How do leftist reconcile "progress" with cultural relativism?

>I'm confused why you think I would have the exact same opinion as all the hundreds of millions of other people on the Earth whi lean to the left.

I don't. I'm looking for some opinions on it, preferably by leftists.

>Why isn't the question "how do you reconcile progress and cultural relativism"?

Because i'm specifically wondering how leftist reconcil it, considering their ideology is composed of both.

>Also what are you defining as "progress". What do you mean by this?

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism

This. Thanks. And even if you have another perspective you implicitly always use universal/European standards.

>I don't. I'm looking for some opinions on it, preferably by leftists.

Then you inadequately phrased your question.

Start again.

Or answer it?....

It's as silly as "why do all rightists worship Mussolini?"

Obviously you don't.

Leftist here. I don't agree with cultural relativism.

Question answered enough for you?

This
For every Leftist who believes in Cultural Relativism you have people like Sam Harris or Chris Hitchens or Bill Clinton

Do you think non-whites are inferior to whites for not having progressed as far?

>Obviously you don't.

Except in this case judging by OP's image he probably does.

Inferior in what way?

Keep in mind that our species is 100,000 to 250,000 years old and civization of any kind is 10,000 years old.

If you are trying to mix up outright racism and being against cultural relativism you are very confused young lad.

By not giving a fuck about cultural relativism because it's fucking shit.

used to be they reconciled it trough the notions of 5 day work weeks, getting payed enough to live decently, having certain rights as a worker and a citisen, having acess to helthcare and education, being threated fairly and equaly by the system not depending on sex or ethnicity, having a say in decision making, like about how things are run and how the capital is used and distributed, etc... this seems to be the same in most cultures, like leftists in india demand the same things as leftists in czech republik or brasil, strangely

bizzare isnt it

Both are against ideas of classical hierarchy and propriety and can be made to serve the cause of egalitarianism when appropriate. You are trying to find a coherent frame to what is glorified political memetics. With progressivism and relativism you get to have some gnostic sense of history religious feeling but you can still deny it.
Of note, the cultural relativism part is often a useful political ploy, particularly in the west with the imported non-westerners. You can see how "cultural relativists" rarely go out of their way to defend native westerners indulging in wrongthink (in the eye of progressives). Often they outright forget about it and denounce the wrongthinkers for violation of the cultural relativism protective eye towards deviants/aliens. In practice it really boils down to "we'll take non progressives as allies against our native adversaries" and it makes it really difficult to see it as anything else than tactical posturing. Basically but with action in mind.

What's your explanation for why White have progressed further than non-whites?

As already said ITT, cultural relativism is only a thing among a few bored academics (who are probably not that much into orthodox progress ideology).
The only time you may see it outside academia is when somalis get off rape charge because of "sexual emergencies". This has little to do with cultural relativism though, and everything to do with politics.

They haven't in any significant sense when you are talking a 250,000 year timescale.

Whites aren't even necessarily ahead in terms of "progression" if you were to go back a relatively short timespan, such as 500 - 2000 years.

As little as 800 years ago, Europeans were the sickly starving peasant slave culture living in literal mud huts that we like to mock Africa for today.

China and Rome were more or less equal in GDP and power, but Rome fell and China didn't. Many will decry the dark ages "weren't that bad" but the reality is the cities starved and depopulated when nobody maintained the roads. Without an urban elite dedicated to education, China easily overtook the west as the global trade hub. India and the Muslim world both prospered trading gold to China, which is the basis for the "gold standard" being a thing.

In the course of 800 years, literal mudhut peasants would take over the world and topple an empire that had been a front runner since literally the beginning of written history. Europe wasn't quite in last place in terms of "civilized progress", but it wasn't much better than Aztecs or Nigerians at the time. "How" Europe became so successful is a very good question indeed. Nobody knows for sure, but I can offer an educated guess as to the answer.

The short answer is that Europe got lucky. The long answer is that Europe fought harder for everything it got.

China had a unifying culture. Even when it got taken over my mongols, they just tried to make the mongols Chinese. Didn't take long to get rid of them either because mongols were incompetent rulers (excellent conquerors). In contrast, Europeans spent more time killing eachother than they did Muslims or anybody else (and they spent a great deal of time killing Muslims).

