Now, I generally believe cultures should be left to their own devices--to develop as they will, and individual people should be free to move about to cultures that suit them. I'm certainly no-one who favors barging into other countries and telling the people there how they must live. Hell, the events of the past five years in the Middle East illustrate vividly the folly and futility of attempting to force a distant culture to live by one's own norms.
However, there are those occasional events that take aback even the most ardent defender of cultural relativism.
Living in fear: Tanzania's albinos
In Tanzania, 25 albinos have been killed in the past year.
The latest victim was a seven-month-old baby. He was mutilated on the orders of a witchdoctor pedalling the belief that potions made from an albino's legs, hair, hands, and blood can make a person rich.
Sorcery and the occult maintain a strong foothold in this part of the world, especially in the remote rural areas around the fishing and mining regions of Mwanza, on the shores of Lake Victoria.
Learning of such horrendous episodes gives even me the fleeting urge to storm Tanzania and engage in a massive re-education campaign.
Not even taking into account the massive discrimination albinos face in Tanzanian society--the thought of people being maimed to death because of superstitious beliefs--of people needing to bury their murdered relatives in concrete coffins to keep raiders away from what remains of the corpses--triggers an affective response of outright revulsion.
In this context, cultural relativism seems to fall away.
Much harder to argue with the right-wingers about intervention, when not
intervening leads to people being hacked to death for ridiculous reasons.
(Man, did I hate typing that.)
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