If racists use some issue as a proxy for race (religion, culture, immigration) there is an instinct on some strands of the left to insist that the proxy has no negative ramifications whatsoever. That's understandable in a way, racism is both a moral abhorrence, and in a time when it seems less of a social taboo, starting to genuinely scare me.
But by insisting that there are no negative aspects of certain religions, cultures, and immigration, they don't thwart racists, they enable them.
As I replied to Gurmendi:
"Saying all cultures are equally valid is explicitly saying that the culture of the American south in the first half of the 19th Century was just as valid as the one slavery abolitionists advocated for. It's nuts."
This is the horseshoe effect at work. It becomes OK to pay as little as posible and even let people go hungry and homeless—or even be enslaved—because “respect the culture.” Some basic living and economic standards that can improve humanity for all are worth fighting for.
"It’s simply to take principles seriously." Exactly. Culture as described by Helen isn't that difficult to understand - the collective norms, beliefs and behaviours of a given group. It's pretty obvious that this often won't be homogeneous with large groups and that subcultures can exist within it. These things can be measured and evaluated and there is lots of work in this area, not least of all in industry and lots of other organizations. Our issue (as well as confusing what culture is) is that we now struggle to articulate and defend our underlying values and principles (not least because of some of the sub cultures that now exist) ie the underlying values and principles of a secular, liberal democracy. These are a moral judgement. And need to be. The issue isn't good and bad cultures per se, it's compatability and alignment (or lack of) of underlying values and principles that lead to groups norms, beliefs and behaviours.
The honest position would be to say that both our European-ancestral cultures and African ones have objectionable and laudable strategies, traditions, and other organizing principles, but once one raises this point, the accusations of discrimination flow freely and histerically.
Thank you, Helen, for another good piece to consider and reflect upon. Nuanced discussions that foster perspective sharing in service of greater clarity and distinction making are as rare to find as they are difficult to sustain.
How can we encourage more critical thinking to better suss out the differences between concepts such as culture, class, caste, "race," ethnicity, nationality, all the ways humans tend to think in terms of Us and Them?
And then to recognize where some of those areas tend to overlap, or not, more than others?
And allow for the very real possibility that the person in front of us is still an Individual, and may or may not fit into any of the categories where individuals do have some choice-making abilities around which beliefs, practices, and values they want to live from and live out in their lives?
I recall that when I studied cultural anthropology in the Before Times decades ago, we learned to distinguish between the etic approach and the emic approach. Briefly, the etic is the perspective of the outsider and the emic the perspective of the insider. The etic is cross-cultural and scientific. The emic is monocultural and faith-based. In the final analysis, the etic supersedes the emic, but it would be a poor anthropologist who didn't treat the emic seriously and take it into account in her analysis.
New Zealand is a good example of the emic taking precedence over the etic in its attempt to merge mātauranga Māori with science. Anything in mātauranga Māori that is of enduring practical value must be subject to rigorous testing and be falsifiable. One cannot admit it into the body of reliable knowledge solely because the Maori believed it for hundreds of years.
P. S. IMO, everyone should take an anthropology course as part of a liberal education.
You've articulated this distinction with crucial clarity. The conflation of 'critiquing cultural ideas' with 'racism against people' is exactly what paralyzes so much progressive discourse. As you note, feminists criticizing 'rape culture' within Western societies aren't called racist—they're called activists. The same logical framework should apply cross-culturally if principles are to be consistent.
These points and distinctions seem so obvious. Why would an intelligent person with classically "liberal" values (e.g. women's autonomy) suggest that cultures cannot be compared or evaluated along a spectrum of human-rights criteria? It's just obtuse, but why are very smart people being obtuse?
It must be nothing more than anti-West bigotry. We simply can't have it that culture of the West is "superior" in any moral sense to a non-Western culture. If that's the premise, then there's nothing more to say except to be obtuse. I guess this is how you get Queers for Palestine.
I don't think it's that simple. In practice, if someone says that a culture associated with some ethnic minority is inferior, that someone often is using that statement as a thin veil for racist sentiment. People often express sentiments obliquely, using statements that, if taken purely literally, are reasonable but are meant to be understood in a "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" fashion.
Yes, some people make the sort of disingenuous high-minded statements that cover an ulterior motive. But it's completely dishonest, and a straw man tactic, to invalidate a high-minded claim on the presumption that it is disingenuous. Because it really may be high-minded. For example, a person could be anti-open borders on economic, cultural, or racist grounds. Dishonest pro-open borders people will presume that all anti-open borders people are racist, which means you just get to bypass the arguments you'd rather not have to respond to.
