Cultural Relativism

Following my previous post yesterday by strange coincidence, and I do appreciate google for this, one of my subscriptions Paul Joseph Watson has posted a rant against "cultural relativism." And while it contains some truth, it is also rather simplistic.

So we can agree with PJW that there are dangerous people, there are dangerous beliefs, people easily misunderstand each other, and people are rarely good. But we can disagree with PJW that this is entirely the work of culture and upbringing.

For example it is true that migration is a serious issue. If we allow the free mixing of cultures then soon we have no culture. Consider a country which needs to designate legal festival days. If there is one culture like in UK then it is simple we have the Christian festivals. Christianity is a complex mixture of the original culture and the imported Christian culture that was evangelised but he festival days have been preserved since very ancient times. In this sense the culture ha snot changed. But true culture is fluid and does change, but at any one time authorities champion a dominant culture for simplicity and practicality. Consider Emperor Constantine switching the Roman Empire to Christianity. But the problem here is "dominant culture" can lead from expected culture and to persecution of non-conforming minority groups.

So what about people who do not want to be Christian? This is where Cultural Relativism kicks off. The problem is that they may be disadvantaged compared with Christians and worse may experience prejudice, persecution and rejection for being essentially "abnormal".

An important distinction to be made here. If I go to a Synagogue and can't find sausages on the menu I am not being persecuted and prejudiced against. Likewise if I go to a country and can't find a church I am not being persecuted against. When we go to another country we accept implicitly their customs. If we decide we don't like the weather and climate then we have come to the wrong place. It is not the responsibility of a foreign country to accommodate our wishes, it is up to us to adapt or move. Where would this stop? Perhaps I have a personal desire for walking naked in the street. Unfortunately this is something I will have to do without in a foreign country that doesn't accept this. This can be summarised by the idiom 'when in Rome do as the Romans.'

However there is a deeper thing here that is not cultural which is respect for people in general. Whether a Kosher or Halal butcher should sell pork to a customer is entirely up to them. But if the Halal or Kosher butcher was to start insulting the person who asked for pork then we begin to step beyond culture toward whether it is good to insult people. Likewise a customer demanding pork from a Kosher or Halal butcher and insulting the butcher for not respecting their wishes is equally problematic.

But before examining this problem of mutual cultural understanding, a quick conclusion of the political problem of multi-culturalism and holidays we began with. It could be said that not providing a national holiday for each and every faith is prejudice. People of faiths that are not given national holidays may feel not included in society. But then we would have national holidays almost every day. The simple solution is to have a dominant culture and legislate around that. If the law legalises the drinking of alcohol and you don't like that, then perhaps you live in the wrong country. Or you can start lobbying like every other political group. But what you cannot reasonably expect is for a country to start legislating for minority groups. It is plain impractical, and it also suggests that the minority groups have not learned the tolerance that they expect from others. The obvious solution for festival days, is for minority cultures to move their traditional holidays to fall in line with the local holidays. This in fact is what Christianity did when it moved into the West. Flexibility is the key to survival. The strongest reed bends in the wind etc. Yet minority cultures may feel their identity being diluted if they start changing too much, and this arrives at the same problem as above of dominant culture.

In a country with one culture then everyone understand everyone and social harmony is easier to achieve. As diversity increases like becomes harder for everyone. Annoyances at finding people doing strange things will only grow. The Halal or Kosher butcher may indeed be deeply insulted by someone asking for pork, so much so that they think it must be a joke or deliberate attack. The customer may be genuinely ignorant and be themselves annoyed at the unjust treatment they get from the butcher and soon each is hurling insults at the other thinking they are both victims of prejudice. I have seen things like this in real life. The problem is understanding and having a multi-cultural society is making huge demands on people to understand each other. One solution is to water down culture so much that no one cares anymore. But this like above is the "no culture" solution. A Jew or Moslem should be able to be righteous about not eating pork, and even have difficulty with people who do because for them pork is dirty and expressly forbade by God. To ask them to tolerate people of different belief, is to either ask them to turn a blind eye, or to in some way water down the belief that it is wrong. It is like Indians having to tolerate the Pakistani practice of marrying cousins. It is disgusting and hard to normalise when your own culture is against it. Where do we stop. Do we start tolerating child sacrifice? Diverse societies can work, but it is very much harder and requires a lot of education and mutual understanding and tolerance to work.

