Except, of course, for that claim itself – which is treated as unquestionable.
This self-refuting orthodoxy has become the West’s intellectual auto-immune disease. In seminar rooms from Auckland to New York, students learn that to judge another culture is to oppress it.
But here’s what the relativists cannot explain: while Western intellectuals insist that no culture or system is superior, the rest of the world votes with its feet. Migration flows are a vast, uncoordinated referendum on institutional quality. And the results are unambiguous. People risk death crossing the Mediterranean to reach Europe, not the reverse. Cuban rafts head for Florida, not Venezuela. Before the Berlin Wall rose, over three million East Germans fled west.
This isn’t cultural chauvinism. It’s data. And it suggests that everything isn’t relative after all.
The Relativist Orthodoxy
Modern relativism began with good intentions. The anthropologist Franz Boas, writing in 1887, argued that “civilisation is not something absolute, but... is relative” – that our ideas are true only “so far as our civilisation goes.” Boas and his students championed cultural relativism as a methodological stance: to combat Western ethnocentrism, one should suspend judgment and appreciate other cultures’ values in context. This was a progressive move in its time, undermining scientific racism and colonial presumptions of superiority.
But methodological humility gradually became metaphysical conviction. After the horrors of Nazism – itself built on claims of absolute truth – relativism gained wider popularity as an antidote to dangerous certainty. By mid-century, the American Anthropological Association was cautioning the United Nations that an international human rights declaration might impose Western values on diverse cultures. The very concept of universal rights was suspect.
The post-1960s academic landscape carried relativism to new heights. Postmodernist thinkers – Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard – attacked the idea of objective knowledge and universal narratives. Lyotard defined postmodernism as “incredulity toward metanarratives”: a sceptical stance toward any overarching truth claims, whether Enlightenment ideals or Marxism. In this view, all knowledge is socially constructed and power-laden. No culture’s beliefs about science, morality, or politics can claim privilege over another’s. “Truth isn’t outside power,” Foucault declared. “Truth is a thing of this world.”
Postcolonial theory added a political charge. Edward Said argued that Western claims to universal knowledge often masked imperial domination. Others urged that non-Western epistemologies are equally valid, and that terms like “development” or “reason” merely encoded Eurocentrism.
By the 1990s, a generation of students had been taught that asserting universal values or objective facts was naïve at best, oppressive at worst. Progress itself became suspect – seen as a narrative the West told about itself. Truth became “truths,” always plural, situated in identity and perspective.
This orthodoxy is now institutionalised. Surveys suggest that 64 percent of American adults – and 83 percent of teenagers – believe truth is relative to each person and situation rather than objective. Among college-age adults, three-quarters embrace moral relativism.
Yet the orthodoxy contains fatal contradictions. The statement “there are no universal truths” purports to be a universal truth. If all truth is relative, then relativism itself is merely one culture-bound opinion – in which case, why should anyone accept it? There is also the tolerance paradox: relativists value tolerance highly, yet pure relativism would require tolerating even the intolerant or the abhorrent. How can one condemn genocide or gender apartheid if no culture’s values can be judged by outsiders?
Perhaps the most potent argument against unqualified relativism is empirical reality. Some institutions demonstrably prevent suffering and allow human flourishing better than others. To refuse to acknowledge this – for fear of being “judgmental” – is not humility. It is moral abdication. And it carries a price: a civilisation that cannot articulate why it is worth defending will not, in the end, be defended.
Migration as Revealed Preference
If relativism were true – if no political system were genuinely superior – we would expect migration flows to be random, or at least symmetrical. They are neither.
The Cold War provided the starkest test. Prior to the Berlin Wall’s construction in 1961, as many as four million East Germans – over 20 percent of the population – fled to West Germany. The exodus was so severe that East Germany was haemorrhaging its workforce. The Wall itself was a brutal admission: the communist system could only retain its citizens by force. Between 1961 and 1989, some 5,000 East Germans still managed to escape across the Wall, while another 5,000 were captured and at least 191 were killed trying. The traffic was entirely one-way. Before the Wall fell, nobody walked east.
Cuba tells a similar story. Over decades, hundreds of thousands of Cubans have braved shark-infested waters on makeshift rafts to reach Florida. The 1980 Mariel boatlift brought 125,000 refugees to the United States in a matter of months. In 2022, worsening conditions sparked a new exodus: nearly 200,000 Cubans reached the United States that year alone. The risk of drowning, dehydration, or shark attack did not deter them. The direction is always the same.
