RUBENSTEIN: Stockwell Day is correct to claim that ‘All cultures are not equal’

Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.Over 26 years ago, in an academic paper titled Sows' Ears and Silver Linings: A Backward Look at Ethnography, acclaimed cultural anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz wrote the following in what was then the world’s premier anthropology journal: “We anthropologists have a heritage of our own. Our predecessors not only told the world but also showed the world that all peoples are equal — equally human, equal in what they are, equal in what they have done for humankind. Nobody else at that time had said it and demonstrated it; anthropologists did. It does not befit us children of that enlightenment to turn our backs on the method that was used to make those ideas accessible to all of us” (Current Anthropology, Vol. 41, No. 2, April 2000, p. 189).Compare that to former Canadian Alliance leader and Conservative MP Stockwell Day’s recent claim that “All cultures are not equal.”Yes, Mintz was correct to assert that all peoples are equally human, a claim I’m sure Stockwell Day would also support, at least if “human” is defined in biological terms.But “equal in what they are?” What does that even mean? And “equal in what they have done for humankind?” Utter rubbish, as thousands of years of cultural evolution separating the West from the rest clearly reveals.I can hardly think of a more corrupt view of the traditional anthropological notion of “cultural relativism” — to fully and accurately capture the content and meaning of the lifeways of other peoples means describing and analyzing them from the internal cultural perspective of those who uphold and cherish these lifeways — than its debased transformation into moral and cultural equivalence, as this nonsense from the late Sidney Mintz shows..Traditional, pre-woke cultural relativism was born and most fully developed in my own discipline, cultural anthropology, in the early twentieth century, its most benign and fully objective form — one I always tried to practice — being trying to understand and describe alien lifeways from the viewpoint of its members, not an easy task, but not an impossible one, as countless descriptive studies called ethnographies have shown.This needs to be contrasted with totally outsider descriptions and explanations of the same cultural traditions and practices, which is no necessary contradiction of the insider perspective, even though it uses different investigative tools and has a different set of goals.The simplest example I can think of comes from Western culture: most ordinary “insiders” would classify tomatoes and cucumbers as vegetables, their best “objective” evidence being their placement in the vegetable section of all supermarkets, even though they are fruit from a botanical taxonomic — i.e., scientific — perspective. This is no contradiction: both are botanical fruit because they grow from a flower and hold seeds, but are nevertheless culinary vegetables because people cook with them in savoury meals.Neither classification can be called absolutely right or wrong, better or worse, because they are parts of different belief and knowledge systems rooted in different paradigms.Still, discovering both systems and their differences, and making sure not to conflate one with the other — a cardinal logical sin — is grounded in Western Enlightenment science, hence modernism’s overall superiority as a system of knowing compared to post- or pre-modernism. .Cultural relativism’s traditional meaning, stemming from the ethnographic work of Franz Boas, founder of American cultural anthropology, and elaborated on by the late Marvin Harris, who borrowed the linguistic distinction between phonetics and phonemics to do so, carried no moral implications, only Western scientific ones. But it slowly became politically corrupted and logically nonsensical over the decades, finally descending into today’s anti-scientific woke ideology.Leftist anthropologists like Sidney Mintz began throwing in the objective, scientific towel decades ago. Today, this disdain for the search for objective truth rooted in the scientific method has corrupted the entire edifice of higher education. This new distortion of cultural relativism and its transformation to moral relativism — now dominant in discussion of indigenous people across the world, but particularly in Canada — is an obscene debasement of the scientific search for verified truth.This is because moral relativism rejects or ignores objective truth, denigrates personal accomplishment, and debases common sense. That doctrine is now ascendant throughout the West.Can the distinction between scientific and anti- or unscientific ways of knowing ever be restored? With the West’s descent from the “live and let live” tolerant relativism of the 60s and 70s, through 80s-90s political correctness, to the zealous and even violent imposition of newly invented or foreign moral codes reinforced by the mandatory acceptance of wokeism, fighting back on this retreat from objectivity is an increasingly urgent one.At least that’s my take on Stockwell Day’s truthful claim that “All cultures are not equal.”Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

RUBENSTEIN: Stockwell Day is correct to claim that ‘All cultures are not equal’

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