So this is where Watson is correct. You cannot just airlift an alien from one culture into another and expect it to work. It will take a childhood to learn the practices of a culture so that you operate correctly and fit in. Expecting immigrants to fit in over night is cruel on both the immigrants and the people they must share their lives with. Not surprisingly immigrants feel hostile to the country they don't understand (and which they probably have unrealistic expectation of from media and the lies of the criminal gangs who make an industry from people trafficking). So I agree with PJW immigration is a serious problem, and not something to be taken lightly.

But this is where the agreement stops. PJW talks as though there is an objective truth: like the truth that immigration is a problem. There is an objective truth, that is not culturally relativistic and that truth is the truth of what he calls the "lefty progressives." It is something of a contradiction in fact to speak of cultural relativism and absolute well being between people. Meanwhile Watson does the opposite and speak of the absolute truth that people are different.

Watson must agree that everyone agrees in some absolute truth, even the relativists. He proposes absolute truths himself. His absolute truth is that Evil exists, and the "lefty progressives" believe that Good exists. In fact a bit of philosophy will show that Watson is wrong and the progressives are right. There is only Good at root. For example consider this: if there is an absolute truth then it applies to all people, and this then unifies all people in that truth whatever it is. There cannot be an absolute truth then that there are fundamental differences between people, as this would itself become a fundamental similarity. And there cannot be an absolute truth that there is no absolute truth.

But there being only Good at root has everyone confused. The path to Good is a particularly difficult and subtle one. Our culture and education may help us down the path to Good, but at the end of the day it is something we must take for ourselves. In Buddhism this is called our Buddha Nature. But Christians could call it our Jesus Nature (aka Holy Spirit) and Muslims our Muhammad Nature, and Jews... (I don't understand the Jewish views of salvation enough).  When we follow those teachings properly it is because we embody them into our heart, we find resonance between the teachings and ourselves. But without an ourselves there then there is nothing we can do.

This is where Watson is wrong. Within each person is Goodness. Whether they can access that Goodness and bring it to flourish and grow is a matter of culture but also their own inner strength. Where there is Evil you have weak people who have been abused and misguided to run from their inner souls rather than face the storm of pain and suffering and reach out to their vulnerable true self.

So why in Watson's video are there so many Evil people out there. One thing that Watson ignores is the rape levels in America. This is not because of recent immigrants, this is because of Americans. Evil flourishes in America as with everywhere. But why are other countries so much worse?

Now we begin the examination of History. "Other countries" in the main are the creation of Western Powers. For many centuries there has been a western policy of colonisation, which has amongst other things tried to enforce the Western mould of Western style governments and economies in nation states. In the same way that it takes an entire childhood to learn a culture, likewise it takes an entire childhood for foreigners to adopt the ideas of Western society, politics, economics. Failures in the Western program to entirely transform countries toward Western ideals have led to disaster. Imperialists also used 'divide and conquer' to control countries, setting groups against one another so that they would never unify against the ruling power, and so that the ruling power could use them to fight one another instead of the government. When independence came you have divided nations, trying to adopt a social order that took centuries for the West to develop. Combine this with exploitative post-colonial policies for example debt to 1st world nations and promotion of proxy leaders and you have recipes for disaster. When we take in immigrants, we are naturally taking them from failed states. Why would someone from a successful state want the hassle of immigration. So we are importing people who are unable to live in their own country, who have been failed by their own country and expecting them to flourish in the UK. Unless they are very young and are open to education and transformation into one of our own, then they are doomed. No use for multi-culturalism here as they need culture in the first place!

In many countries political movements that blame colonialism make it very dangerous for Western people also. They are useful as political targets, as well as just being hated. Western media also portrays Western women as whores who will drop their clothes and have casual sex. For strict cultures where female sex is something restricted to marriage (so that women don't have children without a partner which is required since culture gives men the trade jobs and child rearing to women) then seeing white women dressing freely and who are seen as whores is very dangerous.

So it is quite correct that travelling to foreign countries requires sensitivity from the traveller. But that works in both directions. Westerners travelling to war torn unstable states will meet centuries of misunderstandings and hatreds that they simply cannot overcome simply. In reverse importing people from these countries will bring confused people bearing centuries of misunderstandings and hatreds. Watson is correct here. But with time and understanding there is no reason why we cannot slowly begin to increase the understanding between people and cultures and arrive at a common humanity on Earth that will do a very great deal to calm down Evil and make it lose its power.