The Parasite of Relativism
Most people think they are good people, who believe good things for good reasons. Even bad people might believe this most sincerely. Because people disagree on “the good”, it means that – logically – they can’t all be right. It can’t be the case that murder is both acceptable and unacceptable, just like it cannot be the case that both teams won the Superbowl. But on one view of ethics, no one is right. It is a view that has fostered by our education system and has taken root in the church and altogether sabotages secular activism. That moral view is relativism.
Relativistic thinking (if you can call it that) abounds in our culture. Any time someone ends a dispute with, “this is what’s true for me”, relativism is at work. A more recent iteration of this attitude can be found in the invocation to “live one’s truth”. Invariably, “truth” is just being used as a substitute for “belief,” but using the t-word is an attempt give one’s subjective states of consciousness the air of authority – as if they now have some special significance and unquestionability. Would any of the doctrinaire “truth-livers” in this sense find it acceptable if one’s truth involved beliefs about flat earths and faulty vaccines? Thus, “living one’s truth” is as dull as it is nonsensical.
Though this form of relativism is deeply concerning, I want to take up the problem of moral relativism. It is overwhelmingly the case that most students have been implicitly (sometimes explicitly) taught that morality is subjective, functioning like automobile or ice cream preferences. Murder is wrong because we don’t like it. More specifically, moral relativists hold that there are no objective moral principles – norms that apply to all people at all times – and that morality either depends on the individual’s beliefs, or on the culture in which they find themselves. The individual flavor of this view is especially ghastly, because it means that that I am justified in doing any action if I believe it to be good. Whether I believe in housing the homeless or hatching a holocaust, it is the right thing to do if I believe it. Because there is no right or wrong outside of one’s own mind, then it follows that we are all equally good, regardless of the life we have lived. Mein Furher and Mother Teresa have nothing in common, save that they are moral equals according to the relativist. What the view really means that there is no such thing as good, as “good” loses all meaning. It is a distinction without a difference, as the philosophers say. This is aptly illustrated in the Pixar film The Incredibles whenSyndrome, the brilliant child-nemesis, tells Mr. Incredible that with his devices, “Everyone can be super! And when everyone is super, no one will be.” The boy-villain may have needed a therapist to help process his childhood trauma, but his logic needed no work whatsoever: it is perfectly intact in this instance.
The modern journey of the young Christian entering adulthood is routed through two threads that become tangled and, without careful reflection (an infrequently bestowed quality of the young), indiscernible from one another: the biblical education in the church and the secular education of the schoolhouse. It is in the church that a young man learns of salvation and sanctity; It is in the schoolhouse he learns of science and society. Baptism meets biology, Christ meets chemistry. Cast into this cauldron the rocket fuels of puberty and peer-pressure, it is a wonder that any Christian survives into adulthood with any spiritual soundness. What sometimes emerges from this pedagogical vortex is a commitment to Christ but also to relativism, as he has been taught that objectivism is arrogant and intolerant; that it is the view of kings and queens and white slave-owners and your uncle the pharmacist, even though the force of intolerance as a social virtue only has meaning outside the relativism it intends to support. But the young person – and more adults than I’d care to admit – cannot be a relativist and a Christian. To relativize morality is to relativize sins, which in turn relativizes the Cross. Relativism is diametrically opposed to all having “fallen short of the Glory of God”, but rather that all have lived up to the glory of themselves. If relativism is true, then Christ died in vain, and you are yet in the sins of your own moral standard which, as it turns out, are no sins at all.
Relativism may haunt the Church, but it is a more prevalent goblin for the garden variety activist who espouses a naturalistic view of the world. These selfsame provocateurs disparage the church for being duplicitous, corrupt, or even outright evil, the latter case taking the treatment of queer folk and the crusades as examples. But they cannot meaningfully employ these terms if there is no moral standard by which to measure them. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter if relativism is true. It all depends on one’s point of view or one’s culture. Any meaningful critique must rely on moral principles that the relativist fails to possess. On this basis, all forms of activism – for progress and social change – suffer a tragic incoherence. Rallying against racism is not morally different than hurling anti-black epithets. The racist is no better than the non-racist if morality is subjective. At the cultural level, a racist culture is no better than a non-racist culture. Now, we can plainly see that a non-racist culture is better, but the relativist can’t rationally defend why it is better, as justice is just one more (subjective) value among many. In short, the relativist-activist is always and everywhere sabotaging their own aims. Should they reject relativism and adopt some other moral theory, then perhaps they would find justification for their work. But that would also mean the possibility of having to (logically) reject other metaphysical commitments: to a world that isn’t all matter and subjectivity.
A robust foundation for social change comes from a world in which there is a moral order and a way we ought to be that does not depend on a point of view. Contrary to the dour cherry-picking of the new atheists, western monotheism has provided a normative basis for enacting substantive reform and improving the human condition, from Selma to southern India. It is a view that treats all human beings as morally equal; that is, equally needy and equally falling short of a standard that applies without prejudice to the entirety of the species. The successful activist, not unlike the successful evangelist, will be measured the number that turn from their wicked ways. But there must first be a demonstrable wickedness afoot that is more than just the conjecture of a finite mind from a narrow slice of history.
