Moral Relativism and Multiculturalism: Confusion on the Left

There is nothing here that is new from a theoretical perspective...though every such human story seems uniquely tragic.

Somehow many liberals fell in love with multiculturalism and moral relativism, even though the former has only a loose relationship with liberalism, and the latter is anathema to it. I tend to think that a weak version of multiculturalism is a good idea; that is, American culture shouldn't press too hard for elements of immigrant cultures to dissolve themselves in the "melting pot"--even though that metaphor acknowledges that the new elements will affect the cultural whole. Rather, it's worth experimenting with the idea that elements of other cultures can fruitfully and happily exist as pockets of difference in a larger American culture. However, an extreme commitment to an untested multicultural ideal is probably imprudent--especially when the ideal approaches a kind of cultural moral relativism, according to which the mere fact that x is traditional in culture C is allegedly enough to make adherence to x obligatory for members of C. Even versions of multiculturalism that fall short of that one ought to be treated as experimental rather than embraced as gospel; but that's rather a different story for a different time.

What liberals who are attracted to such ideas fail to recognize could not be more obvious: that oppression and injustice are oppression and injustice, and they are in no way mitigated simply because one's own culture (or family, or community, or tribe) inflicts them. If that has any effect at all, it is to make them worse, not better. It makes no sense whatsoever to deny that Smith is oppressed simply because it is his own culture who is oppressing him--to deny this would be to deny the justice of (to take only one particularly salient example of millions) the cause of Martin Luther King. King was right to criticize the way blacks were treated in the American culture of the time. He would have been right to do so even if the majority of blacks did not agree with him, even if the majority of Americans had never come to do so, and even if he had not been an American himself. America was wrong, and there is nothing wrong with pointing that out. In fact, it may be obligatory.

The same, however, holds for any culture that is oppressive or unjust, and for any rational criticism of such cultures. Although the type of liberal in question often acknowledges the points at the end of the last paragraph, they fail to universalize them--they recognize that non-Americans are rationally permitted to criticize America, but somehow think that the reverse does not hold. Of course we've got a history of irrational criticism of and disastrous interventions into other cultures--and there is some wisdom in being wary of repeating the mistakes of the past. But that is reason for being careful when criticizing other cultures, not reason to never do so.

And here's a little hint: if you think that female genital mutilation is just dandy so long as its done by non-Westerners, you've become so open-minded that your brains have fallen out. It's horrendous, and it doesn't become one iota less horrendous simply because the mutilated girl lives on the other side of the creek rather than on this side. It does not magically become painless; it does not magically cease to be a maiming; it does not magically become a wonderful thing simply because it happens over there rather than over here. By such magic, domestic abuse in my neighbor's house would become just fine, the Holocaust would have been none of our affair, and the imminent murder of an innocent would be of no concern to me--or perhaps I should even approve of it--so long as the principals are different than me. Yet some liberals who have no trouble criticizing our local versions of fundamentalism somehow have no trouble tolerating the very much greater varieties of insanity associated with fundamentalisms from afar. But moral relativism is no friend of liberalism; liberalism is the view, roughly, that individuals have a familiar set of inviolable rights, and that there is a large private sphere into which others may not obtrude. Illiberal violations of one's rights do not become morally permissible simply because lots of people gang up and do the violating...nor because such violations have gone on for a long time...nor because they have become institutionalized. If anything, all that only makes them worse.

This is one of the (fewish, IMHO) ways in which the American right has currently gotten things more right than the American left, and the left would (as Jacoby notes) do well to get their house in order on this point. Of course the right's characteristic failure in this vicinity is to condemn every unfamiliar thing willy-nilly--and that error really does seem to be rampant on the right. This failure of the left emanates largely from the academic intellectual left, and its force could probably be minimized pretty easily just by getting liberals to think about these issues a little bit. Even a little careful thinking about relativism and its ilk tends to reveal their radical implausibility. This is an issue I can easily envision liberal conventional wisdom wising up about in the relatively near future. It's a little bit of irrationality that could fairly easily be shed.