Why Did We Let Bush Try to Bring Wal-Mart to Iraq?

One of the insults you're sure to hear if you dare to suggest that we might not have the right to turn Iraq into Little America is "cultural relativist." It's a strange insult, because the people flinging it at you have absolutely no idea what it means. That's the point: "Cultural relativism" is a charge meant to dazzle the victim with its obscurity, like every 9-year-old's favorite word, "antidisestablishmentarianism." At my elementary school, that word was considered to have magical power because it was, supposedly, longer than any other word in the language.

But at least we 9-year-olds weren't lame enough to use it as an insult, or assume that it actually meant anything.

The right-wing regurgitators who spew out "cultural relativism" truly believe they're engaging in some pretty hardcore intellectual critique when they drop that multisyllabic bunker-buster on you. And how do they know this? Because a horde of 10th-rate intellectuals like New York Times columnist David Brooks and Newt Gingrich have said that that cultural relativism is the root of all left-wing evil. Gingrich has a soundbyte on the topic, often cited by rightwing bloggers: "Cultural relativism is like saying that going to McDonald's or boiling up your neighbor have equal merit as culturally driven ways of having lunch."

If Gingrich were a real intellectual, he might know that the true birth of cultural relativism was marked by Montaigne's essay "on Cannibals" in 1580. Montaigne, like all the smarter, braver Europeans of the time, tried to learn from the other cultures Europe was encountering around the world, rather than simply condemning them for all the ways in which they differed from Europe. He compared the cruelties of cannibal tribes with those of European "justice." His point was not that one culture was superior to the other, but that every human ever born finds it dangerously easy to revile the savagery of other tribes, but very difficult to see the brutalities of their homeland: "...while we quite rightly judge [the cannibals'] faults, we are blind to our own."

Of course Gingrich wouldn't know Michel de Montaigne from Joe Montana, so his comparison of cannibalism to eating at Mickey D's was pure dumb luck -- lucky for us, that is. Because in comparing cannibalism with eating at McDonald's -- clearcutter of rainforests, fattener-up of the poor and gullible -- Gingrich offers a perfect example of the bias Montaigne was trying to overcome: smugly certain of his own tribe's superiority, blind to its cruelties. Gingrich would never reflect on the fact that the New World cannibal tribes Montaigne discussed were among the first victims of the encounter with "the West." The Carib, most famous of these tribes, committed mass suicide rather than be enslaved by the European conquerors. It seems obvious that their brutality was more than matched by that of the Europeans. That, of course, is cultural relativism. It's also common sense.

Cultural relativism starts with a very simple, sensible premise: Every time and place is unique, and its standards can't be transposed to any other time and place without fudging the comparison. Cultural relativism is thus a form of intellectual rigor -- a very uncomfortable one, compared to the cozy simplicity of cheering for your tribe and sneering at all others. Whenever serious intellectuals apply cultural relativism to their studies, they face the wrath of tame pundits. Nietzsche, the greatest modern relativist, is still regularly slandered by tenured cowards for daring to treat philosophers' most cherished concepts as historical artifacts rather than timeless truths.

You'll note that so far I've cited a Frenchman and a German as examples of the intellectual courage it takes to face the scary fact of cultural relativism. Unfortunately, America got its tutors from Britain, whose intellectuals have always been much more timid and inclined to collaboration than those of continental Europe. After the French Revolution, Britain actively discouraged intellectual inquiry of all sorts that might have interfered with the mass production of the practical, unimaginative, cruel men needed to run the empire. Great minds in 19th century Britain went into the sciences, where a certain degree of intellectual freedom was tolerated. That's one of the major reasons that what passes for the American intelligensia has been so craven and tongue-tied in defending cultural relativism.