Dictatorship of Relativism

By Crispin Sartwell

 

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, speaking just as he and his colleagues were retreating to select a new pope, spoke against the "dictatorship of relativism" in the world today. It's a memorable phrase, though odd because relativists take themselves to be the opposite of dictators: their idea is that you shouldn't believe anything so seriously that you would enforce your beliefs on anyone.

   But I'm a college prof, and like most of my ilk, I know what Ratzinger was talking about: in my classroom and especially in the papers my students write, relativism has the paradoxical and annoying status of a dogma.

     Relativism comes in various forms. Cultural relativism is the view that the belief-systems of individuals are constructed within a social context and can only be evaluated within that context. In  its most extreme form, relativism becomes radical  subjectivism: the view that anything anyone believes is "true for that person" and that no person's belief is better than anyone else's.

     Whether my students believe such a thing with regard to mathematics, for example, I'm not sure. But they say they believe it about every question in philosophy, the discipline I teach. Most papers I get start out with a subjectivist disclaimer. "Since the beginning of time, philosophers have argued justice. Whatever anyone believes about justice is justice to them, it's a very opinionated issue."  (Sadly for this subjectivist, I had told my class that I would fail every paper that started with "Since the beginning of time...")

     Cultural relativism does have some salutary effects. In that same class in political philosophy, we discussed Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. Hobbes describes the "savages" of America as living in a state of nature, a brutal war of every man against every man. He thinks that it is impossible for people to live decently except under the thumb of a powerful government. Had he started by trying to understand the cultures he was condemning as savage, he might have questioned the universal validity of his own fascism.

     But radical subjectivism has nothing to recommend it; it reduces all talking to mere quacking. Everything you say or hear means anything you like, which entails that it means nothing at all. Even worse, it means there is no sense in complaining about the grade I just gave you.

    My students do seem sincerely to believe what we might term "temporal relativism": Plato's ideas would never work in today's world, they aver (and aver) because people now would disagree with them. They identify consensus with truth.

    One would think that such enthusiasm for unanimity ill becomes radical subjectivists, but perhaps unanimity is the only thing that could make subjectivism seem innocuous. Unanimity is the only hope for a world in which no one can communicate with anyone else at all.

    The good part about all this is that my students are trying to be nice, trying not impose their views on people, trying not to act in a way incompatible with democracy and tolerance.

    The bad part of it is that most of my students don't care very much about ideas and have no serious commitments.

     I don't try, in the classroom, to demonstrate that there are objective or eternal truths ≠ though I think there are. But I'd like to suggest at least that some reasons for believing are better than others and that these can emerge in a dialogue or colloquy.

     Because the real danger ≠ and the actual use - of relativism is that it encourages lethargy: it relieves you of having to justify or even think about what you believe and the reasons you believe it.

    There are, in short, worse dictatorships than the dictatorship of relativism: Hobbesian dictatorships, for example. But there is no thinking without passion, and there is no passion in relativism.