Addressing a class during my third week in Kenya, I inquired: “How do you know you’re right, Sophia? Feminists who come to Kenya to empower local women are no worse than international missionaries who labor to spread the gospel.”
Sophia, an American activist who supports, among other causes, the anti-free trade movement, responded harshly. She criticized me for a lack of sympathy towards East African females who function as near-slaves in male-dominated households. Further, she attempted to distinguish her own opinion from that of religious enthusiasts.
How, I never understood. To me, both religious and non-religious Western advocates hold the same basic presumption: African society is inferior to our own. We, as enlightened human beings, have an obligation to educate Kenya’s citizens. Both are guilty of moral imperialism.
But now I know it nearly doesn’t matter. Inevitably, comparatively wealthy Americans, Europeans, and Asians will come to East Africa to promote their ideals. Somebody is going to tell my friends in Meru, Nairobi, and Lamu (to name but a few Kenyan cities) something. If people like Sophia, well-intentioned individuals who I now happen to agree with regarding the plight of women, are not spreading their beliefs, others will disseminate much less helpful ideas.
Ultimately, I’ve come to believe that “cultural relativism,” a theory that conceptions of truth and moral values are not absolute but must be qualified to suit particular peoples and places, is, more often that not, relatively damaging.
This is not to suggest that we, as the West, or I, as Yoni Cohen, are always right. Nor that we always understand the historical context, local meaning, productive justification, or religious inclination towards a particular cultural practice. Because activists and missionaries alike too often assume that Western society holds the answers, they often worsen the lives of those they are trying to help. To illustrate one of our many errors, let me recall personal experience.
Last semester, along with several other Washington University students studying-abroad, I spent two weeks with the Samburu, semi-nomadic pastoralists who herd cows and goats for a living. However, rather than consume animal meat, the Samburu consume animal products.
Their diet consists almost exclusively of milk and yogurt. Over the past half-century, well-meaning anthropologists, economists, and diplomatic advisors from the West have suggested they shift towards consuming meat rather than milk. The results have not been positive. Not only did few Samburu attempt the change, but those that did found the climate too dry and the land not fertile enough to accommodate the number of livestock necessary for a healthy meat diet.
I am, however, arguing that as both as individuals and as a community, we hold certain views of what is right and what is wrong, what is just and what is unfair or unequal. Our responsibility-in and out of class-is neither to temper nor to fail to act upon those values. As we address China’s conduct in Tibet, cultural Islam’s treatment of women, and European attitudes towards enforcement of drug and prostitution laws (among other subjects recently discussed), we should, after educating ourselves, speak and act with clarity and confidence. For while we should know ourselves to not necessarily be right, we can often argue with greater confidence that others are wrong.
Take “free trade” for example. I, like many who had previously been persuaded by the conservative economists that today dominate academia, used to support so-called free trade agreements and principles. Today, after having observed the detrimental and often deadly effects of free trade-inspired debt and loan arrangements upon the people of Kenya, I no longer support the laws or policies that make modern-day unfair trade possible.
Without getting into details, I’ll mention that for every dollar the West currently provides Africa in aid, American and European countries deprive their non-Western brethren of eight dollars through farm subsidies. Eight to one! American businessmen lecture African heads of state about the importance of free trade and open markets, yet support closed markets in the area in which African countries hold the largest competitive advantage.
The issue at hand, however, is not unfair trade. It is cultural relativism as a roadblock to social activism. The free trade example is illustrative of my larger argument because if I do not act, others (multinational corporations, Western governments, etc) will. Many, including myself, have reservations about telling people in other countries not to join the global economy. Who am I to tell Kenyans which economic system to adopt?
But who am I, knowing that silence amounts to complicity, not to at least offer my opinion?