The Myopia of Cultural Relativism*
Filip Mazurczak
When asked by an English reporter what he
thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi
reportedly quipped: “It would be a good idea.”
Scholars doubt that this exchange took place. However,
the popularity of the anecdote shows how widespread
hatred of our civilization has become, including among
our own culturally relativistic elites. Their self-loathing
is frequently coupled with a glorification of the Far
East and apologetics for Islam.
In actuality, the West created the greatest
civilization in world history, and it was only until after
the Enlightenment that its decline began. A comparison
with Oriental and Muslim societies reveals that it was
only in the West where freedom, beauty, and the search
for truth could flourish.
For cultural relativists, 1789 serves as the
demarcation line between barbarism and progress.
In their misguided view, the West before the French
Revolution was a dim, ignorant, superstitious place.
True enlightenment only existed in India. The
Romans and Greeks were cruel, the Church Fathers
were misogynists, and the Middle Ages—the ‘Dark’
Ages—were an unredeemable embarrassment. The
Renaissance was temporarily treated somewhat
better, as it was incorrectly viewed as a turn towards
secularization, but now it is more frequently presented
as the age of corrupt Borgia popes and the time of the
first encounter of Europeans with the rest of the world,
a prelude to the latter’s oppression. It was only thanks
to the Enlightenment and French Revolution that
the West ‘discovered’ ideals such as liberty, equality,
and brotherhood, which finally led to ‘progress’, the
abolition of monarchy, secularization, and notions
of equality that have recently led to the apex of
human achievement: the legalization of abortion and
homosexual ‘marriages’.
Of course, the above description of the antiWestern
historical narrative is somewhat of a caricature.
However, this construct is more or less what most
students in the West are taught about their civilization.
They are indoctrinated to hate tradition, religion, and
order, instead idealizing progress and emancipation
and turning towards the East for guidance.
These self-hating Westerners are right about
one thing: 1789 indeed was a watershed moment in
Western history, insofar as the French Revolution
created the world’s first totalitarian regime. Russian
philosopher Vladimir Solovyov wrote that the
difference between Christ and Marx is that the former
asked his disciples to give their own goods to the poor,
while the latter asked his followers to take others’ by
force and redistribute them equally. The same applied
to the French Revolution, which attempted to enforce
liberty, equality, and brotherhood by the guillotine.
It was the period before the French
Enlightenment that allowed the West to flourish. The
interaction of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem created a
civilization based on the quest for truth, beauty, actual
equality, freedom, and rationality. The ancient Greek
philosophers taught us how to search for truth, while
the Romans gave us the basis for modern law and,
applying reason, constructed cities, roads, and works
of architecture. The greatest philosophical revolution
in the West, however, occurred after the Edict of Milan
in 313.
It was Christians who built the first hospitals
and poorhouses, founded the oldest universities, and
created masterpieces of art. Above all, Judeo-Christian
values made Western man see his neighbour as an
equal—because, to quote St. Paul, “there is neither
Greek nor Jew”.
The French Revolution, and the French
Enlightenment that preceded it, represents a
hermeneutic rupture with the past, a point when
Western thinkers detached themselves from Roman
law, the West’s Judeo-Christian heritage, tradition,
and the search for truth. In the 19th century, Comte
replaced God with the cult of reason; Marx created the
blueprint for what was to be a society without inequality
(violently imposed, of course); Nietzsche convinced us
that some are weak and therefore a burden to society;
and Bentham rejected the notion that all men are
endowed with equal dignity as “nonsense on stilts”.
What followed was a series of true disasters: genocides,
wars, concentration camps, and the Gulag.
The main intellectual influencers of today’s West
are the ideological descendants of Comte, Nietzsche,
Bentham, and Marx—people such as Michel Foucault,
Slavoj Žižek (who has written a panegyric about mass
murderer Lenin), and Judith Butler. They postulate a
world in which everything is relative, simultaneously
elevating the homosexual agenda and abortion to
religious dogma. Today’s post-modernists strictly reject
the search for objective truth, especially if it does not
fit their ideological agenda.
For example, despite the fact that all scientific
evidence shows that unborn children are, indeed,
humans capable of feeling pain, that differences
between the sexes are real, and that a child needs strong
male and female role models for stable development,
today’s ideologues champion the homosexual agenda
and permissive abortion laws. They want to interfere
directly in the democratic right to free worship. (In
recent months in the United States, legislation intended
to protect religious liberty in Indiana was lambasted
by intellectual and political elites, while presidential
candidate Hilary Clinton has said that Christianity must
change its teaching on abortion.) In fact, many of these
people no longer hide that they want to destroy the
traditional family—an outcome that Marx and Engels
prescribed in the Communist Manifesto.
