Relativism: So What? (Part Six: Pope Talks Out His Ass)
International Herald Tribune, July 17, 2008:
"Do not be confounded by those who see you as just another consumer in a market of undifferentiated possibilities, where choice itself becomes the good, novelty usurps beauty, and subjective experience displaces truth," he said.
He also declared faith's central position in the moral universe, attacking the idea that there are no absolute truths.
"Relativism, by indiscriminately giving value to practically everything, has made 'experience' all-important," he said. "Yet experiences, detached from any consideration of what is good or true, can lead not to genuine freedom but to moral or intellectual confusion, to a lowering of standards, to a loss of self-respect."
The thing is, the "ism" that Benedict is decrying, "indiscriminately giving value to practically everything," doesn't exist. No one does that, and no one holds the position. Even people who say they hold it don't hold it.
martinskidmore told me several days ago, "Very few people would even attempt the kind of thinking you do, and even fewer are remotely capable of it." That's true, but just not relevant to the sort of "relativism" the Pope is referring to (what I called position six in Monday's posting, which I summarized as "Nothing is better than anything else"). This is a position that no smart person or even average person can hold if he thinks about it for 20 seconds, and the same goes for imputing it to others. In that regard it's similar to someone's giving "The Backstreet Boys don't even write their own songs" as his reason for disliking the Backstreet Boys. It's not his reason. He hasn't worked through his reasons, and this functions as a stand-in for doing so. So the question is "What blocks the 20 seconds of thought?" (What I wrote last July in "What's Wrong With Pretty Girls": "The persistence of stand-in issues such as whether or not bands write their own songs... is because they allow us to feel class issues without actually discussing them and allow us to indulge our uneasiness with happy songs and the pretty girls who dance to them without our really exploring where the uneasiness comes from.") I won't say that "nothing's better than anything else" and its variants are a stand-in for this or that particular issue - people use stand-in issues so as to prevent themselves from figuring out what their actual issues should be - but one attraction of the issue is that it allows people to feel the issue of ethnocentrism without actually dealing with it, or it allows those who are genuinely trying to deal with it to invoke the imaginary support and methodology they believe they acquire from "relativism."
It is important to work through the intellectual issues surrounding "relativism," to understand how even smart people can convince themselves that "relativism" is an issue, but ultimately what we're dealing with isn't an intellectual issue or an intellectual mistake but a mental block, and the goal is to understand what people seem to gain from the mental block, what short-term apparent necessity propels them not to think. So, while going through the intellectual issues may help us be more precise about where there's a block, it won't necessarily bring us to the reasons for the block.
(Some of the issues in "relativism" are more complex than "Nothing's better than anything else" is, but contra Martin, I don't think any of them take a piercing intellect to understand. E.g., one doesn't have to have graduated elementary school to realize that "I want to understand this in its own context before condemning it as barbaric" isn't the same as "You have no right to judge.")
(Also, although Pope Benedict's statement may not be doing his own views justice - and maybe it wasn't so dumb in context - I wonder how he can think it's ever acceptable to accuse people of "indiscriminately giving value to practically everything.")
"Do not be confounded by those who see you as just another consumer in a market of undifferentiated possibilities, where choice itself becomes the good, novelty usurps beauty, and subjective experience displaces truth," he said.
He also declared faith's central position in the moral universe, attacking the idea that there are no absolute truths.
"Relativism, by indiscriminately giving value to practically everything, has made 'experience' all-important," he said. "Yet experiences, detached from any consideration of what is good or true, can lead not to genuine freedom but to moral or intellectual confusion, to a lowering of standards, to a loss of self-respect."
The thing is, the "ism" that Benedict is decrying, "indiscriminately giving value to practically everything," doesn't exist. No one does that, and no one holds the position. Even people who say they hold it don't hold it.
martinskidmore told me several days ago, "Very few people would even attempt the kind of thinking you do, and even fewer are remotely capable of it." That's true, but just not relevant to the sort of "relativism" the Pope is referring to (what I called position six in Monday's posting, which I summarized as "Nothing is better than anything else"). This is a position that no smart person or even average person can hold if he thinks about it for 20 seconds, and the same goes for imputing it to others. In that regard it's similar to someone's giving "The Backstreet Boys don't even write their own songs" as his reason for disliking the Backstreet Boys. It's not his reason. He hasn't worked through his reasons, and this functions as a stand-in for doing so. So the question is "What blocks the 20 seconds of thought?" (What I wrote last July in "What's Wrong With Pretty Girls": "The persistence of stand-in issues such as whether or not bands write their own songs... is because they allow us to feel class issues without actually discussing them and allow us to indulge our uneasiness with happy songs and the pretty girls who dance to them without our really exploring where the uneasiness comes from.") I won't say that "nothing's better than anything else" and its variants are a stand-in for this or that particular issue - people use stand-in issues so as to prevent themselves from figuring out what their actual issues should be - but one attraction of the issue is that it allows people to feel the issue of ethnocentrism without actually dealing with it, or it allows those who are genuinely trying to deal with it to invoke the imaginary support and methodology they believe they acquire from "relativism."
It is important to work through the intellectual issues surrounding "relativism," to understand how even smart people can convince themselves that "relativism" is an issue, but ultimately what we're dealing with isn't an intellectual issue or an intellectual mistake but a mental block, and the goal is to understand what people seem to gain from the mental block, what short-term apparent necessity propels them not to think. So, while going through the intellectual issues may help us be more precise about where there's a block, it won't necessarily bring us to the reasons for the block.
(Some of the issues in "relativism" are more complex than "Nothing's better than anything else" is, but contra Martin, I don't think any of them take a piercing intellect to understand. E.g., one doesn't have to have graduated elementary school to realize that "I want to understand this in its own context before condemning it as barbaric" isn't the same as "You have no right to judge.")
(Also, although Pope Benedict's statement may not be doing his own views justice - and maybe it wasn't so dumb in context - I wonder how he can think it's ever acceptable to accuse people of "indiscriminately giving value to practically everything.")