Cultural and moral relativism (Part I)
It used to be that virtually every society on earth had its own moral and social code and believed it was the best on earth—and not just the best for that particular society but the best, period. The only question was whether that society thought others should adopt the same code, or whether it had a laissez faire attitude on that score.
Western culture was no different, although with our dedication to the value of individual freedom of thought and belief, over time Western society developed an unusual attitude of tolerance for the beliefs and customs of others—up to a point, that is. This did not prevent the West from believing its values were best and should be the dominant ones, or that certain things were right and others wrong no matter what the prevailing cultural mores.
This point is well illustrated by a famous story said to describe the reaction of British General Charles James Napier to the custom of suttee in 19th century India:
You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.
Come to think of it, the Napier quote is a nearly perfect (although somewhat sarcastic) example of cultural relativism. It is not, however, an example of moral relativism.
Western culture developed the science (or so-called science, some would say) of anthropology for the very modern Western purpose of studying other cultures in an attitude of respect and tolerance. Back when I was in college, the argument about cultural and moral relativism was already going full tilt. As an anthropology minor, I was exposed to it, although (shades of conservatism to come?) I always thought it was obvious that some cultures were “better” than others. both in the sense of meeting basic human needs and in the sense of having values that were more in keeping with some notion of a universal morality that transcended narrow cultural assumptions.
My understanding of anthropology was that it celebrates diversity by studying it with an open and non-condemning mind, in order to understand it. Our own prejudices and kneejerk reactions—and in the case of the precursors of modern anthropology, our cultural and racial ethnocentrisms—can blind us to observation and reason, and anthropology tries to correct for that through cultural relativism, which is the idea that we must look at the customs of other societies from the standpoint of their function as part of the whole society in which they are embedded.
In this sense, anthropology is to culture as psychology/therapy is to the individual: it adopts a stance of acceptance as a strategic tool towards helping to see clearly. This does not mean we leave all judgments and all values behind; we merely suspend them for a while. For anthropologists, this open attitude helps with the collection and analysis of data, just as it does for the therapist when questioning a client.
Anthropology is especially interested in describing cultures and then determining the function of their institutions and customs. In this way, a practice that at first may appear wildly dysfunctional can be seen to have a purpose as an organic part of the larger culture. For example, certain societies that function in especially harsh environments (the pre-modern Inuit come to mind) regularly practiced infanticide in times of scarcity, despite their deep love for their children. This was functional in terms of the survival of the larger group. This doesn’t make it morally right, however. It simply makes it a survival tool.
The process is somewhat akin to a therapist’s emphasis on what is called “the function of the symptom.” To take a simple example, a person with an injury might embrace the invalid role with special vigor—perhaps failing to cooperate with physical therapy exercises—in order to garner the maximum amount of sympathy from other family members. This does not mean that the person’s injury isn’t real. But the physical problem can be milked for all it is worth by a person who otherwise isn’t getting what he/she needs, emotionally. Therefore, it is performing a function for that person, although we can also say that it clearly isn’t the best way to handle the situation.
But it is a far cry from describing and learning about the function of a group custom (or a symptom, for the individual) and approving of that custom. Such approval, however, is understandable in anthropologists—after all, in order to devote one’s life to the study of a culture, one must spend many years living with its people, and it helps to actually like them if one is going to spend so much time with them (although I distinctly recall one anthropology professor of mine who seemed to detest the people he’d spent decades studying; he spoke of them with distaste, and mentioned that he always laid in an ample supply of Scotch to get him through his field research).
But somehow the idea that we cannot, and should not, judge other cultures at all has taken hold in recent years; not just in anthropology but in the West as a whole, and especially in our school system. The proper name for this is moral relativism, as opposed to cultural relativism. This phenomenon is a combination of a decline in our own previous attitude of celebration of Western civilization—and an emphasis instead on its sins, its mea culpas—combined with a romantic Rousseauvian attitude toward the other, of which the “noble savage” is a familiar subset.
