A Few More Nails in the Coffin of Moral Relativism

In the last post I briefly mentioned the concept of moral relativism.  I anticipated getting a few complaints from at least a few people who recognized the idea.  Still others might be familiar with the concept, but they don't know it by name.  Basically, when someone has an objection, specifically a moral objection, to some aspect of a culture and they are told, "Well, that's the way they do things.  We can't judge them by our morality.", this is moral relativism in practice.  In theory, the idea is as weak as a house of cards, blown to pieces by the slightest breath of a thought.  Since this idea is an integral part of the liberal conceit I mentioned in the last post, I figured it wouldn't hurt to explore a little more why I don't think it's a viable theory.

First of all, if morality were strictly a cultural phenomenon, then by what standard would these cultures decide upon, or naturally develop, their morality?  You could say that they do what's best for their people.  But this "doing best", already presupposes a moral principle.  It begs the questions: Why ought they do what's best, by what standard is something "best", and all to what end?  Obviously different cultures have different customs and priorities, but these are largely a matter of practicality, style, and circumstances.  For instance, keeping people warm is probably a higher priority in the Eskimo culture than, say, in the Nigerian culture, and many of their customs may even be designed around that end.  But whether you're talking about keeping Eskimos warm or Nigerians from being eaten by lions, the common denominator, the principle, is still the same: the preservation of human life.  Moral relativism confuses the difference between ends and means.  It leaves a culture with an engine, but no destination.  It leaves morality as a set of motions with no purpose, no adherence to anything beyond the arbitrary whims of a particular culture.  Under moral relativism murder is wrong because...well, because that's just not what we do here.  Try the next town over.

Secondly, if morality were strictly a cultural phenomenon, then that would put morality completely under society's control.  There would be no point in trying to stand up against any perceived injustices that you believe are being permitted in your society.  According to moral relativism, society by definition is always right.  The Holocaust?  That's just the way the Nazis did things.  We can't judge them by our morality.  Jim Crow?  That's just the way they did things back then.  We can't judge them by our modern standards.  Taken to its most logical conclusion, moral relativism, the refuge of ultra-liberals, ends up leading to the most conservative fascism imaginable.  The status quo becomes the standard bearer of morality.  In fact, there is an inherent contradiction between moral relativism and the liberal drive for progressive change.  This drive is based on the implicit assumption that there are absolute principles worth striving towards.  The really ironic part is that moral relativism itself is promoted by liberals on the basis of an absolute principle, tolerance.  How do you like that for a contradiction?

Of course, moral relativism was never meant to be applied this way.  It's light was never meant to shine on the likes of the Nazis.  It was never meant to be a full-fledged, workable, theory.  It is a rhetorical device, designed to disarm criticism.  It's only meant to be applied to cultures who fall under the liberal rubric of "cultural diversity."  When someone tells you, "We can't judge these people by our morality", what they're really saying is, "You're not allowed to say bad things about these people.  They're poor."

As I said in the previous post, you don't hear as much about moral relativism as you used to.  I remember when I used to spot subtle insinuations of it in all kinds of movies and TV shows.  Nowadays, it seems that all but the extreme left have abandoned the idea.  In fact, I think I can pin-point exactly where the theory died: the burka.  That's where liberals found themselves face to face with the contradiction mentioned above.  They couldn't dismiss something so obviously oppressive to women, something so clearly at odds with their own feminist values.  And rightly so!  It was refreshing to see them take a stand on something.

Finally, moral relativism is meant to promote understanding and appreciation of other cultures, but it actually acts as a wedge, driving us apart.  It treats morality as an untranslatable language, indecipherable from one culture to the next.  Instead of encouraging us to find value in other cultures, it dismisses the concept of value altogether.  It assumes from the outset that such & such a society would fail a moral evaluation, so it throws away the test form and declares that everyone gets a passing grade.  With it's policy of unlimited permission, it undoes our motivation to better ourselves as a species.  It's one thing to keep an open mind, to appreciate the differences between us, but we mustn't be afraid of standards.  We need standards.  We need stars to reach for.     

