# Cultural Relativism Cultural relativism is the anthropological principle that a society's beliefs, values, and practices should be understood and evaluated within the context of that society's own history, environment, and internal logic — not measured against an external universal standard. As a methodological commitment it is foundational to modern anthropology: it instructs the researcher to suspend ethnocentric judgment long enough to understand *why* a practice exists, what functions it serves, and what meaning it carries for the people who live it. It does not, in its disciplinary formulation, assert that all cultural practices are morally equivalent, that female genital cutting is "just as good" as its absence, or that no cross-cultural moral judgment is ever legitimate. It asserts, more modestly, that understanding must precede judgment — and that the judgment itself must be informed rather than reflexive. This distinction — between a methodological stance and a moral claim — is the fault line along which the concept has been weaponized in the American [[Political Correctness]] wars, the [[Western Civilization]] debate, and the broader right-wing critique of the modern university. For [[Allan Bloom]], cultural relativism was the rot destroying students' capacity for philosophical seriousness. For [[Kevin MacDonald]], it was a Jewish ethnic strategy to weaken European identity. For the [[Nouvelle Droite]], it was a false universalism masking cultural homogenization. For the [[Heritage Foundation]] and [[PragerU]] version of "defend the West" conservatism, it is the intellectual acid that dissolved the [[Western Civilization]] curriculum and replaced it with [[Multiculturalism]]. Cultural relativism may be the single most contested anthropological concept in this vault — not because anthropologists debate it fiercely (they largely treat it as a settled methodological premise) but because it has become a proxy term in a civilizational argument that has very little to do with anthropology. ## Origins: Boas and the Boasian Revolution The concept emerges from the work of Franz Boas (1858–1942), the German-born Jewish émigré who became the founding figure of American cultural anthropology at Columbia University. Boas arrived in the United States in 1887, at a moment when the dominant anthropological paradigm was unilineal cultural evolution — the idea, deeply embedded in Victorian racial science, that all human societies progressed through the same stages of development from "savagery" through "barbarism" to "civilization," with white European societies at the apex. This framework was not merely academic; it provided the intellectual scaffolding for colonialism, for the [[Eugenics]] movement, and for the racial hierarchy that structured American law from [[Scientific Racism]]'s heyday through the early twentieth century. Boas attacked this paradigm on empirical grounds. His fieldwork among the Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka'wakw) of the Pacific Northwest and his studies of immigrant head-form changes demonstrated that what the racial scientists attributed to fixed biological inheritance was in fact shaped by environment, history, and cultural context. Each culture, Boas argued, had its own historical trajectory; no culture was a "primitive" version of another. The proper method was to study each culture on its own terms — to understand its internal logic rather than to rank it on a universal ladder. Boas trained a generation of students who built this insight into the institutional infrastructure of American anthropology. Ruth Benedict's *Patterns of Culture* (1934) argued that each culture selects from the "great arc" of possible human behaviors and institutions, producing internally coherent but radically different ways of life. Melville Herskovits formalized the principle: the anthropologist's first obligation is to understand, not to judge. This is the disciplinary meaning of cultural relativism — a research method, not a moral philosophy. ## The Critical Distinction: Methodological vs. Moral Relativism The most important intellectual move in the history of cultural relativism's political weaponization is the deliberate collapse of two very different claims: **Methodological relativism** says: to understand why a practice exists, you must first understand the cultural system in which it is embedded, rather than immediately evaluating it by the standards of your own culture. This is a research posture. It does not prevent the researcher from eventually making moral judgments; it insists that those judgments be informed by understanding. **Moral relativism** says: no culture's values can be judged superior or inferior to any other's; all moral systems are equally valid; cross-cultural moral judgment is inherently illegitimate. Boas himself never endorsed the second position. Neither did the mainstream anthropological tradition. The 1947 "Statement on Human Rights" drafted by Melville Herskovits for the American Anthropological Association — often cited as the high-water mark of uncritical relativism — was itself contested within the discipline and has been extensively revised. Contemporary anthropology operates with what might be called "critical relativism": cultural context matters for understanding, but understanding does not require moral paralysis. The political utility of collapsing these two positions is enormous. If cultural relativism is merely a research method, it is banal and unthreatening. If it is a moral doctrine asserting that cannibalism and constitutional democracy are equivalent, it is monstrous — and anyone who teaches it is complicit in civilizational decline. The entire conservative critique depends