According to experts, a specific kind of virus is about to become diffused all over the world. They say it invades the modern countries through winds that especially blow from the West. People affected by this virus slowly get blind. Then, it attacts people’s sense of emphaty. Do you wonder what happens at the end? It turns people into stereotype robots that have no tolerence to others who do not resemble them. This virus is called ethnocentrism.
Herskovits defines ethnocentrism as accepting the norms and values of a culture as universal. Hence, ethnocentric people refuse to accept alternative cultures and they see them as inferior. Actually, this is an effect of modernism. Today, I want to talk about cultural relativism and modern people’s negative attitudes toward different cultures and its effects in the 20th century. First of all, I will talk about the growth of ethnocentrism due to modernism. Then, I will mention bias against religion in modern countries .
Now, let me mention the growth of ethnocentrism as a result of modernism. As we all know, after the Enlightenment, Europe has developed so rapidly that other societies could not catch them in the field of science and technology. This progress caused them to think that just because they have advanced technology, they have advanced culture, too. As the famous writer Montaigne puts it, modern men call barbarous anything they are not familiar with for they always know the flawless religion, the perfect policy and the most developed way of doing anything! To follow the footprints of modernism and cultural relativism in my own country, I administered a questionnaire to randomly selected 33 people from three biggest modern cities of Turkey. I asked them questions about their relativistic attitudes toward different cultures. Now, lets have a look at the results together. About %60 of the people answered my questions are not warm to the idea of having a homosexual neighbour. Again in the graph, %48 of people interfere with the behaviors of foreigners if their attitudes conflict with Turkish norms. Here, we can see that people living in modern cities are not culturally relativistic as we expect them to be. Unfortunately, this is an upsetting result because ethnocentric way of thinking is quite problematic as it destroys emphaty and understanding among people and it causes disintegration of the people. This brings me to the second problem that I will talk about today, the problem of bias against religion. In the middle ages, Europe suffered a lot from the oppressive obligations of the church and after Enlightenment, there was a huge resentment to religion. Therefore, although Christianity has continued as a part of culture, with the age of modernism, Europe abandoned considering religion as a primary autority. In the 20th century, terrorism of Islamic groups also contributed to Europe’s prejudice against religion. My field research also supports this idea. Here, you can see that although they are not relativistic in other issues, people are quite relativistic about different religions probably because they are not already strongly affiliated to a certain religion.
Europe is considered to be the prominent advocate of human rights and freedom, but it started to put religious people under pressure. Here, I’d like to show you a cartoon which perfectly explains what I am trying to say.
In this cartoon, there are two ladies looking at each other. One of them is in Burgha. She is completely dressed in the way that her religion orders. The other one looks modern and there are a few badges on her which make me think that she is an enthusiastic supporter of some ideologies. Her yellow hair should be a sign which points out that she is from the West. However, her eyes are bandaged. She cannot really look at the other lady. I believe that that bandage is modernism. People trying to be modern is again limited and biased or a kind of blind because of their anti-relativistic attitude toward others. They cannot see the reality behind the issues because they refuse to get deep in these issues. They stay on the surface and are satisfied with this. What I suggest as a solution is that these people should be brave enough to accept that they are not superior. When Galileo said that the world is not at the center of the universe, humanity faced this fact and accepted this. Now, the west needs a second Galileo which will teach them that no culture is superior to another culture. We do not need to be relatively eminent to be precious. We are precious because we are diversed. I think modern countries should not hide behind the concept of modernism and be brave enough to be “primitive” where necessary.
