All Cultures are Not Equal

The Perilous Incoherence of Cultural Relativism

My Jordanian friend Ibrahim had a “sort-of” girlfriend. I say “sort-of” because they never actually spoke or even got within fifty feet of each other. Late at night, they would exchange glances, waves, and affectionate gestures through the windows in their houses, which were about fifty or sixty feet apart.

The problem was that Ibrahim and his “girlfriend” weren’t the only ones who could see in the windows. So, one day, they were interrupted by the girlfriend’s father dragging her away from the window by the hair. Trembling behind the wall by the open window, Ibrahim listened for an hour to violent screaming and thrashing from the neighboring house. For weeks afterward, he peered from the window, fearing she had been killed. Thankfully, he finally spotted her exiting the house one day with a shrouded head (perhaps to hide the injuries) but still alive.

Even if her family had killed her, they likely wouldn’t have faced serious consequences. While honor killings are technically illegal in Jordan, legal loopholes and sympathetic courts make convictions rare. The culture takes a hard line on women interacting with unrelated men. I experienced this firsthand when two female classmates said “Hi” to me on the street near Yarmouk University, only to have shopkeepers start throwing rocks at them. An Egyptian acquaintance once bragged to me, “If I thought my daughter was behaving inappropriately, I could kill her, and no court in this country would convict me.”

Importing Incompatible Cultural Practices

Along with Middle Eastern immigrants, European nations have imported a passel of honor killings. Germany reports an average of 12 honor killings a year—roughly 1.7% percent of all murders. It is likely that most cases in which the victim survives (like Ibrahim’s girlfriend) are never reported.

Honor killings aren’t the only troubling practices that have been imported. Islamic and North African countries have some other customs that are, um, distinctive. FGM (“Female Genital Mutilation”) is one example. The innocuous-sounding acronym fails to fully convey the horror of the grisly procedures it includes—clitoridectomy and infibulation (if you don’t already know what that is, it’s best not to look it up). Here’s how common it is in a handful of countries:

Somalia: 98%
Djibouti: 93%
Mali: 89%
Sudan: 87%
Egypt: 87%

Like honor killings, FGM has immigrated to Europe. One study reported that nearly one percent of all women giving birth in France have undergone FGM. Hundreds of thousands of women are either victims of or at risk from this practice.

First-cousin marriage is also prevalent in many parts of the Islamic world. For instance:

Pakistan: 50-60%
Saudi Arabia: 25-30%
Iraq: 25-30%
Jordan: 25-30%

Though legal in many Western countries, first-cousin marriages were rare until the recent increase in immigration from these countries. Now, it’s common enough to impact public health. A 2017 report found that one in five child deaths in a predominantly Muslim area of the U.K. was linked to the consanguinity of the parents.

Aren’t All Cultures Equal?

If U.S. schools teach any absolute principle, it is—paradoxically—that everything is relative. As Allan Bloom wrote:

“Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating.”

Schools assert, in particular, that the principle of relativism must be applied to different cultures. If you grew up any time after the 1960s, you probably remember teachers, from grade school to grad school, piously insisting, “We mustn’t judge other cultures.” Underlying the relativist orthodoxy is the romantic assumption that all cultures around the world are enlightened and compatible with the teachers’ progressive values—unless, of course, those cultures were corrupted by Western capitalism or colonialism.

If you want to witness entertaining paroxysms of cognitive dissonance, ask a cultural relativist about the caste system, FGM, or honor killings. The reflexive response is that these practices don’t really belong to the respective cultures. The real culprit is—wait for it—Western Patriarchal Colonialism! This artful dodge enables cultural relativists to avoid the prickly reality that many cultures are fundamentally different and some values are truly incompatible.

For example, my son at Boston College attended a class last year in which the professor insisted that the caste system was a creation of British colonialism (I heard UChicago anthropologist Bernard Cohn make similar claims in one of my own classes decades ago). Those British colonialists must have had incredible power over time and space because Megasthenes (the Greek ambassador to the Maurya court) described the caste system in the 4th century BC, al-Biruni (the Persian polymath) observed it in the 11th century AD, and the Arab explorer Ibn Battuta documented it in the 14th century.

Similarly, some try to claim that FGM isn’t an established practice in many Islamic countries. Like the claims about the caste system, these fantasies are soundly refuted by historical fact. A Tang Chinese (Du Huan) already described female circumcision during the Abbasid Caliphate (8th century CE). There are also hadiths (sayings attributed to Muhammad) that acknowledge and tacitly approve of the practice. Like honor killings, FGM has been outlawed in many countries, and several current Islamic authorities (like the Mufti of Egypt) have denounced it in the last decade or two. However, the four major Sunni schools (madhabs) of Islamic jurisprudence all historically recommended it, with one declaring it obligatory.

Time to Stop Pretending

The customs I’ve described here are only a few examples from a long list of cultural traditions that conflict sharply with Western liberal values: persecution of gays, killing apostates or infidels for insulting Islam, and so on. Many of these are founded on interpretations of religious texts like the Quran and hadiths.

Unfortunately, in recent years, Islam has been less flexible than Christianity or Judaism in adapting to modernity. There are currently eleven Islamic countries that prescribe the death penalty for apostasy. As I’ll discuss in a future article, Islamic modernism (a movement that sought to reconcile Islam with liberal values like democracy, human rights, and scientific inquiry) was only briefly ascendant before being pushed aside.

As immigrant populations grow and reach majority levels in some areas, we need to face the fact that large numbers may hold beliefs that are incompatible with ideals that have prevailed in the West since the Enlightenment.

This issue will likely come to a head in Europe before it does in the U.S. In the U.K., Sharia councils are already operating or being proposed in cities like London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Bradford. It’s unclear whether witnesses will testify in honor killing cases in these areas, or if local juries will convict the perpetrators if they do. In Germany, some schools are telling parents their daughters must dress “modestly” to “respect” Syrian migrants who think modesty means being shrouded from head to toe.

People in Western countries face a choice. We can continue allowing unfettered immigration by people who hold beliefs that may conflict with our long-held common values, or we can restrict immigration numbers and composition to preserve those values. With the current unprecedented levels of immigration (one in four people in America lives in an immigrant household), we might want to ensure that future immigrants don’t bring incompatible values with them.

The great irony of cultural relativism is that it is based on an absolutist assertion—one that is held almost exclusively by progressives in the West. Ask anyone in Cairo, Istanbul, or Lahore if they agree that their culture is no better than any other, and they’ll likely laugh in your face. If there’s one belief that cultures around the world have shared throughout history, it’s the opposite of relativism: they believe in ethnocentrism, that they’re better than the rest. This is perhaps ensured by a Darwinian process: cultures that don’t think they’re better are inevitably overwhelmed by cultures that do.

This brings us to the dilemma Western countries now face: if we don’t believe in the superiority of our culture, those who believe in the superiority of theirs will eventually replace it.