Looking for a blog post about culture and cultural/moral relativism

May 11, 2013 6:25 PM

I read a blog post about 5 or 6 years ago, which had some interesting and insightful things to say about how western culture often judged other cultures for not being culturally/morally relativistic.

My memories of the exact content are hazy, but I remember:

* I most likely read it via a comment or post on MeFi. Searching for it through tags, my favourites and phrases isn't turning up anything.

* The author was, possibly, a science fiction writer.

* I could be completely, completely wrong about this, but I strongly feel like the post mentioned dolphins more than once.

Does this ring any bells for anyone?

posted by Jon Mitchell to Media & Arts (5 answers total)

No dolphins, but the MeFi connection makes me think Scalzi's post from 2002 might be it?
posted by heliostatic at 9:26 PM on May 11, 2013

Response by poster: I turned that one up while searching for it! - but that's not the one.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 10:24 PM on May 11, 2013

Response by poster: Thinking about it a bit more, the core of the article was better articulated as:

US Culture often assumes that it is a good thing to look at other cultures in a non ethno-centric, morally relativistic way, and that it is a good thing for a culture to not make assumptions about another - without realising that thinking that is a good thing is, itself, is one of the big assumptions that US culture makes, and not a universal truth.

I suspect the dolphins came into it as some sort of example, unknowable culture to be compared against.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 10:37 PM on May 11, 2013

Best answer: Based on your revised description, David Brin's The Dogma of Otherness?
posted by Lexica at 10:31 AM on May 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: That's it! I am pleased to find out that I was not entirely imagining the dolphin thing.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 10:42 AM on May 12, 2013