Why? Malthusian warfare is one major suggestion. Without the technology to make their food yields more efficient, survival really became a matter of who had more land. And if you had excess population and not enough land, your only choice was to invade your neighbor. Other practices in Europe- such as a celibate clergy that share a collectively inherited property pool- are also suspected to be a feature of Malthusian pressure.

At any rate, Europeans spent a great deal more time killing eachother. And while this seems awfully counterproductive, it does hone your tenacity for cunning warfare and ruthless tactics. The Chinese invented gunpowder, and the Ottmans had mortars, but it was Europeans who decided to invest heavily into cannons and then put them on boats so you could move them around quickly. Just as important as military technology, however, was game theoretical bastardness. Which I'll elaborate on here in a second.

When Vasco De Gama sailed around Africa, he demanded tribute from every port. The amount he demanded was pitifully small for the Indian Merchants of East Africa, who incidentally could have crushed his fleet with their far superior numbers and wealth. But it was cheaper to pay the mugger than to kill him. So most of them did. And a few of them just called his bluff. But at the end of his journey, Vasco had a great deal of money, which Portugal spent on "more boats and cannons" and repeated the process. Only now killing Vasco would be much more of a hassle, and fewer called his bluff. By the third or fourth time Portugal did this, the ports were flying the Portuguese flag. And everyone who stopped at them for necessary supplies had to pay tribute. That alone funded the Portuguese Empire.

Mongols may have also been this clever, but the Chinese and Indians never were. They prospered too much from peace to ever figure out you could game the system by being an asshole. But Europeans had been fucking eachother for centuries. So it seems related that Europeans wold be more likely to try a strategy like this.

Another key invention for Europe was of course transoceanic sailing. China *could* have done this, but never did. Their largest naval expedition was Zheng He's fleet, which was ridiculously huge and went around demanding tribute (which it got, but isn't as clever as Vasco because it could have wrecked any port it sailed into, rather than vice versa). The problem was Zheng He only went as far as East Africa, and having heard tales of Europe as "yet another dirt peasant shit hole" decided "yeah, there's really nothing out there as great as China. Fuck Exploring its a waste of time". In a sense, he was right. There wasn't anything as great as China. But that *complacency* would be China's downfall. They were content to be wealthy and huge, but didn't want to expand even bigger. China dismantled the fleet on the offchance it could be used for a coup.

Europe, meanwhile, built transoceanic ships. Why? Because fuck dealing with the Barbary Corsairs in the Mediterranean. So they sailed around Africa (which went great) and they sailed west. And *this* is where Europe got lucky.

The conquest of the Aztecs is just a perfect storm. Captured eloquently in "Guns, Germs, and Steel" - it left out one more crucial technology: hooves. The Aztecs did not have horses. With horses, Cortez conquer a village and kill the messengers so that nobody ever knew he even conquered it. This was possible because the Aztec empire consisted mostly of angry slaves who were happy to be "liberated". And with steel armor and swords, the aztec wood and glass weapons were harmless. Using a small force that consistently avoided casualties, you could consistently defeat small enemy forces so long as they never overwhemed you. Kill messengers, and they never do. ANd with each conquest, the army grew with liberated slaves.

Guns helped in that they made you appear as a god- so when Cortez arrived in Tenoctitlan, he was greeted warmly (despite Montezuma being unaware Cortex had already amassed a slave army). The warm welcome bought time for the black plague to kick in- a cocktail of plagues the Old world had an immunity to, but not the new world. With the Aztec population devastated, a slave army (also devastated) invades, and invincible iron conquistadors wreck havoc with boomsticks.

Thus the largest and only real substantial empire in the New World fell. One that just happened to have more gold than iron. Rinse, wash, and repeat with the Incas. Enslave everyone and put them in the silver mines. Now Spain is the unquestioned superpower of Europe, though Portugal is still sitting pretty as well. Good thing they got along for some reason.

>only these problematic white people need to progress, every other culture is fine as it is

Enter Sir Francis Drake. He steals all the gold from the Spanish and isn't afraid of anybody. Spain gets pissed, sends an Armada, somehow manages to fuck that up, and between buccaneers and privateers, Britian has stolen enough gold to sustain a leisure class of educated merchant elites (as opposed to landed feudal lords). These elites are responsible for enlightenment philosophy, including Adam Smith a few centuries later. But most important among them was the British East India Trading Company.

