Cultural Relativism

The new boy in my life: ES. We met at a purim party-he's a future doctor :)

I had an interesting conversation with ES yesterday. He came over before we went to see Juno (which by the way, is really cute), and we started talking about our day and such. He's been having a clinical week, and they're focusing on deaf people. There's this amazing new technology that gets implanted into the person's head, and sends signals directly to the neurons, thereby bypassing the deafness. It actually allows deaf people to hear--it's amazing. Anyway, ES was telling me how among the deaf community there is now this issue about using this technology, because it detracts from deaf culture. As in, who are we to impose our beliefs that "our" culture, the hearing culture, is better, more "normal"? There are some people in the deaf community who are refusing to give their children access to this technology because they believe that the child is fine, and that they don't want them to lose their deaf culture. Then there are others who claim that denying this technology from a child is child abuse. So there you have it--both sides of the coin.

Now, deaf culture is a somewhat simpler case, because most people would agree that the benefits of hearing outweigh those of being deaf. However, this whole discussion led into cultural relativism in general. For example, about genital mutilation/female circumcision. And from there, Eden said something that somewhat surprised and impressed me. He said that it was sort of funny how we talk about culture as if it's everyone's culture--but really what we're referring to is men's cultural rules; the women have to cover themselves, they have to cut/sew themselves, do certain jobs, wear certain clothing, abide by purity rules, etc.

Basically he was saying that we have to be careful when we talk about this whole cultural relativism business--who's culture are we talking about exactly? I was a little taken aback that he's thought about it in this way. And extremely impressed. This boy keeps getting more and more points :)