Cultural Relativism and Liberal Universalism

Phyllis Chesler, an Emeritus Professor in Psychology and Women's Studies from City University New York has written a critical piece in the Times Online that questions the cherished Anthropological notions surrounding imperialism (e.g. "Dependency Theory" and Orientalism) as well as cultural and moral relativism. She writes this article from the personal experience of having lived in purdah during her marriage to an Afghan in the early 1960s. In the article she uses very un-PC words such as "barbarism", "evil" and "feudal" to make her point. For example:

Individual Afghans were enchantingly courteous — but the Afghanistan I knew was a bastion of illiteracy, poverty, treachery and preventable diseases. It was also a police state, a feudal monarchy and a theocracy, rank with fear and paranoia. Afghanistan had never been colonised. My relatives said: “Not even the British could occupy us.” Thus I was forced to conclude that Afghan barbarism was of their own making and could not be attributed to Western imperialism.

Long before the rise of the Taleban, I learnt not to romanticise Third World countries or to confuse their hideous tyrants with liberators. I also learnt that sexual and religious apartheid in Muslim countries is indigenous and not the result of Western crimes — and that such “colourful tribal customs” are absolutely, not relatively, evil.

Although Anthropology emerged as an Imperial endeavor - as an attempt by the conquering powers to better understand and rule their new subjects - the field has long ago turned its back on Empire and any ideological encumbrances it may have once had in this regard. If anything, the Anthropology of the post-WWII era has been the font of some of the most scathing critiques of the colonial imperative and a champion of national rights for those who were once colonized. Based on anti-essentialist notions that undermined the worldview of those who believed in the "White Man's Burden", anthropology (as a field) was supportive of and deeply invested in the liberation movements of the 1950s and 60s.

Unfortunately, as self-rule spread from country to country throughout the developing world, these new states miserably failed at bettering the lives of their citizens and often descended into civil war and anarchy. To account for this unanticipated turn of events, anthropologists and other social scientists put forward explanations such as "Dependency Theory" and Orientalism. The former blamed the recently departed colonizers for economic and political emasculation of these societies and the latter argued that this behavior stemmed from, "old-fashioned and prejudiced outsider interpretations of Eastern cultures and peoples."1

According to Dependency Theory, the colonizers may have left, but what they left behind were nation-states that were either not viable states (because their borders did not take into account underlying ethnic rivalries) or so economically dependent on the departing imperial power that independence was effectively a ruse designed to benefit only a tiny comprador group serving external interests. This viewpoint, which stemmed primarily from communist and structuralist analyses became the accepted wisdom in the the 1970s, especially among liberals and academics. That these ideas are still quite potent is clearly exemplified by the anti-globalization movement, the modern-day inheritor of the anti-neocolonialist mantle.

That most of these colonies were pre-modern societies that suffered from long-standing social and economic issues prior to the advent of the first European is apparently irrelevant and does not fit the model of a "lost Eden". At the same time, it is apparently irrelevant that some of these former colonies have now been independent states for longer than they were subjugated to foreign rule. Even in places like India, where Empire stretched to almost 400 years, the fact that well over one billion people have been born since British Raj is discounted as irrelevant. As Chesler rightly points out, these theories do not account for failed states such as Afghanistan which were never colonized, yet have been unable to provide their citizens with basic necessities or a modicum of human rights. However, the notion that there may be something indigenous to these cultures that is disadvantageous or detrimental to development has been repeatedly rejected as racist.

I suspect that this actually stems from the wide-ranging philosophical impact of Anthropology's most cherished notion, "cultural relativism". This posits that the differences between people are just a question of custom à la "You say to-may-toe and I say toe-mah-toe." No doubt Franz Boas, who spent his life combating essentialist notions of race and hierarchical notions of superiority would be both pleased and chagrined at his legacy. The smug certainty of Western civilization or White superiority has been vanquished, yet Boas - who was well-known for his scientific temperament and an unwavering moral compass - would undoubtedly balk at the populist interpretation that everything is relative.

Boas clearly recognized the existence of evil and regularly spoke out against both racism and Nazism. Indeed, "When the Nazi Party in Germany denounced "Jewish science" (which included not only Boasian Anthropology but Freudian psychoanalysis and Einsteinian physics), Boas responded with a public statement signed by over 8,000 other scientists, declaring that there is only one science, to which race and religion are irrelevant."2 Scientists are supposed to base their conclusions on facts and not on ideology. Unfortunately , what started as a healthy corrective against prejudice and racism has morphed into an ideological albatross that effectively blinds us to the essentializing of our adversaries.

Unfortunately, many anthropologists confuse their role as ethnographers and become anthro-apologists. While it is certainly the role of an anthropologist to understand and explain other cultures, it has become the custom among anthropologists to explain away the excesses of all cultures but their own. Rare is the anthropologist who can explain without condoning. While anthropology emerged as the science which embraced the "exotic" and rightly called into question the civilized nature of the industrial or "developed" world, it has too often taken sides while suffering from a bad case of the Stockholm syndrome.

Moreover, an unforeseen outcome of these critiques and "deconstruction" is that they have intellectually undermined the foundational notions of Western civilization. Frankly, if this were aimed against other cultures it would be considered "politically incorrect" and run the risk of being seen as bordering ethnocide. This begs the question of why the same person who will travel half way around the world to experience a "colorful tribal custom" has only scorn for the long-standing traditions of their own culture? Why is it that the same person will eloquently defend the "right" of cannibalism, wearing of the burqa or female genital mutilation but bristle at Western hegemony when equality, human rights and democracy are suggested? This is because cultural relativism is often confused with moral relativism. If every culture is "adaptive" in its own way, then who are we to judge which one is better?

Chesler rejects this view and instead proposes:

Now is the time for Western intellectuals who claim to be antiracists and committed to human rights to stand with these dissidents. To do so requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism, which justifies, even romanticises, indigenous Islamist barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals and intellectuals. Our abject refusal to judge between civilisation and barbarism, and between enlightened rationalism and theocratic fundamentalism, endangers and condemns the victims of Islamic tyranny.

I share Chesler's wish that those Western intellectuals who support tyrants and murderers would no longer be so blinded by ideology that they embrace anyone professing anti-Western or anti-capitalists rhetoric as a "progressive". I am old enough to remember that at one time Pol Pot was the cause célèbre of the Left and I will not be terribly surprised in the future if people start disappearing and concentration camps are uncovered in Chavez's Venezuela. No doubt, twenty years from now legions of university professors will make their careers arguing that the Bush administration really should have invaded Venezuela instead of searching for WMDs in Iraq. Somehow the fact that the same people would be the most vocal opponents of any such action today does not seem to be a contradiction. After all, if all truth is relative, then one can certainly advocate one thing today and something else tomorrow.

The problem with Chesler's neat "solution" of a "universal standard of human rights" stems from the same totalizing place that it opposes. Chesler is basically proposing a liberal universalism that is the opposite pole of ethnocentrism and xenophobia. In my opinion, it is a morbid fear of liberal universalism, more than the existence of American bases in Saudi Arabia, that causes Bin Laden to wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. As globalization continues to extend it's inexorable grip on the planet, more and more cultures and customs will bump up against each other with all the potential for conflict that this entails. It is precisely for this reason that "minimum" if not "universal" standards of human rights should be adopted.