Cultural Relativism Protects Religion Far More Than It Protects Politics

We are told that we may not judge other cultures. The rule is presented as universal: their ways are theirs, ours are ours, and criticism from outside is a kind of imperialism. I want to point out that the rule is not applied universally, and that the pattern of where it is applied and where it is waived tells you what it is actually for.

The Test Case

Take two states that are, by any ordinary measure, among the least free on earth. In one, a hereditary ruler governs through a security apparatus, executes dissidents, and controls what may be said. In the other, the same is true. One of them is North Korea. The other is Saudi Arabia.

Criticism of the first is not merely permitted in polite company; it is expected. Nobody who calls North Korea a prison camp is accused of failing to respect Korean culture. Nobody suggests that the Kim dynasty is a legitimate expression of a different value system that we, from our limited Western perspective, are not equipped to evaluate.

Now say the same things about Saudi Arabia, and watch the room change. The word culture arrives. So does the word tradition, and their way of life, and the suggestion that you are being Islamophobic, or colonial, or that you do not understand the region.

The two regimes are comparably unfree. The difference is that one of them is unfree in the name of a religion. And that is enough to move it from the category of things we may condemn to the category of things we must respect.

The Relativism Is Selective

This is the observation I want to press. Cultural relativism, as actually practised, is not a general principle about cultures. It is a specific reflex about religion.

We criticise political systems freely. Communism, fascism, military dictatorship, one-party rule: all of these are fair game, and the people who denounce them are not called bigots. We criticise economic arrangements, legal systems, educational methods, and dietary habits. The cultures of other nations are, in all these respects, evaluated and ranked without much embarrassment.

Only when the practice under discussion is religious does the shutter come down. Then the culture becomes sacred, the outsider becomes unqualified, and the criticism becomes an attack.

If relativism were a principle, it would protect North Korea. It does not. So it is not a principle. It is a boundary drawn around one particular kind of belief.

Why Religion Gets the Exemption

Two reasons, I think, and they reinforce each other.

The first is a kind of intuitive respect for depth. We sense, correctly, that religion sits closer to the core of a person than politics does. A North Korean who escapes can shed the ideology in a year. A believer who loses his faith loses something that structured his family, his calendar, his grief, and his sense of what he is for. Overcoming a religion is harder than overcoming a political system, and we know it.

But look at what follows from that. Because we value our own religion and would not want anyone fighting us over it, we decline to fight anyone else over theirs. This is not respect for the other culture. It is a non-aggression pact between believers, extended by habit to everyone. The secular observer, who has no stake in the pact, is expected to honour it anyway.

The second reason is more creditable and more interesting. We remember what our own governments did with the idea of reforming other cultures. The language of liberation has been used, within living memory, to justify wars that served oil interests and arms manufacturers and turned out badly for nearly everyone else. Having watched that, a good many people concluded that any talk of a culture being worse than ours is the opening move of the next such war, and they built a defence: this is their culture, you have no right to criticise it, and certainly no right to change it by force.

That defence is understandable. It is also a category error. It confuses the question of whether a practice is bad with the question of whether our government should be trusted to fix it. The answer to the second can be no while the answer to the first is yes. I have argued elsewhere that our distrust of government makes us think badly about cultures; this is the religious instance of the same failure.

What the Selectivity Costs

The cost is borne by the people inside the protected cultures, and it is not small.

A woman in a theocracy is in the same position as a dissident in a secular dictatorship: subject to a system that constrains her and that she did not choose. We have decided that we may speak for the second and not for the first, and the only difference between them is the vocabulary the regime uses. That is not a moral distinction. It is a linguistic one, and we have let it govern who gets our sympathy.

There is also a cost to our own thinking. A society that can criticise everything except religion has, in effect, agreed that religion is the one topic on which reasoning stops. That agreement does not stay in its box. Academia is more afraid of blaming religion than of blaming anything else, and the reflex I have described here is where that fear comes from.

The Honest Position

Either cultures may be criticised or they may not. If they may, religion is not exempt. If they may not, then North Korea is off limits too, and nobody actually believes that.

The consistent position is the first. It does not commit you to invading anyone. It commits you only to saying, of a practice that harms people, that it harms people, whether the justification offered is a party manifesto or a holy book. The distinction between those two justifications is one the believers care about. There is no reason the rest of us should.