Stop Talking Nonsense About Culture

When progressives forget how progress works.

(Audio version here)

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A recent tweet by fellow in human rights, Alonso Gurmendi, declared, “Sorry, ‘some cultures are inferior to others’ is just racism with extra steps.” This claim would be hard to justify for anybody with consistent principles, but especially, one would have thought, for anybody who cares about human rights. His follow-up responses to criticism reveal a serious confusion, or perhaps a deliberate word game, around what ‘culture’ actually means. By refusing to understand the term as it is commonly used, he ends up missing the point that people who speak of better or worse cultures are making.

When asked, for instance, whether Nazi Germany wasn’t an example of a culture with grave moral failings, Gurmendi replied, “I guess Germany must be an inferior culture.” But Germany is not a culture. It’s a geographical location, a landmass inhabited by changing populations across time. What makes Germany today a vastly better place to live than Germany a century ago is the change in culture from one that embraced Nazism to one that despises and rejects it. The culture of Germany now is superior to the culture of Germany then.

Gurmendi insists that he isn’t denying that there are better and worse ideas. Yet when we talk about cultures being better or worse, we are talking precisely about the ideas that have become dominant among a group of people at a given time. A culture in which there is broad agreement that women are autonomous human beings with the same rights as men can very reasonably be said to be superior to one in which they are not. We would expect a fellow in human rights to recognise that when women’s status improves, it is because the culture has changed — not the soil, not the population, but the prevailing ideas.

When asked whether a country that had 100% racists would be inferior to one with none, Gurmendi replied that no such culture exists. This is true but also irrelevant. A culture need not be unanimous to be defined by its dominant norms. Racist cultures have existed despite people who opposed racism living within them. It would have been little comfort to enslaved Africans in America to be told they did not live in one because they were also part of the culture and did not personally endorse the practice. Culture is constituted by predominant and powerful ideas, not by universal consensus.

We have to understand culture as ideas, because that is what it is. Conflating culture with race or ethnicity is precisely where people go wrong, whether this is by claiming that people of a certain race all hold bad ideas, or by mistaking opposition to those bad ideas for racism. It’s particularly worrying when progressives make this error, because the very possibility of progress depends on recognising that cultures can change. In order to effect such change, we must be able to criticise culture and argue that some visions of it are better than others.

Progressives usually grasp this well when it comes to their own societies. When feminists say we live in a “rape culture,” they are not saying “But a rape culture is in no way inferior to a culture which abhors rape, so carry on.” They are condemning that culture and calling for reform. When anti-racists speak of a “white supremacist culture,” they are not being value-neutral either. Condemnation is implicit in the claim. They are saying this culture is inferior to one that does not hold white supremacist ideas, and advocating bringing about such a culture.

Nor is this logic confined to progressives. Anyone who makes arguments about how society should work accepts that some cultural ideas are preferable to others. That’s what it means to have values and principles.

There is, however, a kernel of truth in Gurmendi’s statement. Sometimes, when people say that some cultures are inferior to others, they are indeed being racist, because they are conflating negative aspects of “culture” with “black and brown people.” We should object to that. But the premise itself is not racist. We can tell whether someone is motivated by racism by asking them to elaborate. If they complete the sentence with something like, “so we should deport all the black and brown people,” they are being racist. If they complete it with, “so we should not import people who intend to uphold cultural values that oppress women, persecute homosexuals, or deny religious freedom, but remain open and supportive of those opposing or fleeing such values,” they are not.

Within every culture, there are people who hold ideas compatible with liberty and human rights, and people who do not. When we say that some cultures are superior to others, we are typically talking about whether the former have predominance and cultural power, or the latter. Cultural relativism closes down the possibility of supporting those who value individual liberty and opposing those who don’t. It closes down the possibility of having consistent principles and contributing meaningfully to positive cultural change.

That isn’t progressive and it certainly isn’t what we would hope to hear from someone who works in the advancement of human rights.

Since writing this, Gurmendi has qualified his statement, saying:

“Cultures are internally contradicting, they are not monolithic, much like a wave function, they are impossible to place in one single spot, unless you reduce them to such a small scale as to make them impractical. You can’t ‘score’ culture because culture is not one single thing.”

This does allow for the existence of different ideas within a culture but it continues to disallow for the concept of progress via the critical process necessary for the bad ideas to be replaced by better ones. We can score culture. If we can say that a culture has improved since it banned slavery and racial segregation, granted equal rights to women and people of all races, and decriminalised homosexuality, then we can also say that cultures which still commit human rights abuses are inferior to those which have outlawed them. We urgently need people working in human rights to acknowledge this.

To deny that some cultures are better than others is to surrender any moral footing for progress. We must be able to say that cultures which better uphold human rights, equality, freedom, and truth are superior to those that do not. Otherwise, we are left pretending that moral progress is impossible, or worse, that to recognise it is somehow racist. It isn’t. It’s simply to take principles seriously.