Kemi Badenoch kicked up an almighty stink when she argued at the weekend that not all cultures are ‘equally valid’ when it comes to immigration. The Tory leadership contender was forced to clarify her comments, made in the Sunday Telegraph. ‘I actually think it extraordinary to think that’s an unusual or controversial thing to say,’ she told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg. The truth is, Badenoch is right – and to pretend otherwise is a mistake.
There can be no better reminder that the different qualities of culture matter very much indeed
I’m a doctor and the idea that all cultures are equal, at least in the way they practice medicine, is absurd. Some years ago, the historian David Wootton wrote a slim and beautifully argued book called Bad Medicine. Wootton raged at the cultural relativism so universal in his peers. He pointed out that medical histories, in their effort to treat all cultures as equally valid, overlook whether the approaches of other places and other times actually worked. Medical practices, in other words, might well be a matter of taste, with some nations going in for doctrines of the four humours, and others insisting on randomised controlled trials. But that didn’t make them all equal, and the differences mattered.
Take the issue of infant mortality. In 1860, child death rates were higher in the richest countries in the world – at that time, the richest the world had ever known – than they now are anywhere. Modern Afghanistan offers newborns a better hope of life than the wealthiest nation on earth did a century and a half ago. That matters. The fact that we live longer, healthier lives, that seeing our children die has gone from being normal to being fantastically unfortunate, matters. When it comes to the business of medicine, cultural relativism misses out on the heart of what matters most.
Medicine isn’t the only issue where this logic applies. Some cultural attributes are not merely different from others but better or worse. Female genital mutilation, for example, is definitely not to my taste, nor to most people’s. It arises from a wider culture of contempt for women’s lives just as improvements in child health stem from the intellectual humility and respect for method that underlie science. Shouldn’t we be allowed to say as much?
Some cultures are better than others with regards to their emancipation of women or their healthcare, their grasp of science, their freedom of opportunity or of speech, the richness of their literature, the inclusiveness of their sport, and the quality of their sauces. Not all these differences matter equally, but they all matter. In 1942, William Beveridge spoke of creating a welfare state to battle the five giants of idleness, ignorance, disease, squalor, and want. These were the qualities of mid-century British culture he wanted to diminish, that he felt were worse – less valid – than their alternatives.
Beveridge was generalising, of course. But, as Badenoch has no doubt discovered, saying anything about a culture involves the sort of risky generalisation that always contains some error and sometimes causes harm. Not speaking of them, though, means staying silent about the richness of human variety, to the reality that some human qualities are better, more wholesome, finer or braver than others, and that these differences contribute to what we call national character.
‘Above all, I learned that the Russians, like us, were human beings,’ wrote Denis Healey in his autobiography, ‘although they were not human beings like us.’ It is difficult to say exactly how they might be different (the Soviet novelist Vasily Grossman, trying to do so, judged that ‘the mystique of the Russian soul is simply the result of a thousand years of slavery’) but a quality, or difference, does not cease to be important because it is impossible to pin down or easy to mistake.
Cultural judgements involve measuring others by our own values – but then whose values should we judge the world by, if not our own? This is not an effort we should be shy about, or try to cancel. It is better, far better, to test the mettle of our thoughts in the marketplace of ideas.
‘You say there can be no argument about matters of taste?’ asked Friedrich Nietzsche. ‘All life is an argument about matters of taste,’ he wrote. Everything is relative, but today relatively few babies die and relatively few children are orphaned. There can be no better reminders that the different qualities of culture matter very much indeed. Badenoch was right to say not all cultures are equally valid. It’s a shame her critics will never admit that.
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