One frequently hears that endangered cultural groups have a right to preservation, and indeed to outside aid and legal sanctions toward that end. Anthropologists and activists have made such claims on the grounds that the survival of these groups has an inherent value. Some advocacy groups* have gone so far as to claim that the absence of such special rights is equal to mass cultural destruction. There is no great moral distinction, such rhetoric seems to suggest, between allowing a culture to assimilate into the wider surrounding society and actually going out and killing all its members.
This vague moral claim has turned up in the discussion of issues as varied as affirmative action* and the moral status of such culturally overwhelming institutions as McDonalds. If we take these arguments literally, cultural survival is relevant very close to a moral absolute; to refuse to agree with it is to sign up on the side of cultural destruction and global conformity.
This is a bit confusing, because it is rather difficult to figure out what is morally compatible about cultural survival in itself. The first challenge is to determine just what the term might mean. It cannot simply mean the continued existence of the individuals that make up the endangered culture, since their survival is entirely adaptation with their complete assimilation, and therefore, with the destruction of their culture. Nor, however, can it mean the preservation of all existing aspects of a culture; for some degree of cultural change and distinctiveness is normal, indeed inevitable. Permanent cultural preservation is an ideal we could hardly hope to attain, let alone a worthy guide to policy.
The reality of cultural survival, then, lies somewhere between total disintegration and permanent preservation. The most plausible meaning of the slogan as a political goal might be simply the preservation of difference: the desire that whatever cultures now exist should not lose their however much the content of their cultures may change over time.
So why would we think that cultural survival is valuable in itself? One argument draws an analogy between cultures and other threatened aspects of the natural world: we ought to preserve cultures because to do otherwise is to allow something unique and irreplaceable to leave the world. Refusing to act against assimilation might be thought equivalent to, say, shooting the last panda.
This argument, though, claims too much, for we feel a similar sense of loss when we face not the destruction of a culture but merely it’s reworking from the inside — and, thereby, the loss of specific elements within the culture. Over time, all of our cultures are remade and many traditional norms and practices are abandoned. We might easily sympathize that there was a loss to the world in what was thereby abandoned. We do have reason to regret that the current ways by which the world is understood — our own ways included — will eventually disappear. But our justifiable sadness does not give us good reason to declare that what is now endangered ought to be preserved forever; or to forbid ourselves from altering inherited cultural norms — abandoning some, changing others — and adopting new ways and customs as our own.
One might even say that this sadness is the inevitable price we pay for freedom. If we had no choice about what norms to adopt, and knew that the next generation would live as our ancestors lived before us, the world might lose one source of trouble but gain many more. The “endangered species” approach to defending cultural survival, then, has some serious defects.
Another line of argument connects the value of cultural survival to the value of cultural diversity, gaining support from the undoubted attractiveness of the latter. On reflection, however, the idea of cultural diversity seems scarcely less ambiguous than the notion of cultural survival itself. This ambiguity lies in whether it means valuing diverse people of distinct backgrounds or valuing the diversity of backgrounds itself.
The first notion — that people ought to be respected as equals regardless of their ethnicity, race, gender and other distinguishing traits is today a part of any plausible political philosophy. But it hardly follows that we must value and preserve diversity itself in the abstract. We have, I think, no reason to regret that the world does not contain twice as many cultures as it does.
The second notion — that of valuing cultural diversity in the abstract — raises in turn another deep ambiguity, the difference between diversity of cultures and diversity within cultures. Exposure to a wide variety of lifeways is clearly of great moral value; it enables people to flourish in ways that conformity and sameness instead suppress. But there is no necessary link between the desirability of diversity within cultures and the demand that there be a wide variety of cultures themselves.
Cultural survival, then, seems surprisingly hard to fashion into an attractive ideal. But in many of the cases of cultural loss that motivate activists and popular sentiment, something else is going on besides the simple disappearance of particular cultures and folkways. All too many aboriginal groups, for example, face persistent marginalization*. This suggests that it is not the disappearance of a culture so much as the reason for its loss that should be the focus of our moral attention. We should condemn and seek to remedy the discrimination and poverty faced by peoples around the world. But it is mistaken to think that the best way to achieve this is to insist that cultural survival is a value in itself.
While I cannot accept the argument that all existing cultures have a moral right to permanent survival, I would assert that there are circumstances under which allowing the destruction of a culture is immoral. Cultures can go out of the world because its members gradually and freely choose to adopt the norms of an outside culture. But much more often, the members of a culture assimilate because the surrounding community has made it impossible not to do so. Injustice and oppression have made many cultures around the world less likely to survive than they would otherwise be; allowing these cultures to disappear would reflect the tragic outcome of an unjust process. But this conclusion derives from the circumstances of the disappearance rather than from the disappearance itself.
The proper focus for our moral concern, then, is not the survival of cultures as collective practices and traditions, but rather the political, civil and human rights of the individuals that constitute the cultures. A culture has no moral claim to eternal existence, especially as against the rights and choices of its own individual members. Our concern about cultures, endangered or otherwise, should ultimately stem from the moral status and rights of their individual members.
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