Ruth Benedict's The Individual And The Patterns Of Culture

Should I help this old lady who’s struggling to cross the street? Our lives are the embodiment of the phrase “to be or not to be.” We are constantly faced with decisions at every turn and these choices shape our life and our lifestyles. At this level of thinking, there can be a notion of right and wrong. The “right” thing to do in the question I provided, as many have voiced in their heads, is to help the lady cross the street. But could it be that in a different culture, the right thing to do would be to disregard or even maim her? In “The Individual and the Patterns of Culture”, Ruth Benedict, a renowned anthropologist, would say that there could exist such a culture. She’d inject her method of cultural relativism and advise that every individual be judged

Benedict devotes a great deal of time discussing people deemed as abnormals. She claims that these people aren’t really “abnormal” in a general sense. They are simply people whose culture excessively reinforced or did not support their tendencies. Those deemed abnormal in one society may be categorized as normal in another. Pinker, on the other hand, argues that since the mind is not a blank slate then discrimination is born from the differences in innate abilities. To demonstrate his point, he quotes Thomas Jefferson in The Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.” Pinker reasons that fairness does not equal sameness. The intended purpose of Jefferson’s claim was that individuals were to have the “same rights and should be treated as individuals”, not that all humans were to be treated as clones. Hence, people are discriminated because humans are not born equal in terms of our innate abilities. Pinker thinks discrimination arises because of genes, while Benedict claims that it’s closely related to how an individual upholds the values of his or her