A 1960’s racist differs from a 2015 or 1930’s racist? Sexism has evolved into another type of sexism? Sex offenders might approach the act of rape differently now that they have Rohypnol and handcuffs at their disposal, but the psyche of a rapist is now as it was in 200BC.
I'm not so sure about that.
There's a true story, a case out of the 1980's, when some hundreds or low thousands of Hmong people were quietly evacuated from Laos as refugees from the Communist takeover. (The French called them Montiagnards, and I apologize for my poor spelling.) They had many problems adjusting to American culture. Some problems were mostly comic with a whiff of tragedy, like trying to grow rice in living room carpets. Others were more severe.
One young man of the transplanted Hmong took a shine to an American girl and tried to get her interest. She had no interest in him, so he did what he would have done back home in Laos: he got together with a bunch of his male friends and they kidnapped her. They helped him rape her, in order to 'claim' her.
Not understanding their crime under Western culture and American law, they let everyone know what they did. It was not difficult to convict them.
No rapist from within Western culture would advertise his act, or expect it to be approved by society. He will know that his act is regarded as deeply wrong, even if he feels justified in it.
Social workers who were trying to help the Hmong assimilate approached the victim and she allowed them to explain things. In what must surely represent a case for sainthood, she spoke at sentencing after the conviction and asked the judge to imposed a sentence recognizing the moral and cultural ignorance, a sentence of mercy (which is often harder than simple leniency).
The Hmong culture fulfilled the first and indispensible requirement for a culture: it allowed the Hmong to survive through the centuries, as individuals and as a people. And if we look carefully, we can find that things like the Stockholm Syndrome are likewise essential to survival of individuals and the human species when only that lowest of cultural requirements is filled.
I hope by this time you are screaming "WE KNOW BETTER!" Yes, we do. Not all cultures are equally good and moral, even though some 'lower' cultures may emphasize virtues that we have largely forgotten, or that we revile (the kind of courage necessary to challenge and defeat a desperate food animal, for instance, or to defeat a neighboring clan's aggression).
Some cultures are better than others. But all cultures face that indispensible first requirement of self-perpetuation. A culture is not, and cannot be, a suicide pact. The only cultures we know are the ones that survived long enough for us to see them, or to see their artifacts.
