As enlightened people we are supposed to believe that all cultures are equidistant from eternity, that none is perfect, that each should be judged by standards that are immanent in the culture itself since no one, now, believes in universal standards. They are values, and values are culture-bound. Applied to an alien culture, they become forms of vanity. But this kind of moral inflation is hardly a danger for us. The danger for us is of a sort of inverse imperialism: the suppressing of our values out of cultural guilt and in the name of cultural relativity….
There is, I think, an element of self-deceit in this attitude. Painfully conscious of the despised roots of his own values in Christianity, capitalism, and industry, the liberal mutes his anger at the inequality, the despotism, and the climate of cruelty in many of the poor countries. He has a doctrine that they are the victims of Western imperialism, of Western finance, and he is afraid of blaming the victim. It is an understandable reaction, and if I have spoken of it too glibly, it was to mask how much I share it. And because I share it, V. S. Naipaul is for me an indispensable writer….
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