One of the reasons that judgment of other cultures has been nearly abandoned is that one of our highest values has become that of tolerance. But tolerance was only meant to mean that we not look down on others merely because of the fact that they are different from us. It does not mean we need to tolerate their destructiveness, their hatred, or their intolerance—the latter of which should always define the limits of “tolerance,” or tolerance would become a value that would lead inevitably to its own contradiction and destruction.
People often blame anthropologists for the problems inherent in moral relativism, and this blame is not totally misplaced. But some anthropologists have long tried to distinguish cultural from moral relativism, and saw the trap inherent in the “tolerance of intolerance” attitude of the latter:
[Anthropologist Julian] Steward and others (e.g. H.G. Barnett 1948) argued that any attempt to apply the principle of cultural relativism to moral problems would only end in contradiction: either a principle that seems to stand for tolerance ends up being used to excuse intolerance, or the principle of tolerance is revealed to be utterly intolerant of any society that seems to lack the (arguably, Western) value of tolerance. They concluded that anthropologists must stick to science, and engage in debates over values only as individuals.
That was good advice, and it might have worked—back then. But by now it won’t help much, because the ideas first promulgated by anthropologists have spread far beyond the narrow confines of that discipline.
[Part II]
I did some anthro in college, probably qualified as a minor.
I almost understood matrilineal cross cousin marriage among the Garo. I think there were seven septs or clans or something. Preferred physical anthro.
I found something interesting. When cultures are studied, various customs can be seen as mechanisms for one thing or another. Thus, wedding showers and baby showers are a more or less frequent, semi-voluntary tax on a large number of people in an amount eminently affordable in order to help the one happy couple afford a substantial and expensive move which is not frequent and is more than they could comfortably afford by themselves.
It works! It’s a mechanism that works as if it were gears milled to within a gnat’s eyelash. It’s great!
Problem is, the fact that the mechanism more or less effectively addresses an issue seems to be evidence among many–including undergrads–that the mechanism is “good”, and the issue is “good”, since it all “works”.
Two issues are lost. One is, is this morally a good thing? The other is, is this the best way to do it, presuming doing it is morally legitimate?
To this point, Evan Sayet has given the best explanation I’ve heard as to why the left exalts nonjudmentalism. Here is my extremely streamlined explanation of Evan Sayet’s explanation of leftist thinking:
Injustice exists. Therefore all of man’s ideologies, philosophies, religions, governments are failures. Why did they fail? Because the real cause of injustice is the attempt to be right.
Without attempts to be right, what would we disagree about? Without disagreement, what problems, wars, poverty, crime, or injustice would we have? None.
To attempt to discriminate between right and wrong, good and evil, better and worse, is not only is to commit the monstrous evil of discrimination, but is to be part of the source of all injustice in the world.
The problem is that the ability to discriminate is the essence of rational thought. So, quite literally, we are dealing with a whole of Western Europe and today’s Democratic Party being dominated by this philosophy that rejects rational thought as a hate crime.
You can read or listen to a Sayet speech to the Heritage Club here:
http://theendzone.blogspot.com/2007/04/our-intellectual-overlords-part-ii.html
It’s simpler than that, really.
For decades, America and the West could justly point out that we were verifiably superior to the Communist world because not only did our system produce more material wealth, it was also morally superior — no deliberate mass famines, no wholesale executions, no systematic propaganda, etc.
How did the Communists counter this? They began convincing their useful idiots in the West that 1) material wealth is meaningless — or, better yet, harms the planet, and 2) you can’t say anything is morally better than anything else, because that’s racist or something.
Back when it was just a tool of Soviet propaganda, there was some perspective to these things. The claims never went too far and always stayed rooted in reality. But since 1990, there are no more KGB handlers to manage the message, and the West’s “intellectuals” have come completely unglued. Unable to think for themselves, they cling more and more tightly to the ideology they were handed, becoming ever more radical, ever more “fundamentalist” in their interpretations.
