The superiority of Western culture can be objectively demonstrated when cultures are appraised based on the only befitting standard for judging a society or culture—the extent to which its core values are life affirming or antilife.

Relativism, the idea that truth is a historically conditioned notion that does not transcend cultural boundaries, has existed since the Greek era, some 2400 years ago. Relativism contends that all truth is relative except for the claim that “truth is relative.”

Cultural relativism wrongly claims that each culture has its own distinct but equally valid mode of perception, thought, and choice. Cultural relativism, the opposite of the idea that moral truth is universal and objective, contends there is no such thing as absolute right and wrong. There is only right and wrong as specified by the moral code of each society. Within a particular society, a standard of right and wrong can be inviolate. Cultural relativism maintains that man’s opinion within a given culture defines what is right and wrong.

Cultural relativism is the mistaken idea that there are no objective standards by which our society can be judged because each culture is entitled to its own beliefs and accepted practices. No one can object to any society’s intolerance that reflects its indigenous worldview. Because there is no objective moral truth that pertains to all people and for all times, one moral code is no better or no worse than any other (i.e., the moral equivalence doctrine). Thus, we should not impose our values on other societies. It follows that, according to cultural relativism, we cannot object to Hitler and Nazism, Mayan infant sacrifice, China’s massacre of students in Tiananmen Square, South Africa’s apartheid, genital mutilation (i.e., female circumcision) of young girls in Africa, and so on, because each of these practices is justified by the worldview within which it exists. Nor could we contend that one culture is superior to another culture. In addition, we would also be prevented from criticizing our own culture’s practices such as slavery. Further-more, within the perspective of cultural relativism, there would be no need for, or argument for, social progress. Toward what objective goal would we progress?

Multiculturalism, racism, postmodernism, deconstructionism, political correctness, and social engineering are among cultural relativism’s “intellectual” descendents. The remainder of the chapter addresses the philosophical underpinnings of these movements, analyzes each of them, and explains why Western culture is objectively superior to other cultures.

Philosophical Roots and Development of Cultural Relativism and Its Descendents

Relativism, the view that truth is different for each individual, social group, or historic period, had its beginnings during the ancient Greek period. However, it was David Hume (1711-1776) whose clear and rigorous formulation of this worldview made it an important idea in the Modern period. Hume argued for moral relativism because no one can know anything for certain. Consequently, a person is unable to pass judgment on alternative moral systems. Hume’s skepticism claims that neither reason nor the senses can supply reliable knowledge and that, consequently, man is a helpless being in an unintelligible universe.

Hume attempted to destroy the concept of causality in the objective world. He argued that because all of our knowledge comes from experience, we couldn’t have any knowledge of causality because we do not experience causality. According to Hume, what we refer to as causality is simply our habit of associating events because of experiencing them together, but this does not mean that the events have any necessary connection. Experiences of contiguity, priority, and constant conjunction do not imply a necessary connection between objects.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) agreed with Hume regarding the inability to see or prove causality in the objective (i.e., noumenal) world, but said that people will always experience the world in causal networks because causality is a feature of the subjective (i.e., phenomenal) world. Kant believed that men are cut off from the objective world and can never know the world in itself (i.e., as it is). However, the human mind has fundamental concepts, categories, or filters built into it through which man cognizes the world. Men structure the world that they experience so that it conforms to the human mind. Therefore, men never know things in themselves (i.e., as they really are) only as they appear given the method of man’s cognitive operations. Reality as perceived by man’s mind is distorted according to the nature of man’s conceptual faculty.

Man’s basic concepts (e.g., causality, time, space, entity, quality, quantity, etc.) do not stem from experience or reality but from an automatic system of concepts, categories, and filters in his consciousness which impose their own design on his perceptions of external reality and render him unable of perceiving it in any way other than the way in which he does perceive it.

Imagine that every human is born with red organic lenses in his eyes through which he sees the world. The world would appear red even though red is not a feature of the objective world in itself. Red is a feature of the subjective world. The functions of the mind’s filters are analogous to that of such lenses.

Kant said that we see the world in terms of entities because we have an entity category built into our minds. For that same reason, we experience the world in terms of a system of causal networks. We can’t know what is really out there in the objective world.

