We Don’t Believe In Anything

Increasingly, my students seem to believe that anything is as good as anything else. I say they seem to believe this because I’m not really sure that, if push were to come to shove, they’d really stick by their relativism. But, in the classroom, cultural relativism is both an easy position to take and one that feels politically correct.

Of course, I lampoon this position in just about every class I teach…in large part because I’m an old fuddy-duddy who believes in teaching “the classics” and who uses words like “fuddy-duddy.” I want my students to take a position, to make an argument, to defend what they think is right. If they eventually come to a relativist stance, that’s fine…but it’s weird for them to start from there. It seems, to harken back to Allan Bloom, to be intellectually lazy. So I coax, I cajole, I harp. I demonstrate for them that the things they like are objectively terrible and the things I like are objectively excellent.

I’m allowed to do this, I think, because support for this relativist position is a mile wide and an inch deep (as Sister Helen Prejean usually says, when she discusses support for the death penalty in America). Perhaps the best, and most recent, example of this bizarre relativism comes from my graduate seminar in political theory, when my students were up in arms over Locke’s support of slavery and then, three weeks later, critiqued Kant for his imperialistic universalism. Of course, I explained that if one objects to Kant’s universalism, then one likely can’t call Locke a racist. And so one of my students, who wanted to embrace relativism more than he wanted to criticize Locke, ended up agreeing that slavery isn’t always wrong.

This is consistent and I applaud the student for his commitment to philosophical relativism at all costs. But I also challenge this position — with my brand of lovingly sarcastic humor — because it’s destructive. Indeed, I want to go so far as to suggest that it opens the door to all sorts of illiberal outcomes insofar as it discourages really critical thinking about anything and thereby shrinks our moral imagination.

Perhaps the best example of this sort of shrinking is that of female genital mutilation, which I refer to as a human rights violation and which some of my colleagues (though generally not political scientists) refer to as an interesting or important cultural practice. If it’s a human rights violation, I argue that it should be eradicated. I can give a wide variety of arguments to support this position, including that it violates the inherent human dignity of the women on whom it is practiced and that many terrible health problems result from it. If it’s a cultural practice, however, then I’m an insensitive Westerner, seeking to force others to conform to my view of the world. But the only arguments I ever hear in favor of FGM as a cultural practice are that people practice it in cultures that are not my own and that women are the ones who practice it.

But these responses to my argument demonstrate that proponents of this cultural practice really haven’t looked closely at the cultures they claim to embrace. It’s true that women are, by and large, the practitioners of FGM but they do so within a cultural context in which men decide that girls who have not undergone the procedure are not marriageable. To simply say that FGM is a valid cultural practice is to regard culture as monolithic and to support only the dominant part of the culture at the expense of those within the culture who oppose the practice. While we might feel good about ourselves for not being insensitive to other cultures, we are also taking a stand against human rights activists within those cultures…and I’m not at all sure why anyone ought to feel good about that. Indeed, the existence of people working against FGM within the culture ought to convince us that we’re wrong about its cultural cache.

So this is why I think our decision to embrace cultural relativism shrinks our moral imagination and allows for illiberal outcomes that ought to make us squirm. We take this position against female genital mutilation not because we’ve learned something about cultures that embrace this practice but because, in fact, we don’t know a whole lot about them. What I want my students to do — what I’m pushing them to do whenever I can — is to take a position and to learn how to defend it. If they want to do this well, they’ll need to learn about positions different from their own and this, I hope, will lead to an ability to seriously consider the perspective of the other.