Aw, what the heck: more Sayet(with a big acknowledgment to Allen Bloom):
The elitists have succeeded in indoctrinating our children into a cult of indiscriminateness. They do this by teaching our children that rational and moral thought is an act of bigotry, and
that no matter how sincerely you may seek to gather the facts,
that no matter how earnestly you may look at the evidence,
that no matter how disciplined you may try to be in your reasoning,
your conclusion is going to be so tainted by
your personal bigotries
and your upbringing
and your religion
and the color of your skin
and by the nation of your great great grandparents birth,
that no matter what your conclusion, it is useless. Your conclusion is nothing other than a reflection of your bigotries.
[…]
So what you’re left with, after 10 – 15 – 20 years in the indoctrination centers that our schools have become, are citizens of voting age who … are utterly unwilling and incapable of critically judging the merits of the positions they hold, and have held, unquestioned, since they were 5 years old.
Its not that liberals are unaware of all the adult things we are aware of. It is that they need to reject them in order to remain in their utopia, which they are told is the only hope for mankind: mindless indiscriminateness.
You are left with adults of voting age who not only cannot judge their own positions, but are virulently antagonistic to any position other than their own. Why? When you are brought up to believe indiscriminateness is a moral imperative, any position other than your own must’ve employed discrimination in it’s formulation […] which makes you not just wrong, on your issues and your stances, but, more importantly: bigoted.
They don’t even think about your issues and your stances. They don’t have to. Even if they were willing to, even if they were able to, they don’t need to. Would you sit and contemplate Hitler’s Social Security policy? No. You would fight Hitler.
What you’re left with, coming out of the schools, is people who quite literally cannot differentiate between
good and evil,
right and wrong,
better and worse.
Very apt analogy between moralistic and psychological approach to crime, on one hand, and moral and anthropological estimation of alien cultures. It is often said: to understand means to forgive. This is not always true. I can completely understand psychological background and motivation of serial killer or terrorist and still find resonable to hang him. But, of course, before making moral or legal judgment we must fully understand motives and curcumstances of the deed at hand, and suspend judgment untill understanding is reached. Such suspension can be only temporal, not permanent. Often this must be done in cycles: switch from analytic mode to judgmental and again to analytic for deeper understanding.
I don’t think there’s any way to escape the fact that if you state that all cultrures are equal, there still has to be a “better” and a “worse”. Otherwise the concept of “equal” makes no sense.
The idea than you simply can’t make judgments about other cultures – or by extension, about anyone else at all, because we are in fact each micro-culturally unique, just as the macro-cultures are – is itself either a self-contradictory judgment, only “culturally relative” on its own grounds, false, or no more than a command, personal choice, or wish.
Thus the same goes for the idea that we as individuals are constrained by race, religion, ethnicity, sex, class, ancestery, group history, age, weight, etc., from making judgments about others, understanding them, and responding appropriately to whatever they do. [If we were really constrained by such factors, there would be little to no possibility that we could even understand what anyone else says. There would probably be no such thing as language.]
I reject the suggestion that culture or any other characteristic or classification-makes-self, or that we are blank slates upon which others – or a “culture” – ‘write’ our selves, and that then we merely repeat the arbitrary or habitual writings ad naseum, while waiting for the next inscription.
Just as cultures do not create life itself, they do not create thought capacities, especially the ability to wonder and understand. What would be the basis for claiming otherwise?
But if anyone instead does want to make the deterministic claim that they themself function virtually exactly like an inanimate machine, they are free to do so, thus disproving their own claim.
There may be a relationship between this topic of relativism, moral and/or cultural, and the earlier one on Lee Harris (via Hirsi Ali) and the faults of reason.
