The Evil of Cultural Relativism
“Cultural relativism!”
“You are saying that blowing up babies and raping children is okay because they have a different culture!”
Well of course not, but I’m used to these leaps of illogic from Christians who have been saturated with a toxic mixture of slippery slope theology and breast thumping patriotism found in so much contemporary American Christianity. It goes right back to our revivalist roots in an era of manifest destiny.
The accusation came yet again from a well-meaning Christian upset that I’d tried to explain that people in the Palestinian Territories operated out of different motivations and therefore exhibited different behaviors than those in the United States.
And it isn’t just islamophobic conservatives. I’ve been taken to task for promoting patriarchy when I pointed out that not all cultures evaluate gender, sexuality, and sexual relationships according to contemporary American standards. They don’t all share the fascinating mixture of prudish Victorian sexual mores, infantilization of adolescents, knee jerk judgmentalism, and aggressive assertion of gender rights and multiple sexualities characteristic of we contemporary progressive Christians anxious to demonstrate that they too have moral standards.
The problem is that ever since “post-modernity” was identified as a thing we seem to be stuck with the dichotomy of imperialistically asserting of universal moral standards and accepting multiple and equally valid moral narratives.
But as I try to point out, we don’t need to be cultural relativists to appreciate and work with cultural difference. Instead we need to recognize that morality is constantly negotiated between individuals and within societies. We humans necessarily occupy an intermediate position between what we perceive as transcendent claims and the specific demands made on us in complex social relationships. And thus we humans must work out a shared morality with each other rather than sitting in judgment on one another.
The results of these negotiations are usually complex, and sometimes unsatisfactory to all parties. That is common in negotiated settlements, but they are better than the dichotomous options above.
Let’s take an example of the sort that has recently come up in discussions with my students and others.
We were talking about sexual relations between a man in his 30’s and a 14 year old woman. When I raised the case my student thought I was talking about a clear case of pedophilia to be condemned. In fact I was talking about my parents-in-law from China. The “child”-bride and her husband seemed content, and their three daughters (my wife and her sisters) and three sons all have advanced degrees and good professions. Yet my student remained adamant: “It was wrong then and it is wrong now.”
The “now” of course condemned not only those Chinese of the early 20th century, but many indigenous people around the world today including some of my former students in Malaysia.
So let’s dig deeper and imagine that instead of instant imperialistic judgement we use our imaginations and ask what kind of moral negotiations led from China in the 1940’s to the United States in 2017.
We’ll start with the fact that in China in the 1940’s, just freed from Japanese occupation and facing a vicious communist revolution, the daughter of peasant farmers living on the coast had no prospect of an education and a very good prospect of starving to death, dying in war, or working forever as a slave to some local man’s mother in law. Becoming an arranged bride of a man who had established himself as a farmer in a small frontier town in Sarawak on Borneo was in fact full of positive possibilities. At least there would be no mother-in-law.
And in any case the transcendent claim recognized by the then dominant Chinese culture was the value placed on bearing children who would perpetuate the clan identity from generation to generation. It is a value reflected in the fact that all the children of a generation share a common generation name as well as a clan name - so they can identify each other as children of that promise.
Neither of my parents-in-law could reasonably expect to “leave their mark on the world,” be memorialized in the clan temple, or even be remembered very long. But they could leave children, and grandchildren whose blood and names would bear testimony that they had fulfilled their duty base on their transcendent values. Not to mention enjoy some happiness, intimacy, and security during their relatively short lives.
Now this transcendent value was somewhat different from the values of the Methodist missionaries who were newly arrived in Sarawak. Their transcendent value was the freedom won by Christ, enacted first and foremost with schools for both boys and girls. They did expect to leave a mark on the world, the liberating sign of the cross written out in diplomas and degrees and professions.
These missionaries didn’t say “wrong” to the marriage of a 14 year old to an older man. Indeed they would arrange some of those marriages when it was necessary for mutual survival in difficult times and places. Having themselves come from generations of missionaries in China they understood both the values and the situation. At the same time they would not willingly allow a girl or boy to go without at least 6 years of schooling (more than most of my great grandparents in the US).
And in the case of my wife and her sisters they could go further. By offering employment to their father after their mother’s death, and a place in a hostel of an orphanage, the missionaries could insure that both sons and daughters could remain in school from kindergarten through graduation from high school.
They did not contest the transcendent value of insuring the immortality of the clan. They simply matched it by enacting the equally accepted Chinese value of education. By 1979, when I first visited my wife’s home town, almost every person would expect to graduate from high school before marrying. By the year 2000 many would attend a local college created by a post-missionary, entirely indigenous Methodist church.
It was an amazing transformation, one arising out of a century of negotiations in which a new morality, neither American Christian nor traditional Chinese, or perhaps both, would govern society. And it came about because American Christians chose to eschew the kind of imperious condemnation of traditional culture that brings all conversation to an end, just as Chinese pioneers chose to bring all their cultural values to the table rather than just a desire for children who could insure the survival of family and clan.
