The Taleban are wrong, and I don't care about preserving their "culture"

A famous tale has it that Martin Amis once asked an audience at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts who believed themselves morally superior to the Taleban, and one third raised their hands.  According to David Aaronovitch, a Cambridge academic last week declared that the "affluent West" had "little to offer Afghans other than bikini waxes and Oprah-imitators".  In certain circles one can hear that there is no moral difference between advocating cuts to the NHS budget and slicing off women's noses for showing their faces in public - the only substantive difference being that we see the misery in the latter case whilst in the former it is hidden.

I appreciate the challenge here.  In my view, morality is an intrinsically religious concept - to say that "X is moral" is to say "My gods will that X".  So, of course, a man that worships Asherah may believe that his god commands the sacrifice of his children at the full moon, whilst his wife, a worshipper of Yahweh, may believe that her god forbids the sacrifice of those same children.  It thus could well be true both that it is moral for the man to sacrifice his children and immoral for his wife to do so.  But the wife will presumably also believe that her god forbids her husband to sacrifice those children.  So she is fully entitled to say that he is wrong to do so.  Although her standard is religion-relative, she can apply it universally.
 
Now, as clear-sighted Atheists from Nietzsche onwards have recognised, one thing about Atheism is that it robs us of an objective standard here - we have no god of our own to appeal to universally.  So all we can say, with those at the ICA who did not raise their hands, is that from the wife's point of view it is immoral to sacrifice them and from the husband's point of view moral.  We have no (religiously anchored) moral standard of our own to apply to them both (Nietzsche, of course, famously attempted to devise a universal aesthetic standard instead, whilst others employ alternative existential standards to the religious choice one (ultimately, a religion can be regarded as an existential choice for reasons I shan't explore here)).

Those of that do still have a religion and hence a moral standard (the vast majority of humanity) can still apply it, as I do - boldly declaring the Taliban's actions to be in violation of God's commands for all humanity, and thus, objectively and universally (albeit relative to my religion), wrong.  And I reject outright the absurd claims of moral equivalence between nose-slicing and spending cuts.  The first is a disgraceful and wicked act of wanton destruction, an assault upon women's role in the world, and an expression of hatred of one's own body in respect of one's biological responses to the sight of women; the latter is a political judgement about the best allocation of scarce resources between many different and important competing alternatives.

Now, as I say, I am sympathetic here to the consistency of the atheist liberal's position.  She really is struggling for a basis beyond cultural difference for objectively judging the Taleban's acts.  (I appreciate that I might be stretching language a bit to describe a bunch of thugs whose major contribution to civilisation was blowing up beautiful ancient statues as having a "culture", but grant me that point for now.)  And I understand that if all we have are consequential ethics, then we might struggle to really robustly demonstrate that the aggregate negative consequences of nose-slicing are really greater than of certain spending cuts with which we disagree.

But I must remark I am surprised that our God-given consciences are not pricked more forcefully by the oppression of these women.  Could it be, perhaps, that the pictures we see of Afghanistan make it seem really so different from our own society that it is almost as if we are watching a movie - some fantasy set in another world with alien beings?  Or maybe we have corrupted ourselves with too many weepy packages on Comic Relief and are no longer able to summon much human empathy if fewer than five hundred people are suffering at a time?

Not everyone, of course.  Julie Burchill was on fire earlier this week, condemning "armchair appeasers" for their inability to believe that anything is worth killing for.  But far too many of us are queasy about the idea that our culture is simply morally superior to someone else's.  We see that as some kind of terrible throwback to colonialism (the horror!).  Those of us bold enough, on occasion, to declare ourselves the good guys rarely have anything borderline in mind.  We aren't saying we should invade another country because we dislike the way they make cheese or the low quality of their daytime TV.

Let's think about that terrible oppressive "colonialism".  A classic instance of cultural imposition was the activities of the British in India in the run-up to the Mutiny of 1857, chronicled in Niall Ferguson's Empire.  Ferguson tells us that the wise old hands of the East India company had refused to support those nasty Christian missionaries and had preferred to tolerate certain cultural practices of the Indians rather than inflict British norms upon them.  But following their victory in abolishing the slave trade, the Clapham Sect turned their attentions to India, and managed to effect the winding up of the East India Company, the taking of direct control by London, and support for Christian missionary work.  Despite warnings by old East India hands of the trouble it would provoke, these missionaries set about trying to persuade the Indians out of certain of their ways and into thinking in Christian terms instead, enforced and otherwise backed by the British authorities.

As predicted, there was resistance, with Hindu and Muslim preachers declaring that the British sought to destroy Indian culture.  Ferguson tells us that this upset led directly in turn to the Mutiny.  After putting down the rebels vigorously, the British then relented on their cultural imposition and promised to respect Indian traditions thereafter.  Ferguson - whether ironically or not, I could not tell - appears to approve.

So what were these nasty Christians trying to change?  What were the "cultural practices" the Indians wished to preserve?  Ferguson tells us there were three key matters:

1. Female infanticide, rife even at that time.  Still today, even though naturally (because of greater women's longevity and lower infant mortality rates for girls from disease) there should be of the order of 96 men to every hundred women, in India that ratio is 108 to every hundred and in Pakistan 111 - reflecting an unnatural infant mortality rate for girls under five of 50% more than boys.  Little girls were slaughtered, and still are.
2. The practice (not strictly correctly) known in Britain as Suttee, whereby a widow either voluntarily or by coercion is burned on her husband's funeral pyre.  This was outlawed in 1829.  1829 - think on that.
3. The Thugee cult - a particular form of mystically- or religiously-inspired banditry, whereby members of the cult hunted travellers in order to murder them.  This cult was stampted out by a campaign in the 1830s.

This the kind of thing nasty cultural imperialists like me are interested in when we proclaim ourselves the good guys.  We don't pretend that the West in general or Britain and America in particular are perfect - far from it!  But one doesn't have to be perfect in order to be better.  And, bikini waxes and all, our culture is just better than that of the Taleban.  If "cultural practices" such as nose-slicing, female infanticide, widow-burning and others similar simply disappear from the world, I for one will regard it as no great loss.