(- continuing -)
Starting from a particular, though perhaps dominant, branch of the Enlightenment (i.e., the Continental as opposed to the British or Scottish Enlightenment), there arose an absolutist, hubristic notion of of Reason (with a capital R) that had no bounds other than the Kantian ones, and that would be able to look down on all moral or cultural judgments as merely primitive codes that it had superseded through its understanding of the mechanisms (i.e., the functions) underlying them.
Conservatives love to rant on about moral relativism. And indeed they make it sound just terrible. But since I studied engineering in college I didn’t run into much of it. Or didn’t recognize it. So if you guys could put together some real examples, with some actual quotes, I’d appreciate it. Otherwise, I feel like I’m reading rants against flat-earthers. They’re wrong, but I don’t know any.
Also, can moral relativism be tied to specific actions that people have taken? I can’t imagine the moral relativists walking up to a cannibal and saying “Eat me”…
Okay, I give. Unable to post the rest of the comment I started above, even in fragments, alas.
(Still curious:)
(-missing sentence-)
From this quasi-divine, or at any rate alien, standpoint, it appeared as though a therapist, for example, might be above or beyond the limitations of particular moral judgments altogether, just as social scientists (“so-called”!) appeared to be above or beyond particular cultures altogether.
But they’re not. Each therapist remains as much a part of his or her particular culture, with all its moral apparatus of judgment, explicit and implicit, as their patients or clients are, just as each anthropologist living within a foreign tribe is merely an extension of his/her own particular culture. The folly inherent in the Faustian notion of Reason, in other words, is to fail to see that “reason” is itself a cultural production or artifact, which has its uses, no doubt, but which is no bootstrap that we can use to pull ourselves out of culture altogether. And one of the odd consequences of that folly is a kind of unilateral moral disarmament, since as long as we’re under its sway, we have no access to the sort of moral and cultural judgments that are essential components of the feedback mechanisms that allow individuals and societies to function at all. In practice, of course, no one not a sociopath is able to remain in that stance for long (you might notice, for example, the moral relativist’s quick moral condemnation of those not sharing that relativism), but the spread of that notion of absolutist Reason through the West has had a confusing and disabling effect on many people’s ability to make moral judgments within their own social and political contexts, not to mention cross-cultural contexts. Such a Reason seems to have left us, ironically, still subject to our own moral judgment, but left everyone else impervious to it — little wonder our self-doubt.
There’s another consequence of that folly of absolutist Reason, by the way, the flip side of this moral disarmament, that’s been if anything even worse in its historic effect — which is the tendency toward manipulative or “engineering” approaches to human and social interactions — but that might be more appropriate in another thread.
(The offending or blocked sentence, above, tried to speak of a “Faustian” quality to absolutist Reason, that aimed, consciously or unconsciously, to lift one out of the contingent world, setting one above not just normal social interactions, but also out of history and culture altogether.)
Anthropology is not a science. Neither is Political Science a science. Calling it so doesn’t make it so; it just cloaks it in a false dignity.
“Pure” reason, free of cultural arbitrary choices and distortions, indeed, exist, embodied in abstract, Platonic structures of mathematics, logic and established truths of “hard” science. This is the goal of science to extend and elaborate this realm. But folly of scientism is that this scientific picture of reality is sufficient for understanding everything, that scientific method can be extended to moral reasoning, value judgements and other humanitarian issues. It can not, and no coherent image of reality can be constructed without inclusion of completely arbitrary, subjective values, principles and beliefs that make all the difference between different cultures. There is no other way for justification of these choices except apellation to tradition, divine revelation and so on. So the problem can never be formulated as choice between Reason and Revelation, because we need both for sensible worldview, but only as problem of demarcation: which problems are scientific and so accessible by scientific method, and which are philosophical, moral or religious, and we need another ways to address them.
Fred: Moral relativism is not a philosophy of action; it is a philosophy of inaction. Under Sharia, it is legal for a fifty-year-old man to marry a nine year old girl, and divorce her the next day (and it is far from unknown). Moral relativism madates that this activity MUST BE CONDONED.
