Cultural Relativism

L&G-

I'm stoked about continuity. There is nothing coincidental in the life of a man ferociously seeking to do the will of God. Yes I am on fire and I plan on staying that way. This a.m. in the WSJ there was a piece on the funnyman P.J. O'Rourke – a political satirist. The article was about whether conservatives or liberals are funnier. And his stance on the issue was that Liberals are always feeling so guilty that they can't be funny and Conservatives are always so worried about the world falling to pieces that they can't be funny. That's funny. Ha ha!!

He talked about negative rights: i.e., "Freedom from" and positive rights: i.e., "What will you give me?" He says, "In a democracy, it's always vibrating back and forth. People want the government to do everything; when they see that it sucks, they want the government to let them take charge, and when that doesn't work, they want the government to come back and fix all the problems that they themselves caused when they took charge."

On developing nations' intransigence, he said, "Twenty years ago we were all very interested in what was making these people fight each (ea.) other, and who was right and who was wrong, and after a while you say: Sit down and shut up. Go to hell." That sounds familiar. Ha ha!! That's funny. Except I know why the baby boom generation got derailed and I'm going back to fix it. This generation threw the baby out w/ the bathwater and expected cosmopolitanism to mend everything. That's impossible because (b/c) people come from different places; they have different habits; they walk and talk and act differently.

I think the ruling [baby boom] generation in America and the up-and-coming generation X have bought into the idea that everyone thinks the same, everyone really has the same general standards for morality and thus, dislocations only arise due to peoples' ignorance and oppression in general. I think there is a lot of truth in what is being said there, but people do not have the same standards for morality – i.e., what is just and what is unjust. Therefore ignorance and oppression are relative terms.

Consider the fact that, in a tribal culture, barbarians would consider it oppressive to be forced to obey civil laws and abide by standards other than their own. And on the opposite side of that coin, citizens of the civilized world consider barbarianism oppressive and threatening. Let's make pretend for a moment. Let's say we have two societies:

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1. African tribe (Voodo, syncreticism)
   
2. Quaker colony (Protestant Christian)
   

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Now these two societies live adjacent to one another. The Puritans do what the Puritans do. They dominate savage nature and subdue the elements (e.g., cut down trees to build houses, develop infrastructure for diverting water and storing it, purifying it for drinking, etc.) according to God's will. He says, "I want you to subdue the earth and populate it." Likewise, the barbarian tribes live in 'harmony w/ nature' or rather, in submission to the elements. They are unscrupulous in their dealings w/ civil society and are therefore unpredictable and untrustworthy.¹

Now the Puritans set up fences, build houses, schools, hospitals, libraries, churches, lay roads, etc. And where civil society ends, tribalism begins. As a Pilgrim settler living adjacent to a tribal culture, what do you think is going to happen?

With your indulgence, I'll ask you to conduct the same experiment w/ the following cultures:

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1. Muslim

2. Hindu

3. Atheist (holism, existentialism, asceticism, commercialism, communism, etc.)

4. Polytheist (human sacrifice, cannibalism, etc.)

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You may ask, well why do I associate people w/ religion and not something else like color of skin or language or geographical location? The reason being, you cannot identify someone's behavioral norms from their color of skin or their language or their geographical location. These superficial discriminations are crosscutting cleavages rather than reinforcing cleavages.

¹I'm asking for some leeway w/ this generalization. I will prove, although it will take some time, that I can defeat sophist tautology and semantical plays on words and ideological fantasy to establish this message as a self-evident truth. Just wait and see!