The Transhuman Judgment of Civilizations
Why we should dispense with politically correct relativism in history and the social sciences
Much of Western academia exhibits left-wing political correctness in its taste for cultural relativism.
This isn’t necessarily bad unless you’re averse to a comprehensive presentation of data. After all, liberalism is about tolerating different viewpoints, so instead of emphasizing just one perspective and ignoring all others, which is the authoritarian hallmark of conservatives, a liberal anthropologist or historian would insist on giving each perspective its due. Instead of ignoring the underclass, for instance, a liberal might tell history from that underappreciated perspective, as Howard Zinn did in A People’s History of the United States.
Or instead of disregarding the humanity of prehistoric, presumably “uncivilized” people, leftist anthropologists and archeologists like David Graeber and David Wengrow might dig up evidence of cultural fluidity, as they do in The Dawn of Everything. Rather than presupposing Western cultural supremacy, they expose how for tens of thousands of years, early people swapped societal structures when it suited them. The implication is that we could do the same and that no social system is objectively best for everyone under all…