It may or may not be anti-western bigotry to claim that cultures cannot be qualitatively compared, but it is certainly dishonest. It's nothing more than a dodge around confronting a rational argument that you can't (or don't want to) contend with.
"(..) the historic sharing of cultural advances until they became the common inheritance of the human race implied much more than cultural diversity. It implied that some cultural features were not only different than others, but better than others. The fact that all people, whether European, Asian, African or other have repeatedly chosen to abandon some feature of their own culture in order to replace it with something from another culture implies that the replacement served their purposes more effectively(...)"
"(...)Cultural features do not exist merely as badges of identity, to which we have some emotional attachment. They exist to meet the necessities and forward the purposes of human life. When they are surpassed by features of other cultures, they tend to fall to the wayside, or survive only as curiosities like roman numeral today(..)"
There's probably like 10 more excerpts I could take from it but at that point it's just be pasting a transcript here.
And thats from the 90s. Similar ideas are found in his Migrations and Cultures and Conquests and Cultures books (and probably Race and Culture, but that one I have not read yet), but this speech really sums it up nicely.
It's crazy to me how long people have been trying to convince others and themselves of this nonsense.
Last night over dinner, I had a brief discussion with a friend about cultural assimilation in the context of immigration. My friend, an NA indigenous woman, expressed the view that cultural assimilation is a negative process leading to “loss of culture”. What my friend means by “culture” differs from Pluckrose’s meaning: “We have to understand culture as ideas, because that is what it is”. For my friend, culture is food, costume, music etc.; that is, cultural artefacts. But my friend also claims to believe in the creation myths of her indigenous culture. I am sceptical of this claim, but that’s another story. Here, it is relevant that my friend does not believe in most of the ideas traditionally held by her indigenous culture about, for example, women or slavery. Actually, I should say that my friend denies her indigenous culture ever held ideas which conflict with her assimilation of liberal democracy.
This kind of denialism in defence of cultures with abhorrent ideologies and, hence, abhorrent cultural practices is characteristic of woke leftists who need to see “BIPOC” cultures as universally innocent of any cultural blame in order to see them as universally culturally oppressed.
I agree with the main points in this article, but I want to push back on a few specific point:
1) I disagree that it is a bad thing to “conflate culture with… ethnicity. To use your example of Germany, German culture has changed between Nazi Germany and today, but I think it preposterous to claim that there is no German culture that is strongly tied to German ethnicity. In fact, I would argue that ethnicity is an inherently cultural concept.
Is there really no such thing as a German culture or an English culture or a Japanese culture?
2) I agree with you that certain cultures can be deemed superior to others, particularly when one focuses on one dimension, but this seems to fit very poorly with your argument in previous essays that government should not seek to shape culture (as the Right wants). I believed that you claimed that government and liberal institutions must be neutral and let the individual decide.
If a culture has certain weakpoints that undermine its own people, why would you not use the power of government and other institutions to improve or at least to protect it from getting worse?
This is particularly true for public education, where socialization plays a crucial role.
You claimed that liberal institutions and government must be neutral on these cultural issues, but also state that some cultures are inferior (and presumably must be changed).
That seems like a fundamental contradiction, particularly when previous generations of Liberals explicitly stated that a free society must have strong values or virtue (for example, the American Founding Fathers).
Why not just state that Liberalism flourishes in certain cultures and governments must nuture and protect that culture, particularly in public education.
Why must we be able to say that "culture A is superior to culture B" in this generalising form? Assuming you reach this judgement based on criteria X, Y, and Z, I might agree with the statement. But it still obscures the possibility of culture B being superior to A in other criteria V and W. Then we need to argue whether criteria X, Y, and Z are more important for evaluating "general superiority" than V and W. This could be a very interesting and enlightening argument.
However, I tend to be suspicious of a general statement if it does not include the criteria that are being used to judge. I question whether the person who makes the statement has reflected and evaluated all the criteria and omits them because they assume the listener uses the same criteria, or whether they haven't and might be using biased reasoning to come to their conclusion.
I question the need for general statements "culture A is superior than culture B" (just as much as I object to "person A is superior to person B"). To me they appear to be much closer to ascribing and inherent property of superiority, rather than a summarised judgements of some of the properties. Given certain historical precedents where ascriptions of inherent superiority have been used to justify inflicting vast amounts of harm to specific groups of people, I prefer statements that include the criteria on which any judgment of alleged superiority is based.
Our language allows us to say "I prefer culture A to culture B because of X, Y, and Z". I think this allows moral progress, because we can say "X is good, so B should have more of X."
