Cultural Relativism

Cultural relativism is the notion that values and mores are not universal but are instead completely determined by culture. This position, popularized by an earlier generation of Western anthropologists, stands in contrast to more traditional perspectives that root values in transcendent sources of meaning or in the universal experience of the human condition.

In the human rights arena, there is general agreement that human rights are universal. At the same time, most parties to the human rights discussion would be willing to acknowledge some variability between societies. Thus disagreements over the universality or relativity of human rights have tended to be confined to debates over human rights that bear on a limited domain of specific cultural practices. Because most such disagreements have arisen in the context of critiques of non-Western societies by Western human rights advocates, the question has arisen as to whether the points at issue really revolve around human rights, or whether Western chauvinists are actually engaged in an effort to supplant non-Western societies’ traditional values with Western values. In response, human rights activists have tended to question the sincerity of such analyses, implying that the concerns being expressed about Western cultural imperialism are little more than self-serving smokescreens put forward to divert criticism away from oppressive social arrangements.

To give an example, the issue of women in conservative Muslim countries inspires this kind of human rights debate. Western human rights activists argue that women in Islamic cultures are denied many of their human rights, including their right to function as autonomous individuals. Some Muslims respond that Islam defines certain roles for women and that to protest against these roles denies the cultural rights of Islamic states. The issue of “female circumcision,” called by human rights activists “female genital mutilation,” involves another such debate.

As part of this ongoing discussion, it has frequently been pointed out that the West in general, and the United States in particular, are quick to call attention to alleged human rights violations if it serves Western interests, but is slow to do so when it does not serve these interests. Furthermore, although the United States likes to portray itself as the global champion of human rights, its own human rights record leaves much to be desired—especially when one examines such historical phenomena as the displacement of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans by European Americans.

This viewpoint was evocatively expressed by Kishore Mahbubani in his 1992 essay, “The West and the Rest”: “[F]rom the viewpoint of many Third World citizens, human rights campaigns often have a bizarre quality. For many of them, it looks something like this: They are like hungry and diseased passengers on a leaky, overcrowded boat that is about to drift into treacherous waters, in which many of them will perish. The captain of the boat is often harsh, sometimes fairly and sometimes not. On the river banks stand a group of affluent, well-fed and well-intentioned onlookers. As soon as these onlookers witness a passenger being flogged or imprisoned or even deprived of the right to speak, they board the ship to intervene, protecting the passengers from the captain. But those passengers remain hungry and diseased. As soon as they try to swim to the banks into the arms of their benefactors, they are firmly returned to the boat, their primary sufferings unabated.” This essay, by a scholar who is also an official in the government of Singapore, has set the tone for the current debate. Mahbubani’s general viewpoint is not, however, unique. In 1991, the People’s Republic of China issued an official statement on human rights which read, in part, that “to people in developing countries, the most urgent human rights are still the right to subsistence and the right to economic, social and cultural development. Therefore, attention should first be given to the right to development.”

The unstated assumption in both of these documents is the premise that increasing individual freedoms in the political sphere undermines or otherwise acts as a brake on economic development. Defenders of the political establishment in countries like China, Singapore, and Malaysia further argue that the emphasis on political and civil rights by Western human rights organizations reflects the  individualistic orientation of the West’s cultural tradition. Asian cultural traditions, in contrast, emphasize such communitarian values as the economic welfare of the larger society. Thus, rather than asserting directly that human rights must take a back seat to economic development, spokespeople for the authoritarian regimes of Asia argue that such human rights as the right to maintain one’s cultural tradition and the right to economic well-being should take priority over political and civil rights. Finally, many defenses of the political status quo in authoritarian Asian countries assert or imply that such societies will gradually develop greater political freedoms and expanded civil rights after their economies become as prosperous as Western economies. Responses to this line of argument make a

number of different counterpoints. First, it is often the case that authoritarian regimes also fail to promote economic development. It is also not the case that democratic political systems invariably retard economic development. Thus the opposition between rapid economic growth and democratic political processes on which arguments against expanded political participation is based is a fallacy.

Second, while the contemporary human rights movement arose in the West, it is inaccurate to assert that Asian culture in general is inhospitable to human rights. In point of fact, neither the West nor the East possess monolithic cultural traditions, although the consensus of both is to balance social concerns and responsibilities with the rights of individuals.

Finally, Asian countries with authoritarian political regimes have, in general, rushed to embrace other aspects of Westernization with little concern over the potential impact on traditional culture and traditional social arrangements. Confining resistance to Westernization to the arena of civil and political rights is thus transparently self-serving. It seems clear that some defenders of cultural relativism are simply using the concept as a smokescreen for cruelty and oppression.

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