It's a huge issue, one that I won't go into properly here. But I find it very difficult to broach the subject partly because I am aware of my own cultural place: as a white male whose teenage intellectual heroes were white males like Clive James, George Orwell, Christopher Hitchens, Will Hutton and the like who robustly defended the Enlightenment as opposed to the New Left identity politics (again, I don't use that phrase pejoratively) figures favoured by university contemporaries, the subject of cultural relativism has seemed one destined to trip me up.
When Richard Dawkins gets into trouble he generally pleads that he is merely robustly standing up for rationalism, sensitivities be damned, and I don't want to look like that kind of white male, because his unpleasantness comes across as just another type of supremacism. Saying that Trinity College Cambridge has won more Nobel Prizes than the Muslim world combined is true, but it comes across as someone terribly satisfied they happen to be in the "best" culture, so I tend to recoil even whenthe evidence is overwhelming that the Muslim world lags disastrously behind the West in terms of educational standing.
The criticism that by Enlightenment standards the Muslim world is doing terribly is a difficult one to make. I can criticise the headscarf, for instance, as essentially punishing women for having hair. There are plenty of defences of it, some very eloquent, and the modern feminist movement has to a great degree stepped up its intersectional game and embraced it. But I will never be convinced that it isn't a misogynist item that impinges ludicrously greater burdens of modesty on women than men. Occam's razor alone suggests that if the rule for women is an old one, it's probably a misogynist one.
Now, in making that argument I either treat humans in a vacuum, with everyone on an equal playing field judged by the utilitarian consequences of their actions, and cultural expressions mere opinions held to the same scrutiny of all opinions, in which case the headscarf comes out badly, as does wider Muslim culture, (stats on apostasy opinion polling bear this out) or I don't because I can't judge other cultures without indulging in supremacism. Usually I favour the former, chiefly because the colossal damage done worldwide by white supremacy seems to me to make white culture come out fairly badly out of history, counteracting any superiority it might have in professed Enlightenment. Nevertheless, applying my values to others with different cultural backgrounds reminds me of the one of the first times I thought religion was stupid as a kid - "Isn't it lucky for you that of all the places you could have been born, they happened to have the right opinion?"
In defending liberal values, then, any good liberal has to convince themself they're not actually just chuffed about being in the right culture. One justification that caught me while listening to A History of the World in 100 Objects runs as follows: human history has varying start dates proposed. But let's take evolution into our current form 200,000 years ago as our start point. If there can be a moral system that applies to all humans, it is that of who does the least harm and contributes the most to human dignity, liberty and happiness. Looking at human history as a race to get to that system, I think you can come to the conclusion that Western European culture got to a good system before anyone else did.
The modern liberal state tries to manage a number of problems: it curbs abuses of power using a mix of rule of law and electoral democracy, with freedom of speech and protection of basic rights it ensures no single opinion, ideology or group is assumed to be worth fighting or dying for, and it generally favours the kind of progressive acquisition of those rights for groups that in older societies were denied them. This provides for a good deal more happiness than a theocracy. So far you could easily be a Niall Feguson-type Western supremacist tub thumper for believing this.
But all those features came about as the result of a new literate middle class that could demand them. The refusal of the liberal state to regard any doctrine as supreme as a theocratic state does is chiefly a result of having to manage too many varying opinions with actual power behind them. It is tied to an economic model that provided for that class. And that economic model is tied indivisibly to imperialism. A vast bulk of the new capital that furnished the banks that in turn furnished the Industrial Revolution came from the rape of resources from all over the non-European world. The great irony of the Enlightenment was that it was built on the back of disastrously unenlightened activity - the decimation of entire Mesoamerican civilisations, the enslavement of African populations, the disembowelling of Indian natural wealth.
In other words, the West got to the Enlightenment by being ruthless enough to get there first. Had Africans, as in Malorie Blackman's alternate history, by a quirk of continental fate gained the technological advantages Europeans eventually enjoyed they would have done exactly the same thing - enslaved and plundered everywhere they went until they got to the Enlightenment because the Enlightenment is merely a pragmatic response to dealing with a bunch of citizens who have money all of a sudden. But the fact these values come from brutality doesn't mean they're wrong. Nor is it wise to be proud of coming from the society that just happened to get there first.
Moreover, as I said, it's 200,000 years of history we're talking about here, with at best 500 years of Europeans moving toward the liberal state. Being impressed that your bunch got there first is like crowing over winning a race by a millimetre. It's crass.
All of which is my personal justification for being a forthright liberal. The modern Left is uncomfortable with this kind of liberalism because of its commitment to a pluralist society, which is admirable but can so easily miss the wood for the trees - watch Seamus Milne or Glenn Greenwald excoriate Western imperialism while totally ignoring the actual threat of jihadism and you'll see what I mean. The wish to accommodate many cultures is right. But we don't have to be embarrassed about being right about being liberal either. And I wish more liberals would accept that their own values apply to everyone, whatever culture, in every part of the world. We are indeed a human family. They'll get there without your help, they've been running race as long as you have, and you're a fraction of a second ahead. And don't forget you cheated to get there.
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