Suttee and Cultural Relativism

"In a culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of “suttee”—the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural: "You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."

India today is better off without suttee. If you don’t agree with that, if you think that’s just dead-white-male Eurocentrism, fine. But I don’t think you really do believe that. Non-judgmental multiculturalism is an obvious fraud, and was subliminally accepted on that basis. After all, most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don’t want to live in anything but an advanced Western society. Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched tribal dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting to sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” or that your holistic masseuse uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality, but not that you or anyone you care about should have to live in an African or Native American society. It‘s a quintessential piece of progressive humbug. But it you think you genuinely believe that suttee is just an example of the rich, vibrant tapestry of indigenous cultures, you ought to consider what your pleasant suburb would be like if 25, 30, 48 percent of the people around you really believed in it too. Multiculturalism was conceived by the Western elites not to celebrate all cultures but to deny their own: it is, thus, the real suicide bomb...

As Simeon Howard said in a sermon preached to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company in Boston in 1773:

An incautious people may submit to these demands, one after another, till its liberty is irrecoverably gone, before they saw the danger. Injuries small in themselves may in their consequences be fatal to those who submit to them; especially if they are persisted in. And, with respect to such injuries, we should ever act upon that ancient maxim of prudence: obsta principiis.

The first unjust demands of an encroaching power should be firmly withstood when there appears a disposition to repeat and increase such demands. And oftentimes it may be both the right and duty of a people to engage in war, rather than give up to the demands of such a power, what they could, without any incoveniency, spare in the way of charity. War, though a great evil, is ever preferable to such concessions as are likely to be fatal to public liberty.

... Consider the name given to the current conflict: “War on terror.” Wait a minute. Aren’t wars usually waged against named enemies? Yes, but, to the progressive mind, the very concept of “the enemy” is obsolescent: there are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven’t yet accommodated. In part, it’s societal forgetfulness. In an electronic age, a present—tense culture, we assume that social progress is like technological progress: it can’t be reversed. Just as you can’t disinvent the internal combustion engine, so you can’t disinvent Women’s rights."

--- America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It / Mark Steyn