I realize I have been neglecting this blog somewhat, but fortunately that does not mean that I've not been opining elsewhere. The following - which will apply to most, if not all, of the posts I will be making over the next few days - comes from a discussion in which I was engaged some time back.
I heard an anthropologist talk about an island tribe that practices ritual homosexuality and pedophilia. The superstition goes that semen = life force, and that for a male child to have enough life force to assure the continuation of the species/race/tribe/whatever that he must ingest semen from the older tribe members. This ritual fellation begins at a surprisingly early age and continues for an extensive period of time until the child is deemed to have absorbed enough life force to marry.
The men jealously guard their semen to such an extent that a husband and wife only cohabitate during a specific part of the year, during which conception is attempted. Women are viewed simply as factories for the production of children and recreational sex - and especially non-procreative sex - is not only frowned upon, but feared. During the remainder of the year, the men live together in communal barracks, segregated from the women as much as is possible.
This anthropologist presented this little tale as an illustration in favor of cultural relativism. The argument was something to the effect that This Tribe has managed to do well enough for itself and does not seem to suffer for its behaviors, which to outsiders seem (to put it perhaps TOO mildly) bizarre.
But the argument, like most of cultural relativism, only stands up in a vacuum. Has the tribe indeed done well for itself? I contend that they obviously have not. They are a stone age culture, speaking a language only they speak, perpetuating a culture that has, in fact, failed to thrive. They have no wealth, no art, and no science. Their only technology is the same technology that every people on the world has managed to develop: means to shelter themselves from the elements, and a means to procure food.
A modern look at their practice shows them to be abhorrent, because our understanding of psychology - a science, by the way, which is advanced literally thousands of years beyond their ken - reveals to us the undeniable and irreversible damage that these people do to their progeny as a matter of course. And it shows in their society: they are a culture of pederasts, fearful and distrustful of the women whom they depend on in order to perpetuate themselves and who must nurture them through those early years before they go off to the abuses of the men's barracks. This is a culture that has managed to survive not for any virtue of its own, but in spite of itself.
This culture (whose name, I'm afraid, escapes me) is not the only one of its kind, though its practices are definitely the strangest and most extreme I've yet heard of. It is tales of peoples like this, who never advanced enough in some cases to even discover fire or writing, that cured me of any Cultural Relativism. We cannot judge people in a vacuum, especially in an increasingly interconnected world. A people is only as good as its contributions to our overall advancement, and a people that never strives, that lurks in prehistoric superstition and rites must be brought forward or left behind in the dusty annals of history.
To listen to Relativists is to risk damning ourselves to the same stagnant fate.
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