Cultural relativism—the reluctance to champion one set of values as superior to others—is at the heart of most versions of multiculturalism, but it is itself a cultural value, and asserting cultural relativism is itself a form of cultural absolutism. I doubt that anyone who preaches cultural relativism seriously thinks it’s anything but backward to kill women for wearing makeup or men for not wearing beards. So if we hold values to be dear, and superior to their alternatives, why not state them and defend them?
I believe that my values are superior to other people’s, not because they happen to be mine, but because when I encounter a superior value, I adopt it, and when I discover a flaw in one of my values, I amend or discard it. As an avowed cultural absolutist, one of my dearest values is, perhaps ironically, a form of cultural relativism called free speech. The value of free speech asserts that all ideas are not equal, but all are protected from violence or governmental restrictions on liberty. The value of free speech says that almost all speech is protected from government censorship (the exceptions are well known and include shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater, truth in advertising, conspiracy, and few others), and that the best response to objectionable speech is more speech. Free speech finds itself defending objectionable speech because only objectionable speech needs defending. It’s a form of cultural relativism because the value of free speech fosters the evolution of values in the marketplace of ideas; it doesn’t presuppose which ideas are superior.
Most religions presuppose which ideas are superior, and Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have a history of killing people who express certain ideas. At the heart of Christianity is anger at the killing of someone for his ideas, but rather than learn from this that it is not a good idea to kill people for their ideas, Christianity spent many centuries operating as if the lesson was that the only problem with Christ’s crucifixion was that the wrong person was killed and the wrong kind of thoughts criminalized. Currently, there are some important Muslims who think that any depiction of Mohammed should be responded to by executing the people responsible for the depiction. No democracy can be established on such a premise, which is why the separation of church and state is so central to our way of life.
I don’t know whether our foreign policy should project more American strength or more American cooperation. Here’s what I learned from living through Vietnam: I don’t know what’s going on overseas, and neither do you, and neither does the State Department or the CIA. It takes an extreme commitment to critical thinking, self-examination, study of the human condition, and interrogation of my own perspective just to get an inkling of what’s going on in the room I’m in, so it’s no surprise that we don’t know what’s going on overseas.
But I do think that we can’t choose oppressors of ideologies, regardless of which ideology is oppressed, and expect democracy to be the result. The greatest threat to American democracy in my lifetime was indeed Communism, not because Communism had a real chance to take root in this country, but because the effort to rid the country of Communism almost took root, and that produced our closest brush with totalitarianism so far. I hope America stands up for free speech, and I am not much interested in risking American lives to protect people who are no more democratic than their oppressors. Whether that describes the body politic of any particular country, I don’t know, but it seems to me to be the crucial question.
Michael Karson, Ph.D. 
A very Libertarian argument here, Dr. Karson.
Reblogged this on Economy and State and commented:
“I believe that my values are superior to other people’s, not because they happen to be mine, but because when I encounter a superior value, I adopt it, and when I discover a flaw in one of my values, I amend or discard it.” -Michael Karson. Well said by my uncle.
The statement your nephew reposted above caught my eye when I first read it in the blog. How do you know when a value is superior? Don’t our prejudices make this difficult – not only to recognize a superior value, but to see flaws in our own values?
Yes, indeed. But a good start, I think you’d agree, is not to turn our values into laws of nature or their iconographies into sacred objects. The willingness to discard values is also, I think, a step in the right direction. Also, I think it’s important to articulate one’s values, to see what happens to them in the marketplace of ideas. Choosing venues to share them in can be a tricky problem, of course, but not insurmountable. And I think it helps to keep most values asterisked with the understanding that the asterisk means “pending further consideration.”