It's sometimes suggested that different cultures should be judged by standards internal to themselves, and that we in the West shouldn't, for example, expect other cultures to be as enamoured of Enlightenment values as some of us here are. Each culture has its own values, it's argued, and there's no reason to take ours to be any better than anybody else's. Nor should we simply assume that our kind of democracy, or perhaps any kind of democracy, is desirable for other cultures which have very different traditions.
Three (out of the many) problems with this view: first, a consistency problem. Why did we never hear these points being vehemently raised at the time of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa? And would anybody now want to say that the fight for liberty and democracy there was misconceived, because it involved imposing Enlightenment values on a culture to which they were alien?
Second, there is a covert assumption being made by those who object to the application of Enlightenment values to non-Western cultures. They are assuming that the longing for democracy and freedom is peculiar to the West, that there are no indigenous drives of this kind in other cultures, so that if they are present, they must have been imported or imposed. But though this may sometimes be true, it isn't always, as the presence of democracy activists in almost every country with an undemocratic regime attests.
Third, this whole way of looking at cultural differences assumes that cultures are discrete entities, which can be sharply distinguished from each other. But this is untrue, and increasingly so. Is current South African culture a purely African phenomenon? Clearly not, any more than English culture is purely Anglo-Saxon. Cultures have porous borders, and with every year that passes they're becoming more permeable, for good or ill. (Eve Garrard)
