The word “relativism” doesn’t help us understand the world, it blinds us to differences that make a difference.
In the specific case of “relativism,” we are blinded through the attribution of a false equivalence between what amounts to the difference between enlightened as opposed to unenlightened behavior. And so, I think “relativism” is a word we are well rid of, when all is said and done.
Let me say more particularly what I mean. I daresay we are all quite familiar with the fact that there are conservatives who like to smear some sensible pragmatists and some secular pluralists (including some big-souled multiculturalists) as menacing “relativists.” They single out these folks for sport for different reasons, but ultimately, I suppose, because neither the pragmatist nor the pluralist has much need for the conservative’s own facile theological (sometimes in its “naturalist” guise) priestly-authoritarian model of enforceable mores. Less familiar, but to my eyes just as bad, one finds that some progressives have begun to mischaracterize certain forms of corruption, fraud, and extremely misleading PR/political spin on the part of partisan hacks, opportunists, and deep pockets on the Right as illustrations of “relativism” as well. This seems to me a profoundly misleading and worrying notion to take up.
One can affirm certain values or beliefs as the best on offer, and for good demonstrable reasons, but simultaneously hold open the palpable possibility that better beliefs may arrive in the future. This seems to me an essentially scientific attitude toward instrumental belief. One can affirm certain values as indispensable to one’s own narrative selfhood—either matters of beliefs through which one identifies as a member of a moral or interpretative community, or more idiosyncratic matters of personal self-creation—while granting these values may be perfectly dispensable to others. This seems to me an essentially secular pluralist attitude toward morals and esthetic values. One can recognize that one shares the world with peers with whom one differs profoundly in many respects—situations, capacities, aspirations—with the consequence that one cannot always expect to prevail in one’s particular ends but often only to find one’s way to contingent compromises that perfectly satisfy nobody but which all prefer to the alternative of a violent or unjust adjudication of difference. This seems to me an essentially democratic attitude toward political questions.
I would say that the overabundant majority of attitudes and arguments that are typically smeared as “relativism” from the perspective of the conservative right, are really affirmations of the three reasonable perspectives delineated above, that of contingent consensus science, secular pluralist norms, and democratic processes. That is to say, what conservatives decry as a menacing relativism really tends more to be a matter of being a grown up, of being Enlightened in the Kantian sense.
It should go without saying that I can hold all of these attitudes while still, for example, managing to say what I really mean as best I can, dealing with people honestly, treating people as peers rather than marks, and so on. And this leads us, unfortunately, to the things some contemporary progressives are calling “relativist” in the attitudes and conduct of Movement Conservatives in the debased era of the Bush II Adminsitration.
Obviously this is something of an oversimplification, but I think we need to be careful to distinguish the things secular progressives say and do that sometimes get called “relativism” and which should more properly be understood as reasonable efforts at coping with the world experimentally in the midst of a plurality of peers, as against the things conservatives say and do that sometimes get called “relativism” but which should more properly be understood as a willingness to lie, cheat, and steal. When someone is lying, cheating, or stealing there is nothing to be gained by freighting one’s righteous condemnation of these straightforward sins with some foggy discourse of relativism that up to this point has always functioned as a stealthy conservative attack on intellectual effort, complex thought, attention to history and nuance, and a recognition and tolerance of differences as they actually play out in a technoscientifically complicated planet.
“Anti-Relativist” discourse is a too-snug, too-sure fit for America’s disastrous native anti-intellectualism, its “rugged individualist” horror of anything actually nonconformist, its parochial disdain for critical thought, its smug catastrophic sense of imperialist entitlement and biospheric exceptionalism. The democratic left has no need of its own variations on these poisonous conservative chestnuts. We need to affirm clearly and specifically what is reasonable in the experimentalist, pluralist, consensualist attitudes conservatives decry as “relativism,” while we need at once to remain clear and specific about just what it is that is so pernicious in the dishonest, corrupt, fraudulent cronyism, parochialism, and authoritarianism of contemporary conservative misconduct. “Relativism” fails to capture the essence of what is better understood as the criminal enterprise of Movement Conservatism.
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