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[20. Dec 2025|15:02] |
Ketlīnai Stokai izcils raksts saistībā ar pētījumu par 'kampaņu pret sieviešu dzimumorgānu kropļošanu' par kuru nesen šeit rakstīju. Viņa tur runā par kultūrrelatīvismu, akadēmiķiem etc. Apakšā saliku diezgan daudz fragmentu, bet tāpēc, ka, manuprāt, tiešām ļoti labi uzrakstīts un ir lasīšanas vērts.
"Progressives are notoriously fond of renaming negatively-coded social practices to make them sound more palatable: “assisted dying” for euthanasia, or “sex work” for prostitution, for instance. The usual strategy is to take the most benign example of the practice possible, then make that the central paradigm. And so we get images of affluent middle-class people floating off to consensual oblivion at the hands of a doctor, rather than hungry, homeless depressives. We are told to think of students harmlessly supplementing their degrees with a bit of escort work, not drug-addicted mothers standing on street corners. Perpetually gloomy about human behaviour in other areas, when it comes to sex and death the mood becomes positively Pollyanna-ish.
Similarly, the authors of the new FGM article are apparently looking for the silver lining. Some genital modifications enhance group identity, they say, and a sense of community belonging. And as with euthanasia and prostitution, they want us to ignore the inconvenient downsides. But at the same time, there is a philosophical component here mostly absent from parallel campaigns. It’s cultural relativism — which says that strictly speaking, there are no downsides, or indeed upsides, at all.
That is: from the inside of a particular culture, certain practices count as exemplary and others as evil. Yet zoom out to an omniscient, deculturated perspective upon human behaviour generally, and there is no objective moral value — or so the story goes. All value is constructed at the local level. Worse: when you zoom back into your own homegrown ethical concerns after taking such a trip, they seem strangely hollow. Like an astronaut returning to Earth after having seen the whole of it from space, everything looks a bit parochial.[..]
..As is typical in disagreements between academics, it appears the Permissives ultimately took charge of the situation. Out went the term “mutilation”. Anti-FGM laws in Western countries got a similarly dismissive treatment, as did anti-FGM campaigns in non-Western ones.
The groups I’m calling Conservative and Centrist should surely still have insisted on laws and campaigns against the particular types of cutting they each opposed. Instead, though, the whole group seems to have got collectively stuck in the demand for “a fair and inclusive consideration” of all forms of genital modification. As if dealing with an unequal distribution of sweets amongst children, it asks: why is male circumcision legally permitted but not female? Why are surgeries on “intersex” children allowed in the West, but not cutting practices done for religious or cultural reasons?
It seems to be assumed that there is no non-arbitrary, meaningful answer to such questions, and that the disparity is therefore unfair. Even so, the article might have concluded that “fairness” requires that all such practices be stamped out. It needn’t have suggested we stop objecting to any of them. The brainworm responsible seems to be, precisely, cultural relativism: that nagging sense that you can’t reasonably single out particular kinds of act for approval or disapproval, when all actions are on the same amoral plane.
But while relativism saps you of faith in your own moral judgements, at the same time old habits die hard. Even the most permissive supporter can’t stop proselytising in favour of some behaviours and not others. In practice, avowed relativists in the Anglosphere often end up valuing the practices of non-Western people over their own. And so our co-authors — the majority of whom work in Europe, Australasia, and North America — tell us that anti-FGM initiatives in Africa cause material harms. Supposedly, they siphon off money and attention that could be better spent in other health campaigns, and they undermine trust in doctors.
They also cause young women to consider genital cutting as “traumatising” in retrospect, we are told, where they would not otherwise have done so. Even though some who have been subject to it can experience “unwanted upsetting memories, heightened vigilance, sleep disturbance, recurrent memories or flashbacks during medical consultations”, there is allegedly no actual trauma there, until some foreign aid agency tells them so.
Meanwhile in the Anglosphere, anti-FGM laws allegedly cause “oversurveillance of ethnic and racialised families and girls” and undermine “social trust, community life and human rights”. All these things, it is implied, are flat wrong. This sounds like old-fashioned morality talk to me. But then again, if old-fashioned morality talk is permissible, may not we also talk explicitly about the wrongs of holding small girls down to tables and slicing off bits of them, or sewing them up so tight that they are in searing agony? These things sound like they might undermine “social trust, community life, and human rights” too." |
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