Use Gold. Buy ships. Sail to India. Make trades. Get screwed. Indian court fucks you over because you're foreign LOL. Never trade with those assholes again. Next time, make it clear that all trades will be governed by British common law. They managed to enforce this with nary a shot fired. How? Because if you fucked them even once, you never got any of that juicy New World gold ever again. Cities like Mumbai and Calcutta became Bombay and Calicut. The towns that screwed them are poor as dirt and got crushed by the Rajas that had tons of British gold to pay for soldiers. Before long, the only parts of India that matter are under British customs, British Law. England decides letting a company run a sub-continent is ill advised, and formally annexes it. India was conquered without a shot (ok, there were a few, but very little formal military action was required. The largest engagement was kicking out the Portuguese)..

Britain proceeds to repeat this process in China. China and Japan freak out because they saw what happened to India and decide to go full isolationist. Britain is contained to just Hong Kong for the most part. Portugal to just Macau. Somehow the Dutch got to trade with Nagasaki. Otherwise, gwailo stay the fuck out. Britain, not one to be snubbed, responds by selling all these useless poppy flowers they found in India to China. The Opium war begins as a very deliberate attempt to disrupt Chinese autonomy. All by the magic of free trade.

So from the mid 15th century to the mid 18th century, Europe went from mud huts to global empire. The Americas were easily colonized. The Native Americans were too diverse to summarize easily, but the simplest answer is that they were a complacent anarcho-communist society. And just like China, complacency leaves you unprepared for a more aggressive threat.

Africa on the coasts was owned by Portugal, and in the north still controlled by Ottomans. But the British were particularly clever in completely destroying any chance Africa had at civilization. Too many tribes speaking too many different languages (the most language diversity anywhere in the world)- without common language, diplomacy and trade were hindered, and hatred for eachother grew instead. When one tribe saw it could gain an advantage by selling its enemies into slavery via gold, it seemed too good to be true. Guess they didn't realize the other tribe got the same offer. Everybody was too busy fucking eachother for that shiny new world gold to realize the Europeans were the only real winner here.

Ottomans held fast until WW1, but for the most part Euro-global dominance was complete. The New world and SS-Africa were enslaved. India sold itself to Britain. Ming China collapsed because it printed too much money and didn't understand economics (nobody did, until Adam Smith came along). The Ching did their best to stay isolationist and rely on their giant population to still be relevant, but the rules of the game had changed. It wasn't about who had the most dudes who could make the most stuff. It was about who had big guns and can make the most people give them stuff, then use that to buy influence so that their enemies sell eachother out and never unite against them.

THAT is the secret to European dominance. Making sure your enemies fuck eachother over- not you. And Europe learned this from fucking eachother over. Europe learned this because it was never complacent with peace and prosperity.

>Europe before 15th century
>mud huts

le dark ages maymay

Then Europe hit critical mass. Britain had the Industrial revolution, and others soon followed. Again, its not obvious why this happened in Britain in the 1800's and not China in the 900's. But the answer is probably that Europe had an unusually high tolerance for competition.

China values harmony. Upsetting tradition and the way thigns are done could collapse society into feudal warfare, and you don't want to end up in mud huts like those Europeans do you? (though plenty of China is STILL to this day living in unfloored mud huts, but not any of the middle class Chinese since Ming).
Europe is all about having a rival, and driving him out of business so that he and his family starve. I mean seriously, fuck that guy. You're pretty sure he stole a turnip from your garden once. You'll show him. Your widget will be 100x better than his widget!

And as I said before, Europe already had a culture of merciless cunning. It is a pretty natural birthplace for capitalism, and perhaps that was always a prerequisite for industrialization. Or at least the essential drive to invent and perfect the technology.

China meanwhile was suffering from Mandarinization. They did good by using a testing system to put only smart people in charge. But that system is only as good as its test. And eventually it became sorta incestuous (much like modern academia is totally out of touch with poor stupid people, though its *trying* to be inclusive at least). It's very hard to test creativity (though the mandarins tried, with poetry interpretations), and eventually you end up with a bunch of autists who can memorize rules, but don't have the cunning Europeans did. And because they were certifiable smart people, they got the money and the pussy and the actual cunning people were told they were wrong and mischeivous and need to STFU. China stagnates, by a very subtle error that we would do well to learn from. To this day Chinese people value western education over their own universities.

