On Cultural Equality

     I have not been called a fascist in a while, so I decided to drop a few lines on the great multi-culturalism argument. So let's get on with it. Cultures, my friends, are not equal.

Let me start by dropping a few definitions. Culture, a group of humans with similar tastes, beliefs, language, et cetera, often distinguished by living in one place. Equal, not being better or worse than any other thing in the same category. Good, that which conforms with standards. Bad, that which does not conform with standards. Better and worse are terms used to compare the relationships between two objects and standards.

Now to jump to the meat of the argument. I'll assume whenever we compare cultures to decided whether or not they are equal, we are not talking sheer numbers. If we were, foolish that it would be, we would have to admit that all cultures are not equal. Modern Chinese culture would have us all whipped. Nor is it time frame or length of staying power. What we should mean when comparing cultures is the moral quotient, if there is such a thing. That is what I will attack with the rest of this piece, but I would like to point out that any one of those facts makes cultures unequal.

Now to define standards. I'll skip a lot of heavy duty philosophy to back up the standards I use for the sake of brevity. Two things that are good are freedom of action/decision/thought and the use of reason as the chief cognitive tool. There are other things that are good, but there are so many that an in depth study of them would take more than 700 words.

Now let us compare two cultures. For the sake of avoiding the easy term 'racist', I'll throw Modern American Culture against Fifth Century Goths, a tribe of Germanic people. Let us apply the standards.

1. Freedom of action/decision/thought.

In the fifth century, Germanic tribes kept slaves. We do not in modern America buy and sell people. We do not even allow employees to be beaten or killed with impunity. Score one for Modern American culture. In fact, early Germanic tribes bought and sold women, too. Maybe that's one more for Modern American culture. Women can vote in America. All American citizens, barring felons and other extremes, can vote if they want to. We're even free not to. Beats having a chief or a shaman leading us around. Well, not by much. Modern Americans just get to elect the elders of our tribe.

2. Use of reason.

Well, in Modern America we like our empirical evidence. None of shamanic visions. Well, not too much. We at least act more like we are trying to make sense of this world and not trying to create others to aspire to. Modern America scores one here. Not a big one, and not without reservations. A lot of people would eliminate the use of reason or subjugate it to other forms of cognition. Score one more for 'freedom of action'. Goths didn't have the choice.

     Now I know that these are only two factors that go into rating a culture, and I know I picked two that put Modern American culture in a good light. I didn't for example, pick something like 'Ability not to muck up the environment' and stuff like that. Goths didn't pollute too much, but they didn't have time to worry about it--they were too busy scrabbling for food. They didn't worry about the future, either--their language didn't even have a future tense.

     Now, before I finish, I am by no means saying that Gothic culture, since it is 'worse' than American culture, is bad. Only less good. Nor am I saying that Modern American culture is perfect, nor unflawed. Just, for this essay, that it is better, not equal to, Fifth Century Goths.

     To say that all cultures are equal is absurd. When all the standards for cultures are defined, it would require that all cultures come out with an even set of scores. Or, of course, the simpler elimination of any concept of good, but if there is no good, why worry about equality anyway? Certainly not because it is good....