When I began my college education, quite a few years ago, I
took a course titled Social Science I.
The course had a strong anthropological bent to it. One of the organizing concepts of the course
was cultural relativism. Simply stated,
the instructive message was for us to view other cultures as equal to
ours. The qualities of a culture are the
product of historical happenstance in the sense that cultures are the products
of developmental processes and that any one culture, except for the accidents of
the past, could have a trait of any other.
A subtext was that one cannot judge one culture as being more morally
sound than any other. Therefore, bolstering
one’s culture as superior is dysfunctional in terms of understanding the
cultural traits of other people and in terms of justice. Thinking one’s culture is superior in any
sense is what we call ethnocentrism.
This idea is a bit touchy.
People have a natural bias toward their own culture. My take was:
okay, I have a bias for my culture, for my way of life, but that bias
needs to be set as a preference – more of an aesthetic preference. But, as the years subsequent to those early
college days have taught me, this whole way of viewing culture has some
shortcomings. While the notion of cultural
relativism had a profound effect on me – it seemed to make so much sense – as I
pursued my interest in civics education, I began to qualify my beliefs
concerning this realm of interest.
Let me point out that this blog’s content has been heavily
influenced by a cultural concern. I have
addressed our cultural bent on governmental and political beliefs and how they
have evolved from our colonial days to the present. I have argued that our history has been
characterized by the dominance of two cultural/political constructs: traditional federalism and natural
rights. I have further argued that we,
in making a cultural decision, should adopt a newer version of federalism –
liberated federalism – to guide our selection of content in our civics
curriculum. This argument is based on an
assumption; that is, that there is a preferred cultural content when it comes
to deciding what content our youngsters should be exposed to in their tax-funded
public school classrooms. Some might
argue that such a policy defies the implied principle of cultural
relativism. I would like to address this
concern.
To begin, I in no way have recommended that any cultural
tradition is less than any other. What I
have implied is that for our national polity, in order to meet certain
challenges – low political knowledge, low levels of political engagement,
criminality, and relatively high levels of incivility – certain cultural
elements should be at least considered by young students. Those elements would be introduced in the form
of issues that civics instruction would have students tackle. I have dedicated space in this blog to describe
this approach, but I want to further explain why I have chosen this strategy
and how it is not an example of ethnocentrism.
The term, “We the people,” means something; it means that
there is an entity made up of human beings who are tied together. What ties them together is a set of ideas and
ideals. This phrase is the first words
of our compact, the United States
Constitution. Constitutions are the
ideals of a political culture meeting the realities of a polity. It is not a claim that the ideals contained
are the best or superior ideals for everyone, but it is what we believe is best
for us. In that spirit, we adopted that
constitution and what it contains. Our
collective lives have evaluated its content and we, after 240 years of national
existence, still believe it is best. As
for immigrants who come here from other traditions, we don’t expect them to
relinquish their beliefs and ideals unless they counter those that are
essential to our constitutional structure.
The federalism I promote in this blog takes a step further. It does not judge beliefs, but it expects
behaviors that promote federalist values.
In this blog, I offered a federalist moral code. But for my purposes here, let me address this
whole concern from another perspective.
Inherent in the moral code I proposed is the trump value of
societal welfare or the common good. I
have stated that this value is experienced in two domains: societal survival and societal
advancement. What do I mean by societal
advancement? Is this progress by Western
standards?
The idea of “progress” is suspect for
those who are committed to cultural relativism, for whom each culture defines
its own goals and ethics, which cannot be evaluated against the goals and
ethics of another culture. Some
anthropologists view progress as an idea the West is trying to impose on other
cultures. At the extreme, cultural relativists and cultural pluralists may argue
that Westerners have no right to criticize institutions such as female genital mutilation,
suttee (the Hindu practice of widows joining their dead husbands on the funeral
pyre, whether they want to or not), or even slavery.
But after a half century of the
communication revolution, progress in the Western sense has become a virtually
universal aspiration. The idea of
progress – of a longer, healthier, less burdensome, more fulfilling life – is
not confined to the West; it is also explicit in Confucianism and in the creeds
of a number of non-Western, non-Confucian high-achieving minorities ….[1]
The author of these words, Lawrence E. Harrison, goes on to
point out preferences that he claims and that I agree are universal or near
universal. They are: life is better than death; health is better
than sickness; liberty is better than slavery; prosperity is better than
poverty; education is better than ignorance; and justice is better than
injustice. While there might be
disagreement about the exact definition of terms (e. g., the term justice) the
overall sense is fairly understood and accepted. The argument can be further extended to state
that certain cultural traits advance progress along these concerns and others
hinder or defy these concerns. I would count
the values that support these preferred states as operational values (although liberty and justice are identified as instrumental values in the moral code I offered in a
previous posting). As such, one can make
value judgments as to the content of cultural traditions. These judgments are not wholesale denunciations
of any particular tradition, but a more specific focus as to particular
cultural biases, attitudes, behavior patterns, and values. Under a liberated federalist approach, they
are legitimate areas of inquiry in which students would be asked to pass
judgement on counter federalist practices.
So, for example, if there is a cultural bias against females advancing
their education – say, seeking a college degree – and the practice of certain
cultural biases prohibits such education among certain segments of the
population, this would be a legitimate subject for a civics course to
address. It should not be forgotten that
federalism invites pluralism, a centered pluralism – “from many, one.” If this is ethnocentrism, which I believe it
is not, then so be it.
[1]
Harrison, L. E.
(2000). Introduction: Why culture matters. In L. E. Harrison and S. P. Huntington (Eds),
Culture matters: How values shape human progress (pp.
xvii-xxxiv). New York, NY: Basic Books, p. xxvi. Emphasis added.
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