Does that sound too easy? Let’s look at another example.
One day in Kuala Lumpur I turned a corner and saw a man slap a woman on the roadside. As I slowed he slapped her again. I got out of my car and told him to stop.
When I did this I was fully aware that his culture and his religion allowed him to “discipline” a wife who “misbehaved” or brought shame on him. I also knew that it was shameful to be caught hitting a woman. And I knew that the local police were unlikely to act if I called them, which in those pre-cellphone days I couldn’t do anyway. So I was left alone to negotiate between my transcendent values (“you don’t hit people, and especially not women”) and his (“a man may strike his wife to discipline her. But doesn’t want to get caught doing it.”)
It was a fairly short negotiation. He told me to go away it was none of my business. I told him I’d knock his head off if he hit her again. And while he considered this I asked her if she wanted to go anywhere. She said her sister’s house. So while he was still considering his options I opened the car door for her. He protested again it was none of my business and we got in and we drove off. When I asked if she’d be okay at her sister's place she said yes, so I dropped her off, made sure she got inside safely, and left.
Now you may argue that I didn’t really “negotiate” about moral values. But honestly I would have been happy to have a longer discussion with him about his cultural and religious beliefs. I knew his language precisely because I’d studied those beliefs in depth. A longer discussion just didn’t seem exigent. And I knew that in that cultural setting a stronger and more credible case for considering a wider variety of transcendent claims would be made by her male relatives when they got the full story and confronted him.
My hasty, and power imbalanced negotiation (I had physical size, a car, and social standing on my side) wasn’t going to have a long term effect on ending domestic abuse in Malaysia. It might not even end it in that household. But the negotiation was neither imperialism nor cultural relativism. It was a necessary intervention to keep more harm from being done while longer, more difficult, and ultimately more successful negotiations could take place between parties more suited to bring them to an enforceable conclusion.
Transformation of societies is always possible. But we can contribute only when we abandon the assumption that we possess the only transcendent values, and that our limited and usually narrow-minded application of those values must be true for all people in all times. When we recognize that there are always other values at play we’ll find that many will align with ours. So we need to recognize that morality is negotiated, from generation to generation and between people with different views of transcendence.
After all, we are not gods to command obedience, but God’s stewards seeking always to know God’s will, knowledge of which we do not have sole possession.
“You are saying that blowing up babies and raping children is okay because they have a different culture!”
Well of course not, but I’m used to these leaps of illogic from Christians who have been saturated with a toxic mixture of slippery slope theology and breast thumping patriotism found in so much contemporary American Christianity. It goes right back to our revivalist roots in an era of manifest destiny.
The accusation came yet again from a well-meaning Christian upset that I’d tried to explain that people in the Palestinian Territories operated out of different motivations and therefore exhibited different behaviors than those in the United States.
And it isn’t just islamophobic conservatives. I’ve been taken to task for promoting patriarchy when I pointed out that not all cultures evaluate gender, sexuality, and sexual relationships according to contemporary American standards. They don’t all share the fascinating mixture of prudish Victorian sexual mores, infantilization of adolescents, knee jerk judgmentalism, and aggressive assertion of gender rights and multiple sexualities characteristic of we contemporary progressive Christians anxious to demonstrate that they too have moral standards.
The problem is that ever since “post-modernity” was identified as a thing we seem to be stuck with the dichotomy of imperialistically asserting of universal moral standards and accepting multiple and equally valid moral narratives.
But as I try to point out, we don’t need to be cultural relativists to appreciate and work with cultural difference. Instead we need to recognize that morality is constantly negotiated between individuals and within societies. We humans necessarily occupy an intermediate position between what we perceive as transcendent claims and the specific demands made on us in complex social relationships. And thus we humans must work out a shared morality with each other rather than sitting in judgment on one another.
The results of these negotiations are usually complex, and sometimes unsatisfactory to all parties. That is common in negotiated settlements, but they are better than the dichotomous options above.
Let’s take an example of the sort that has recently come up in discussions with my students and others.
We were talking about sexual relations between a man in his 30’s and a 14 year old woman. When I raised the case my student thought I was talking about a clear case of pedophilia to be condemned. In fact I was talking about my parents-in-law from China. The “child”-bride and her husband seemed content, and their three daughters (my wife and her sisters) and three sons all have advanced degrees and good professions. Yet my student remained adamant: “It was wrong then and it is wrong now.”
The “now” of course condemned not only those Chinese of the early 20th century, but many indigenous people around the world today including some of my former students in Malaysia.
So let’s dig deeper and imagine that instead of instant imperialistic judgement we use our imaginations and ask what kind of moral negotiations led from China in the 1940’s to the United States in 2017.
