The Traveler and the Stayer
Both should be careful to avoid mistakes. What mistakes?
The traveler sees foreign cultures and thus can compare them with his own. Suppose that when asked “What have you learned?” he replies: “Different strokes for different folks!”
Now, this truism is ambiguous. One might mean that it’s a fact that different cultures have different customs and thus that there’s a diversity of lifeways. Call this interpretation A. It’s a descriptive interpretation.
But one might mean that since there’s a miscellany of lifeways, no particular way of life is wrong. They’re all morally acceptable. Call this construal B. It’s a normative interpretation.
A is true. B is a mistake of reasoning. From the descriptive fact that different cultures have different customs, it doesn’t follow that no custom is wrong. For example, some cultures in Africa practice infibulation. However, that anthropological fact doesn’t entail that infibulation is morally acceptable. The ancient Chinese practiced foot-binding. Some ancient societies practiced infanticide by exposure, abandoning unwanted infants in the wild to die by starvation or hypothermia, or to be devoured by animals. Some societies have prevented women from working, voting, or standing independently in a law court. The fact that such practices have occurred doesn’t entail that they are morally permissible.
The stayer, on the other hand, might prefer the familiar to the foreign. “I like the way things are done around here,” she says. “I’m not comfortable with how things are done in other places.” So far, she has merely described her subjective tastes. She might add: “We’ve always done things like this around here.” Perhaps it’s true. Yet it doesn’t follow that the way she and her society live is morally acceptable. Imagine the foot-binder who says to the Christian and Confucian reformers who tried to end the practice: “Well, this is what our society does. It must be morally right.” To reason in this way is to commit the fallacy of ad populum or perhaps appeal to tradition.
One might think that all of this should be obvious. Yet for some, it’s not. As Herodotus recognized long ago, people are inclined to believe (falsely) that their own customs — merely in virtue of being their own — are not only morally acceptable but the best of all customs. As he wrote: “it is, I think, rightly said in Pindar’s poem that custom is lord of all.” (The Histories)
Custom might be king in the sense that each society prefers its own ways of life. But custom is also a confuser, requiring the guidance of reason.
Reason: don’t leave home without it.