The risks of multiculturalism: the Chinese example.

We often hear about the need to respect other cultures and promote multiculturalism these days. The need to promote respect for other cultures is one of those things that sounds quite obvious. But, as it tends to happen with these issues, the devil is in the details. What do we mean by respecting other cultures? Leaving them alone? Does that mean forgetting about them even when we can help (for instance, to help them fight against a large epidemic)? And what about intervening in order to stop genocide or major crimes against humanity? Should we just watch from the outside then so we cannot be accused of cultural imperialism? Also, does respecting other cultures mean to consider them as equals (not in the sense of their individual rights, of course, but in the sense that we have to assume that their accomplishments are equal to ours)? All these are complex questions without a very easy answer but they certainly illustrate the paradoxes that a simplistic multiculturalist approach entails.

Science has often been at the center of the criticism against Western cultural imperialism leveled by those who defend a multicultural approach, and Wilson is clearly aware of it:

Between the first and thirteenth centuries they led Europe by a wide margin. But according to Joseph Needham, the principal Western chronicler of Chinese scientific endeavors, their focus stayed on holistic properties and on the harmonious, hierarchical relationships of entities, from stars down to mountains and flowers and sand. In this world view the entities of Nature are inseparable and perpetually changing, not discrete and constant as perceived by the Enlightenment thinkers. As a result the Chinese never hit upon the entry point of abstraction and break-apart analytic research attained by European science in the seventeenth century.

(Edward O. Wilson: pp. 30-31)

You see, multiculturalists take the typically postmodern approach that everything is relative. Therefore, there is no way to judge anything. Actually, there may not even be any anything to judge, since there is no evidence whatsoever that there is a world outside our own minds in the first place. It's relativism taken to its highest form. Yet, what Wilson is telling us here is that there is indeed a way to judge. There is a yardstick that we can use to measure things against. In the case of knowledge, it consists of the extent to which a particular theory manages to explain events in the past and, more importantly, the ones that will happen in the future. In other words, we can study a particular hypothesis and see, first, if it can explain past and present events in a manner that makes sense and sounds logical and, second, whether it helps us predict future behaviors too. In this sense, it is quite clear that while the Western approach to science can show some evident successes, the same cannot be said of the traditional Chinese approach, for instance. This is not cultural bias, the same way that observing that Michael Phelps is a better swimmer than me doesn't show cultural bias either but it's rather a pretty objective statement. It may be something that those who are in favor of an absolute egalitarian approach to social issues may dislike, but that still doesn't change its factuality.

So, when it comes to the best way to obtain knowledge about our surroundings, we ought to ask ourselves which has proven so far to be the best methodology, the one that has shown the best results, the one that has proven to lead to hypothesis or theories that can better explain the events that happened in the past as well as the ones that are still to come with at least a decent level of approximation. And, when it comes to this particular question, it seems evident that the Western approach to science wins hands down. Everything else is either wishful thinking or denying the evidence that's in front of our eyes.