Comparative Cultural Aberration Distortion
In optics, deformities caused by lenses are classified by type, and most people are familiar with common ones that distort the image. But there are harder ones to spot, like chromatic aberration distortion.
“Chromatic aberration distortion” is the non-uniform bending of light of varying color/wavelength as it passes through the lens. The result is a change in the color values, sometimes shown as color “fringes” along objects in a photo. The image isn’t distorted or twisted out of shape, but even if you don’t know exactly what is wrong with the photo, you know something’s not quite right. The picture isn’t sharp and clear.
There’s a similar thing happening in the world of political debate. It has its roots in the desire to cast all cultures as basically equal and remove the specter of “judgment”. The arguments where this is used seem reasonable enough, but are “not quite right”.
An example: in an on-line forum, a member mentioned that while Islamic countries with Sharia Law will execute homosexuals, in our country homosexuals were sometimes killed by bigots, and therefore, the poster concluded, “how different are we, really?”
My answer was short … I reminded him that when individuals killed homosexuals in our country,the criminal justice system punished them. In Iran, it is the criminal justice system that kills the homosexuals. The world of difference between those two was lost in the debate in our desire to be understanding and not emphasize the differences between us.
But it is a distortion of reality. As we see concepts and events through our own “lenses”, we have to be careful about analyzing by “bending” things at different rates. Having the state take the power to enforce religious law is infinitely worse than a person who joins a restrictive and controlling church and abdicates his rights. Having the state execute homosexuals is infinitely worse than living in a culture that hasn’t completely eradicated prejudice and bigotry, but is trying.
“Comparative cultural aberration distortion” is non-uniform bending of concepts to make two cultures seem alike when they are not. It is very common, and it is very dangerous.