The Mediterranean migrant crisis of 2015 saw an estimated 1.3 million people – primarily Syrians, Afghans, and Africans – risk dangerous sea crossings to reach Europe.
Every barrier erected to prevent citizens from leaving in the twentieth century – the Berlin Wall, the Korean DMZ, the Iron Curtain – was built by the unfree side. Liberal democracies build no walls to keep their people in. They don't need to.
Economists confirm what the migration data suggest. People move not only for higher incomes but for safety, rule of law, and freedom. Episodes of democratic backsliding trigger emigration even when economic conditions remain constant – illiberalism itself becomes a push factor. And refugees, when given choices, overwhelmingly head for liberal-democratic states, often bypassing nearer countries to reach more open societies further away.
Cultural relativists may claim all systems are equal, but the migrations of millions tell a different story. Given the freedom to choose, human beings consistently choose freedom.
Human Flourishing and Institutional Quality
The same verdict emerges when we move from border crossings to long-run development. Historical evidence overwhelmingly links the rise of liberal-democratic and market institutions to dramatic improvements in human flourishing.
The natural experiments of divided nations are particularly striking. After World War II, West Germany’s GDP per capita rapidly pulled away from East Germany’s. By the late 1980s, West Germans were roughly twice as prosperous as their Eastern counterparts – despite the two states sharing the same people, the same language, and the same starting point. The divergence was purely institutional.
The Korean Peninsula provides an even starker comparison. South Korea, after decades of market-driven growth and democratisation after 1987, transformed from a war-torn agrarian society into a high-income, technologically advanced nation. North Korea, under totalitarian command, delivered chronic poverty and periodic famine. Today, South Korean GDP per capita is roughly 25 to 30 times that of the North. Life expectancy in the South exceeds the North by more than a decade. Southern children are on average several centimetres taller, thanks to far better nutrition. The North Korean famine of the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands, even as South Korea’s supermarkets overflowed. Satellite images of the peninsula at night tell the story at a glance: the South blazes with light; the North is almost entirely dark.
Economist and Nobel-laureate Amartya Sen observed that “no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press.” Democratic governance prevents famines not through superior benevolence but through feedback: citizens can complain, journalists can report, and governments that fail to act can be replaced. Authoritarian secrecy enables mass starvation.
The pattern holds across continents and cultures. Nearly all countries with very high human development scores are liberal democracies. The bottom ranks are dominated by authoritarian rule, conflict, or command economies. Higher scores on Freedom House political rights indices and Fraser Institute economic freedom indices are consistently associated with better health outcomes and higher incomes. The correlation between liberty and human welfare is not Western projection. It is empirical regularity.
Yet in the seminar rooms where these facts might be examined most rigorously, they are often the hardest to state. Relativism may be the purest example a “luxury belief” – a conviction that costs nothing to hold because the person holding it already lives under the institutions it refuses to defend. The professors who teach that no culture is superior enjoy independent courts, uncensored newspapers, and hospitals practising evidence-based medicine. They deploy logic and evidence to argue that logic and evidence are merely Western ways of knowing. Their students nod, then check their phones – on networks that work because engineers treat physics as universally true. Nobody applies for a transfer to the philosophy department at Pyongyang University. The refugees on the raft have no access to luxury beliefs. For them, the question of which institutions are better is not academic. It is mortal.
The China Complication
The obvious objection is China. If liberal democracy is the key to human flourishing, how has an authoritarian state delivered the most dramatic poverty reduction in history? By World Bank estimates, over 800 million Chinese escaped extreme poverty in the four decades after Deng Xiaoping’s reforms – accounting for three-quarters of global poverty reduction in that period. Life expectancy soared from about 62 years in 1978 to 78 by 2020. On these metrics, China represents perhaps the greatest improvement in human welfare in history.
But the most revealing comparisons are not between China today and China before Deng. They are between China and societies that share its cultural inheritance – South Korea and Hong Kong – where similar people, starting poor, made different institutional choices and arrived at very different destinations.
All three began the post-war era impoverished. All three embraced markets. All three drew on Confucian traditions of education, family cohesion, and respect for hierarchy. Only two embraced liberal institutions. Today, South Korea is roughly twice as rich per person as China; Hong Kong nearly three times. Culture did not determine that outcome. Institutions did.
