Relativism misunderstands
reality
By Patrick O'Hannigan
web
posted June 24, 2002
For pundits as for realtors, location matters. The California town where
I write a monthly column for a weekly newspaper hosts a state university,
a state prison, and many different festivals, so every mutt of an idea
roaming the national scene eventually ambles past my door. More than a
few of these strays can be traced back to a misunderstanding of human
nature that has been popular since the philosopher Rousseau swooned over
noble savages. Following news reports about the first Palestinian woman
to explode herself and a handful of bystanders, for example, a music critic
at the newspaper to which I contribute echoed some of his syndicated brethren
by asking whether Americans could judge the morality of suicide bombing.
The critic reasoned that because war is hell and U.S. foreign policy
can be incoherent, the slaughter of innocents is sometimes a legitimate
response to feelings of helplessness. He also implied that anyone who
thinks murder should never be confused with therapy lacks sympathy for
oppressed people.
Envision a sled dog race where the only dog actually in harness is the
big dog in the star-spangled collar, and you have a sense of the mindset
to which many of my neighbors on the soft-boiled left subscribe. In that
view, no other dog on the world scene is leashed, harnessed, or held to
the standard of the American dog.
The rationale for this posture as described and endorsed by my colleague
is that if the United States changed places with the rest of the world,
our notions of right and wrong would change, too. This illogical assertion
is nothing more or less than relativism, a defect in or perversion of
the democratic impulse that passes for wisdom among people unnerved by
any dogma not their own. History and theology teachers might have inoculated
the rest of us against such silliness, but for the most part they have
what a telegenic Cuban-American bandleader famously called "a lot
of splainin' to do."
Why history and theology should answer for the influence of a flawed
philosophy may not be apparent at first glance, so let me set the table
for that argument by noting that one problem with calling morality portable
and relative rather than fixed and absolute is that such thinking inevitably
degrades into the nihilism of might makes right.
Exhortations to treat other people as we want to be treated cannot by
themselves ensure civilized discourse or keep angry people from flirting
with the ethic of the militiaman in the movie "Black Hawk Down"
who explains that "in Somalia, murder IS negotiation."
Had my colleague argued for armed neutrality as an alternative to global
peacekeeping, I might have cheered, but the man took more exception to
America's alleged ignorance than to its foreign policy. Like many journalists,
he believes we could understand other cultures better if we paid more
attention to them, and this is good because understanding leads to peace.
In other words, to understand all is to forgive all.
That popular view makes insufficient allowance for the corruption of
human nature. Here on earth, peace is not the only possible fruit of understanding.
Consider domestic violence, where people who understand each other very
well still assume the roles of victim and victimizer. A similar dynamic
applies between nations. As National Review Online editor Jonah
Goldberg explains, "Whatever you think of the differences between
Palestinians and Israelis, you would be a fool to think they don't understand
each other better than the average American diplomat understands either."
Not only that, he points out, "If mutual ignorance were the font
of war, Mexico would be at war with [the former Soviet republic of] Moldova."
Many people are bothered by the fact that James Clavell's prisoner-of-war
novel King Rat has as much to say about human nature as anything
in the self-help section of your local bookstore. But as essayist Florence
King observes with characteristically vivid understatement, "shunning
insight while noisily proclaiming that we 'care about people' is awkward,
however."
Christians who contrast the church militant with the church triumphant
or beseech the Queen of Heaven from behind what one Catholic prayer calls
this "veil of tears" know very well that conflict is part of
life. Astute pre-Christian philosophers reasoned their way to the same
conclusion even without Moses, or settled knowledge of the human inclination
to evil defined by the Catechism of the Catholic Church as "concupiscence."
Unfortunately, traditional Catholic and Classical Greek thought are shadows
of their former selves. Two classics professors writing about hard times
in their academic specialty put the case well: "Believers in modernism
(who do not know Thucydides, Plato, and Euripides) have misunderstood
the nature of man and the role of culture, and the proper balance between
the two. As a result, they have not proved that we can empathize, excuse,
counsel, talk, nurture, OK, or chicken-soup the demons out of any of us."
With that indictment and the chronology of history in mind, the dismal
record of relativists surprises only people unfamiliar with what Christians
call Original Sin. Among that crowd are forgetful bishops, therapists
who cannot distinguish between mental, emotional, and spiritual problems,
and pundits who think moral clarity belongs only to fanatics. None of
the aforementioned people understand G.K. Chesterton's quip that the world
is always complicated for those who lack principles.
A friend of mine framed the choice eloquently this past Lent. "Either
you believe that human nature is badly flawed or you do not," he
said. "The question is realistic, not idealistic. It is empirical.