Why do we need to say "A is superior to B", if not to obfuscate the criteria that are being applied?
Yes, that's a much more nuanced take and it is the one we should take when just comparing cultures as a whole in an abstract, intellectual way. But people are seldom doing that. They're usually speaking within a certain context. For example, I am currently joking about my cooking on Twitter and this is causing people to joke back about how inferior British cuisine is to almost every other culture on the planet. Alonso is speaking in the context of human rights though and this is where the political debate most commonly is situated. Some cultures really are better than others in supporting things like women's rights, gay rights, religious minority rights and this is something that needs considering when it comes to immigration if we wish to keep those rights.
I had a conversation at work with a friend who is certainly more left leaning probably progressive in some ways. We were talking about Iran, and I mentioned that British culture was better because of our freedoms we have and all the groups etc ... I also know that Iranian culture is very friendly and that their government does not reflect the people on the ground who do suffer from the regime. But many people support it also. He pointed out Britain and the West, more individualistic cultures had higher rates or mental health difficulties and as such was proof that although we have our freedoms. The people their are probably more happy. (I would argue that totalitarian regimes probably don't collect very sophisticated wellbeing data from the people they opress). I don't agree with the point but it made me think about separating top down bottom up culture. I wasn't demonizing Iranians my father in law is Iranian, my partner half Iranian in so many ways it is a beautiful culture and regimes like the Iranian government make me sad because it's such a waste of so much possibility for travel, tourism, cultural sharing business etc.... But I do not visit because I do not fancy being arrested for being a spy. (Although, one look at me and don't reckon they would get much for my bounty!).
I am unconvinced by that. I suspect individualistic cultures have higher expectations of happiness and seek mental health support more. However, even if it is true, the beauty of a liberal society is that you don’t have to be individualistic. You can voluntarily join a religious or other community and hold yourself to its standards. You just don’t have to.
If racists use some issue as a proxy for race (religion, culture, immigration) there is an instinct on some strands of the left to insist that the proxy has no negative ramifications whatsoever. That's understandable in a way, racism is both a moral abhorrence, and in a time when it seems less of a social taboo, starting to genuinely scare me.
But by insisting that there are no negative aspects of certain religions, cultures, and immigration, they don't thwart racists, they enable them.
As I replied to Gurmendi:
"Saying all cultures are equally valid is explicitly saying that the culture of the American south in the first half of the 19th Century was just as valid as the one slavery abolitionists advocated for. It's nuts."
These are worrying times.
This is the horseshoe effect at work. It becomes OK to pay as little as posible and even let people go hungry and homeless—or even be enslaved—because “respect the culture.” Some basic living and economic standards that can improve humanity for all are worth fighting for.
"It’s simply to take principles seriously." Exactly. Culture as described by Helen isn't that difficult to understand - the collective norms, beliefs and behaviours of a given group. It's pretty obvious that this often won't be homogeneous with large groups and that subcultures can exist within it. These things can be measured and evaluated and there is lots of work in this area, not least of all in industry and lots of other organizations. Our issue (as well as confusing what culture is) is that we now struggle to articulate and defend our underlying values and principles (not least because of some of the sub cultures that now exist) ie the underlying values and principles of a secular, liberal democracy. These are a moral judgement. And need to be. The issue isn't good and bad cultures per se, it's compatability and alignment (or lack of) of underlying values and principles that lead to groups norms, beliefs and behaviours.
A massive beartrap-topic in my country.
The honest position would be to say that both our European-ancestral cultures and African ones have objectionable and laudable strategies, traditions, and other organizing principles, but once one raises this point, the accusations of discrimination flow freely and histerically.
Thank you, Helen, for another good piece to consider and reflect upon. Nuanced discussions that foster perspective sharing in service of greater clarity and distinction making are as rare to find as they are difficult to sustain.
How can we encourage more critical thinking to better suss out the differences between concepts such as culture, class, caste, "race," ethnicity, nationality, all the ways humans tend to think in terms of Us and Them?
And then to recognize where some of those areas tend to overlap, or not, more than others?
And allow for the very real possibility that the person in front of us is still an Individual, and may or may not fit into any of the categories where individuals do have some choice-making abilities around which beliefs, practices, and values they want to live from and live out in their lives?
I recall that when I studied cultural anthropology in the Before Times decades ago, we learned to distinguish between the etic approach and the emic approach. Briefly, the etic is the perspective of the outsider and the emic the perspective of the insider. The etic is cross-cultural and scientific. The emic is monocultural and faith-based. In the final analysis, the etic supersedes the emic, but it would be a poor anthropologist who didn't treat the emic seriously and take it into account in her analysis.