The question is whether markets without democracy can complete the journey. South Korea democratised in the late 1980s at roughly the income level China has reached today – and then crossed into stable, high-income prosperity. Virtually every country that has made that crossing (excluding petro-states) either was already a democracy or became one during the transition. China is testing whether authoritarian capitalism can break the pattern.
Hong Kong offers the reverse experiment. For decades it demonstrated what Chinese society could achieve under British common law and open institutions: one of the richest places on earth. Since Beijing tightened political control after 2020, capital, talent, and young people have begun leaving – the verdict delivered in real time. When China loosened economic controls, Hong Kong-style prosperity followed. When it tightened political control, Hong Kong-style confidence evaporated.
China is not a refutation of liberal universalism but a partial confirmation of it. Same culture. Different institutions. Different outcomes.
Not so relative
To say that liberal democracy is better is not a claim of Western cultural supremacy. It is a claim about consequences – about what actually happens to human beings under different institutional arrangements.
The needs are universal: physical security, material sufficiency, political voice and the credible expectation that one’s children will have at least as good a life as their parents. They need institutions that embed trial and error into governance itself, so that bad policies can be challenged and bad leaders replaced without bloodshed. They need institutions that hold power accountable and that allow individuals to build lives of dignity and meaning. Liberal democracy and market economies, whatever their local variations, have shown an unrivalled capacity to meet those needs.
This does not mean Western countries are perfect, or that non-Western cultures have nothing to offer. It means that the core institutional framework – political freedom, rule of law, economic openness – taps into universal human aspirations. It outperforms alternative systems by revealed preference and by measurable outcomes.
Cultural relativism, for all it has reminded us about humility, cannot obscure these facts. The reflexive relativism of contemporary academia has hindered honest appraisal of why liberal institutions work so well. It has left a civilisation unable to defend its own foundations – even as those foundations continue to attract the world’s migrants, refugees, and strivers.
Everything isn’t relative. Some things are better than others. And in defending liberal democracy as universally preferable – while always improvable – we stand not in ethnocentric hubris but in solidarity with generations of humans who, when free to choose, have chosen freedom.
Roger Partridge is chairman and a co-founder of The New Zealand Initiative and is a senior member of its research team. He led law firm Bell Gully as executive chairman from 2007 to 2014. This article was sourced HERE
This isn’t cultural chauvinism. It’s data. And it suggests that everything isn’t relative after all.
The Relativist Orthodoxy
Modern relativism began with good intentions. The anthropologist Franz Boas, writing in 1887, argued that “civilisation is not something absolute, but... is relative” – that our ideas are true only “so far as our civilisation goes.” Boas and his students championed cultural relativism as a methodological stance: to combat Western ethnocentrism, one should suspend judgment and appreciate other cultures’ values in context. This was a progressive move in its time, undermining scientific racism and colonial presumptions of superiority.
But methodological humility gradually became metaphysical conviction. After the horrors of Nazism – itself built on claims of absolute truth – relativism gained wider popularity as an antidote to dangerous certainty. By mid-century, the American Anthropological Association was cautioning the United Nations that an international human rights declaration might impose Western values on diverse cultures. The very concept of universal rights was suspect.
The post-1960s academic landscape carried relativism to new heights. Postmodernist thinkers – Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard – attacked the idea of objective knowledge and universal narratives. Lyotard defined postmodernism as “incredulity toward metanarratives”: a sceptical stance toward any overarching truth claims, whether Enlightenment ideals or Marxism. In this view, all knowledge is socially constructed and power-laden. No culture’s beliefs about science, morality, or politics can claim privilege over another’s. “Truth isn’t outside power,” Foucault declared. “Truth is a thing of this world.”
Postcolonial theory added a political charge. Edward Said argued that Western claims to universal knowledge often masked imperial domination. Others urged that non-Western epistemologies are equally valid, and that terms like “development” or “reason” merely encoded Eurocentrism.
By the 1990s, a generation of students had been taught that asserting universal values or objective facts was naïve at best, oppressive at worst. Progress itself became suspect – seen as a narrative the West told about itself. Truth became “truths,” always plural, situated in identity and perspective.
This orthodoxy is now institutionalised. Surveys suggest that 64 percent of American adults – and 83 percent of teenagers – believe truth is relative to each person and situation rather than objective. Among college-age adults, three-quarters embrace moral relativism.
