I remember a conversation I had with a girlfriend while I was in college. I was trying to describe cultural relativism to her as a basis for tolerance of different cultures. Her slamming her fist on the little cafe table was a clear indication of what she thought about that particular perspective. I tried in that moment to soften the conversation by saying I don't necessarily believe cultural relativism is the way to go, but I did see the merit in it if you're going to accept that you must tolerate the practices of cultures that have no relevance to our own.
To bring others into the fold since I'm sure moral theory isn't something many people think about, cultural relativism is the idea that the cultures of the world all have vastly different origins and paths toward modernity. To accept this point you couldn't possibly impose your cultural values onto another culture because you'd be negating their entire cultural evolution. You'd be stripping them of their identity and telling them to do something they could potentially be very uncomfortable with. This generally makes sense, except when you bring cultural traditions into play which directly harm people. The theory of cultural relativism basically endorses practices like genital mutilation, abuse of women, executions for myriad small offenses, sexual repression, even genocide by saying we just don't understand the context of those practices. This is the point my girlfriend at the time was so disgusted with.
As I've grown and watched cultures around the world tear themselves apart time and again, I think I've reached a point where it's just not suitable to exist behind a veil of universal tolerance. My current perspective is pretty much summed up by the want for universal well-being. I think that's a very easy thing to wrap one's head around. People shouldn't harm each other. But harming each other is a current cultural norm and to explain why I'm going to attempt to describe a brief history of humanity in simple terms and show how we arrived where we are which is quite simply an environment that openly accepts harm as a norm. Then I'll offer an alternative way of being. And I'll say up front that the alternative is going to happen. It's going to take a few generations, but as long as nothing catastrophic happens to earth and globalization continues, there isn't any doubt in my mind that it'll happen.
When we were just starting out as humans it was a tough life. We couldn't explain anything about our existence because we were limited to the tools given to us by our biology. We had eyes, and ears, and a tongue, nose, and could feel things. That allows us to keep ourselves alive and proliferate as a species, but that skill set is very limited when you ask questions like, "What is that big yellow ball in the sky that lights up the village in the morning?" and, "What happens when we die?" Questions were asked and people worried and then something interesting happened in primitive human cultures. Some people from the villages figured out that if you act like you know the reason for something intrinsically mysterious other people will be curious to know about it. They might even worship you for it because obviously you were given a skill set that fully outweighs their own. Enter religion: a few people who thought they knew better than everyone else, people who may have even fooled themselves into really believing the underpinnings of their ridiculous fabrications because they may have had very believable dreams or succumbed to very vivid hallucinations.
Now along with all the various explanations for the questions of the environment, religion also explained what you should do in order to be a good person. Keep in mind that before these rules of morality were being engineered people existed for a long time without killing each other off, which means without the religious framework of morality, it wasn't complete chaos. People lived together without constantly killing each other, territorial disputes aside. But to modernize, culture needed more rules involving limitations on ownership to prevent stealing, limitations on sexuality to prevent disease and coveting, even limitations on what you could eat because in those times certain food was much more dangerous than it is now.
So people had it made. We knew how to be good and we knew how the universe worked. All our concerns were covered, which gave us the freedom to be productive, to build families, to give back to society. This contentment only existed within the confines of the various religions that had taken hold though. The conflict between religions was extremely volatile. The reason is obvious. If someone says your entire perspective of the universe is wrong, and you've been living a lie, and you might very well go to a place of eternal hell fire for eternity because of it, you might get a little touchy.
As time went on, a select few people in each civilization started to write things down. And with a few generations information started piling up. People from younger generations were given knowledge from older generations and it resulted in individual people coming up with really big, ambitious ideas because they didn't need to start from scratch with each new thought. Enter science.
At this point the religions of the world got a little worried. People like Newton and Galileo and eventually Darwin explained the universe in terms that contradicted the explanations of the original people that said they already knew everything. Religious leaders took a few different approaches to this problem. They killed really smart people, they said, "Why ask these questions, GOD doesn't want you to," they said, "Wait, wait, maybe some of this stuff you're saying is right, but your observations still don't conflict with anything you need faith to believe in, like how to get into heaven, BOOM! gotcha." The idea of non-overlapping magisteria is born.
This pretty much leads up to today, depressingly. When people talk about morality, they generally say that religion has it covered because good and evil can't be scientifically derived. Why should we help each other? Why should we protect each other? Why should we try to contain our basest of impulses? The religious answer is if we follow the rules we'll be rewarded in some arbitrary afterlife. There is still no formal science of morality. With all of our historians, anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, we still haven't agreed on what moral guidelines drive society forward.
But, there's an easy answer to the question of how to move forward: universal well-being. If you enter a conflict with the objective want of not harming anyone, it's likely you won't hurt anyone. If you set aside your pride and look at every interaction as an opportunity to learn, then there's no reason to even fight. If you understand how your country came to be in the first place and that every other country has an equally rich and interesting history, why fight about it? And if we know objectively that women are just as strong and intelligent as men, why mess with them so damn much? The only remaining hurdle in shifting the backbone of morality from religion to common sense is making objective information universally available.
This is why I say the eventual solution is inevitable. As soon as people are capable of reading whatever book they want, or going to whatever website they want, they'll stop looking to local pride in their religion and familial tradition for answers. Keep in mind, I'm not talking about an individual. Individuals are remarkably stubborn when it comes to existentialism. To change someone's mind about their existence after their 20's is extremely difficult. But, as generations pass, as groups of people are gradually alienated by objective information, the problem will fix itself. So, our responsibility is to help the technological infrastructure grow as much as we can. Open the pipelines and let the people drink up the observations of scientists using tools infinitely more effective than our senses. Spread objective information. And I say that while giving the middle finger to the myriad philosophers who say there is no such thing as objectivity. Fuck you guys. You're making it hard for people to tell which way is up.