New Zealand is a good example of the emic taking precedence over the etic in its attempt to merge mātauranga Māori with science. Anything in mātauranga Māori that is of enduring practical value must be subject to rigorous testing and be falsifiable. One cannot admit it into the body of reliable knowledge solely because the Maori believed it for hundreds of years.
P. S. IMO, everyone should take an anthropology course as part of a liberal education.
Indeed! I have been working closely with a case of precisely this. We should teach anthropology like this!
Very well stated.
You've articulated this distinction with crucial clarity. The conflation of 'critiquing cultural ideas' with 'racism against people' is exactly what paralyzes so much progressive discourse. As you note, feminists criticizing 'rape culture' within Western societies aren't called racist—they're called activists. The same logical framework should apply cross-culturally if principles are to be consistent.
Brava Helen 👏
These points and distinctions seem so obvious. Why would an intelligent person with classically "liberal" values (e.g. women's autonomy) suggest that cultures cannot be compared or evaluated along a spectrum of human-rights criteria? It's just obtuse, but why are very smart people being obtuse?
It must be nothing more than anti-West bigotry. We simply can't have it that culture of the West is "superior" in any moral sense to a non-Western culture. If that's the premise, then there's nothing more to say except to be obtuse. I guess this is how you get Queers for Palestine.
"It must be nothing more than anti-West bigotry."
I don't think it's that simple. In practice, if someone says that a culture associated with some ethnic minority is inferior, that someone often is using that statement as a thin veil for racist sentiment. People often express sentiments obliquely, using statements that, if taken purely literally, are reasonable but are meant to be understood in a "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" fashion.
Yes, some people make the sort of disingenuous high-minded statements that cover an ulterior motive. But it's completely dishonest, and a straw man tactic, to invalidate a high-minded claim on the presumption that it is disingenuous. Because it really may be high-minded. For example, a person could be anti-open borders on economic, cultural, or racist grounds. Dishonest pro-open borders people will presume that all anti-open borders people are racist, which means you just get to bypass the arguments you'd rather not have to respond to.
It may or may not be anti-western bigotry to claim that cultures cannot be qualitatively compared, but it is certainly dishonest. It's nothing more than a dodge around confronting a rational argument that you can't (or don't want to) contend with.
"But it's completely dishonest, and a straw man tactic, to invalidate a high-minded claim on the presumption that it is disingenuous."
True, but it's so annoyingly common that it makes your claim "It must be nothing more than anti-West bigotry" untrue.
Reminds me of this speech from Thomas Sowell: https://youtu.be/On2x5a5Y030?si=jmNa8Yb8rWcgRkNj
"(..) the historic sharing of cultural advances until they became the common inheritance of the human race implied much more than cultural diversity. It implied that some cultural features were not only different than others, but better than others. The fact that all people, whether European, Asian, African or other have repeatedly chosen to abandon some feature of their own culture in order to replace it with something from another culture implies that the replacement served their purposes more effectively(...)"
"(...)Cultural features do not exist merely as badges of identity, to which we have some emotional attachment. They exist to meet the necessities and forward the purposes of human life. When they are surpassed by features of other cultures, they tend to fall to the wayside, or survive only as curiosities like roman numeral today(..)"
There's probably like 10 more excerpts I could take from it but at that point it's just be pasting a transcript here.
And thats from the 90s. Similar ideas are found in his Migrations and Cultures and Conquests and Cultures books (and probably Race and Culture, but that one I have not read yet), but this speech really sums it up nicely.
It's crazy to me how long people have been trying to convince others and themselves of this nonsense.
Last night over dinner, I had a brief discussion with a friend about cultural assimilation in the context of immigration. My friend, an NA indigenous woman, expressed the view that cultural assimilation is a negative process leading to “loss of culture”. What my friend means by “culture” differs from Pluckrose’s meaning: “We have to understand culture as ideas, because that is what it is”. For my friend, culture is food, costume, music etc.; that is, cultural artefacts. But my friend also claims to believe in the creation myths of her indigenous culture. I am sceptical of this claim, but that’s another story. Here, it is relevant that my friend does not believe in most of the ideas traditionally held by her indigenous culture about, for example, women or slavery. Actually, I should say that my friend denies her indigenous culture ever held ideas which conflict with her assimilation of liberal democracy.
This kind of denialism in defence of cultures with abhorrent ideologies and, hence, abhorrent cultural practices is characteristic of woke leftists who need to see “BIPOC” cultures as universally innocent of any cultural blame in order to see them as universally culturally oppressed.