We’ll start with the fact that in China in the 1940’s, just freed from Japanese occupation and facing a vicious communist revolution, the daughter of peasant farmers living on the coast had no prospect of an education and a very good prospect of starving to death, dying in war, or working forever as a slave to some local man’s mother in law. Becoming an arranged bride of a man who had established himself as a farmer in a small frontier town in Sarawak on Borneo was in fact full of positive possibilities. At least there would be no mother-in-law.
And in any case the transcendent claim recognized by the then dominant Chinese culture was the value placed on bearing children who would perpetuate the clan identity from generation to generation. It is a value reflected in the fact that all the children of a generation share a common generation name as well as a clan name - so they can identify each other as children of that promise.
Neither of my parents-in-law could reasonably expect to “leave their mark on the world,” be memorialized in the clan temple, or even be remembered very long. But they could leave children, and grandchildren whose blood and names would bear testimony that they had fulfilled their duty base on their transcendent values. Not to mention enjoy some happiness, intimacy, and security during their relatively short lives.
Now this transcendent value was somewhat different from the values of the Methodist missionaries who were newly arrived in Sarawak. Their transcendent value was the freedom won by Christ, enacted first and foremost with schools for both boys and girls. They did expect to leave a mark on the world, the liberating sign of the cross written out in diplomas and degrees and professions.
These missionaries didn’t say “wrong” to the marriage of a 14 year old to an older man. Indeed they would arrange some of those marriages when it was necessary for mutual survival in difficult times and places. Having themselves come from generations of missionaries in China they understood both the values and the situation. At the same time they would not willingly allow a girl or boy to go without at least 6 years of schooling (more than most of my great grandparents in the US).
And in the case of my wife and her sisters they could go further. By offering employment to their father after their mother’s death, and a place in a hostel of an orphanage, the missionaries could insure that both sons and daughters could remain in school from kindergarten through graduation from high school.
They did not contest the transcendent value of insuring the immortality of the clan. They simply matched it by enacting the equally accepted Chinese value of education. By 1979, when I first visited my wife’s home town, almost every person would expect to graduate from high school before marrying. By the year 2000 many would attend a local college created by a post-missionary, entirely indigenous Methodist church.
It was an amazing transformation, one arising out of a century of negotiations in which a new morality, neither American Christian nor traditional Chinese, or perhaps both, would govern society. And it came about because American Christians chose to eschew the kind of imperious condemnation of traditional culture that brings all conversation to an end, just as Chinese pioneers chose to bring all their cultural values to the table rather than just a desire for children who could insure the survival of family and clan.
Does that sound too easy? Let’s look at another example.
One day in Kuala Lumpur I turned a corner and saw a man slap a woman on the roadside. As I slowed he slapped her again. I got out of my car and told him to stop.
When I did this I was fully aware that his culture and his religion allowed him to “discipline” a wife who “misbehaved” or brought shame on him. I also knew that it was shameful to be caught hitting a woman. And I knew that the local police were unlikely to act if I called them, which in those pre-cellphone days I couldn’t do anyway. So I was left alone to negotiate between my transcendent values (“you don’t hit people, and especially not women”) and his (“a man may strike his wife to discipline her. But doesn’t want to get caught doing it.”)
It was a fairly short negotiation. He told me to go away it was none of my business. I told him I’d knock his head off if he hit her again. And while he considered this I asked her if she wanted to go anywhere. She said her sister’s house. So while he was still considering his options I opened the car door for her. He protested again it was none of my business and we got in and we drove off. When I asked if she’d be okay at her sister's place she said yes, so I dropped her off, made sure she got inside safely, and left.
Now you may argue that I didn’t really “negotiate” about moral values. But honestly I would have been happy to have a longer discussion with him about his cultural and religious beliefs. I knew his language precisely because I’d studied those beliefs in depth. A longer discussion just didn’t seem exigent. And I knew that in that cultural setting a stronger and more credible case for considering a wider variety of transcendent claims would be made by her male relatives when they got the full story and confronted him.
My hasty, and power imbalanced negotiation (I had physical size, a car, and social standing on my side) wasn’t going to have a long term effect on ending domestic abuse in Malaysia. It might not even end it in that household. But the negotiation was neither imperialism nor cultural relativism. It was a necessary intervention to keep more harm from being done while longer, more difficult, and ultimately more successful negotiations could take place between parties more suited to bring them to an enforceable conclusion.
Transformation of societies is always possible. But we can contribute only when we abandon the assumption that we possess the only transcendent values, and that our limited and usually narrow-minded application of those values must be true for all people in all times. When we recognize that there are always other values at play we’ll find that many will align with ours. So we need to recognize that morality is negotiated, from generation to generation and between people with different views of transcendence.
After all, we are not gods to command obedience, but God’s stewards seeking always to know God’s will, knowledge of which we do not have sole possession.
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