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Home Front
Relativism is dead?
2001-10-04
  • Andrew Coyne National Post
    But the rediscovery of truth -- the daunting awareness, not merely that I might be wrong, but that I might be right -- is more than the final death blow to relativism. It is implicitly universalist.
    To smash an airliner into a building is not wrong in some cultures, but not in others; it is not wrong for you, but not for me; it is simply wrong.
    To smash an airliner into a building is not wrong in some cultures, but not in others; it is not wrong for you, but not for me; it is simply wrong. Who's to say? All of us. Humanity. Civilization. And if it is wrong to kill, if every person has the right to life, if each one's life is the equal of every other's, then all else follows: freedom, equality, democracy, and the rest of the apparatus of humanism. Or as they are not afraid to say in some parts of the world, of "universal human values."

    To say that this is a revolution would hardly do it justice. The moral code that was slowly working its way through our societies stressed not right and wrong, but authenticity: To thine own self be true. An action was to be judged, not by appeal to universal values, but by whether it was consistent with the actor's (self-chosen) identity. Hence the undergraduate's obsession with what to him seems the worst, if not the only crime: hypocrisy. Actions are not, indeed, to be judged at all, but rather persons, and by extension nations, are to be scored against their previous record. To the point that his only reaction, on hearing of the murder of 6,000 Americans, is to bring up other crimes other Americans are alleged to have committed.
    • Posted by:Fred Pruitt

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