The communications revolution of the past century has thrown into our face the fact that people have very different ways of understanding the world and different sets of values. We know this because magazines show us pictures of them, and on TV they’re busy either behaving in their quaint ways or yelling at us. This new awareness of the diversity of our world has helped exacerbate our culture’s depressing relativism.
Y’all know the relativist argument: Other people have views they hold as strongly as you hold yours. Those views are incompatible with yours. Thus, a sense of certainty is insufficient to guarantee truth. Therefore, we can’t trust certainty. Therefore, we have no way to decide whose views are right.
Good things come from this relativism, including a willingness to listen to others and maybe even a little humility. (That was, at least, until the Bush Doctrine declared humility to be unpatriotic.) But relativism contradicts a tenet of knowledge: To believe something is to believe that it’s true. Relativism wants to keep sneaking in a qualifier — “Of course, I might be dead wrong” — that seems to destroy the possibility of knowledge.
Worse, relativism can sap action: Since all sincerely held beliefs are equally valid, why go to any pains to defend yours?
There’s just something wrong with relativism.
When I was a college-age lad and all was tinted rosy (or, more accurately, was swirling slightly if you looked at it carefully), I tried to dodge the relativism two-step by going beneath it: All the different values held in the world are only held because the holders are alive. Life is therefore an ultimate value underneath the pitter-patter of relative values.
Thus, I became a pacifist.
But there was something wrong with my reasoning. For one thing, it means there’s nothing worth dying for, which seems implausible. For another, just because life is a condition of having values doesn’t mean that life is itself a value. This line of thought contributed to my ditching pacifism in favor of a less-principled preference for life over death, loving over killing, chicken over bloody cow muscles. I mean, call me crazy, but that’s what I believe.
And the problem of relativism remains. Its premises seem true. Its conclusion seems true and salutary. But it literally goes against everything we believe by telling us that we have no right to believe any of it. There’s something wrong with this setup.
I think the Internet is showing us what’s wrong relativism.
Relativism works by pointing to the most extreme differences: “On the Isle of Kerflooey, natives worship pickpockets and think that nipples are the seat of intelligence.” There is an assumption — not a logical part of the argument but part of its appeal — that cultures live apart from one another, developing wildly different ideas and values. Further, the metaphysical picture relativism paints depicts knowledge as an internal state: The Civilized Person and the Untutored Native look at the same scene but have different images in their heads (or nipples). Neither has privileged access to the truth, or at least neither can reliably know that they have privileged access. So we’re all stuck in our silos of knowledge.
That picture explains why relativism is not just frustrating but depressing. It’s an isolationist’s view of the world.
But now we have a world that’s snapping itself together through talk and writing and conversation. In this world, relativism is much less important and appealing. You don’t have to sit alone and try to undercut your every belief in the name of a humble relativism. Instead, you can put your knowledge out into the world where it can talk with others who hold contrary views. Rather than being silos, we are conversations that — as conversations do — continuously and eternally negotiate agreement while iterating on difference.
Relativism flourishes when we’re each sitting in our corners, imagining contrary positions that would make us look foolish. Relativism is irrelevant when we are actually talking with others who disagree with us. But when all you have to do is click on a few links to actually engage with those other people with their contrary views, relativism looks masturbatory. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. [hee-hee]
Relativism simplifies the world. It renders all views equal. The Internet complicates the world. All the world’s beliefs are in play as conversation engages us in the mutual quest of trying to find what’s right and wrong, what’s better and worse, what we can agree about and what we’d better leave alone.
In a connected world, relativism is just a way of giving up.