"Relativism: So What?": So What?

[koganbot]

I keep telling myself I'm going to write a series of lj posts called "Relativism: So What?" but I keep putting off beginning this. I think a major reason for my block is that, though I can lay out the "intellectual" issues surrounding "relativism," my true goal is to get at "what are people's underlying reasons for thinking there's an issue here?" or to put it better, "people wouldn't bring up the issue of 'relativism' if they didn't think they were taking care of something by doing so, so how do I get them to think and talk about what it is that they think they need to take care of?" A subsidiary question might be, "Frank Kogan thinks he's taking care of something when he tries to get people to think and talk about what they think they're trying to take care of when they raise the issue of 'relativism,' so what is it that Frank Kogan thinks he's trying to take care of when he does this?"

Anyhow, four questions:
(1) What do you mean by "relativism," when you use the word (assuming you use the word)?
(2) Does the issue of relativism matter to you? If so, why does it matter?
(3) What do you think other people mean when they use the word "relativism"?
(4) What do you think they think is at stake?

Don't let your answers by overconstrained by the questions. I want to hear your ideas before giving mine.

By the way, someone on my flist (though I'm not on his) used the term the other day, clearly believed that "relativism" was a potent force in the world.

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

1: not sure i've ever used the word -- i suppose i kind of treat it (in the discussion of others) as a marker for "nothing is decided yet"
2: the social issue of what can be taken to be known, and what is still being debated, is an exact cultural map of many (most? all? i don't know) pressing political conflicts
3: by relativists, some people seem to mean "those guys who are too complacently or vaingloriously superior, and/or cowardly, to take a stand on what they believe -- who argue that "the other guy may have a point" even when the "other guy" is some kind of crusading n4zi or similar"
4: what they think is at stake is the secureness of the institutions of established reliable knowledge

[ludickid.livejournal.com]

1. When I use the word "relativism", I refer to the belief that human ideals, truth, morals, ethics, and other values are relative to the time, place, culture and circumstance under which their judgments are developed, and cannot be held as being universally true. It holds that there is no bias-free platform from which a universal truth can be established, and that all human ideas are necessarily socially constructed.

Perhaps just as important is what relativism is NOT: it is not the belief that nothing is true. It is not a position from which you can make no moral judgments. Belief in it does not preclude you from thinking you are right about any given issue, or in pursuing a political or legal goal based on that premise.

2. Yes, I think relativism is important. It is important largely because it is misunderstood, and it is blamed (fraudulently) for all sorts of social ills, mostly by those who either don't understand it or deliberately misinterpret it. But it is also important because I think a lot of problems in our society come from the widespread adherence to non-relativistic – that is to say, so-called 'objective' or 'absolute' notions of morality, achievement, opportunity, culture, and behavior. I think if relativism were more widely understood and applied, we would be able to approach a lot of social and political problems in a more straightforward way, without a lot of unhelpful moral baggage (after Rorty, I am a neo-pragmatist in this regard).

3. I'm not sure; I'd have to ask them. I do think that when a lot of conservatives and right-wingers use the term, they more or less mean it as nihilism, a sort of omnipresent belief that nothing is true and all moral judgments are equally false and should be ignored. When they say "such-and-such is a relativist", they mean "such-and-such is a moral monster with no values", which is not correct.

4. I'm not sure how to address this either. I suppose if they're sincere, they worry that those under the sway of moral relativism have lost their moral compass and are capable of believing any sort of pernicious nonsense. If they're not sincere, they're just deliberately muddying the waters to make it look like people who adhere to a philosophy that threatens their position as arbiters of the only acceptable moral code are vile beasts inclined to murder and rapine.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

I think ludickid's points are sound, but they are the ideal situation, not the one we have. We're getting back to postmodernism here: if all metanarratives have equal value, none can be judged to be right at the expense of others. This does create problems with - the main cause of the issue I think you are looking at - an unwillingness to commit to an idea of what is right because there are people who disagree, and who is to say that they aren't right as well or instead? There are liberals who use this kind of thing to avoid making, or possibly just expressing, strong moral judgements, and this is often called relativism, so we can't pretend that the word's meaning doesn't include that, whatever we would prefer it to mean. Personally, I don't believe that you have to commit to an idea as permanent and absolute and universal to believe it is worth supporting or defending here and now.

It's most often used by the right to attack the left, often for failing to be critical enough of, in particular, ethnic minorities or foreigners for some action or other - sometimes as uselessly as 'it's PC gone mad!'. I'm inclined to think it's often basically the same comment dressed up in fancier clothes.

[koganbot]

When I run into the word "relativism" it's usually a pejorative, with people who take relativistic positions like pragmatism, holism, contextualism, structuralism, deconstruction, etc. generally not willing to apply the term to themselves (this strategy makes sense, given the crazy ways the term gets used, but the word itself when divorced from the craziness isn't misleading). But the term is being used positively more and more, I think. Here's the post that dubdobdee was referring to above, from my friend Charlotte Pressler. It's on a Matthew Yglesias comment thread (where Yglesias says he heard on NPR that "a majority of Americans (I forget the actual number) believe that 'truth is relative'"). Charlotte's comment:

I teach an introductory philosophy course in rural South Florida and so might be able to contribute some analysis (quickly, before Hurricane Charley gets here). Almost all my students are evangelical and/or charismatic Christians who believe in the literal truth of the Bible, and almost all believe that truth is relative. I found this contradiction interesting, and looked into it further.

