Letters to a Young Progressive: How to Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don't Understand Read Free

cultures—including the rotten meat I saw being boiled in order to be fed to the prisoners at that Ecuadoran prison—she was, of course, implicitly accusing me of ethnocentrism, which is defined as judging other cultures by the standards of one’s own culture.
    Notice that the accusation of ethnocentrism is self-defeating because it, too, is a form of ethnocentrism. You cannot accuse someone of ethnocentrism without forcing your own standards upon them—standards they do not share. Let me explain.
    Ethnocentrism is a concept really only taught within the culture of sociology and anthropology departments at secular universities. The idea that you should not judge other cultures is itself a judgment, and the number of people who subscribe to it make up a very small percentage of the people on this planet. But they demand that we all live by their non-judgmental worldview, which flourishes only in certain departments of elite Western universities, even though that worldview really imposes harsh judgments on others outside their own culture.
    Logic aside, there is also a serious practical reason to avoid falling into the trap of cultural relativism—it renders one completely incapable of addressing the problem of evil. It may seem chic to refrain from judging other cultures when it comes to something trivial like tastes in food or fashion. But what about something like genocide?
    Are we really prepared to say that our culture today is not superior to that of Nazi Germany in the 1930s? Does anyone consider such a view to be chic?
    And is it really morally sophisticated to pretend that you don’t notice that the rotten meat being fed to prisoners in a hellhole of a prison smells badly? Or, coming closer to home, that you don’t see any difference between a talk show host whose politics you don’t agree with, and a man responsible for several gruesome murders?
    We know from history that any society foolish enough to experiment with Marxism will find that the quest for equality results in a lower standard of living for all. Similarly, any society foolish enough to embrace cultural relativism will find that the quest for equality results in a lower overall standard of morality.
    We all lose something when we try to place all individuals on an equal plane by embracing a general philosophy of moral relativism—or of moral equivalence, as progressives so often do in the political realm. When a progressive does something wrong, his fellow progressives blandly defend him by pointing out the flaws of the guys on the other side. If everyone is guilty, no one is guilty.
    There was a reason why that professor said Charles Manson was a “poor little guy who got railroaded by the system.” The professor is a political liberal who bought into the free-love philosophy of the 1960s. What Manson and the members of his hippie “Family” did makes crystal clear what a failure and a sham that whole free-love movement became. The youths of the 1960s eventually proved themselves to be the worst generation this nation has ever produced.
    Manson is a vicious murderer who induced others to murder by preying upon their fears. It is both silly and wrong to call him innocent. It is also silly to compare him to Glenn Beck—a man who, whatever his flaws, has never murdered anyone.
    Moral relativism fails logically. But it’s very useful psychologically—for those who want to escape the possibility of ever feeling guilty, so that they may do as they please, whenever they please. I found moral relativism very convenient for this purpose when I was sleeping around and doing drugs.
    But moral relativism and moral equivalence don’t just help you feel equal to other, better people when actually you ought to feel bad about yourself. They also help you feel superior when, actually, you ought to feel quite ordinary. Why is it so completely typical for college students (and professors) who have adopted the Marxist program of economic equality—and the