Yet the orthodoxy contains fatal contradictions. The statement “there are no universal truths” purports to be a universal truth. If all truth is relative, then relativism itself is merely one culture-bound opinion – in which case, why should anyone accept it? There is also the tolerance paradox: relativists value tolerance highly, yet pure relativism would require tolerating even the intolerant or the abhorrent. How can one condemn genocide or gender apartheid if no culture’s values can be judged by outsiders?
Perhaps the most potent argument against unqualified relativism is empirical reality. Some institutions demonstrably prevent suffering and allow human flourishing better than others. To refuse to acknowledge this – for fear of being “judgmental” – is not humility. It is moral abdication. And it carries a price: a civilisation that cannot articulate why it is worth defending will not, in the end, be defended.
Migration as Revealed Preference
If relativism were true – if no political system were genuinely superior – we would expect migration flows to be random, or at least symmetrical. They are neither.
The Cold War provided the starkest test. Prior to the Berlin Wall’s construction in 1961, as many as four million East Germans – over 20 percent of the population – fled to West Germany. The exodus was so severe that East Germany was haemorrhaging its workforce. The Wall itself was a brutal admission: the communist system could only retain its citizens by force. Between 1961 and 1989, some 5,000 East Germans still managed to escape across the Wall, while another 5,000 were captured and at least 191 were killed trying. The traffic was entirely one-way. Before the Wall fell, nobody walked east.
Cuba tells a similar story. Over decades, hundreds of thousands of Cubans have braved shark-infested waters on makeshift rafts to reach Florida. The 1980 Mariel boatlift brought 125,000 refugees to the United States in a matter of months. In 2022, worsening conditions sparked a new exodus: nearly 200,000 Cubans reached the United States that year alone. The risk of drowning, dehydration, or shark attack did not deter them. The direction is always the same.
The Mediterranean migrant crisis of 2015 saw an estimated 1.3 million people – primarily Syrians, Afghans, and Africans – risk dangerous sea crossings to reach Europe.
Every barrier erected to prevent citizens from leaving in the twentieth century – the Berlin Wall, the Korean DMZ, the Iron Curtain – was built by the unfree side. Liberal democracies build no walls to keep their people in. They don't need to.
Economists confirm what the migration data suggest. People move not only for higher incomes but for safety, rule of law, and freedom. Episodes of democratic backsliding trigger emigration even when economic conditions remain constant – illiberalism itself becomes a push factor. And refugees, when given choices, overwhelmingly head for liberal-democratic states, often bypassing nearer countries to reach more open societies further away.
Cultural relativists may claim all systems are equal, but the migrations of millions tell a different story. Given the freedom to choose, human beings consistently choose freedom.
Human Flourishing and Institutional Quality
The same verdict emerges when we move from border crossings to long-run development. Historical evidence overwhelmingly links the rise of liberal-democratic and market institutions to dramatic improvements in human flourishing.
The natural experiments of divided nations are particularly striking. After World War II, West Germany’s GDP per capita rapidly pulled away from East Germany’s. By the late 1980s, West Germans were roughly twice as prosperous as their Eastern counterparts – despite the two states sharing the same people, the same language, and the same starting point. The divergence was purely institutional.
The Korean Peninsula provides an even starker comparison. South Korea, after decades of market-driven growth and democratisation after 1987, transformed from a war-torn agrarian society into a high-income, technologically advanced nation. North Korea, under totalitarian command, delivered chronic poverty and periodic famine. Today, South Korean GDP per capita is roughly 25 to 30 times that of the North. Life expectancy in the South exceeds the North by more than a decade. Southern children are on average several centimetres taller, thanks to far better nutrition. The North Korean famine of the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands, even as South Korea’s supermarkets overflowed. Satellite images of the peninsula at night tell the story at a glance: the South blazes with light; the North is almost entirely dark.
Economist and Nobel-laureate Amartya Sen observed that “no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press.” Democratic governance prevents famines not through superior benevolence but through feedback: citizens can complain, journalists can report, and governments that fail to act can be replaced. Authoritarian secrecy enables mass starvation.
The pattern holds across continents and cultures. Nearly all countries with very high human development scores are liberal democracies. The bottom ranks are dominated by authoritarian rule, conflict, or command economies. Higher scores on Freedom House political rights indices and Fraser Institute economic freedom indices are consistently associated with better health outcomes and higher incomes. The correlation between liberty and human welfare is not Western projection. It is empirical regularity.