on treating the second as what anthropologists actually believe and teach, which allows the university itself to be cast as a factory of nihilism. ## Allan Bloom and the Straussian Critique [[The Closing of the American Mind]] (1987) is the text that transformed cultural relativism from an intra-disciplinary methodological debate into a national political controversy. [[Allan Bloom]], a student of [[Leo Strauss]] at the University of Chicago, argued that American students arrived at the university already corrupted by relativism — "the belief that all values are equal, all cultures are equivalent, and no moral claim can be superior to any other." This relativism, Bloom claimed, made genuine philosophical inquiry impossible because genuine inquiry requires believing that some answers are better than others. Bloom's argument operates on [[Declinism]] logic: there was a golden age (the Great Books tradition, the Western philosophical canon from Plato through [[Friedrich Nietzsche]]), followed by a catastrophic fall (the 1960s campus upheavals, the introduction of ethnic studies and women's studies), producing the present degradation (students who cannot think because they believe nothing is worth thinking about). The villain of the story is a bastardized version of German philosophy — Nietzsche and [[Martin Heidegger]] imported into America without the philosophical rigor their originators intended, producing what Bloom called "nihilism with a happy ending." The Straussian dimension is critical. [[Leo Strauss]] taught that the Western philosophical tradition contained genuine, discoverable truths about the best way to live — truths accessible to the few who could read the great texts with sufficient care. For Strauss and his students, the relativist position was not merely wrong but dangerous: if no culture or way of life is superior to another, then philosophy itself — the love of wisdom, the pursuit of the good — is pointless. Cultural relativism, in the Straussian reading, is the death of philosophy. The [[Claremont Institute]], staffed heavily by Straussians, continues to prosecute this argument. [[Hillsdale College]] operationalizes it as curriculum. Bloom's book sold over a million copies. It gave a generation of culturally conservative Americans a philosophical vocabulary for their anxiety about what universities were doing to their children. It also established the template that [[Dinesh D'Souza]], [[Christopher Rufo]], and a long line of campus-critique polemicists would follow: the university has abandoned truth for relativism, and the relativism is a specifically leftist pathology. ## Kevin MacDonald and the Antisemitic Frame [[The Culture of Critique]] (1998) takes the Boasian revolution and recasts it as a chapter in the alleged Jewish strategy to weaken European cultural cohesion. [[Kevin MacDonald]] argues that Boas and his students promoted cultural relativism not because the evidence supported it but because undermining the concept of a natural racial hierarchy served Jewish group interests. If there is no hierarchy of cultures, then there is no basis for the European ethnocentrism that has historically generated [[Antisemitism]]. Cultural relativism, in MacDonald's framework, is an intellectual weapon deployed by a minority group to disarm the majority. The argument depends on three moves. First, it notes — accurately — that Boas and many of his prominent students were Jewish. Second, it asserts — without evidence meeting scientific standards — that their intellectual conclusions were motivated by ethnic self-interest rather than scholarly inquiry. Third, it treats the success of Boasian anthropology within the discipline as proof of ethnic-strategic coordination rather than as the normal outcome of a paradigm that better fit the evidence than its predecessor. MacDonald's framework is the intellectual infrastructure behind the far right's treatment of cultural relativism as a conspiracy rather than a methodology. When [[VDARE]], [[American Renaissance]], [[Jared Taylor]], or anonymous posters on [[Daily Stormer]] and [[Stormfront]] attack Boasian anthropology as a Jewish subversion project, they are running MacDonald's argument. The concept feeds directly into the [[White Nationalist Radicalization Pipeline]]: if cultural relativism is not a scientific methodology but a deliberate strategy to weaken white identity, then rejecting it is not anti-intellectual — it is self-defense. ## The Nouvelle Droite: Ethnopluralism as Inverted Relativism The [[Nouvelle Droite]]'s [[Alain de Benoist]] performed the most sophisticated appropriation of cultural relativism on the right. Rather than attacking the principle that cultures are different and should be understood on their own terms, de Benoist *embraced* it — and weaponized it for separationism. If cultures are genuinely different, truly incommensurable, each with its own irreducible integrity, then mixing them is not enrichment but destruction. [[Multiculturalism]], immigration, and liberal universalism — all of which claim to celebrate cultural difference — actually *homogenize* cultures by forcing them into a single liberal-democratic framework. The only way to truly respect cultural difference is to keep cultures apart: each people in its own territory, living according to its own traditions. This is [[Ethnopluralism]] — the Nouvelle Droite's central doctrinal innovation and the most intellectually consequential repackaging of racial separationism since the fall of explicit biological racism. It produces the same political conclusions as old-fashioned racism (closed borders, forced repatriation, ethnic homogeneity) while deploying the language of the very anthropological tradition that was