Kant’s epistemological dualism states that there is an object in itself and the same object as it appears to us (i.e., as filtered through our epistemological apparatus). Kant holds that the mind is concurrently both helpless and creatively powerful. It is helpless with respect to knowing the objective world but it is omnipotent regarding the social world (i.e., the world as created by the human mind). Reality becomes social because people create reality.

According to Kant, there is only one type of human mind that is universally the same (except for individual idiosyncrasies that occur because of our humanity and hence imperfection). Each person has the same categories and thus constructs the world in the same way. As members of the same species, we each have the same processing apparatus.

Kant contended that reality (as far as we can know it) depends on the cognitive functioning of the human mind in total. Society sets the norms of truth and falsity and right and wrong. This is the essence of Kant’s social primacy of consciousness theory in metaphysics. Man’s ideas are essentially a collective delusion from which no person has the power to escape. If a man sees things differently than the majority, then he must be mistaken due to some defect in his own information processing mechanism. Since and because of Kant, “objectivity” is generally thought to mean collective subjectivism. Truth, to the extent that it can be known in the phenomenal world, is to be determined by means of public polls.

Kant believed that man’s categories were unchangeable. Contrariwise, Hegel (1770-1831) argued that they evolve and change and that evolution is essential to understanding consciousness, history, and mankind. Marx (1818-1883) claimed that they changed differentially according to economic subgroups. This fragmentation or pluralization of Kant’s social subjectivism has ultimately developed to the point where today’s multiculturalists claim that groups create their own reality based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, etc.

Each multicultural subgroup has its own reality, its own logic, its own truth and falsity, and its own right and wrong. It is therefore impossible to discuss, argue, or judge any one group’s truth as better than any other. With no way to reason among the groups, the only alternatives are either isolationism or group warfare through which political power is used to slug out group differences.

Rousseau (1712-1778) held that reason had its opportunity but had failed, claiming that the act of reflection is contrary to nature. Rousseau asserts that man’s natural goodness has been depraved by the progress he has made and the knowledge he has acquired. He proceeded to attack the Age of Reason by emphasizing feeling, the opposite of reason, as the key to reality and the future. His thought thereby foreshadowed and gave impetus to the Romantic Movement.

Following Kant and Rousseau, the romanticists believed that reason is limited to the surface world of appearance, and that man’s true source of knowledge is feeling, intuition, passion, or faith. In their view, man is essentially an emotional being and therefore must seek the truth and act accordingly. The virtuous individual was a “man of feeling” who was sensitive to the plights of others and who spontaneously exhibited sympathy, pity, and benevolence to them.

Godwin (1756-1836) had a profound sense of egalitarianism. He believed that it was desirable and just for the output of society, to which all contribute, to be shared among all with some degree of equalization. He viewed the differences among individuals as being the product of different social circumstances, not in inherent differences in people’s abilities. Although he realized that some differences were the results of inheritance, he firmly believed that proper environmental structuring could overcome any inherent inequalities.

Nietzsche (1844-1900) contended that feeling and intuition are actually forms of reason and viewed the universe as a realm of colliding wills and violent conflict. He also held the view that a few superbeings (supermen or overmen) who were “beyond good and evil” had the right to rule the masses for their own higher purposes. These exceptional individuals, possessing the highest level of development of intellectual, physical, and emotional strength, would possess the courage to revalue all values and act with freedom to their internal Will to Power. As a result, the lowest levels of society would believe themselves to be exploited and oppressed and would experience a deep-rooted resentment. The result would be a negative psychic attitude, a will to the denial of life, and revenge in the form of translating the virtues of the superior into vices.

Kierkegaard (1813-1855) said that truth is subjectivity and that authentic existence is a matter of faith and commitment. In turn, Heidegger (1899-1976) maintained that (1) man is “thrown into the world”; (2) existence is unintelligible; (3) reason is invalid; (4) man is a creature in fear of the primary fact of his life—death; and (5) man is destined by his nature to “angst,” estrangement, and futility. Heidegger’s oftentimes-unintelligible writings can be described as the intellectual counterpart of modern art.

This brief review of philosophy has identified the roots of many of today’s prevalent concepts, including relativism, social subjectivism, collectivism, determinism, pluralism, economic egalitarianism, irrationalism, elitism, and the will to power, resentment, and historical victimization. These are the concepts that underlie, in varying proportions, the various intellectual descendents of cultural relativism.

