Cultural Relativism and Absolutism Western

¶ … Cultural relativism and absolutism

Western culture idealizes individual autonomy and choice above all things -- better to make a mistake in choosing a partner, it counsels, so long as it is your own mistake, than to have the choice made for you, for good or for ill. Even in high school, "Romeo and Juliet" is not read as a cautionary tale, but as a story of star-crossed lovers who are torn apart because their parents refused to allow them enough autonomy. Thus it is very difficult for Sam, or indeed anyone from Western culture to understand Jaza's obedience to her family's will, given that Western nations see innovation and challenging accepted values, if they conflict with individual personal desires, as part of necessary progress to a more 'civilized' way of life.

However, it is just as easy to imagine someone from outside of our own culture looking askance and asking 'how can you eat pork,' 'how can you have the death penalty?' It is easy to judge a culture from the outside, to judge it on its own terms is more difficult. Jaza's culture prizes parental ties over personal autonomy, and social stability, even long-term happiness in marriage, over romantic love. Consistency with the past is not some Emersonian hobgoblin of little minds for Jaza; it is an important value, despite her momentary pain (Emerson 303). Furthermore, it must be added that Jaza has had exposure to other values and systems of thought in the West, but she is choosing to remain consistent to some degree with her family values. How much choice does she have? Perhaps no more or less than someone in America who goes into his or her family business under some pressure (perhaps the threat of withdrawing tuition for a college education)?

Why is being deprived of choice in marriage so much worse than being deprived of the choice of what school or occupation a person enters, and how much choice do we have in terms of our class mobility in the United States, really? Yes, Jaza weeps but so does a child being sent away to camp, or college, or being kicked out of the family home at age twenty-five. To some individuals from cultures outside of our own, these acts might seem barbaric. Why judge Mongolian culture more harshly than Western culture? It is very easy to see the constructed nature of an 'alien' culture, and criticize it, rather than learn from it, but as pointed out in Ruth Benedict's essay "In Defense of Moral Relativism," what we take for granted in our society, even the division of the genders into what seem like essential categories, is not universally true to all societies (Benedict 207).

Culture is not moving in progress to 'more individualism,' thus making Jaza's culture 'more primitive' than our own, rather Jaza's culture and American, Western culture simply value autonomy and the feelings surrounding choice of a partner very differently. While William Irvine's critique of relativism might have some validity as it pertains to certain human rights, such as the right to life, in terms of more complex issues, such as marital choice, the understandable, but highly emotional and biased reaction of Sam to being rejected by Jaza does not reflect that Jaza's human rights are being violated, any more so than an American child being pressured to choose to major in Economics, for example, rather than English for his 'own good' to 'get a good job after graduating from college' for which he will thank his parents 'when he is older and knows better' (Irvine 42). In fact, this similar justification is used by Jaza's own parents, within her own culture -- the young cannot know what is best for them in terms of a partner, thus the old must decide.

And what constitutes a 'successful' marriage or life partnership is also quite culturally relative. Jaza's culture defines stability and a lack of divorce as successful, and if these are the benchmarks of success, than traditional Mongolian society is superior. Sam and defenders of Western values, of course, would vehemently disagree and state that even if divorce is easier, and more mistakes are made in a society characterized by autonomy, this is innately 'better.' But even our own cultural critics bemoan the current state of the family, and measure its success based upon the divorce rate -- at least, if a family is poor. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, for example, in his essay "Defining Deviancy Down" automatically assumes that having a two-parent family is 'better' for children [at least, poor, minority children], as defined by certain standards of success and social factors, such as the prevalence of crime: "in 1965, having reached the conclusion that there would be a dramatic increase in single-parent families [with the change in welfare legislation], I reached the further conclusion that this would in turn lead to a dramatic increase in crime" (Moynihan 414). In his belief structure, a lack of certain measurements of success and nuclear structures constitute a 'failure' in a way that might be profoundly offensive to comfortable, middle-class single mothers of any race raising happy, well-adjusted children -- measurements of failure that might not be as evident in children from middle-class homes with a single, wealthy parent, either.

The fact that the single-parent families spoken of by Moynihan are by definition, as welfare recipients, more apt to suffer poverty may indicate that their difficulties reside in other societal factors, and an increase in crime might have other social causes that merely correlated with the change in welfare legislation. Moynihan's invocation of changes in welfare legislation and a rise in single parent families implies again, what is successful, what is deviant is 'obvious' -- yet not so many years ago, to have a daughter who did not marry and worked outside the home, to have a son who was gay, or to have a child who did not produce grandchildren might be read as deviant, and morally wrong, but societal standards have changed, and despite William Bennett's likely rage at this fact, the 'deviant' products might say that they would not wish their lives to have been different (Bennett 534). In fact, they might say that their lives are celebrations of the types of individual autonomy that is quintessentially American, even though Bennett takes certain 'cultural indicators' of success and failures as self-evident.