Moral Relativity

I have to wonder about morality, especially in the untouchable realm of children. I was watching Showtime's Shameless, and in the show there's this 13 y/o Mormon polygamist gal who gets, I presume here, taken by the state from a Mormon 'cult community', something akin to the stereotypical portrait of Mormon polygamy, and placed with a couple on the series. Of course being raised in that kind of environment, the norms are quite different for women, and it's a show meant to shock and awe, so naturally they have that character offering to do chores instead of to just goof off and play like we, the audience, would expect a 13 year old to do. And of course they amp up the shock value when we learn she has a child.

My mind, being the hyper-analytical that it is, went another route than the show's asking it to go. The reaction that the show expects from the audience, and is mirrored by the characters, is that of latent disgust with her upbringing and pity that she's been influenced in such a way to normalize such things. Yet let's think about it here for a moment. How different is that kind of judgement than European explorers charting African villages, finding out the natives eat bugs as a meal, and assuming they're malnourished? The scientific evidence is against it, yet the label remained for a long time.

Now, the counter-argument to this comparison is that there are scientific studies that show what kind of impact that kind of family environment has on children, and how they don't grow up into well-adjusted adults. My counter to that: By well-adjusted, it's meant well-adjusted to 'this' society.

Stew on that for a bit.

What I came up with was this: There's an inherent bias in evaluating the impacts of any method used in a modern society, because we're in the society we're evaluating, therefore we're going to look at 'good' and 'bad' in this society based on the pre-existing lens that the society has.

A colleague has a wonderful footer on her e-mail that helps example my next point: "It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society." (Jiddu Krishnamurti) Why are we assuming our way is the best way, and why are we using that to reinforce behaviors and actions that we, as members of the society, already oppose as harmful. Movements like Occupy wouldn't exist if this wasn't the case to at least some degree.

Now, does that make these child-bride Mormon polygamy communes any better? Probably not, but I'm not in them so I can't gauge if their society is 'sick' or not, I can only gauge ours. And this starts to get to my point: If I can't judge your culture because I'm not living in it, and you can't judge mine because you're not living in it, then to what standard are our cultures being held? There's many answers to this, varying from religious, to scientific, to metaphysical, to simple faith, to a refusal to believe, and so on. Again, it's a matter of consistency, as there isn't a universally agreed upon standard for which to cross-culturally judge.

Here's the scary part: Without that cross-cultural standard from which to judge, this breaks analysis down into simple factoids. There's no longer any pro/con list, no capacity for asking 'is this good or bad.' It's just raw information, without value. And by value I mean that in both senses, value in the sense that there's no value-judgement being made, and value in the sense that it lacks a metaphorical 'this is valuable' component. I would argue that they are one in the same, but that's a rant for another day.

So, returning to Shameless, if there's no universal standard to judge different cultures, then how can anyone legitimately judge the environment that anyone is raised in, be it a child we raise in our culture, or one raised in a child-bride Mormon polygamist culture? Well, I think there actually can be something of a guiding path on this, and I'm going to pull out everyone's favorite naturalist: Charles Darwin. Yes, I'm going to make an evolutionary argument in defense of Mormon child-bride communes, oh the irony!

Consider that in any evolutionary system, all creatures/beings/organisms will develop a homeostasis that's adapted to their function and their environment. Darwin examples this on a genetic level, but you see this on a more immediate level too. Human brain pliability is quite extraordinary. How else do people adapt to changing circumstances? Regardless, ignore the minor tangent there for a moment. The point I'm getting to is this: In a culture that supports women being homemakers and child-bearers starting from an early age, the function of women in that society will require the normalization of those functions. Those functions are adapted specifically for the roles within that society.


Simply put, they're doing exactly what they're adapting to do in that environment: survive. It's no different than what happened to the Native Americans after colonization. They adapted to our ways and our methods.

Now, here's the piece that most civil revolutionaries will have issue with: If we take Darwin's evolutionary concepts a bit further, we must include the effects of mutation. Remember, that the key to evolution is both variation and selection. The process doesn't work without both. Within cultures there will be cultural variation, and a whole hell of a lot of it (hence why culture evolves faster than genes).

Now, we, being outside of a Mormon child-bride community, would 'love' to interject our culture into theirs. We see it as too much variation for us to handle. We forget that every community has both variation and selection, not just selection, including Mormon child-bride ones. Who's to say that there's not variation within that community that won't change it over time, more organically, and with less displacement?

There's two arguments I can make from this, so I'll start with the easy one: What I'm advocating for here is akin to Star Trek's prime directive: Do not interfere in the development of other cultures. I sense the logic behind that was covered here already, but this gets to the displacement I was talking about. What;'s wrong with jarring shifts like that? Why is it 'bad' or 'harmful' to 'tame the savages,' as it were? Well, the kind of shock that interjecting modern values into a culture that doesn't share them is akin to the GDP doing a hula-dance of vertical motion. Ok, yes there's progress, but there's also a lot of harm that's done during the transition.

Yes, I realized I also just made a free-market argument for not 'blowing up' Mormon child-bride communities. More irony.

So, back to my main thesis for a moment here, and I'll try to wrap this up as it's almost midnight and I'm tired. We, as individuals, are agents within our culture(s), but not within other's culture(s). I cannot have agency in Mormon child-bride land, and they cannot have agency within my mainstream american values land. However, that being said, both the Mormon child-bride polygamist husband and I can have common culture(s). Do you think it's impossible to find a Mormon child-bride polygamist who's not also a fan of Star Trek? If I do, there's cultural overlap, and there's a place that both myself and this example Mormon child-bride polygamist have in common.

Ok, here's the big one, be ready for it:

It is my assertion that the most constructive, positive, growth-oriented, and less harmful shifts in any population are done in realms that both the shifter and shiftee have personal agency.


I may never get through to the Mormon child-bride polygamist in matters of broader cultural issues, but if they're a trekkie, you can damn well be sure that I can get through to them, and have a very productive cultural exchange, in that setting.

Yes, I did use a 'reductium ad absurdum' fallacy with my entire argument, however I would posit that this applies across ALL cultural divides, be they ethnic, gender, socio-economic, geographical, technological, age, job industry, etc etc.

Make of it what you will, but I think it's an important concept, and one I'm going to stew on a great deal.

- Jason