The mentality you describe partially derives from the widespread acceptance of what David Stove called the Worst Argument in the World (http://www.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/worst.html):

“We can know things only as they are related to us, under our forms of perception and understanding, insofar as they fall under our conceptual schemes,etc. So, we cannot know things as they are in themselves.”

Stove gives an example of this argument manifests itself:

“The cultural-relativist, for example, inveighs bitterly against our science-based, white-male cultural perspective. She says that it is not only injurious but cognitively limiting. Injurious it may be; or again it may not. But why does she believe that it is cognitively limiting? Why, for no other reason in the world, except this one: that it is ours. Everyone really understands, too, that this is the only reason. But since this reason is also generally accepted as a sufficient one, no other is felt to be needed.”

And so it is with foreign policy. Why are America’s foreign policy interests suspect? For no other reason than they are our interests.

Expanding on what Carter said, for the cultural relativist, the _badness_ of our culture is immanent and absolute, while the _goodness_ of minority and alien cultures is also immanent and absolute. The relativist is only a relativist in relation to the (imperfect, but real) good of our culture. In other words, just as the leftist belief in justice as equality of results creates a vicious double standard by which the successful are unjustly dragged down and the unsuccessful are unjustly raised up, so the belief in relativism, which pretends to treat all cultures equally, removes any truth or value from our own culture, and attributes absolute truth and value to other cultures.

Why is this? How can it be that the cultural relativist is really an absolutist, and thus a fake relativist? It is because the true relativist position is actually the position that the relativists sneer at as absolutist. What is called the absolutist position posits transcendent objective standards. In relation to those standards, things are judged as MORE OR LESS good, as MORE OR LESS true. Their _relative_ degree of goodness and truth is established in relation to an _absolute_ standard, which is transcendent to them. This is _true_ relativism. Of course, no one calls it that. For the sake of discussion, we could call this position objective relativism.

By contrast, the cultural, or subjective, relativist, denies that there is any higher or objective truth, and judges all things in relation to some subjective point of view, namely the preferences and desires of each person or group. But since these subjective perspectives have no absolute standard above them by which their truth and merits can be judged, they become THEIR OWN IMMANENT ABSOLUTE. So, what is called relativism is really a perverted absolutism, because it treats relative values as absolute, and what is called absolutism is really a true relativism, because it judges the true relative values of things in the light of absolute values.

When we combine these insights with the fact noted above, that cultural relativism does not start out with clean hands and honest intentions, but with a leftist agenda to equalize the world by debunking white Western culture and celebrating nonwhite non-Western cultures, then we understand how cultural relativism treats our culture as immanently and absolutely bad, and alien and threatening cultures as immanently and absolutely good.

The analysis also explains why absolutists, because they are able to judge the differing relative value of things under the light of a transcendent truth, and do not squash things down into an immanent absolute, create societies with real political freedom and diversity and respect for individual rights, while the declared enemies of absolutism, who reject any standard above themselves, always end up running corrupt dictatorships that squash dissenters like bugs.

Finally, in a massive act of projection, the narrow and oppressive spiritual prison that relativists profess to see in that “absolutism” that they have rejected, actually describes THEIR OWN CONDITION.

See also my concurrent entry on true and false openness:

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/002175.html

I’m sorry about the excessive difficulty of the comment. It’s not my way to make things unnecessarily difficult, and I don’t like writers who do that. But there’s a reason for it here.

I’m using the word relative in two contradictory senses and the word absolute in two contradictory senses. That’s my attempt to push the reader into seeing a different way of understanding these words. “Relative” has been so overtaken by the negative concept “relativism” in our time that people have lost the non-derogatory meaning of the word. The legitimate meaning of relativity as I use it here is simply that some things are “more” or “less” in regard to some attribute than other things. Similarly, absolute has positive meanings (to conservatives), and I wanted to show a negative meaning of the word, namely the quality of thing when it doesn’t have any relationship with anything higher than itself.

What I say in the previous comment is not new. It’s found, for example, in the often-expressed idea that liberals are terrified of inequality because, lacking any belief in a transcendent, if they decided that some people were inferior to themselves in some aspect, that would mean they were absolutely inferior and therefore there would be no reason not to kill or enslave them. In the absence of the light of transcendence, each thing becomes absolute (in the false sense) instead of relative (in the true sense). A person who is inferior in the (false) absolute sense has no rights and should just be killed or treated inhumanly. But a person who is inferior in the (true) relative sense remains our fellow human being. But to retain the (true) relative sense of things requires the belief in the (true) absolute. It’s in the light of the (true) absolute that things take on their true meanings relative to the absolute and to each other. In Jacob’s dream of the ladder ascending to heaven, and with people going up and down on it, each level in the ladder is determined by its distance to the God who is at the top of the ladder.

