By virtue of a science experiment gone wrong, you are transported to Britain in the late 19th century. Her Majesty, the Queen of England and Empress of India, has recently transferred you to the subcontinent. During your third day as governor, a married man dies near your place of residence. The tradition of the natives is to burn the living widow of the husband on his funeral pyre. If you had been that British regent in India, would you permit the natives to burn the widow of a man who had just died at the funeral?
Did you cringe at the suggestion that those natives -- in that day you would have called them heathens or savages, but any term will do for now -- would burn the widow? Then your first reaction would probably be to stop them from such a barbarous practice and permit the widow to live. However, because your were educated at a prestigious school and you were on the proverbial front lines screeching (in meter), "Difference, Difference is what counts! Diversity, diversity, is what its all about!" your conscience whispers to you that it would be arrogant for you to "impose" your values on everyone else. What will you do?
Let us suppose that you stop the pagan sacrifice in the name of human rights. You reason that everyone has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. You assume that this society was probably a patriarchal one in which women were oppressed; they do not burn widowers under similar condition. You reason that the classically liberal self-evident truths: autonomy, freedom, self-determination and non-discrimination between the sexes should apply to this woman. You wave your hand and the troops (under your command) liberate the woman, by any means necessary, from the clutches of the frenzied mobs of men.
Let us suppose that you choose the other path, which would have led to the sacrifice of a human being. You choose that path because back in Britain, you attend sermons where the (insert religious leader here; doesn't matter as long as it's on the "liberal" side of the faith) told you that the way to peace was through social justice and "tolerance for all peoples." Every sermon you heard, "Truth is neither fixed nor final. All religious, faiths, values, and cultures are valid. To judge them is the height of arrogance."
You feel guilty for having ever conceived that your values, which of course are solely the products of the your culture, are in any way universal. Moreover, since you know that your (Western) culture is in no way superior to this widow-burning culture, you permit them to murder that poor woman who enters the afterlife smelling the stench of her own flesh burning. Nevertheless, you feel better for having not imposed your values on anyone else and turn to finish reading your copy of Said's "Oreintalism" (from the future), which has replaced your Bible since you became enlightened.
By working through this scenario, we observe that there are two contradictory understandings of the good here: respect for our common humanity versus respect for our different cultures. Both understandings agree that the interests of health and preservation are what we all have in common.
However, it is the weight to which they ascribe socially constructed classifications that differ. For the human rights advocate, there is a common humanity and the liberal order of individual rights is what matters. To the cultural relativists, or the multiculturalists if you prefer, being French, Indian or black is more important than a nation of common humanity because these separate cultures give men their depth and must be respected. One is cosmopolitan and universalistic and calls attention to similarities; the other is particularistic and celebrates difference.
Both principles cannot be embraced without contradiction. One cannot criticize the United States or a political position for being culturally indifferent, upholding "hegemonic paradigms" or displaying the "arrogance" of "imperialism" and simplicity and then criticize the United States for not upholding "human rights" or the "rights of women everywhere." They principally differ in their view of culture. For the human rights advocates, culture is a non-factor in calculations about rights; for the multiculturalist, culture or common experiences factor heavily in thinking on rights. The belief in the ubiquity and divisiveness of culture began as an alternative to the crusading spirit of the Enlightenment.
Furthermore, the culture alternative was an attempt to recapture the old attachments of family, God and country in a world of growing individualism, indifference and solitude. This attempt to temper the corrosive effects of individualism with the paper-mache props of "culture" ignores that particularism, group rights and other collective identifiers are locked in a battle to the death with liberal society and our American constitutional order, which emphasizes the individual.
This idea of culture and its corollary of the new "ethnicities" that are being discovered every day in our diversity-awareness programs is a superficial reaction that borrows its fuel from the original anti-Enlightenment movement to the problems of community in the late modernity of a Western post-industrial society. It is superficial precisely because differences, for which we once were willing to die and fight for, are not based on phenotypes, dress or food, but on differences in beliefs about the nature of good, evil and God. Notions of ethnic solidarity, displays of ethnic dresses and foods are insipid, pathetic attempts to latch on to our fleeting beliefs and souls.
