Diversity is perhaps the most overused and ill-defined concepts in our culture today. You can find its assumed merits being mindlessly mouthed in most popular venues with regularity.

But what exactly does it mean? It depends on who you ask, but on the college campus it is usually accompanied with the implicit support of relativism.

I had the pleasure of having a discussion with an acquaintance recently who was utterly confused with herself. Yet, she had the confidence to invite me onto the bandwagon of her own perplexity with great eagerness. “It is always wrong to force your culture onto another culture.” Let’s look for a second at this gem of an assertion. “Really?” I replied. “So what if society (A) has the view that all other societies should be made to serve the goals of society (A). If society (B) resists, is this not an implicit rejection of this relativistic principle since the resistance violates the beliefs of society (A) that all people should serve its ends?” She did not have much to say to this fairly obvious objection. This is the problem with self-defeating statements. They inevitably collapse into silence or petulance.

I like to call Cultural Relativism “Ethical Relativism Light.” The statement “no culture is better than any other culture” immediately leads to confusion when you try to use it as a basis for a moral command “therefore you should never impose your culture onto another culture.” This absolute statement asserts a proposition that must imply one of two possibilities: 1) There is no way to know what ways of living are better for humanity and 2) there is no way of living that is better than any other.

Now, almost everyone rejects the second option and most people speak as if the first is false as well. If philosophical materialism were true then I would agree with statement 2. Thankfully, it is false. However, even if it were true, the cultural relativism would be contradicted, for if there are no true moral realities, then how can we characterize cultural imperialism as morally bad? At best, the relativist can say that since we don’t know, we should refrain from impositions of values on others, but this is merely a statement of preference. If all things are neither moral or immoral, there is no reasonable objection to asserting the superiority of one culture over another. This is why cultural relativism is inherently contradictory when it makes demands on our conduct.