Human nature is demonstrably flawed." My friend then buttressed his
conclusion with personal testimony: "As someone who has not attended
a proper church service in over a decade, but who nevertheless just bought
tickets to [a performance of] Saint Matthew's Passion on Good Friday,
I am truly disgusted with bloodless postmoderns who pretend to be smarter
than Saint Augustine."
Amen to that. In all fairness, however, such malaise as we traditionalists
rail against comes not only from selective preference for the new over
the old but also from misapplication of civil rights rhetoric and reflexive
rejection of hierarchy. Together these mistakes turned discrimination
of any kind into a bogeyman of the modern left. As any honest history
of 20th-century American thought will demonstrate (see, for example, the
work of Thomas Sowell or Heather MacDonald), well-meaning attempts to
give the all- too-discriminatory world a makeover can warp impressionable
minds.
One need not fear the Death of the West to see that this kind of thinking
bodes ill for our republic. When an elementary school in my town celebrated
"International Day," for example, it was with the support of
parents who firmly believe that the subset of relativism called multiculturalism
is an unalloyed good. Many of them assume that Americans are uniquely
deficient in learning about the rest of the world, and a few voiced the
hope that learning about different cultures would make their children
more accepting of those cultures. To broaden young minds is exhilarating,
but we should deepen them, too.
Given that the United States is the world's only remaining superpower,
wouldn't it follow that citizens of other countries should be learning
about us, rather than the other way around? But when I wondered in print
how many kids celebrating International Day knew more about falafel and
Oktoberfest than about James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, I was called
an ignorant jingoist and worse.
Speaking to another bromide of multiculturalism with which I take issue,
Internet diarist James Lileks debunks the theory that children who celebrate
different cultures are necessarily better for it. His take on multiculturalism
rebuts the moral equivalency according to which respect for life is different
from but no better or worse than eating a dog, stoning a homosexual, or
mutilating a clitoris.
Over to you, Lileks: "Some cultures suck, if I can put it in the
frank terms of Kids Today. Of course Kids Today wouldn't dare say that,
having been taught that such a judgment is, well, judgmental. But [any]
value-free tour of the globe Disneyfies humanity into a theme park of
costumes and ethnic foods."
"In order to respect all viewpoints, no actual viewpoints may be
professed, let alone examined," Lileks continues. "Religion
is turned into a sparkle-flecked gruel of good intentions that curdles
the moment it comes in contact with reality." The misguided reverence
for tolerance that accompanies this malnourished (sin-free) view of religion
ensures that every idea is equally empty. At that point, Lileks warns,
"tolerance becomes abolition, where Good has an infinite number of
cheeks to present to mass murderers who had bad childhoods, and no one
has the ability to shove the flag in the dirt and say THIS is where I
stand without being mocked by those whose cleverness barely conceals their
loathing."
Lileks is angry, eloquent, and right. His words affirm the wisdom of
the warning in section 407 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, wherein
we are reminded that, "Ignorance of the fact that man has a wounded
nature inclined to evil gives rise to serious errors in the areas of education,
politics, social action, and morals."
Playing an uptown riff on the same theme, historian Victor Davis Hanson
declares relativism and multiculturalism both antirational and amoral.
Those who agree with Hanson may also salute Time magazine alumnus
William A. Henry III, who wrote before his death in 1994 that the quest
for peace through multicultural education fosters "a pseudo-racial
pride not far from hatred."
In short, we would all do well to remember who and how we are. If I may
use a musical metaphor to speak theologically: To hear the real though
far-off hymn that hails a new creation, we must first be humble enough
to recognize discordant notes in the old creation. This thesis has practical
applications. Curriculum reform and repentance are not different means
to the same end, for example, but different means to different ends.
Similarly, any credible recipe for peace in the world involves more than
walking a mile in someone else's moccasins. Those who think differently
ignore ancient wisdom and court disaster by misunderstanding human nature.
In philosophy, theology, and politics that is penalty enough, but columnists
on the arts beat pay an even greater price for writing mash notes to Lady
Relativism and the psychopaths in her service who blow innocent people
up for want of enough skill to wreak havoc on hard targets. As one of
the better songwriters in Nashville famously observed following a moment
of Trinitarian inspiration, country music can be defined as "three
chords and the truth." Journalists with a weakness for politically
correct homicide forfeit the ability to see the second half of that equation,
and consign their work to the remainder bin next to forgotten recordings
by that multicultural patsy and relativist extraordinaire, Pontius "What
is Truth?" Pilate.
Patrick O'Hannigan is a self-described paragraph farmer in Central
California and a columnist for New Times (San Luis Obispo).

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