Hmm, sorry: a quick comment at work, knocked out without sufficient care.
Obviously the opposition to privileging any particular metanarratives is a standard explanation of major parts of PoMo. I should have phrased it more like that (as ludickid has below) - a refusal to accept any one as true as against others. This is a meaning of relativism.
There are all kinds of metanarrative, and it is used loosely. Systems of thought (your class i) are the kinds of things I had in mind, rather than specific ones about some detail of psychology or whatever. How we draw the line is questionable - some would regard Marx's political analysis as class i, some as class ii, I guess. Anyway, I'd put a system of ethics and morality in class i, and that is kind of what we were talking about.
There's a sketch on an Asian (Brit usage: ancestry from the Indian subcontinent) sketch show called Goodness Gracious Me where an Asian woman runs into some sort of community centre begging for protection from her violent husband, who is chasing her with a knife. The white community worker refuses to help on the basis that his behaviour may, for all she knows, be culturally valid, and she wouldn't want to oppress them with her values. The Asian woman obviously treats her as a lunatic.
It's nearly always moral relativism that is at issue when the term is used, especially in a negative sense. I was trying to say that we don't have to believe one moral-ethical system of thought is absolute, flawless, enduring or whatever to believe that we can adopt a set of moral values. I have mine, and while I don't have the imagination to know how mine will look to someone 100 or 1000 or whatever years from now, I am not fool enough to assume my ideas will be prevalent then. This same thinking applies to, say, critical ideas about music, except that seems even more volatile, perhaps because the musical environment is so volatile.
no subject
Obviously the opposition to privileging any particular metanarratives is a standard explanation of major parts of PoMo. I should have phrased it more like that (as ludickid has below) - a refusal to accept any one as true as against others. This is a meaning of relativism.
There are all kinds of metanarrative, and it is used loosely. Systems of thought (your class i) are the kinds of things I had in mind, rather than specific ones about some detail of psychology or whatever. How we draw the line is questionable - some would regard Marx's political analysis as class i, some as class ii, I guess. Anyway, I'd put a system of ethics and morality in class i, and that is kind of what we were talking about.
There's a sketch on an Asian (Brit usage: ancestry from the Indian subcontinent) sketch show called Goodness Gracious Me where an Asian woman runs into some sort of community centre begging for protection from her violent husband, who is chasing her with a knife. The white community worker refuses to help on the basis that his behaviour may, for all she knows, be culturally valid, and she wouldn't want to oppress them with her values. The Asian woman obviously treats her as a lunatic.
It's nearly always moral relativism that is at issue when the term is used, especially in a negative sense. I was trying to say that we don't have to believe one moral-ethical system of thought is absolute, flawless, enduring or whatever to believe that we can adopt a set of moral values. I have mine, and while I don't have the imagination to know how mine will look to someone 100 or 1000 or whatever years from now, I am not fool enough to assume my ideas will be prevalent then. This same thinking applies to, say, critical ideas about music, except that seems even more volatile, perhaps because the musical environment is so volatile.