It appears to have two sources. First, my students apply the word "truth" to all of the statements they believe, and don't distinguish between claims of fact and claims of value. They are not encouraged to make such a distinction by the local culture; the local authorities frequently describe obvious value claims as "facts," adding that "you can't argue with facts." "Truth," in my students' dialect, thus winds up meaning something like "my basic orientation to the world, the way I see things, my perspective"-- which would be correctly described as personal, individual, and "relative."

I might add that an article in the journal Teaching Philosophy (apologies to the author, whose name I can't remember) argued that the beginning philosophy students who claim that "truth is relative" are really trying to say something like this: "I don't agree with Mom & Dad any more about a whole lot of things, and I love them, so I don't want to say they're wrong, but I don't want to give up my own point of view either."

The second reason my students believe that truth is relative, however, strikes me as much more pernicious. They have grown up in small, tribal, tightly-knit, highly conformist communities that (needless to say) did not encourage free discussion or debate. In college, they meet for the first time people who do not share their presuppositions, and they begin to get an inkling that the wider world contains many more. They have never been asked to defend their own belief systems before, and, in all honesty, some of their beliefs are quite indefensible. When students in this position say that truth is relative, they are trying to exempt their own belief system from the requirement of rationality. They want to be able to go on believing whatever their local community has decided to believe, even though both argument and evidence are against them. Again, they are encouraged in this by the local authorities, who teach them to devalue reason and (especially) "book learning."

The fact is that my students will be ostracized by their local communities (it's called "disfellowshipping") if they disagree in any point with their community's creed. It is a public, brutal shaming, and any human who could avoid it, would. If this sheds any light on the "relativism" of the American public (or, perhaps, the persistence of "creation science" and other follies), I would be glad.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Had a conversation about the myth of "moral relativism" with someone after a (kind of dumb) commencement speech I just sat through that was saying, in essence, that there are THREE TYPES of readers: (1) those who read "naively," not taking into consideration social context (e.g. _____ is writing within a racist society and reflects its values), (2) those who read "in the know" and ONLY see the social context without recognizing the artistry etc. of the work (e.g. "OMG ____ reflects the values of a racist society [shutdown]!!!!"), and (3) truly critical readers (the readers at University X) that achieve a "second naivete" and recognize the value system without throwing out the possibility of artistry, validity, value, etc. in a problematic work.

This was stupid for fairly obvious reasons, the main one being that if we grant that there are hypothetically readers that fall into category (1) and (2), we DON'T need to suggest that this is some sort of "norm" of reading and we definitely don't need to condescendingly assert that University X has some sort of unique ability to create such an obvious model of critical thinker.

Anyway, I linger on the construction of the strawmen in this debate because she used the framework to justify what she called a "moral relativism" in students of hers (who had yet to become TRULY CRITICAL Type 3 readers, of course) who claimed that if they saw a violent cultural norm happening in front of them (the practice of a group of people ritualistically killing a widow after the death of her husband) they wouldn't stop it because it "wasn't for them to judge."

What she isn't thinking about is that she's given them an extreme hypothetical that they likely had no context for judging whatsoever AND were probably giving (vaguely) a response that seemed to "fit the teacher," even though in this case it DIDN'T fit the teacher. I find it difficult to believe that these students were all expressing something as specific as an ideology, or ideological tendency, that we can call "moral relativism." More likely, they were, with no little uncertainty, revealing their discomfort with their (now public) ignorance of a foreign culture. If you asked them "is murder wrong," I imagine most of them would say "yes." Then you could muck 'em up with something like "is ritualistic killing murder," and, having never actually experienced or had any knowledge of anything like a ritualistic killing, watch them not know exactly what to say. But this would probably be because it was considered to be outside the SCOPE of their judgment, not because "everything is relative." They would feel "unqualified" to respond. (That's my hunch for a more positive version of "relativism" anyway that isn't just constructing a strawman; i.e. this woman's students and their responses were presumably all real.)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

haha as you can probably tell from the tumbling chaos of some of my posts, this question uncorks a whole bunch of themes fermenting in my head lo! these 20-odd years, and they are REALLY NOT arriving on-page in an orderly or a clear fashion (for a change eh readers!)

the most compressed is where i just throw in "jazz" -- GOOD LUCK GETTING ME TO TEASE THAT OUT QUICKLY

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I think I agree with dubdobdee above if he is saying Jazz is the ultimate in relativism.

However, if he isn't saying that then I'm just putting that out there anyway.

I don't like jazz or relativism, I believe they're both totally contrary to any sort of value system and we'd generally say we need a value system. However, since semantically relativism would seem to suggest a belief in the relationships between things, ie: things are value positive or value negative comparatively to each other in their scale of thing-ness (a lion is more a cat than an ocean etc.) then we are all relativists because that's the very basis for a functional value system. And maybe in this sense jazz is listenable.

So swings and roundabouts, really.