But is too much credence being given to Kerry’s good faith in this argument? I believe that we should have elections, even if my preferred candidate loses; I believe that the press can print most things, even if I disagree; I believe that I should follow properly passed laws even if I think them unjust. That is to say, I think (like most people) that process and law have an independent value in a well-functioning state. Kerry is merely piggybacking on this widely shared belief to provide cover for his true desire for surrender in Iraq. I’m sure Kerry didn’t make similar arguments about our Bosnian adventure because he didn’t want the same outcome. Similarly leftists make free speech arguments about pornography, because they favor it, but not about hate speech laws, and Andrew Sullivan will make judicial overreach arguments about taxation but not about homosexuality. Even more serious and consistent leftists than John Kerry call for UN involvement in all circumstances not because they prefer process but because they prefer US surrender in all circumstances.

The two terms I use when discussing the two senses of relativism used by Mr. Auster are “relativism” and “relativity”. Perhaps it is only helpful to those of us with a scientific bent, who understand the difference between Einstein’s theory of _relativity_ and postmodern antiscientific _relativism_. Relativity doesn’t reject absolute truth that transcends our current frame of reference; it merely acknowledges that the truth we see is dependent upon our frame of reference. Einstein almost called his theory the “theory of invariants”, because it is really a theory that radically changed what was scientifically viewed as relative and what as invariant, and “theory of relativity” gives short shrift to the invariant side of the dualism. Another way to say it is that Einstein applied phenomenalism to physical science; and as the postmoderns have shown us phenomenalism, although not necessarily relativist in itself, can easily lead the weak-minded down the path to relativism.

I agree with Matt’s distinction between the two terms. That thought was on the edge of my consciousness as I was writing the comment but didn’t quite make it through the door. :-) However, my use of relativity is not exactly the same as Einstein’s, even though both of them seem to me like common sense observations. Einstein’s relativity is that things _appear_ different depending on where the observer is situated and how fast and in what direction he is moving in relation to them. My relativity is that things _are_ different depending on how close or far they are from the absolute. What the two relativities have in common is that they are not “relativistic”; they exist in relation to an absolute frame of reference.

No, Einstein’s relativity is the same as Mr. Auster’s, though I may not have said it properly myself in my own comment. Duration, length, mass, etc. _really change_ depending on relative velocity. The _absolute_ or _invariant_ is the speed of light.

Phenominalism is like this, it seems to me. It acknowledges that my reality _is in fact_ different from your reality, yet both are knowable and objective with reference to things that transcend them. Relativity - real, genuine ontological relativity - does not imply relativism, although it is very often taken to imply relativism.

I have to go untie the knots in my brain now though because even thinking about this stuff is perplexing. I don’t think it admits of a simple, intuitively obvious explanation so Mr. Auster shouldn’t be hard on himself in the difficulty of understanding his earlier comment.

Thanks to Matt for the correction on Einsteinian relativity. Of course, it’s not just that things look differently to the observer depending on how fast and in what direction he’s moving; the observer himself changes.

Also saying “absolute frame of reference” will make the physicists cringe because Einstein denies that such a thing exists; Mr. Auster uses the term “absolute frame of reference” where Einstein uses the term “invariants” for something that is metaphysically constant. That is all just terminology though. It would be interesting if traditionalist conservatives could find a way to intelligently swipe the terminology of physical relativity and use it as a critique of moral relativism. My own past attempts to do so have been hampered by the general obscurity of my presentation, but there is a basic truth in here that can be used to hammer postmodern relativism back to the nothing from which it came.

Ok, the comparisons between the two relativities can be useful. But let’s remember that Einstein is speaking of physics, and I’m speaking of culture and morality.

Certainly. I think that beneath both there is the same (true) metaphysic of relativity and (false) metaphysic of relativism though. The connection isn’t just an analogy (at least I don’t think so); it is a common metaphysic.

Most Democrats who vote don’t even know or seem to care about this fact. It’s all about getting their power back. This article should be released somehow to as many Democrats or Moderates as possible. We have to convert as many people we possibly can. We already have Senator Zell Miller & Former New York Mayor Ed Koch on President George W bush’s side. I’m sure we will gain many more as we get closer to the Election.
Sincerely,
Dave Sawyer