Are All Cultures Equal?

__"Cultural Relativism as Ideology" by Dennis H. Wrong, in Critical Review (Spring 1997), Yale Stn. Box 205416, New Haven, Conn. 06520.__

Scratch a modern "multiculturalist," and you get (among other things) what has long been known as a "cultural relativist," that is, one who regards all cultures as morally equal. Yet the anthropological doctrine of cultural relativism originally had a quite different meaning, maintains Wrong, an emeritus professor of sociology at New York University.

"The term culture, in something approximating the modern sense," he writes, "was originally an expression of German nationalism and was deployed against the universalism of the French Enlightenment." Denying there was any single story of human progress, Germans insisted "that different peoples developed their own unique ways of life that could only arbitrarily be measured against a common standard. Therefore, despite the economic and political ‘backwardness’ of German society, German culture was not necessarily inferior to that of France."

It was only "a short step from acceptance of the irreducible variety of cultures" and the rejection of a common human nature, Wrong says, to the theory of races that later became the basis of Nazi ideology. But in the ivory tower, he observes, culture became the ruling idea among German historians. When the pioneering German-born anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942) emigrated to America in 1886, he brought this German tradition with him. The rise of the Nazis later discredited racial theories, and shifted intellectual opinion decisively in favor of the view of Boas and others that culture, not race, shapes human customs and institutions. This view was popularized by Boas’s student Ruth Benedict (1887–1948), in her 1934 book Patterns of Culture—a paperback bestseller in 1946. She attempted to illustrate what came to be known as "cultural relativism" (though she called it "cultural relativity").

Against the backdrop of the crimes of Hitler and Stalin, Benedict’s book (and especially a sentence in it about "equally valid patterns of life") stirred intense debate about cultural relativism’s implications for moral judgment. Wrong believes that Benedict did not mean to imply that any and all patterns of life are equally valid morally. "The original cultural relativism of Boas and his students did not entail the eschewal of any and all moral judgment," he says. Their cultural relativism meant that the culture in which individuals had been reared since infancy invariably shaped or determined their actions. But just because the actions of cannibals, headhunters, and other individuals should be viewed in the context of their cultures, that did not preclude "a comparative evaluation of different cultures and the conclusion that some were more desirable than others." Making such evaluations was not the work of scientists qua scientists, however, since moral judgments were then regarded as outside the fact-oriented realm of science.

Today’s multiculturalists, in contrast, go so far as to call into question even factual knowledge, Wrong points out. They "are usually epistemological as well as cultural or moral relativists." But he does not believe that the current multiculturalist vogue will last long. "The very stress on supposedly irreducible cultural differences may express an uneasy awareness that they are not very great and that... they are likely to diminish," thanks to intermarriage and integration into the larger American society.