is every culture as good as every other one.

That is a question that I want to take up pretty seriously in this episode of the show.

And it's a question obviously that is on a lot of people's minds.

Cultural relativism is this kind of broad catch-all term for the idea that,

well, they do things one way and one place and another way and another place.

And obviously that's true in some respects, right?

I mean, you know, it's no better to eat tacos than it is to eat hamburgers,

there's no better to eat hamburgers than those to eat tacos as far as I'm concerned.

Purely a matter of preference and these are things non-existential differences that we can talk

about. But what about things like polygamy, right? What about worse things like infanticide or

eugenics, right? Things that they do in some cultures and not another. What about incredibly

punitive laws about sexuality, right? These things, there's a kind of incoherent idea that we have

floating around in our society that, well, it's all fine and dandy, everyone can do everything,

but we have certain moral absolutes, right? We want rights for gay people everywhere.

But, you know, we want to be sensitive about Muslim culture. So we want to be sensitive about

this, that, and the other. And so we have this weird incoherence where we believe certain things

very passionately. And yet we also have this weird relativism that comes out of our, like an over

extended desire for sensitivity. And this is an idea which is very, very ancient. I've talked

about Herodotus before and when we had Tom Hollandon, he mentioned this idea that custom is king.

And we were talking about the fact that that's not actually a position of cultural relativism.

Herodotus was talking about the fact that where you grow up and the assumptions that you're surrounded

by shape you in really important ways. But there are certain things that Herodotus proclaims

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