22 – NOT RELATIVE, RELATED

In argument about moral problems,

relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.

                                                                                             Roger Scruton                                                                                          

January 4, 2025

The quote displays the late Professor Scruton’s (d. 2020) sense of humour.  However, if you are not acquainted with the late, great Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), you won’t get the joke.*

As we have been moving along, it may have occurred to some readers that “contradiction,” aka the Principle of Non-Contradiction sounds a lot like “relativism,” or “moral relativism,” if one cares to be a bit more precise.  These days one could also speak of “cultural relativism.”  “Gender identity” is also a form of “relativism.”

Relativist arguments go thusly:  “It’s all relative.” “You have your truth. I have my truth.”  “________ [insert truth claim] is (merely) a construct, conditioned by the place and times in which one lives/lived.”  Axioms such as: “To each his own” – in Woke phrasing: “To each their own” – “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and so on are all catchphrases for relativism.

What underlies all such statements is the worldview that there are no governing facts to which we all must submit, no correct answers, only opinions. 

Yet, however “tolerant” and reasonable it sounds, this is nonsense!!!  The one who says “It’s all relative” is not merely offering an opinion – which one is free to accept or reject – he, or she, is making a fact claim; the inference is: “It is absolutely true that it’s all relative” or “The correct answer is that everything is relative.”  So, contradiction rears its head once again.

What Christians, and all others who are able to reason consistently, should see – and understand – is that even fine-sounding nonsense is still nonsense!**  One website I visited - https://twominenglish.com/its-all-relative-meaning/ - and of quite recent vintage, offered what I regard as all the standard arguments lauding relativism’s supposed “tolerance;” it completely missed the contradiction, and  failed to properly distinguish between “relative” and “related.”

For instance, the article states:

Saying “it’s all relative” acknowledges… differences in experience or opinion without arguing that one perspective is better than the other.

Is that true?  It sounds reasonable, but isn’t the author’s unstated argument/truth claim – albeit implied and not clearly stated  – that being skeptical of all perspectives is the best option.  However, skepticism is applied to everything except the skepticism itself [and that makes sense when you think it through]!

What we have here is folly at the level of The Emperor’s New Clothes!  Roger Scruton’s “scoundrels” are fools, who pedal foolishness   as wisdom!  It is a sign of Christian maturity that we can identify contradiction and an even greater mark of that maturity that we do not let it pass, that we “call it out.”  We don’t want to be rude or nasty; this is one way that we learn to “speak the truth in love.”

Now, all created – or temporal – things are related to space and time; they also have limits.  Therefore, every created thing – by definition – has a context, each has a perspective, but these are built into the nature of limited thing, but that does not mean they are relative, and, therefore, without any fixed meaning.  [This is what Einstein’s Theory of Relativity actually shows:  that within the bounds of physical space and time, there are absolute answers.***

So, once again we review where we have been: On is On and Off is Off without variance; every baseball pitch is either a ball or a strike without variance; only one object can occupy a given space at a given time without variance!

For what it’s worth, even Einstein is on side!! As he once said: “The more I study science, the more I believe in God.”  Amen.

Next time: Contradiction and blindness?