Cultural relativism is killing liberalism

            I am, by no means, the first Liberal/Progressive to make the observation that the American Left has lost its way.  What I have noticed is that in the name of multiculturalism and being accepting of 'the Other' it has become next to impossible to criticize anything happening in another culture for fear of being painted with the label 'imperialist'.  On a lesbian message board I participate in, the case of a Saudi woman, who was sentenced to six months jail and some 200 lashes with a whip for being in the company of a man not related to her by blood or marriage came up.  A number of women, in fact the vast majority of them, reflexively stated that we had no right to say anything about the harsh treatment this woman is being faced.  The reason?  Because this was Saudi society, not American society, and therefore any suggestion that the idea that a woman should not be able, under threat of punishment, to associate freely was entirely beyond critique!  Re-read that sentence because it is a shocking statement.  Women who are feminists, who putatively support the feminist idea that women are human beings and should be treated equally, were entirely unwilling to condemn a law that is predicated upon the very idea that there is something inherently wrong with women that they must be forbidden to associate with men they are not related to by either blood or marriage.  What kind of feminism is that?  It is modern, 'Liberal', feminism which is so entirely reflexively anti-American and anti-Western that those who hold to it cannot even bring themselves to condemn female genital mutilation. 

 

            Whatever the West does is ipso facto wrong because the West did it.  Whatever other cultures is ipso facto beyond criticism because they did not happen in a Western culture.  So I was treated to the spectacle of someone comparing, in all honesty one must assume, FGM with the piercing of a little baby girl's ears.  Now, as far as I am aware, the ear lobes are not places where this piece of hypo-allergenic will cause permanent hearing loss. 

 

            While liberal commitment to anti-imperialism is certainly noble and a stance I absolutely support, it can be taken too far and when we, as liberals or progressives reflexively refuse to condemn the doings of other cultures because they aren't American culture we do a disservice to ourselves as progressives.  This reaction is just part of a larger pattern in American progressive thought.  This larger pattern is the lack of a coherent philosophy of what it means to be a liberal.  This is not to say that progressives do not have things that we will condemn.  We pay lip-service to anti-racism, to egalitarian economics, to being against religious fundamentalism but it is largely lip-service and not much beyond it.  If you press a little and dig a bit then you will find an unwillingness to say that anything much is actually wrong. 

 

            On this same discussion group there have been numerous discussions about world-view and the general zeitgeist is that all world-views are equally valid and that the Western way of viewing things is just one amongst many.  This may be something that makes us feel we are entirely safe from being judgmental but it is more a cop-out and a refusal to either call someone wrong or to be called wrong ourselves.  It is particularly ironic given that the world-view of, say, Fred Phelps must also be given the 'all world views are equal and none are truly wrong' consideration if you take that position.  Now, no one in this group is willing to admit that Phelps and his ilk may be correct.  However, there is simply no recognition that the logic of strong relativism must apply even to those ideologies most harmful to gays and lesbians. 

 

            The logic behind this is extremely straight-forward.  If by all world-views one truly means all, in the ordinary sense of that word, then one must admit that the Christian fundamentalist who states that their brand of Christianity is the only truth must be correct.  Now, of course, it should be painfully self-evident that this cannot be the case.  Given the overall arc of Christian fundamentalism, it either is true (e.g. there is a God, this God has a very specific plan for humanity and a zero-tolerance policy for any deviation from that plan) or it is not.  There are no possible worlds where there is a God who requires you to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior is correct and where other religions are also true.  It is logically incoherent to say that both are true in the same world.  If the relativist is correct then they are incorrect because this means that the world-view that states 'all ideas are not equal in their truth claims' is also correct which negates the first proposition.  Why this isn't obvious to all thinking is beyond my comprehension. 

 

            I long for an American Left that is capable of actually standing for something in a strong manner.  The American Right has left us a large gaping space which we could claim and hold.  That space is being evidence-based.  By this I mean it in the sense that social workers do in evidence-based practice.  Instead of taking the position that X is true because X is good liberalism, we should first ask ourselves does X make sense given what we can observe about the world?  Global warming offers an excellent example.  Either there is evidence for global warming (and at this point almost everyone who knows bugger-all about climatology agrees that global warming is happening) or there is not.  Now, while it is true that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, it still stands that if there is no evidence it does not make economic sense to advocate policies based upon the idea that there is because it 'saves the environment'.  However, if there is evidence for it then it not only makes sense to implement policies to alleviate or stave off the effects it is irrational to do otherwise.  The American Right has, for the most part, abandoned evidence as a sine qua non for advocacy and that space in the American polity is open.  Another good example of abandonment of evidence that I associate with the Left (although, strictly speaking, it is not) is the 'autism is caused by the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine' meme.  This pernicious meme has lots of cache on the Left although the evidence is not there.  Not only is the evidence not there, there is evidence to the contrary.  Namely that mercury, the alleged causative agent, is no longer used in the MMR vaccine.  It hasn't been used for six or seven years and yet the incidence of autism continues to climb even though, relatively speaking, most school-age children are still being given the vaccine.  If the MMR vaccine were the cause, what one would expect is that there would be a tail-off of autism cases in children who reached the age that MMR is administered after mercury was no longer used as a preservative agent in the vaccine.  Yet that isn't observable.  Does that make any difference at all?  No.  Why?  Because people have it in their heads that the vaccine causes autism and therefore that is what it is caused by. 

 

            The Left really cannot afford to be so sanguine about ignoring evidence in favor of ideology.  The Right has a number of tools in their boxes which do not rely on evidence to make headway.  The most powerful of these is the religious impulse.  Nothing turns people out to your side more than the idea that some Invisible Friend wills it.  We have a space to actually be the reality-based community. I think we should seize it.