I agree with the main points in this article, but I want to push back on a few specific point:
1) I disagree that it is a bad thing to “conflate culture with… ethnicity. To use your example of Germany, German culture has changed between Nazi Germany and today, but I think it preposterous to claim that there is no German culture that is strongly tied to German ethnicity. In fact, I would argue that ethnicity is an inherently cultural concept.
Is there really no such thing as a German culture or an English culture or a Japanese culture?
2) I agree with you that certain cultures can be deemed superior to others, particularly when one focuses on one dimension, but this seems to fit very poorly with your argument in previous essays that government should not seek to shape culture (as the Right wants). I believed that you claimed that government and liberal institutions must be neutral and let the individual decide.
If a culture has certain weakpoints that undermine its own people, why would you not use the power of government and other institutions to improve or at least to protect it from getting worse?
This is particularly true for public education, where socialization plays a crucial role.
You claimed that liberal institutions and government must be neutral on these cultural issues, but also state that some cultures are inferior (and presumably must be changed).
That seems like a fundamental contradiction, particularly when previous generations of Liberals explicitly stated that a free society must have strong values or virtue (for example, the American Founding Fathers).
Why not just state that Liberalism flourishes in certain cultures and governments must nuture and protect that culture, particularly in public education.
Why must we be able to say that "culture A is superior to culture B" in this generalising form? Assuming you reach this judgement based on criteria X, Y, and Z, I might agree with the statement. But it still obscures the possibility of culture B being superior to A in other criteria V and W. Then we need to argue whether criteria X, Y, and Z are more important for evaluating "general superiority" than V and W. This could be a very interesting and enlightening argument.
However, I tend to be suspicious of a general statement if it does not include the criteria that are being used to judge. I question whether the person who makes the statement has reflected and evaluated all the criteria and omits them because they assume the listener uses the same criteria, or whether they haven't and might be using biased reasoning to come to their conclusion.
I question the need for general statements "culture A is superior than culture B" (just as much as I object to "person A is superior to person B"). To me they appear to be much closer to ascribing and inherent property of superiority, rather than a summarised judgements of some of the properties. Given certain historical precedents where ascriptions of inherent superiority have been used to justify inflicting vast amounts of harm to specific groups of people, I prefer statements that include the criteria on which any judgment of alleged superiority is based.
Our language allows us to say "I prefer culture A to culture B because of X, Y, and Z". I think this allows moral progress, because we can say "X is good, so B should have more of X."
Why do we need to say "A is superior to B", if not to obfuscate the criteria that are being applied?
Yes, that's a much more nuanced take and it is the one we should take when just comparing cultures as a whole in an abstract, intellectual way. But people are seldom doing that. They're usually speaking within a certain context. For example, I am currently joking about my cooking on Twitter and this is causing people to joke back about how inferior British cuisine is to almost every other culture on the planet. Alonso is speaking in the context of human rights though and this is where the political debate most commonly is situated. Some cultures really are better than others in supporting things like women's rights, gay rights, religious minority rights and this is something that needs considering when it comes to immigration if we wish to keep those rights.
And religions too, religions are ideas and can be ranked even if they are all false in their premise of believing in gods and whatnot.
I had a conversation at work with a friend who is certainly more left leaning probably progressive in some ways. We were talking about Iran, and I mentioned that British culture was better because of our freedoms we have and all the groups etc ... I also know that Iranian culture is very friendly and that their government does not reflect the people on the ground who do suffer from the regime. But many people support it also. He pointed out Britain and the West, more individualistic cultures had higher rates or mental health difficulties and as such was proof that although we have our freedoms. The people their are probably more happy. (I would argue that totalitarian regimes probably don't collect very sophisticated wellbeing data from the people they opress). I don't agree with the point but it made me think about separating top down bottom up culture. I wasn't demonizing Iranians my father in law is Iranian, my partner half Iranian in so many ways it is a beautiful culture and regimes like the Iranian government make me sad because it's such a waste of so much possibility for travel, tourism, cultural sharing business etc.... But I do not visit because I do not fancy being arrested for being a spy. (Although, one look at me and don't reckon they would get much for my bounty!).
How might you respond to such pushback Helen?
I am unconvinced by that. I suspect individualistic cultures have higher expectations of happiness and seek mental health support more. However, even if it is true, the beauty of a liberal society is that you don’t have to be individualistic. You can voluntarily join a religious or other community and hold yourself to its standards. You just don’t have to.