Relativism—Feet Firmly Planted In Mid-Air

This … cancer, eating away at the soul of humanity cloaks itself in wondrous finery, doesn’t it. How could being a relativist cause harm? Surely, what’s wrong with according “honor” to everyone’s viewpoint. To anyone’s viewpoint. It’s inclusive. It is welcoming. It is accepting. It is progressive. It is egalitarian. It is … human.

The problem:

And by insisting that “everything is relative”, everyone’s viewpoint becomes equally correct, equally valuable, equally “worthy of being honored”—no matter how absurd or contradictory or just plain stupid or wrong it might be.

This is why I continue to insist—despite the overtones of elitism it may seem to engender—that no one is simply, by the default of being born, “entitled to their opinion.” Opinions, just like the people who own them, are to be judged worth or unworthy.

Judgment per se presupposes a standard. This standard—whatever it is—in order to be a standard is required to be unchanging, proven true and factual by testing. This, for example, is how Science works. This is why you have little qualm with flying in an aluminum tube 35,000 feet in the air when you can’t intelligently discuss why it doesn’t fall out of the air: millions of people “prove” the safety of air travel by rigorous and constant testing.

Entitlement, generally, is mostly bullshit. One is not even entitled to their own life. One can’t, for example, make a case against the ocean as it pours into a drowning man’s lungs that it shouldn’t do so because the drowning man is entitled to their life. The ocean cares not a whit and another hapless person gets admitted to Davy Jones’s locker.

Everything is not relative. Relativism leads to doing things that are popular, not that are right and true and correct. Ironically, no one, not even its most ardent supporters can sustain relativism for long. We certainly don’t act as if relativism is true. You act as if your opinion that you should receive $11.34 in change from the cashier is correct, regardless of what the cashier’s opinion of the issue happens to be. You’re appealing to an external, unchanging standard (in this case, the “laws” of Mathematics) that the cashier’s opinion on the matter is incorrect. In this case, the cashier is certainly not entitled to their opinion.

So let’s stop feeding this creeping monster. Exercise your moral and mental courage: call things as they are, even those that will hurt you. Bring up the elephant in the room. Bring it up and kill it. Regain your human dignity. Because wherever it does lie, dignity does not lie with floppy relativists, however popular they are.