More importantly, it is symptomatic of the larger philosophy of postmodernism, which rejects logic en toto. While moral relativism itself may not “do anything,” postmodernism is an infectiously racist, genderist, elitist philosophy which pretends to be the voice of tolerance.
Without, I hope, taking us too far afield (and especially without writing another mysteriously blocked sentence), I disagree with Sergey on a number of points above:
– I don’t think there are any “Platonic” structures, whether of mathematics, logic, or the hardest of hard science — all are cultural constructs, of greater or lesser utility or effectiveness.
– On the other hand, I don’t think that any, beyond the most trivial, “subjective values, principles and beliefs” can be “completely arbitrary” either — to the extent that they have any influence at all on our behavior or choices, and to the extent that that behavior and choices have consequences for our situation, then these values, etc., come under objective selection pressures, just as do phenotypal characteristics.
In other words (paraphrasing Marx), we do indeed construct our own culture, but we don’t construct it just as we please — in the final analysis, our cultural evolution is constrained and guided by the same environment or nature that governs biological evolution.
– I really don’t think Revelation is going to aid us in our problems with determining, and living within, the limits of reason (small r).
All that said, I do agree with Sergey in his general point that there are limits to reason, as well as with his general outlook. These issues are maybe out of place here, however interesting in their own right.
A wonderful thread with intelligent commenters! This is the kind of thoughtful discussion that I crave. So rare in modern society, except in certain places on the net. Neo, you really attract a high level of reader and commenter. You can be proud.
(Of course, you’re not responsible for those silly trolls on other threads.)
Hi Neo, did you ever take any Sociology?
I just started my first intro to sociology class and have already developed some interesting parallel ideas.
If you do have any thoughts on sociology in particular I would like to hear them in part 2. And if you need a starting point I can give you my thoughts.
I am trying to apply myself wholly to the liberal arts, and an understanding of the world around me, and am treating my sociology course more as an excercise in critical thinking. I can tell you that sociology is most definitely not a liberal art. On the contrary. If you look at the history of sociology and read a little about its founder, Auguste Comte, it will become evident that he created sociology –which he initially wanted to call “social physics,” as a master discipline which he believed was the accumulated result of all previous knowledge. I am not kidding. Comte thought that he could discover social laws, like science was discovering laws in nature, which would enable humanity (through sociology) to predict human “behaviour” with certainty, and organise itself based on “scientific” principles. Sociology is in that way a product of the spiritual pathology of post-revolutionary France and a product of the Enlightenment project gone haywire –not to mention a product of the XIX century’s blind belief in material progress.
If liberal arts are supposed to teach us about ways with which to abstract ourselves from our own time and material conditions of our age, Sociology, by and large, entrenches people in a time and a condition of thinking, of being. Instead of liberating, in my view, it enslaves. Not all sociologists are so imprisoned by their discipline, but the liberated ones are few and far between –and they have liberated themselves precisely because they have gone outside the narrow confines of sociology and explored areas in the liberal arts.
Moving on to moral relativity then… It seems to me that moral relativity is a tool with which some anthropologists and sociologists use to blind themselves from the truth rather than helping them find it. I aspire to the Socratic ideal of enthusiastically seeking knowledge wherever I find it, while remaining humble about the limits of my own knowledge. However the worst offenders of moral relativism seem to be more akin to the skeptics of the late Greeks. In our modern example however, the moral relativists truly believe in the supremacy of their thought and do not recognize the ironic humility of Socrates.
Anyway, I dont know if that makes any sense, but I hope it keeps everyone thinking…
The trouble is that it isn’t anthropolgy anymore – it’s politics. It’s a tragedy when science becomes hijacked as means to political ends. It makes the truth much, much harder to find.
How long will it be before objectivity and rational discourse are restored in the discussions of anthropology?
and economics?
and the environment?
