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It's Not All Relative

Levinovitz, Alan Jay
http://www.chronicle.com/article/Its-Not-All-Relative/239356

Publisher:  The Chronicle of Higher Education
Date Written:  05/03/2017
Year Published:  2017  
Resource Type:  Article

Can a devotion to cultural tolerance lead to the triumph of alternative facts?

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

In my upper-level course on religion and medicine, I often ask students to pronounce on the veracity of beliefs about human physiology and the origin of sickness. Do we have four humors? Are chakras real? Is illness caused by demonic possession?

These questions come in the context of studying different cultures’ healing traditions, from Hausa medicine in West Africa to traditional Chinese medicine, and students are clearly wary of judging cultural practices that aren’t their own. The solution, almost always, is to soften their answer with "for me" or "for them." For me it’s not true that we have four humors, but for them it is.

Their position, however well-intentioned, is perilously similar to the one now being weaponized by dark political forces. In an extraordinary New Yorker profile, the alt-right media celebrity Mike Cernovich, whose work has been closely associated with white nationalism, explains his approach to truth: "Look, I read postmodernist theory in college. If everything is a narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominant narrative. I don’t seem like a guy who reads Lacan, do I?"

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