In the article of The Challenge of Cultural Relativism, it came to my attention how subjective every belief is in our world. Almost everything that we consider to be "right" in our society may be horrendously wrong in another. The main issue that was discussed in the article was the humans' natural tendencies to accept their native country's customs and find any other belief to be wrong, simply because it was different. This can be directly related to Things Fall Apart with the large amount of confusion held between the tribe and the white men. One custom of the tribe was to participate in a dance where a group of men would dance around wearing masks that forbidden to be taken off. Once a tribe member is converted to the belief that the masks were silly and unnecessary, he removes one from a dancer and the tribe is in awe of his action. In our society we would agree that the masks do not hold any significance in its circumstance, but the tribe was built on the custom of this dance and any violation is highly unlawful.
In today's society, several young members of the world are pushing for a revolution in the way of same-sex marriage. As said in the article, others that have been raised on the belief that marriage is strictly between a man and a woman may find it hard to change their views to something that they would consider "primitive" or "barbaric" and will fight to keep their belief alive. As the fight for same-sex marriage grows stronger, it becomes harder to find that there are people that feel strongly against the movement, as seen here. I personally may be slightly biased towards the topic, but I can understand why those against gay marriage feel the way that they do. If you were repeatedly told as you grew up that marriage was for no one but a man and a woman, you would be ignorant towards any other argument, which leads to the problem that no one can seem to agree on the issue of gay marriage.
I can agree with the article's argument that almost everything that we learn is subject to our upbringing in our society. As the article said, however, there are values that are held in all cultures due to the need of survival, which makes sense. If you want your people to survive, you can't kill each other or be completely dishonest, otherwise you will not last very long. As I said before, all cultures hold different beliefs which leads to conflicts. My only solution is that, as a society, we have to break through our ignorance of "primitive" and "barbaric" actions and open our imagination towards the culture of others to better understand the world that we live in.