Reality of Platonic structures became obvious only after deep study of advanced mathematics, and no wonder that only professional mathematicians hold these views. All common presentations of these structures have, indeed, “cultural dress” on them, so only more abstruct underlying structures are culturally independent and so objective. So, we really have only one arithmethics, while presentations of it in different systems of numeration are different. The same is true for group theory: the number of fundamental simple groups is fixed, while any group can have infinite number of presentations. The same for set theory, topology and geometry. Even on some other galaxy, if there are intelligent beings, interested in mathematics, they will discover the same mathematics up to form of presentation, language and notation.
As for arbitrariness of value judgments, I mean only that there is no force that can compel us accept one or other; every choice is exercise of free will. This does not imply that all choices are “equal” in any sense: some are good, some are bad, and some are fatal. These choices eventually lead to rise or fall of civilizations that take them, but it can become evident only after long historical development.
I’ll agree that some kind of mathematical Platonism — meaning the notion that mathematical concepts have an independent existence in nature — is at least assumed by most professional mathematicians, but not by all, and in any case mathematicians, not being philosophers themselves, don’t have to be concerned about the the various ontological and metaphysical difficulties such assumptions have commonly lead to. There’s no doubt an important element of “discovery” in mathematics, but what’s being discovered is simply the implications and interconnections within our own constructions. An alternative to these Platonic assumptions would be to allow that some very basic constructions are so abstract and so generally useful that they’ll be “found” — i.e., re-constructed — time and again, even under very different circumstances, but still to assert that they have no realm or mode of existence apart from within the minds that constructed them. For an example of how more complex mathematical constructions can be thought to “exist” at one time, but not another, consider the history of the notion of “infinitesimals”, which were mathematical objects found to be useful in the early history of calculus, then went out of favor in the 19th century, only to be brought back into some degree of favor in the 20th century.
Why any of this matters, of course, apart from its inherent interest, is a different and deeper question — it’s certainly a long way back to the notions of moral and cultural relativism that we started with, and that has particularly plagued the contemporary left.
I say this is amusingly relevant to this thread – from Jay Nordlinger, of NRO:
Sally says, almost as a throwaway line:
It may be a long way back, but it’s a completely on topic way back. When I fear for the short to medium term viability of our society, my fears center around a nation which is rent in disagreement over the very purpose of man’s existence upon Earth. Such a nation, when facing decisions, cannot even agree upon the facts comprising the circumstances upon which the decision must be decided.
How, HOW can a nation fail to agree upon the facts underlying her national decisions? It comes back – to a degree which I cannot quantify – to the subject of this post and of this thread.
Fred.
A cultural relativist isn’t going to walk up to a cannibal and say, “eat me.” He’s going to say to the cannibal, “If you want to eat that guy over there, I’m cool with it. Who am I to judge?”
There was a recent anthro conference which decided that complaining about FGM is judgmental and culturally insensitive.
Fred: If you want to see Moral Relativism in action, then go to this lefty blog (it’s function is to reinforce paranoia about Fox News)
http://www.newshounds.us
and then in an appropiate story , go to the comments and say something like “Sharia law is horrible on women and minorities and should not be established in the US”
and then wait about 5 seconds for your demostration.
Richard,
I’m not sure I agree. I think there really are “anthropologists” who would allow themselves to be eaten rather than appear judgemental, racist, or unscientific.
Initially, they convince themselves – no, they take it as an article of faith – that if they understand the cannibals then the cannibals won’t want to eat them. When the lid slams down on the cookpot and the water starts to boil, they console themselves with the notion that, after all, they really deserve to be eaten.
Bugs.
Those aren’t anthropologists. Those are liberals.
And, really, they only believe that OTHER people deserve to be eaten.
As Wretchard said, when they are taken to the room with the floor sloping to the drain, and the table with the dull knife, they will finally get it and begin to howl, “But I’m on your side!”. Not that it will make any difference.
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