Relativism: Oppression's Ally

JAMES O'KEEFE

In examining cultural relativism, we must first ask ourselves whether or not certain cultural differences ought to be tolerated to such a point where we approve of cultural traditions that seem to us unjust or even ethically evil. Among these we find genital mutilation, the Hindu practice of suttee – burning women at the stake – and making women cover their faces like Cousin Itt from the Adams Family. The Multiculturalist connoisseurs and anthropological relativists would say yes, while the conservative intellectuals Allan Bloom, Robert Bork, William Bennet, or “neo-cons,” as they are called, would say no.

So is it morally justified for us to rescue Afghan women from their society? Absolutely.

Those who oppose the “neo-con” efforts of George W. Bush, Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of the gang include author Lila Abu-Lughad in her essay, “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?” Lughad uses the justification that particular cultural traditions that “we” westerners denounce, like the practice of stoning a woman to death because she left her home without the company of a male relative, are ignorant because our disapproval itself contains hidden Western prejudices about the history of exploitation and racism that indirectly led to such savagery in the first place. Lughad, similar to most postmodernists, prefers an historical and political view of any region to a review of its religious or cultural aspects. Lughad describes how U.S. involvement is responsible for stonings and burnings due to our support of the Taliban during the last twenty-five years in our effort to fight the Soviets. If Lughad is arguing that brutality against women under Shari’a Law been caused by the Americans, then aren’t we obligated to fix this? Even if it is our actions and not religious extremism (that’s a big “if ”) that explains stonings and burnings, they certainly don’t justify such brutality. Lughad justifies not brutality but the wearing of cultural dress; this focuses on the wrong issue. It is not the burqas and
other forms of cultural dress we hope to save Muslim women from, it is their right not to be butchered, not to have their lives taken from them when they speak their minds in the home or in public. Living in the free world, Lughad takes those rights for granted. Saving women from oppressive tyrants does not constitute western imperialism; it is a confirmation of the fundamental rights of all human beings. Lughad’s argument ignores extreme forms of brutality in its attention to the burqa, and then focuses on the question of moral relativism. The notion that truth is a reflection of a certain cultural bias – the idea that what is right and what is wrong differs from culture to culture, from era to era, from person to person, et cetera – can be first understood in the context of David Hume’s distinction between facts and values. We know for a fact that the world is round, but whether or not the world is lovely is a different thing entirely, and arguably of little importance. The Comedian George Carlin made our egocentrism poignant to a modern audience with his hauntingly wise rebuttal of environmentalism: The planet Earth is fine, it doesn’t care what color or shape it's in; it is dependent rational animals like human beings, not a chunk of rock in the cosmos, that are emotive enough to make those determinations. “The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ‘cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic.”

But some emotions and values can and should be universal. There should be standards of judgment among people, ideas and events to prevent harmful perversion. Otherwise personal liberation will become on one hand the Sartre-inspired Marxist doctrine of everybody determining their own truths, and on the other the extreme libertarianism of Ayn Rand, where public virtue is ignored. Both bring about an inability to make universal judgments on anything, and we are forced to accept the extremist behavior of others. And since we are indifferent to extreme forms of tolerance, we become... bored. Worse, without a moral standard upon which to rely, we need to be given one from the cultural elites that begin to develop an excessive amount of dominance over our values. These elites may be professors at a University where the young-uns lack a common moral foundation, or worse, elites that serve selfish purposes, like the pigs George Orwell told us about on that farm of his, where society as a whole lacks a moral foundation.

Individualism has to be restrained in order to avoid undermining the traditional values of the community. To preserve these values, some universal truths are required to govern the community. This philosophy has been attributed to Pope Benedict XVI, whose philosophy echos Allan Bloom’s sentiments:

Truth is not determined from what is popular in a democracy, truth is discovered by leaving your cave and discovering what is eternal. Without God, you run the risk of tyrants making that determination. Without a compromise where individuals slightly subordinate themselves to their communities, communities will be governed by tyrants that replace God. The people should govern themselves and be given the right to do so from a divine authority.

When you deny objective values, you create what may be called "men without chests," as C.S. Lewis put it in his short book The Abolition of Man. Curious how we expect "virtue and enterprise" of these men when the organ that provides such services has already been removed.

James O'Keefe is a Rutgers College Senior majoring in philosophy.

NJO: Originally printed in the December 2005 issue of The Centurion.