The Liberal Conceit

First of all, if it seems like I'm picking exclusively on liberals in this post, rest assured that conservatives will get their day in my nuclear court sooner or later.  I don't consider myself to be clearly one or the other.  I'm just a guy, looking for the truth, and I don't believe that the truth can be neatly packaged within any particular ideology.  But if I had to say which way I leaned, it would definitely be towards the liberal side.  I tend to think that their positions are more thought out, more sensitive to the issues involved, more sympathetic and open minded, and they don't tend to use religion as the final word in every argument like their own literal Deus Ex Machina.  However, there is a point where liberals and I definitely part ways.  I call this point "the liberal conceit."

If I had to sum up the liberal conceit in one sentence, it would be, "If you come off as an asshole saying it, it can't be the truth."  You see, the liberals have taken a diverse number of disenfranchised groups, causes, ailments, oddities, underdogs, classes, and special cases under their wing.  They're very protective of these things and these people.  They're very touchy and quick to go on the defensive where they are concerned.  So if you have anything to say about them which isn't 100% glowing positivity, full of smiley face suns and singing marshmallows, then you'll quickly find the liberals shaking an accusing finger in your direction like you're the next Adolf Hitler.

What!?  You deny that there was a gender bias in those test scores??  How dare you!

You know you've reached the liberal conceit in a conversation when you start hearing phrases like, "How would you like it if someone said..." or "How would you feel if someone..."  or "Well, I happen to know a...."  The debate shifts from facts and arguments, and boils down instead to a discussion of hurt feelings and offended sensibilities.  You find yourself facing a wall where scientific study and evidence mean nothing to the person you're talking to if what you're saying isn't "nice."

Now, I had to proceed cautiously when trying to come up with an example to use here.  We're talking about a veritable mine-field of liberal outrage.  So I had to tread carefully.  I'm not looking to pick any fights that will obscure the point I'm trying to make.  I've been down that road before and it's not fun.  However, I think I've found a fairly innocuous example, and it just so happens that it has the added benefit that I am a member of the group under consideration.  That should at least buy me a little leeway as far as the "asshole" factor is concerned, since I'll be talking about myself as well.  The group in question is left-handed people.

I won a contest with this!

Many years ago I read a book called The Left-Hander Syndrome.  The book took a more sober and scientific approach to the subject than most I've read, almost to the point of dryness.  They got into a statistical analysis of left-handedness, the fact that left-handed people tend to die younger, go insane more easily, more geniuses and more mentally handicapped as well, ect.  They showed how left-handedness was connected to other rare traits.  They dispelled several popular myths about left-handedness.  All fairly interesting stuff.  

But then they got into the fact that left- handedness is a result of brain damage or at least brain trauma usually experienced in the womb.  They stated that right-handedness is actually the default option for all human beings, and that left-handedness only occurs because of a trauma to the left hemisphere of the brain (which controls the right side of the body.)  All cases of left-handedness, they claimed, were a result of the right hemisphere of the brain and the left side of the body compensating for this damage.  Well, this was a bit of a blow to me.  I had been told all my life that left-handed people were "unique" and "holistic" and "creative."  While all of that could arguably still be true, this book was telling me that left-handed people weren't a special minority of different people who just used our other hand.  The book was telling me that we were actually damaged right-handers, implying in a sense that we were actually inferior to normal right-handers, merely compensating for this infirmity by favoring a hand nature had never intended.

Now this is the point where the liberal conceit would be going off like an air raid siren.  The whole thing sounds like something dreamed up by Nazi intellectuals, and it smacks of old tales of the one room school houses where they used to smack kids hands with a ruler if they used the "wrong" one.  I can almost hear the itchy fingers of someone waiting to leave a scathing comment.  Only the latitude I've bought by throwing myself into the mix is keeping them at bay, but even that latitude is limited.  It's almost inevitable that someone below will say something like, "Well, my daughter is left-handed and I'm incredibly offended by what you said."  To that hypothetical comment I can only reply, "Frankly my dear, the truth doesn't give a damn."

