Someone describes a practice. You say you think it’s wrong. And then a third person, who has been quiet until now, says: well, it’s their culture.
Notice what just happened. The conversation is over. Not because anything was settled, but because continuing now looks like bad manners. That’s what makes the move so effective — it ends an argument while wearing the face of decency, and most people would rather lose the point than look like the kind of person who pushes past it.
I think it deserves pushing past. Not because respect for other people’s lives is a bad instinct, but because this particular sentence doesn’t deliver it.
You answered a different sentence
Start with what actually got said. I made a claim about a practice. What came back was a claim about a people.
Those aren’t the same object. A practice is a thing humans do, and like anything humans do, it can be defended, revised, or abandoned. A person is not a practice. Nobody chooses which set of customs they’re born inside, and nobody should have to answer for them.
So the swap runs in one direction only, and it always runs the same way: an objection to a practice gets returned as though it were contempt for a population. It’s an answer to a sentence I didn’t say. And notice that it isn’t a retreat from moral claims either — outsiders ought to defer is a rule proposed for everyone, everywhere, which makes it a universal claim advanced by someone who would rather not have to defend one.
Now the honest complication, because it’s real. Sometimes the criticism is a proxy. People do use disapproval of a custom as a socially acceptable container for disliking the people who hold it, and readers who flinch at this argument have usually seen that happen. So the distinction is worth testing rather than asserting.
The test is symmetry. Does the person applying the standard apply it to their own side, at cost to themselves? And does the objection land on the practice, or on the presence of the people who practise it? Someone who is outraged about a custom abroad and untroubled by its equivalent at home isn’t making an argument about the custom. That’s a fair thing to check. It’s also a fair thing to be checked on.
There is no “they”
Here’s the deeper problem. The sentence assumes a they — a group that has considered the matter and arrived, together, at a position.
No group is like that. Not theirs, not yours, not any.
And the practices most likely to be defended this way are, with unhelpful regularity, the practices that face the most internal resistance. That isn’t a coincidence; it’s the mechanism. Customs that everyone genuinely wants need no enforcement, and no defenders.
So “their culture” is rarely a description of what a people believe. It’s the settled account of an argument somebody won — usually the people who had the power to win it, and who still have the power to say what the culture is. Deferring to that account isn’t neutrality between insiders. It’s picking the winners, then calling it respect.
The dissenters we hear from are the ones who got out, got a platform, or got lucky. They’re a floor, not a ceiling.
This isn’t hypothetical, and it isn’t confined to one tradition. Caste discrimination gets defended as ancient custom by people whose position in it is comfortable. Compulsory dress laws get described as cultural preference by governments that jail the women who decline. Communities that shun members for leaving present the shunning as a private matter of faith, which is easier to say if you’ve never been the one shunned. In each case there is an internal argument going on, and the outside observer who says “it’s their culture” has quietly awarded it to one side.
Now do it at home
If the question only ever gets pointed outward, it isn’t a question — it’s a weapon.
So point it here. Anyone who says this is who we are is making a bid for authority, not reporting a finding. Men are not represented by the people online currently claiming to speak for men. Families are not represented by whoever has trademarked the phrase “family values.” Nations are not represented by the version of national tradition that happens to be politically convenient this decade.
Same two questions, at home: who is making this claim, and who inside would say otherwise? Asking it about your own side is the part that costs something, which is why it’s the part that makes the rest honest.
The objection that deserves an answer
There’s one serious objection, and it isn’t the one usually raised. It’s this: reasoning of exactly this shape has been used before, and it built empires. The civilising mission arrived with a moral case attached. People who hear a Westerner explain what’s wrong with a distant custom have historical reason for the hair on their neck to rise.
That’s true, and it shouldn’t be waved off. But look at where the damage actually happened. It wasn’t in concluding that a practice was wrong. It was in the next step — deciding that the conclusion licensed acting over people, at scale, by force, usually to someone’s profit.
Those steps are separable, and separating them is the whole job. Judging a practice tells you nothing about who should act, or whether outsiders should act at all. And the people best placed to change a practice are almost always the ones living inside it who already want it changed. Backing them isn’t the imperial move. It’s closer to the opposite of it.
It’s tempting to think all of this needs a foundation under it — that before I can say the appeal to culture fails, I owe you an account of where moral standards come from. I don’t. The objection doesn’t arrive from somewhere above the disagreement; it comes from inside it. The appeal needs a they whose agreement settles the matter, and there isn’t one, and that failure is complete on its own terms. Whatever yardstick you hold, including one you take to be entirely local to you, it’s their culture doesn’t engage it. It changes the subject to a consensus that was never there. (Where standards come from is a question I find interesting for its own sake, and I’ll come back to it.)
What this costs you
Very little, which is the appeal.
When you hear it, ask two questions. Who is saying this? And who inside would disagree, if disagreeing were safe?
Then accept both questions about your own side, from someone who owes you nothing.
Written with AI assistance.
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