Multiculturalism

The main idea of multiculturalism is the equal value of all cultures (i.e., cultural relativism). However, multiculturalism does not mean cultures as normally understood but rather as biologically defined (i.e., ethnically, racially, or sexually defined) groups. Multiculturalism, a politicized form of cultural relativism, rejects the idea that there are general truths, norms, or rules with respect to both knowledge and morals. Gone are the Enlightenment beliefs in objectivity, reason and evidence, and principles of freedom and justice that apply equally to all individuals. Unlike cultural relativism, multiculturalism excludes one worldview from the realm of equally valid worldviews—the Eurocentric Western perspective based on the contributions of dead white males. Multiculturalists dismiss the significance of Western civilization by claiming that Western traditions of elitism, racism, and sexism are the cause of most of our current problems. They accept a Romantic view of human nature as beneficent and benign until it was corrupted by flawed Western ideology and culture.

Multiculturalism implies that race, ethnicity, and sex (or sexual preference) have an inescapable effect on the way people think and/or the values they hold or are capable of holding. There are many closed systems of perception, thought, and feeling each affiliated with some biologically defined group. Rational dialogue among individuals from different groups is precluded because each group has its own “truth” and standards for its attainment. The multiculturalist maintains that each person is simply a representative of a particular biologically defined perspective who must agree with his own group’s worldview (unless he wants to be ostracized) and thus be unable to rationally discuss and meaningfully evaluate and critique ideas with representatives of other groups. Multiculturalism thus destroys an individual’s confidence in his own mind—this occurs when a person allows his group to tell him what to believe.

At one time, truth was viewed as transcendent, fixed, and unchanging. Epistemological egalitarianism has accompanied the loss of transcendence. Each group of persons now is thought to have an equal right to make truth claims. Think of the absurdity in which unreflected upon opinions are weighted equally with well-thought-out opinions in today’s numerous opinion polls that tend to be tabulated according to biologically defined categories. Truth is now thought to be a constructed cultural product that is immanent in each individual culture or subgroup. For the multiculturalist, truth only exists by consensus within each biologically defined group.

Multiculturalism is anti-individualistic in the sense that it expects each person to agree with the perceptions, thoughts, and judgments of his group in order for his own perceptions, thoughts, and judgments to be legitimate. The multiculturalist believes that a person’s thoughts are either the collectively constructed thoughts of his racial, ethnic, or sexual group or are the thoughts foisted upon him by the dominant white male worldview. A ruling premise of multiculturalism is that ethnic origin carries with it irrevocable attributes—if a person has a certain name and physical features, then he must have a particular perspective on life and the world. Multiculturalists assign each rational and autonomous individual into a group based on the group’s specific, absolute, and nondebatable dissemblances from other groups.

Multiculturalism attempts to replace individual rights with collectivism by assuming that a man’s identity and value are derived solely from biology, and that what is important is not what a person does as an individual, but rather what some members of his biological group currently do or did years ago. It follows that collective guilt replaces individual responsibility—a person must assume the responsibility for acts committed by his ancestors and pay for these acts ad infinitum.

The victim mentality is both a cause and effect of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism promotes a culture of victims who have a perpetual claim on society and the government. The result is the division of society into political interest groups with conflicting demands that cannot all be met.

Educational proposals from multiculturalists attempt to inculcate in students the idea that Western classical liberal order is, in fact, the most oppressive order of all times. As a result, people are taught to view themselves as victims. This perspective is based on the relativistic assumption that because all cultures are inherently equal, differences in wealth, power, and accomplishments between cultures are, for the most part, due to oppression. Thus, in order to establish cultural equality, multiculturalists emphasizing non-Western virtues and Western oppression dismiss the illiberal traditions of other cultures and attack the ideas of a common culture based on an intellectual, moral, and artistic legacy derived from the Greeks and the Bible.

There would be no harm in multiculturalism if the term simply meant that we should acknowledge and teach truths about many cultures. It is admirable to teach students both the noblest aspects of various cultures and of their failings. Unfortunately, multiculturalism’s pluralism and relativism has engendered a reluctance to acknowledge anything positive about Western culture while concurrently maintaining a nonreflective and approving position toward non-Western and minority ideas. Students are taught that no “properly educated” person would be willing to pass judgment on another culture. If a student should deny the equality of all cultures he would be told he was guilty of “ethnocentrism.”

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