Nadine,
Your position and that of Lindy's makes sense only if you accept the notion that something called "cultures" are wholistic entities and have to be judged as such.
Most real life, everyday cultures are fragments of new things, traditional things, in conflict with one another, etc. If as one portion of these disparate things we label with that awkward term "culture," the males in that culture abuse women, I don't have any problem considering it wrong, arguing that power is a frequent creator of the justifications for abuse in social settings and the best form of those justifications of abuse are written into some of the disparate codes that males then appeal to.
Sorry about the awkward sentence. But I'm in a bit of a hurry right now.
Another illustration, I don't have any problem respecting the portion of my own Southwestern cultural background that laid such a heavy emphasis on individual independence, while bemoaning the heavy emphasis on machoness and justifications for the ready availability of guns.
I fail to see any way in which that conflicts with pomo, or whatever.
The only admission I make is that, to repeat myself ad nauseum, I don't know whether god, truth, or goodness, as some transhistorical Platonic forms, also approves of individual independence and disapproves of machoness and ubiquitous guns. |
