The poet Robert Frost once described a liberal as someone unable to take his
own side in an argument. Today it often seems that it's not just liberals
who can't take their own side - it's almost an expression of the zeitgeist.
Ours is an age in which few things seem to raise the hackles more than intellectual
certainty or political decisiveness. It is in that context that we need to
understand the debate about relativism.
In one sense, the debate about relativism might seem old hat - an academic
spat, that raged fast and furious through the 90s, but which now appears to
have burnt itself out and, in any case, has no real bearing outside the academy.
I want to suggest, to the contrary, that relativism is so embedded in our
lives that we often don't recognise it as such. The way we think of issues
such as pluralism or tolerance, our understanding of personal identity, our
attitudes to science - all are deeply shaped by the relativist outlook.
At the heart of relativism is the belief that there is no such thing as a
universal truth, only a variety of conflicting truths, each of which may be
regarded as valid. And that many such beliefs and values are incommensurate
- not just incompatible, but incomparable, because there is no common
language we can use to compare the one with the other.
The consequence of this approach has been both to undermine the value of knowledge
and to narrow the scope of intellectual and political debate.
Science, for instance, is increasingly seen in some quarters as just another
way of understanding the world. As Richard Rorty has put it, 'Scientists invent
descriptions of the world, which are useful for purposes of predicting and
controling what happens, just as poets and political thinkers invent descriptions
of it for other purposes.' But no description, he argues, provides an accurate
representation of the world.
It's true that science is not the only means through which to understand the
world. But neither is science just another perspective. An argument such as
Rorty's helps blur the distinction between fact and belief. It's a blurring
that lies at the heart of many contemporary disputes about science.
Take, for instance, the debate about Kennewick Man. Here, the scientific study
of an ancient skeleton has been held up for nearly a decade because of fears
that such studies might undermine traditional Native American views of their
origins, and their own sense of identity and being.
Or consider the debate over Creationism. Creationists now argue that evolutionary
theory is just one way of understanding humanity's biological past, and one
that is neither better nor worse, just different, to the account given in
Genesis. So children should be taught both accounts as incommensurate
truths about the world.
The blurring of fact and belief is also at the heart of such controversies
as those over GM foods or the MMR vaccine. For what we see in these debates
is the promotion of the idea that how one feels about an issue matters as
much as what may be factually true. It's an argument that can only open the
way to irrationalism and quackery.
Relativism undermines intellectual debate in a broader sense too. One legacy
of relativism is that we've come to view pluralism not as a description
but as a prescription. No one disputes that different people
have different views that they often take to be truths. But we can view such
pluralism as a precondition for debate - without a clash of views there can
be no debate. Or we can view it, as relativists often do, as condition that
makes debate either impossible or destructive. Impossible because the different
views are incommensurate. Destructive because robust debate is seen as undermining
the conditions for tolerance and pluralism. I've lost count of the number
of times I’ve been prevented by both newspaper and radio editors from
quoting from the Satanic Verses because it causes offence to Muslim
believers. Either way the consequence has been to close down debate rather
than open it up.
One final point. The production of knowledge is always historically, culturally,
socially situated. But the situatedness of knowledge does not make it valid
only in that particular context. It's a point that often forgotten by both
sides in the contemporary debate about relativism. On the one hand, relativists
believe that the contingency of knowledge production makes universal knowledge
impossible. On the other hand, critics of relativism often view universalism
as an ahistorical essence, as something rooted in nature, without a historical
or social context. We can see this, for instance, in the current discussion
about human nature.
What both sides underestimate is the role of the active human subject in transcending
their immediate situation, and hence the possibility of historically situated
knowledge that also bears the potential of more universal validity.