The English edition of Der Spiegel online has an impassioned, eloquent and moving response to the UNICEF photo of the eleven-year-old Afghan child bride.
I loved this essay agree with it wholeheartedly. "Love, tenderness, beauty, individuality and respect...human rights" must be fought for. Anywhere we see a human being's future or dreams being truncated, we should intervene--sensitively and respectfully, but definitely. Because, as Johann Hari put it in this excellent column, these are *not* "western" values. They are *human* values. They occur spontaneously in human hearts everywhere, no matter the culture. They have always been there, at war with our more brutal side. They are as human as our inhumanity. They are native to every land. Whatever, wherever and whenever, I'm on their side and I want them to win.
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But this essay, which I love, mischaracterizes--even as it embodies--cultural relativism.
Cultural relativism does *not* mean--or it's not supposed to mean--that you "approve" of everything. What it means is that you try to understand *why* things are the way they are in a given culture. Instead of *just* being outraged, you stop and think.
Leon de Winter does exactly that. He understands the child-bride system perfectly well, and he concedes implicitly that, if he were in the same circumstances, he'd probably do the same thing. ("The man in the image is oblivious of his wrongdoing. He's only doing what his forefathers did. Sticking to traditions increases the chances of survival.")
*That* is relativism: *understanding.* Not condoning.
For example. Boy, this is going to be touchy. Please understand that I mean no disrespect, I'm not judging anyone's choices, and I'm *not* trying to make an equivalency between the two practices. To the contrary, I'm deliberately going to pick a practice that we in our culture find totally normal and benign and even necessary.
So.
A case can be made that the common practice of putting young children in day care is cruel.
Very often, young children--toddlers in particular--are deeply distressed to have to separate from their parents day after day. In fact, mothers and fathers are often very unhappy about this too. Scenes of tears on both sides are common at day care centers.
An outsider who sees this level of unhappiness day after day could very much be forgiven for concluding that we are a culture of barbarians.
They could look upon our many justifications of the practice as nothing more than shockingly callous rationalizations. ("After a few minutes, your child will get distracted and stop crying, so no worries!!" "There's no proof that it damages kids in the long term!!")
But if they threw that in our faces, we would say "Wait a minute! You don't understand the situation! It's more complicated than that, and besides, there *is* no proof that it damages kids in the long term!"
But. Nobody denies that, very often, a lot of unhappiness surrounds this practice.
We are willing to ignore that unhappiness because we feel it serves a more important purpose--earning money, self-actualization, whatever.
And most importantly: nobody, but nobody, sees it as an oppression issue. We concede that children forced to separate from their parents against their will can be unhappy, that they can experience "separation anxiety," but nobody sees it as a violation of their rights or spirit or humanity or will. That kind of language just doesn't get used. No, you see, it would have to be something *serious* to count as that, not just forcing them to part from their mothers yet again despite them pleading not to.
I think you see my point.
Our culture forces kids to do things that make them (sometimes really, really) unhappy too. Not things that are quite as drastic as getting married at eleven...but to a screaming two-year-old trying to cling to his mommy as she pries him off her to go to work, you better believe it *feels* that drastic. I mean, why the hell do you think the kid is screaming? Some random reflex? No, the kid's *heart is breaking.* As far as it's concerned, with its extremely limited cognition, its world is collapsing in that moment.
And hey, how about this? I ran across this during some routine work-avoidance a few days ago and my jaw fell open in horror--not because it was so unusual, but because it was exactly the opposite. It's a story about the bullying that Victoria Beckham (Posh Spice) endured at school. "'People would push me around, say they were going to beat me up after school, chase me.'"
Yet she had to go back, day after day. And just live with it.
We do not question the mandate that all kids must go to school. When some of them experience that level of abuse, we just sort of say "Oh, that's too bad." Noises are made, but nothing really changes, and nobody questions the system. It would not occur to anyone to suggest that Victoria Beckham was really, truly being damaged by this. Made *unhappy,* sure. But damaged? Her integrity violated? To the point where someone should have taken her out of school? To the point where someone should have *closed the school entirely and all others like it,* given that it fostered such brutality? Um, no. Nobody would ever suggest *that* as a solution. It's impossible to even conceive of.
But someone from a different world would suggest *exactly* that. It's the most logical thing to suggest. If this system of mass education produces large numbers of routine sufferers like Victoria Beckham--and indeed it does--then away with it!
At which point all our minds melt down, because if we didn't have this system, what *would* we have? What would we be? How would we adjust, how would we live? If you pull that one thread, the entire thing starts to unravel, taking everything down with it and causing a huge mess.
Do you see the point of relativism now?
And do you see how blind we are to our own forms of barbarism? Don't get me wrong, I'll take our forms over the forms you see in Afghanistan any day. But we are, in many ways, a staggeringly brutal culture. Our own yearning after beauty proves it. We wouldn't love it so urgently if it wasn't so imperiled in our own world.
Take Beckham's childhood suffering again. How can "love, tenderness, beauty, individuality and respect" exist in such a life as anything other than a sad little dream? It can't. We have to acknowledge that such a childhood would have been every bit as bleak as that Afghan child bride's.
We believe that it was redeemed because she got to grow up to be Posh Spice. In spite of everything, she got to choose what to do with her life, and in her case, her choices appear to have worked out pretty well. That, in our culture, fixes everything.
And again, I do agree that it's far better than the alternative--a bleak existence where you do *not* get to choose to be Posh Spice.
Humanity has won some significant victories in our world and these need to be protected and shared.
But humanity, in our world, also has a ways to go. Working out how to get there without causing other groups (like mothers) to suffer and lose is our challenge.
Hey. If we'd thought about that thirty years ago, instead of being so eager to give the Soviets a Vietnam in Afghanistan, maybe that eleven-year-old would be in school today.
And maybe her daughter, born twenty years from now after her mother would have been solidly educated and established in a career, could have experienced the *solution* to school--the next, more humane evolution.
Too bad, isn't it.