Yet in the seminar rooms where these facts might be examined most rigorously, they are often the hardest to state. Relativism may be the purest example a “luxury belief” – a conviction that costs nothing to hold because the person holding it already lives under the institutions it refuses to defend. The professors who teach that no culture is superior enjoy independent courts, uncensored newspapers, and hospitals practising evidence-based medicine. They deploy logic and evidence to argue that logic and evidence are merely Western ways of knowing. Their students nod, then check their phones – on networks that work because engineers treat physics as universally true. Nobody applies for a transfer to the philosophy department at Pyongyang University. The refugees on the raft have no access to luxury beliefs. For them, the question of which institutions are better is not academic. It is mortal.
The China Complication
The obvious objection is China. If liberal democracy is the key to human flourishing, how has an authoritarian state delivered the most dramatic poverty reduction in history? By World Bank estimates, over 800 million Chinese escaped extreme poverty in the four decades after Deng Xiaoping’s reforms – accounting for three-quarters of global poverty reduction in that period. Life expectancy soared from about 62 years in 1978 to 78 by 2020. On these metrics, China represents perhaps the greatest improvement in human welfare in history.
But the most revealing comparisons are not between China today and China before Deng. They are between China and societies that share its cultural inheritance – South Korea and Hong Kong – where similar people, starting poor, made different institutional choices and arrived at very different destinations.
All three began the post-war era impoverished. All three embraced markets. All three drew on Confucian traditions of education, family cohesion, and respect for hierarchy. Only two embraced liberal institutions. Today, South Korea is roughly twice as rich per person as China; Hong Kong nearly three times. Culture did not determine that outcome. Institutions did.
The question is whether markets without democracy can complete the journey. South Korea democratised in the late 1980s at roughly the income level China has reached today – and then crossed into stable, high-income prosperity. Virtually every country that has made that crossing (excluding petro-states) either was already a democracy or became one during the transition. China is testing whether authoritarian capitalism can break the pattern.
Hong Kong offers the reverse experiment. For decades it demonstrated what Chinese society could achieve under British common law and open institutions: one of the richest places on earth. Since Beijing tightened political control after 2020, capital, talent, and young people have begun leaving – the verdict delivered in real time. When China loosened economic controls, Hong Kong-style prosperity followed. When it tightened political control, Hong Kong-style confidence evaporated.
China is not a refutation of liberal universalism but a partial confirmation of it. Same culture. Different institutions. Different outcomes.
Not so relative
To say that liberal democracy is better is not a claim of Western cultural supremacy. It is a claim about consequences – about what actually happens to human beings under different institutional arrangements.
The needs are universal: physical security, material sufficiency, political voice and the credible expectation that one’s children will have at least as good a life as their parents. They need institutions that embed trial and error into governance itself, so that bad policies can be challenged and bad leaders replaced without bloodshed. They need institutions that hold power accountable and that allow individuals to build lives of dignity and meaning. Liberal democracy and market economies, whatever their local variations, have shown an unrivalled capacity to meet those needs.
This does not mean Western countries are perfect, or that non-Western cultures have nothing to offer. It means that the core institutional framework – political freedom, rule of law, economic openness – taps into universal human aspirations. It outperforms alternative systems by revealed preference and by measurable outcomes.
Cultural relativism, for all it has reminded us about humility, cannot obscure these facts. The reflexive relativism of contemporary academia has hindered honest appraisal of why liberal institutions work so well. It has left a civilisation unable to defend its own foundations – even as those foundations continue to attract the world’s migrants, refugees, and strivers.
Everything isn’t relative. Some things are better than others. And in defending liberal democracy as universally preferable – while always improvable – we stand not in ethnocentric hubris but in solidarity with generations of humans who, when free to choose, have chosen freedom.
Roger Partridge is chairman and a co-founder of The New Zealand Initiative and is a senior member of its research team. He led law firm Bell Gully as executive chairman from 2007 to 2014. This article was sourced HERE
1 comment:
The epistemological error the fashionable make is to apply the same criteria to science as to humanities. Wherever there are value judgements involved, relativism prevails. But the molar mass of hydrogen is 1.00791 whether that's measured in the US, NZ, Japan, or even North Korea - or is not measured at all. Science presents us with universal, objective truths.
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