But that's far-fetched, right?  No one would leave a comment like that, right?  No one gets that worked up over handedness, right?  Well, consider this screen cap of a review for the book off of Amazon:

Click to Enlarge

Now, I don't know how valid the conclusions in that book are.  That's not my point here.  If someone wants to pick apart the author's scientific findings, that's one thing, but people take this immense umbrage to things like this simply because they don't like what they are hearing.  They find it "offensive."  We live in this cushy culture of entitlement where people think that being "offended" is like some kind of trump card that supersedes facts and reality.  This is a precedent set by the liberal conceit.  Well folks, the fact of the matter is that the truth isn't always the nice cuddly fairy-tale that the liberals want it to be, where everyone gets a trophy just for participating in the human race.  Sometimes the truth is downright ugly and unpleasant.

Sometimes liberals try to sidestep this unpleasantness by trying to bend reality to this warm little fantasy of theirs.  There used to be a few liberal ideas floating around out there that nearly stated this in explicit, philosophical terms.  You don't hear as much about them nowadays, but I'm sure they're out there: multiculturalism and moral relativism.  Now, don't get me wrong.  I'm all for embracing other cultures and keeping an open mind, but these ideas went far beyond that.  Their explicit positions were 1.) that all moralities were a group phenomenon and equally valid; what was wrong in one society, was right in another, and it was all just a matter of perspective and opinion 2.) that all cultures were of equal value, and no one could claim that any society was in any way better than another.  The purpose of both these ideas was to sterilize any objective standard of judgement.  It was the liberal conceit incarnate.  It was deliberately calculated to disarm any ideas which might seem negative, and instead promote an image of the world where everyone is wonderful, everyone wins, and everything is a huge love fest from sea to shining sea.

Well, I'm not buying it.  It's a nice idea, but it's not the truth.  Right is right, wrong is wrong, and it doesn't come down to a matter of geography.  Human sacrifices aren't suddenly acceptable because we happened to be hanging with such and such a tribe and we happen to be at certain degrees latitude and longitude.  As far as better or worse, I admit these are vague terms, and yes, all cultures have a mixture of good points and bad, but on a case by case basis considering different aspects, you can't deny objective standards.  You can't deny that the life expectancy might be higher here, the crime rate lower there, and so on.  No, none of this will do.  The truth exists beyond us, and beyond what we would like it to be, beyond what offends our sensibilities.  We need to face it with open eyes if we're going to get anywhere as a species.                  

When Did Thomas Edison Become the Bad Guy?

Sometimes I feel like there's a meeting I missed, like there's some committee that gets together in the middle of the night and makes changes to the culture.  Everyone else seems to be instantly on board with these changes.  No one else seems thrown or confused by them.  In fact, sometimes I wonder if anyone else even notices that a change has happened.  I never hear anyone ever mention it.  There just seems to be this unspoken understanding that the thing is different now.  If I were living in the world of 1984, I'd be the bewildered guy wandering through the crowd asking, "But weren't we just at war with Eurasia?", that is until the Thought Police hauled me away and put a rat cage on my head and showed me the error of my ways.

For instance, I can't remember the first time I went into a restaurant and  a "server" took my order, but I definitely remember that they used to be called "waiters" and "waitresses."  I understand the reason for the change in terminology, obviously, the whole politically correct agenda behind it all.  I just don't know when this was decided or by whom.  There was never any big announcement on TV or in the town square where someone got up on stage and declared, "Henceforth, they shall be called 'servers.'  Woe be unto them who use the gender specific job title....Oh yeah, and by the way, we're getting rid of 'actress' altogether."  No, it all just seemed to happen overnight, and everyone fell right in step with it as though the job had never been called anything other than 'server'.

