to one that does not. That is an absolute value. Goodbye, cultural relativism. This is a shock to the intellectual life of the hitherto politically correct.
What is to be our society’s solution? What philosophical position should our Australian government operate from henceforth? Throw out the bathwater but keep the baby.
POC suggestions:
We must desist from saying culture A is superior to culture B: that my team can do no wrong and yours can do no right.
We can say modern Western culture is superior to modern Aboriginal culture in its attitude to child abuse. Equally, we might want to say modern Western culture’s approach to the status of its elders is benighted, and that many other cultures have a superior approach.
In other words, we should not see it as a competition of cultures, but of better and worse ways of doing particular things. No culture should be regarded as sacrosanct - or immune from criticism. In one of countless clear examples of beneficial cross-cultural fertilisation, Arabic numerals were a huge advance on the Roman numerals of the west.
Why we must reject cultural relativism as a supreme doctrine is because we believe in human rights. Suffering is out there: human rights, which sets ethical limits to specific kinds of suffering, is an absolutist notion. Exactly what all the human rights are is not totally defined. For example, is democracy a human right? Human rights may evolve as our species evolves. Slavery was okay in ancient times and until the 1860s in the USA. Now it is universally regarded as a violation of human rights. Similarly for child abuse, we hope..
Cultural relativism, and the postmodernism to which it gave rise, is untenable. We are forced back to the hands-on pursuit of rational solutions to human suffering, issue by issue.
Perhaps it is this way so that the gods can continue to be entertained by our fumblings and stumblings. There is no way of remaining morally superior and uninvolved at the same time: it seems we must continue to be game, try our best, and risk error.
Philip O'Carroll