Meanwhile, the West has settled for mediocrity,
even ugliness. It is difficult to read Petrarch or marvel at the perfection of Michelangelo’s sculptures without
feeling awe and pride to be the recipient of such a rich
inheritance. Today’s mass culture, however, strives
for vulgarity. When Spanish philosopher José Ortega
y Gasset wrote The Dehumanization of Art in 1925,
he could hardly have predicted that in 1999 New
York’s intellectual elites would venerate, as a symbol
of religious freedom, a painting of the Virgin Mary
covered with photographs of female genitalia from
pornographic magazines and elephant feces.
As mentioned before, the anti-Western
school has instead turned to the Far East, especially
India, for inspiration. While India is a top emerging
economy, its culture makes huge inequalities unlikely
to disappear no matter how robust its GDP growth.
Whereas Christianity teaches that there is “neither
Greek nor Jew”, Hinduism retains a caste system that
consigns millions to destitution and neglect because
of the families into which they were born. The abuse
of women is commonplace in India and widows,
considered “inauspicious”, are ostracized by their
families and villages.
It is traditional Western values—the very ones
that young people are taught to hold in contempt by
academia, the Guardian, and New York Times—that
represent the only hope for the millions of hapless
Indians suffering because of such (anti-progressive)
cultural shackles. Missionaries from Europe and the
Americas (Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity are
the best-known example) continue to rescue countless
Indians from filth, neglect and starvation. The Catholic
Church in India also is a great advocate of widows’
rights. These moves are not motivated by proselytism:
The faithful serve persons of all creeds, and although the
Catholic Church is the largest charitable organization in
India, only about 2% of the population are Christian.
Further double standards abound—courtesy of
the proponents of moral equivalence, no less. Western
newspapers revel in stories of sexual misconduct by a
tiny minority of Catholic priests, despite the Vatican’s
adoption of a strict line against deviant clergymen. In
contrast, the late Indian Sathya Sai Baba—a cult leader
who claimed to be a deity and to possess miraculous
powers (such as making Rolex watches ‘materialize’,
a trick debunked by illusionists)—was accused of
molesting dozens of underage boys from various
continents. Indian courts refused to investigate,
because as a ‘holy man’ he enjoyed impunity. Such
license strongly contrasts with the Roman concept of
equality before the law and the separation between Church and state dating back to Pope Gregory VII.
Today’s cultural relativists have a similarly bizarre
approach to the Muslim world, embracing Islam and
rejecting Christianity. A peculiar symptom of this
inversion is that in 2007, Columbia University invited
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak, while one year later
Sapienza University of Rome cancelled a planned
lecture by Pope Benedict XVI to appease anti-clerical
professors. The new dogma may be summarized by
Barack Obama’s disdainful comments (putatively
made in regard to the threat of ISIS) at his 2015 prayer
breakfast: “Unless we get on our high horse and
think this is unique to some other place, remember
that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people
committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.”
Certainly, Christians have committed crimes
towards others. However, this fact comes with two
important qualifiers that do not attach to all other
religions. First, the right to kill innocents was never a
part of Christianity, which has always preached love
of one’s neighbour and forgiveness. Misdeeds by
Christians resulted not out of the theology, but simply
from the wretchedness of individuals. This is not the
case in “the religion of peace”.
Egyptian Jesuit Samir Khalil Samir has noted
that Islam is based on three inequalities: between man
and woman, freeman and slave, and Muslim and nonbeliever.
When during a 2006 lecture in Regensburg
Pope Benedict XVI quoted a Byzantine emperor who
said that Islam is incompatible with reason, Muslims
killed an Italian nun, a missionary in Somalia, in
response. Conversely, when Christians are constantly
insulted on Western late-night television, they turn the
other cheek.
Second, Christians—with extremely rare
exceptions that are inevitable since their numbers
exceed two billion—no longer commit violence in
the name of their faith. Many Muslims, however, do.
This distinction is not because more Christians live
in developed countries and, as prevailing opinion
holds, economic progress makes people less savage.
Saudi Arabia, home to the two holiest cities in Islam,
is a wealthy country that espouses Wahhabism, a
particularly radical form of Islam, which crucifies
apostates and subjects women to genital mutilation.
Yet it typically receives a pass from the Left.
It is indisputable that since 1789, and especially
in recent decades, the West has been in a state of
decay. If it ever wants to regain its former stature,
it must embrace the fact that it was once great and
acknowledge the unique source of its strength. This
revival can only happen if a fundamental change is
made in how history is taught in the West—and if
an honest look—unhampered by cultural relativism
or political correctness—is taken at the differences
between cultures.
______________________
*Filip Mazurczak is a translator and journalist whose work has
appeared in the National Catholic Register, First Things,
The Catholic Thing, and other publications.
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