We Say All Cultures Are Equal Because We Do Not Trust Our Government

We have reached a strange place. Educated people in free countries will not say that a culture which cuts the genitals of girls is worse than one that does not. They will say it is different. They will say we lack the standing to judge. Press them privately and most of them believe the obvious thing; press them publicly and they retreat into relativism.

Part of this is a genuine anthropological principle, and a good one: do not judge a practice before you understand what it does inside its own society. But that principle explains only a fraction of the reflex. The rest, I want to argue, is something we almost never name. We refuse to rank cultures because we do not trust what our own government would do with the ranking.

The Wars We Remember

Free countries have started unnecessary wars. Not once; repeatedly, and within living memory. Some of those wars were the representation problem in its purest form: the people in government stood to gain from the war, in influence, in contracts, in re-election, while the citizens who fought it and paid for it stood to gain nothing.

And every one of those wars was sold with a story about culture. Their culture is barbaric. Their women need saving. Their people would choose freedom if we removed the tyrant. The story was sometimes partly true and it was always useful, because it converted a question about interests into a question about virtue, and nobody wants to vote against virtue.

The public learned the lesson the way publics learn lessons: not as an analysis but as a reflex. If saying that another culture is worse than ours is what the government uses to start a war, then stop saying it. Say they are all the same. Deny the government the premise.

The Reflex Is Rational, and It Is Still Wrong

I want to be fair to the reflex, because it is doing real work.

It is a defence against a real danger. A government that could freely appeal to cultural superiority would use that appeal, and history says it would use it badly. Cutting off the appeal at the root, by making the claim socially unsayable, is a crude but effective control on a system we have no better way to control. It is the same move as a family that bans all discussion of money because the last three discussions ended in a fight.

But look at what it costs. We have adopted a false belief about the world in order to constrain our rulers. We are lying to ourselves about anthropology because we cannot fix our politics. The girls who are cut do not benefit from our silence. The people living under a theocracy are not helped by our insistence that theocracy is just another way of organising a society. We have traded their interests for a leash on our own government, and we did it without noticing we were making a trade.

What the Trade Reveals

The pattern is worth generalising, because it is not confined to culture.

Whenever you find a free society holding a belief that is plainly at odds with the evidence, and holding it with unusual heat, ask whether the belief is doing political work. Frequently it is. The belief is a fence around something the government would otherwise exploit. We do not believe it because it is true; we believe it because the alternative hands a weapon to people we do not trust.

That is a diagnosis of the political system, not of the public. A public that trusted its government to weigh interventions honestly could afford to say true things about other cultures, because saying them would not automatically license a war. It could say: this practice is monstrous, and also, we are not going to invade anybody over it, and both statements would be heard as they were meant.

We cannot say both, because we know the second will be dropped the moment the first is granted. So we deny the first. And our thinking about the world gets worse, in exactly the place where it should be most clear-eyed.

The Remedy Is Not More Courage

The usual response to relativism is to demand that people be braver: say the true thing, accept the discomfort. That misreads the problem. People are not relativists out of cowardice. They are relativists out of a correct estimate of what their government does with moral certainty.

The remedy is a government whose decisions about war are not made by the people who benefit from war. Take the decision out of the hands of the interested minority, and the public no longer needs to defend itself by pretending not to see. A society that decides for itself whether to fight can afford to know the truth about whom it is not fighting.

Until then, expect the strange place to persist: a civilisation that has learned more about other cultures than any before it, and has trained itself not to draw conclusions.