developed to *combat* racism. The [[Identitarian Movement]] runs this logic operationally: "remigration" (the demand that immigrants return to their countries of origin) is framed as defending cultural diversity, not attacking it. The irony is structural. Cultural relativism was developed by Boas partly to undermine the racial hierarchies that justified European colonialism. The Nouvelle Droite uses cultural relativism to argue for the very ethnic separationism that those hierarchies enforced — just with different justificatory language. [[Richard Spencer]], [[Sam Francis]], and the American alt-right imported this framework wholesale, translating it from French intellectual journals to English-language far-right discourse via [[American Renaissance]], Counter-Currents Publishing, and eventually into the ambient rhetoric of the [[MAGA]] media ecosystem. ## The Western Civilization Debate Cultural relativism occupies the center of a specific curricular controversy that has animated the right since the 1980s. The question, reduced to its essentials: should the American university require students to study the canon of [[Western Civilization]] — from [[Ancient Greece]] through [[Ancient Rome]], Christianity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and into the modern liberal democratic tradition — as a coherent, uniquely valuable civilizational inheritance? Or does the very concept of a unified "Western" canon impose a false hierarchy on the plurality of human cultural traditions? The Stanford "Western Culture" controversy (1987–1988), contemporaneous with Bloom's bestseller, crystallized the debate. Students and faculty challenged the university's required "Western Culture" course, arguing that its canonical reading list marginalized non-Western contributions and women's voices. The course was restructured as "Cultures, Ideas, and Values" — which critics like [[William F. Buckley Jr.]] and [[Dinesh D'Souza]] presented as a capitulation to relativism. The fight has never ended. The [[Classical Education Movement]], [[Hillsdale College]]'s free online courses, [[PragerU]]'s "Western Civilization" content, and the [[Claremont Institute]]'s scholarly apparatus all frame the defense of the Western canon as resistance against relativist rot. [[Jordan Peterson]]'s enormous audience for lectures on meaning, hierarchy, and the Western tradition taps the same anxiety that Bloom articulated: that something valuable is being lost because the culture no longer believes anything is better than anything else. The deeper pattern is that "cultural relativism" functions in this debate less as a position anyone actually holds in its strong form and more as a [[Moral Panic]] trigger — a shorthand for the fear that the hierarchies that once organized meaning (better and worse, higher and lower, civilized and barbarous) have collapsed, leaving nothing but a flat field of equivalent claims. This is a [[Declinism]] narrative wearing epistemological clothes. ## The Frankfurt School Connection The conservative critique links cultural relativism to the broader [[Cultural Marxism]] conspiracy theory, which casts the [[Frankfurt School]] — [[Theodor Adorno]], [[Herbert Marcuse]], [[Max Horkheimer]], [[Erich Fromm]] — as the architects of Western cultural dissolution. In this narrative, Boasian anthropology and Frankfurt School [[Critical Theory]] are two prongs of a single assault: Boas dissolved the concept of cultural hierarchy from within anthropology while the Frankfurt School dissolved it from within philosophy and social theory. [[The Authoritarian Personality]] (1950), co-authored by Adorno, pathologized traditional values and ethnocentrism as psychological disorders, further delegitimizing the idea that one's own culture might be superior. The [[Frankfurt School Ecosystem]] page maps this network in detail, but the key point for cultural relativism is that the conspiracy theory treats independent intellectual developments as coordinated strategy. Boasian anthropology and Frankfurt School critical theory emerged from different disciplinary traditions, with different methods and different conclusions. They shared certain premises — that ethnocentrism distorted inquiry, that racial hierarchies lacked scientific basis — because those premises were supported by the evidence. The conspiratorial reading treats convergent conclusions as proof of coordination, and coordination as proof of ethnic conspiracy (via MacDonald's framework). ## Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Philosophical Backstory The conservative critique of cultural relativism draws its deepest intellectual energy not from anthropology but from [[Friedrich Nietzsche]]'s diagnosis of European nihilism. Nietzsche argued that the death of God — the collapse of the metaphysical framework that had organized European meaning for two millennia — left a void that no secular philosophy had yet filled. Without an absolute ground for values, all values become contingent, historically conditioned, and ultimately arbitrary. This is the philosophical problem that Bloom, following Strauss, identified as the root illness: cultural relativism is not a methodological choice but a symptom of nihilism — the inability to believe that anything is genuinely, non-contingently better than anything else. The irony, which Bloom noted but perhaps did not fully absorb, is that Nietzsche himself was no relativist. He argued that some ways of life were indeed higher than others — that the slave morality of Christianity had produced precisely the kind of weak, resentful, egalitarian culture that the relativists now celebrated. The far right's appropriation of Nietzsche — through [[Julius Evola]], [[René Guénon]], the [[Nouvelle Droite]], and the [[Dark Enlightenment]] — follows this thread: if relativism is nihilism, then the antidote is a return to hierarchy, to the recognition that some cultures, some peoples, some traditions are superior. The path from "cultural relativism is wrong" to "our civilization is superior" to explicit racial hierarchy is not a slippery slope fallacy — it is a well-documented intellectual trajectory. ## How the Concept Functions in Right-Wing Discourse Cultural relativism serves several distinct rhetorical functions across the right-wing ecosystem: **Campus-critique conservatism** ([[Allan Bloom]], [[Dinesh D'Souza]], [[Christopher Rufo]]): relativism is what the university teaches instead of truth, producing students who cannot think, judge, or defend their own civilization. The solution is curricular reform — more Western canon, less [[DEI]], more [[Hillsdale College]] and less contemporary humanities. **Antisemitic far right** ([[Kevin MacDonald]], [[VDARE]], [[Daily Stormer]]): relativism is an ethnic weapon deployed by Jewish intellectuals to disarm European identity. The solution is exposure of the conspiracy and reassertion of European ethnocentrism. **Ethnonationalist right** ([[Nouvelle Droite]], [[Identitarian Movement]], [[Richard Spencer]]): relativism, properly understood, *supports* separationism — if cultures are truly different, they must be kept apart. The solution is [[Ethnopluralism]] and "remigration." **Religious right** ([[Heritage Foundation]], [[Hillsdale College]], [[National Conservatism]]): relativism is the enemy of [[Natural Law]] and the [[Natural Rights]] tradition that grounds the American constitutional order. If values are culturally contingent, then the self-evident truths of the [[Declaration of Independence]] are merely one culture's opinion. The solution is a return to the philosophical and theological foundations of the West. **Populist right** ([[Ben Shapiro]], [[Jordan Peterson]], [[PragerU]]): relativism is what elites believe and what ordinary people correctly reject. "Facts don't care about your feelings" is an anti-relativist slogan that positions the speaker as a defender of objective truth against the relativist academy. Each of these deployments depends on the same initial move: collapsing methodological relativism into moral relativism, treating a research posture as a civilizational surrender, and then presenting one's own preferred hierarchy as the restoration of meaning in a world that relativism has emptied. ## Open Questions - Does the distinction between methodological and moral relativism hold under philosophical pressure, or does consistent methodological relativism inevitably erode the ground for cross-cultural moral judgment? - How does the right's simultaneous attack on cultural relativism (as nihilistic equivalence) and deployment of cultural relativism (as ethnopluralist separationism, via the [[Nouvelle Droite]]) resolve — or does the contradiction go unnoticed because different wings of the right occupy different positions? - Has the concept exhausted its political utility? [[Christopher Rufo]]'s campaigns target [[Critical Race Theory]], [[DEI]], and [[Woke]] ideology rather than "relativism" per se — has the vocabulary shifted while the underlying critique remains the same? - To what extent did Boas's cultural relativism actually succeed in displacing [[Scientific Racism]] in the academy, and to what extent did [[Race Realism]], [[The Bell Curve]], and the "human biodiversity" movement represent a resurgence of the paradigm Boas thought he had defeated? ## Connections Cultural relativism is the anthropological concept that links [[The Closing of the American Mind]] as conservative diagnostic, [[The Culture of Critique]] as antisemitic weaponization, the [[Nouvelle Droite]] and [[Ethnopluralism]] as separationist appropriation, the [[Western Civilization]] debate as curricular battleground, [[Cultural Marxism]] as conspiracy-theory framing, and the [[Frankfurt School Ecosystem]] as alleged institutional vehicle. It connects the [[Declinism]] tradition ([[Oswald Spengler]], [[The Decline of the West]]) to the campus [[Political Correctness]] wars, and links [[Friedrich Nietzsche]]'s diagnosis of nihilism to [[Allan Bloom]]'s diagnosis of the American university. The concept is the hinge between the [[Scientific Racism]] tradition that Boas challenged and the [[Race Realism]] movement that claims to revive it. ## See Also - [[Allan Bloom]] — the Straussian critique of relativism - [[The Closing of the American Mind]] — the text that made relativism a national issue - [[Kevin MacDonald]] — antisemitic recasting of Boasian anthropology - [[The Culture of Critique]] — cultural relativism as alleged ethnic strategy - [[Nouvelle Droite]] — appropriation of relativism for ethnopluralist separationism - [[Ethnopluralism]] — relativism inverted into separationism - [[Western Civilization]] — the canon relativism allegedly dissolved - [[Cultural Marxism]] — conspiracy theory linking relativism to civilizational destruction - [[Leo Strauss]] — philosophical foundation of the anti-relativist critique - [[Multiculturalism]] — the curricular alternative relativism allegedly produced - [[Scientific Racism]] — the paradigm Boas's relativism challenged - [[Race Realism]] — the contemporary revival of hierarchical racial thinking - [[Declinism]] — the narrative structure that gives the anti-relativist critique its urgency - [[Friedrich Nietzsche]] — the diagnosis of nihilism underlying the philosophical critique - [[Critical Theory]] — the Frankfurt School framework linked to relativism in conservative genealogy - [[Post-Truth]] — the epistemological crisis that relativism allegedly enabled