Another odd example I've noticed is "they" changed the "B.C/A.D." dating standard to "B.C.E/C.E.", which means "Before the Common Era" and "The Common Era" respectively.  What the heck is the "Common Era"?  Common to what?  The years haven't changed.  We're still dating everything from the same moment in history.  Isn't it disingenuous to discard the religious references in name but to keep them in number? At least when the French Revolution threw God out the window they started over with year one.  So far, I've only heard this one on TV and it seems confined to academic circles, but what do I know?  When the date comes up in casual conversation, people rarely feel the need to specify, "that's 2010 Anno Domini...in the year of our blessed Lord.  Amen."  So for all I know, the change might already be widespread in the public consciousness.  But I doubt it.  Even the world of historical TV documentaries seems to be struggling with this one.  I think I caught one of them using good old "B.C." the other day.  Maybe the secret midnight committee got together and decided, "This one just isn't catching on." 

Even the news often makes me feel like I've been left in the dust.  It used to be that the anchorman would come on at six, tell you what was happening in the world, and leave it to you and your friends to scratch your head over the human condition.  Now, with the proliferation of the 24 hour news channels, I constantly feel like I've walked into a room in the middle of a conversation.  They've already moved on to speculating about the meaning and the impact of such & such, and I still have no idea what they're talking about.  A few years back, I heard people gossiping and grumbling about Rev. Jeremiah Wright for a month before I even had the slightest idea who the man was and what he had said to get people so worked up.

The process sometimes even extends to history itself, and there they even have a name for it.  They call it "Revisionist History."  The problem with this term is that it's used indiscriminately.  On the one hand, it's used as a pejorative term, meaning someone who distorts or misrepresents the facts of history in order to promote a specific agenda.  On the other hand, it's used again as a pejorative term, but this time meaning someone who has brought new facts to light that challenge a common, established, and traditional view of a historical subject.  People are rarely willingly to admit that they're using the term in this second sense, but I have actually seen a few cases.  Mostly the term just gets thrown around as a vague accusation in cases of historical disagreement.  The problem is, watching these arguments from the sidelines, the double meaning makes it easy to get confused and awfully hard to keep score.

I remember Christopher Columbus was an early target.  Some time in the early 1990's some nebulous powers-that-be seemed dead set on burying this man's reputation.  Some people objected to this, calling it "revisionist history."  But the nature of the objection wasn't always clear.  Some people meant, "They're making stuff up to make Columbus sound bad."  Then there were other people who meant, "Columbus is a revered American icon and you're ruining his image by bringing up facts that make him look bad.  I'm going to stick my fingers in my ears so that I don't have to hear about it...la-la-la-la."  Then, of course, there was a lot of grey area between these two viewpoints, where people we're just pissed off about the whole thing, but they really hadn't thought out why.

But somewhere in all this crossfire, I get to feeling like I can't keep track of what the truth is.  You grow up hearing one thing about history and then the secret midnight committee has another one of their damn meetings, and the next day everyone's saying, "Nope, it actually happened like this."  What are you supposed to believe?  Is this new information any more reliable than the old information?  You certainly can't dig up Christopher Columbus and ask him if he really chopped off an Indian's hand. 

For instance, not to sound like some lunatic fringe, holocaust denier, but until about 8 years ago I had never heard about these Japanese Internment Camps that they had in America during World War II.  I never learned about it in school.  I never heard anyone talk about it.  This information just seemed like it popped up out of nowhere, and everyone acted like it had been common knowledge forever.  I'm not saying it didn't happen; I'm just wondering why I never heard of it.  Then, of course, there's Thomas Edison.  When I grew up, he was the symbol of the American dream, a genius and a great man.  Now, it appears he stole all of his ideas, destroyed brilliant careers, engaged in all kinds of illegal acts, and probably strangled puppies because he didn't like the way they wagged their tails.  

There are two possibilities, and sometimes it's hard to tell which side of the line Occam's Razor falls on.  One, people of the past were ignorant, unenlightened, bigoted, and apparently willing to credit Paul Revere with feats of daring and bravery solely because of the rhyming potential of his name.  Or two, someone is fabricating a bunch of elaborate smear campaigns to push an agenda or cause trouble or just to let people know they're too original and clever to be impressed by the conventional image of Thomas Edison.  I guess it all comes down to the real question:  Who are these people, and where are they holding their damn meetings?