Grounding Cultural Relativism (Social THOUGHT & Commentary) (Viewpoint Essay‪)‬

Cultural relativism, or at least the idea of cultural relativism, is in trouble. Not only is it the case, as Robert Ulin suggests in an adjacent article in this collection, that "cultural relativism is among the most misunderstood yet publicly important concepts associated with twentieth century anthropology that endures today." It is also one of the most passionately contested notions in all of contemporary intellectual life. Pregnant with real-world political implications from the start, cultural relativism by now inspires critics from all points along the political spectrum. After having long been regarded by Western traditionalists as a gateway to and icon of moral degeneration, criticized by philosophers as a negation of the idea of universal truth in ethics, (1) and denounced as evil by clergy--most notably by Joseph Ratzinger, whose pontifications on the subject now carry the weight of his recent ascendancy to the papacy (2)--cultural relativism is increasingly under fire from human rights activists, socialists, communists, and left-leaning thinkers the world over. In fact, the situation is so bad that Maryam Namazie, public intellectual and Director of the Worker Communist Party of Iran has, for instance, taken to calling cultural relativism "this era's fascism" and is demanding that it be consigned to "the garbage cans of history" (1998:1), while in February 2006, a group of twelve internationally prominent intellectuals, with deep ties to the Islamic World, among them Salmon Rushdie, brought forth a manifesto denouncing cultural relativism as an anti-democratic doctrine that facilitates what they call "the new totalitarianism-Islamism." (3) How ironic.