Cultural Relativism: When I Realized My Values Were Not Universal

 

When the boat disappeared beyond the horizon, leaving him alone on the small wooden pier, Matteo felt the weight of distance for the first time.

Before him lay the island he had dreamed of for years—a strip of green land suspended in the vastness of the Indian Ocean.

He was twenty-six years old, had just earned a degree in anthropology and archaeology, and was convinced he was standing at the beginning of something important.

Throughout his years of study, one question had fascinated him more than any other:

Does a universal morality exist?

Beneath differences in language, religion, and tradition, was there a common moral core shared by all human beings?

Matteo believed there was.

And he was convinced that this expedition would provide the evidence he needed.

The first days passed without surprises.

The community hosting him lived in small villages scattered along the coast.

Families cooperated closely, elders were respected, and children grew up surrounded by the care of the entire group.

There were rules, prohibitions, ceremonies, and clearly defined social roles.

The more he observed the community, the more familiar it seemed.

The clothes were different. The religious beliefs, myths, and legends were different.

Yet beneath the surface, something felt remarkably familiar.

Every evening he recorded his observations in a notebook.

"Stable social structure."

"Strong internal cooperation."

"Presence of shared norms."

He was pleased. His theory seemed to be confirmed.

Then came the day of the great seasonal ceremony.

The entire island seemed transformed.

People decorated their huts with colorful flowers. Men lit large ceremonial fires.

Women prepared baskets overflowing with food for the sacred feast.

Matteo observed every detail with excitement.

This was the moment he had been waiting for—the most authentic expression of the local culture.

As the sun began to set, everyone gathered in the large central clearing.

Songs rose into the air. Drums beat hypnotic rhythms. The atmosphere was solemn and intense.

Then Matteo saw the food.

At first, he thought he had misunderstood.

He stepped closer.

His stomach tightened.

Among the dishes were substances that, in his culture, would have been considered impure and revolting: dried droppings from herbivorous animals, carefully processed and mixed into other preparations.

Nearby, animals that he had always associated with companionship and affection were being roasted over open fires.

For a few seconds, he stood frozen.

Then a sudden feeling swept through him.

A deep, visceral disgust.

He had to walk away.

That night he wrote frantically in his notebook.

"Repulsive practice."

"Morally unacceptable custom."

"A form of cultural regression."

The words seemed to pour out by themselves.

They were not the result of reflection.

They were a reaction.

A judgment.

A verdict.

For the first time since arriving on the island, he no longer felt like an observer.

He felt like a judge.

In the days that followed, he avoided the subject, but something inside him had changed.

Whenever he met the villagers, he found himself looking at them differently.

Yet something strange happened.

The more he observed them, the less he could reconcile the ritual with the image he had formed of them.

They were generous people.

They welcomed strangers.

They cared for children and elders.

They treated one another with respect.

So where was the barbarism he thought he had seen?

One afternoon he finally gathered the courage to ask one of the elders about the ceremony.

The old man listened patiently and smiled before replying.

"You only saw the food."

"What else was I supposed to see?" Matteo asked.

The elder picked up a handful of soil.

"This soil feeds the grass."

Pointing to a grazing animal, he continued:

"The grass feeds the animal."

Then he slowly let the earth slip through his fingers.

"When the animal dies, it returns to the earth."

After a brief pause, he added:

"For us, nothing is separate."

The elder explained that the substances Matteo found disgusting symbolized fertility and transformation.

They represented the continuous passage of life from one form to another.

The ritual did not celebrate impurity.

It celebrated the cycle of existence.

Matteo listened, yet part of him still resisted.

A few days later, everything changed.

During an evening conversation, several villagers began asking questions about life in Europe.

At first he answered casually.

Then he noticed the astonishment on their faces.

When he described industrial farming, the elders exchanged puzzled glances.

When he explained how much food was wasted every day in large Western cities, the silence deepened.

Finally, one of them slowly shook his head and asked:

"Why raise so many animals if so much food is simply thrown away?"

Matteo had no answer.

For the first time, he found himself on the other side of judgment.

Now he was the one being misunderstood.

He was the one whose customs seemed strange.

That night he could not sleep.

He reread his notebook page by page.

At one point, his eyes stopped on a sentence he had written after the feast:

"Repulsive practice."

He stared at it for a long time.

Then a question emerged—a question he had never asked himself before.

Where exactly was the disgust?

In the action itself?

Or within him?

He closed his eyes and tried to describe the event as neutrally as possible.

A group of people were consuming certain foods during a religious ceremony.

That was the fact.

Everything else—disgust, condemnation, indignation—came afterward.

Those reactions did not belong to the observed action.

They belonged to him.

They were the product of years of education, habits, symbols, and meanings absorbed without conscious awareness.

The realization was unsettling.

Until that moment, he had believed that certain values simply existed in the world.

Like the color of leaves.

The sound of the sea.

The shape of rocks.

Now he was beginning to understand that values were not objects, nor were they properties of things.

They were interpretations.

Ways of seeing reality.

Ways of assigning meaning to what happens.

From that moment on, his work changed.

He stopped trying to determine who was right and who was wrong.

He stopped dividing cultures into civilized and primitive.

Instead, he began studying how human beings construct moral judgments.

He discovered that actions can be observed.

Values, however, are assigned.

He also discovered that what one society considers sacred may appear absurd to another, and what one society regards as natural may seem incomprehensible elsewhere.

Months later, when he returned to Europe, he was no longer the same person.

He carried the same notes, the same data, and the same observations.

But he read them with different eyes.

He finally understood that his research had never truly been about human actions.

It had been about the language through which we judge them.

He had not discovered a universal morality.

He had discovered something more unsettling—and perhaps more profound.

That between the world and our judgments there is always a perspective.

And that we often mistake that perspective for reality itself.

From that day forward, he never forgot the lesson he had learned on that distant island.

He became convinced that actions belong to facts, while values belong to people.

And that what we call good or evil is not written into the things we observe, but into the lens through which we have learned to interpret them.