One of the books I often recommend to readers is 2009’s The Wayfinders, which is the published collection of anthropologist Wade Davis’s Massey lectures. In those lectures — which is to say, in that ...

The novelist Virginia Woolf once said, "on or about December 1910, human character changed." (see Jackson Lears). She was kidding about the specificity of the date but in earnest about the change.

Aside from a small assortment of political extremists, religious fanatics, and rabid ideologues, few today are more certain of their position, or less open to the views of others, than those who ...

Cultural relativism, the realization that diverse cultures have different, incommensurable aesthetic standards, anticipated by Montaigne and Machiavelli, was the discovery of the Neapolitan ...

In the early 1970s, renowned anthropologist Clifford Geertz published his most influential book, The Interpretation of Cultures. The book was widely read throughout the social sciences and humanities, ...

Cultural relativism’s empty notions of justice, rights, and welfare have defeated objective truths brought by realism in political argument. Philosopher Bernard Williams once said that “we all have a ...

Cultural Relativism—An anthropological term that can best be defined as follows: An individual's actions, behaviors and beliefs can be understood only in terms of the culture from which he or she ...

Supporters of President Donald Trump join in prayer outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington Jan. 6, 2021, where U.S. Congress will meet in joint session to certify the Electoral College vote for ...

If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and [for] men who claim to be bearers of an external objective truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than fascist attitudes. —Benito ...

Cardinal Ratzinger’s sermon on relativism at the Mass for the Election of a Supreme Pontiff hit the note most important both in his own life and in the coming life of the Church, in an age calling ...