>THAT is the secret to European dominance. Making sure your enemies fuck eachother over- not you. And Europe learned this from fucking eachother over. Europe learned this because it was never complacent with peace and prosperity.

retarded bullshit. No people has been complacent ,from the most dung eating African tribes to the the grandest empires. If you think African tribes weren't constantly fucking each other before, during and after European colonization your hopelessly deluded. As for "divide and conquer" literally the easiest strategy in the playbook used by everyone from China to Arabia.

>What is FEMEN

Did I say mud? Silly me, perhaps I should have said *literaly animal dung*.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wattle_and_daub

As I said before, the dark ages weren't *that* bad. Mostly they're a lack of historical record. But the richest European kings were lower middle class compared to Indian and Chinese aristocracy.

So, global trade dominance, manifest destiny into new world lands, and industrialization, and yeah- the European dominance is complete. But there's a little more to the story as well.

Japan was the only non-European power recognized as a peer by Europe and acknowledged in the G8. Why?

So back when Japan and China were freaking out and becoming isolationist, Japan decided to have a "purge the white people" day, in which they genocided all foreigners living in mainland Japan. They then decided to fire *bamboo cannons* (which only fired one shot and obliterated themselves) at American Commodore Perry's fleet as they sailed through the Yamaguchi straight. Commodore Perry responded by burning the nearest city to the ground, killing every last nip he saw, then doing that three more times and demanding a surrender from the capital. Japan to this day calls it "the unfair treaties". It basically gave the U.S. unrestricted tariff free trade with Japan.

Realizing Japan would become a U.S. territory in mere decades like India did with Britain, they decided to take drastic measures. They literally disbanded their government and every single official but one went on world tour. Seriously, they paraded the emperor around the world in like 1000 days. From the American West to the Transiberian railroad, they took note of all our technology- including our civil structures and government. They then went home, drafted a new constitution, killed the samurai with guns (who didn't want to abandon their feudal holdings), and proceeded to methodically industrialize Japan.

It is mostly active in white countries.

Japan even copied western religion, whipping up a bloodthirsty crusader zeal for Shintoism that had never before existed in their history. They copied western nationalism and patriotism as well, carefully weaving their original cultural identity in as much as possible while copying everything they could. The result was the Meiji restoration, which would go on to conquer a chunk of Russia (Russo-Japanese war), then Korea, then China, then Phillipines, then... well, surely you know the rest.

So, when you say "non-whites are inferior for not having progressed"- keep in mind that some of them *did* progress exactly as far, and are by all measures considered peers. And furthermore, through most of history, whites were not explicitly dominant at all- at best, only a peer to China and India.

Fuck you it was a good, if simplistic, summary.

You're quite right to observe that Africa does have exactly the same Malthusian pressures and internal strife Europe did. So my explanation is not sufficient, but I think it is part of the story. East Africa in particular was more complacent when they were part of the Indian trade sphere. It is a curious matter as to why West and South Africa never ascended, but I highly suspect it is because of their language diversity inhibiting trade and diplomacy.

While divide and conquer is surely in Sun Tzu, my claim isn't that its unique to the Europeans, but that Europeans were simply *better* at it. More cunning. More able to implement the grand strategy in more unexpected ways. As I said in the beginning, the short answer is Europe had a lucky windfall (New World gold). The long answer is that they fought harder for every inch than everyone else (ruthless cunning).

It was "germs guns of steal, Europeans are a special kind of evil, and luck." Luck, I presume, that the author imagines not given by a higher power but chance.

>India
Nice meme

To be fair, luck is a big part of it. I doubt the conquistadors would know about the plague wiping out a lot of the New World, so you can't attribute it to cunning, just dumb luck. Same with the African tribes being bullshitted into selling their neighbours off, they thought they were getting a good deal on an enemy but they only weakened their own continent to slightly strengthen themselves at the time while most European nations weren't busy crippling each other and as such remaining in a position of power.

Um, what are you disputing exactly? You mean the cohesion of the Indian subcontinent as a single entity? I concede, that is a bit of a gloss. It was always a random pile of warring kingdoms, none of whom identified with one.

But the subcontinent has always had enormous proportional population for all of history, which grants it tremendous GDP. So throughout history its always been a strategic trade jewel.

>white mans burden
>satire

"India" is as much of a thing as "Europe"