Cum Laude Address: March 18, 2009
I want to thank the Members of the Cum Laude Society for the honor of being invited to speak on this occasion.
I congratulate the newest members of the Cum Laude Society for their achievement of academic excellence. In honor of that achievement, I aim to achieve two things today: One is to help banish a certain rhetorical question from serious conversations at [our school]. The academic life is built on asking and trying to answer questions, but this question is deadly to the pursuit of truth. It is the question “Who is to say?”
My second aim is to help restore an unfashionable concept to respectability, a concept without which the meaning of the Cum Laude society and of education itself would cease to exist. That concept is absolute values.
These two aims are related because we are all apt to react to the word “absolute” with the question “who is to say?” Bred for individual liberty, we Americans fear that absolutes lead to oppression and tyranny, and we sense danger. Overreacting, we retreat for safety into what Pope Benedict has called “the dictatorship of relativism.” “Who is to say?” really means “since everything is relative, no one has a right to judge me.” Whew! Safe. So we are tempted to think, or rather to feel without thinking.
But consider the illogic: To deny that any values are absolute is to make an absolute of relativism. And without faith in an absolute value like justice, a secondary value like individual liberty loses all meaning. If justice is relative, on what grounds can we argue that oppression and tyranny are bad?
Of course it is not easy to apply an absolute like justice to particular situations. What one calls joking another might call bullying. And often the absolutes themselves seem to conflict. Like the Duke in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, our own Ethics Committee must regularly balance the two absolute values of justice and mercy, and tempering the one with the other in any particular case is hard. However, the difficulty is not removed but only increased when we pretend that justice and mercy are not absolutes. The function of human intelligence is not to deny those absolutes but to do the hard work of approaching them as nearly as we can.
Certainly absolute values do not apply to matters of mere taste. If you say “I like chocolate ice cream,” no one is going to say, “you’re wrong; I like vanilla.” But when it comes to good and evil, right and wrong, truth and error, meaning and nonsense, beauty and ugliness—the most important subjects of human thought—replacing absolute values with relativism leads only to intellectual confusion.
A few weeks ago I said to one of my classes, “there is such a thing as beauty.” You should have heard the outrage. You would have thought I was advocating the torture of puppies and kittens. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” they shouted with passionate intensity, as if I must never have heard that cliché before. “Who are you to say what beauty is?”
It is true that the experience of beauty is always a relation between the viewer and the object. Something beautiful will not appear beautiful to one who is blind. Discerning people may find elements of beauty in something otherwise ugly. And there are many gradations of twilight between the high noon of beauty and the midnight of ugliness. But discerning those gradations is part of the challenge and the joy of life: making and comparing judgments is what human beings like to do, and will do no matter what. To renounce judgment by pretending that all beauty is relative—that there is no essential difference between the beautiful and the ugly—is to bury human discernment alive in a coffin made of error.
If a picture is worth 10,000 words, I’m going to save myself 40,000. Here are two faces and two vases.
[Images shown:
1. Painting by Quentis Massys, after a drawing attributed to Francesco Melzi, itself the copy of a lost original by Melzi’s master, Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1490)
2. Sculpted head, fifth-century Greek.
3. Porcelain Chinese vase
4. Ugly modern vase]
Relativists may kick and scream, but their empathic responses to these images tell the truth: one of the faces is ugly (as Leonardo meant it to be), and one is beautiful. And the same with the vases. You yourself may be more or less beautiful than your neighbor. Beauty is not and should not be a requirement for invitation to the Cum Laude society. But like it or not, true beauty—like true academic excellence—is real, and it is the farthest thing from ugliness.
The same is true for the other absolute values by whose light all human judgments are made: justice, love, truth. (We could add the Greek motto of the Cum Laude Society: arete, dike, time). To deny their reality leads, as I said, only to confusion.
One form of confusion is the self-contradiction I mentioned earlier: Relativists who deny absolutes make an absolute of relativism.
A second form of confusion is the abolishment of the grounds for moral judgment. I think you will agree with me that scientists should not falsify their data, that your friend should not date your girlfriend or boyfriend behind your back, that cutting in the lunch line is wrong, that the strong should not tyrannize over the weak. But who are we to say so unless we agree that the values of truth, loyalty, and justice are absolute? We might not like others to fake their data, betray our friendship, or push us around. But without faith in absolutes we cannot reasonably claim it is wrong for them to do so. Similarly, when relativism dissolves our faith in honesty, the rule of law, and the brotherhood of man, how can we assert that it is bad for CEO’s to embezzle, politicians to lie, mobs to lynch, or terrorists to blow up busses full of children?
The study of other cultures and civilizations is essential to education. But the relativism that goes by the fashionable name of “multiculturalism” leads to a third kind of confusion when it preaches that all cultures are created equal. For example, when we say that the principles of freedom, equality, and the rule of law are merely “Eurocentric,” on what grounds can we condemn other cultures who practice autocracy and persecution?
In fact, the very idea that we should treat other cultures justly and without prejudice is derived from no other culture but the one into which we have all been born or transported: the English-speaking West. Several thousand years of Jewish and Christian teaching that all men are the children of God, a thousand years of English Common Law, and two centuries of American Enlightenment doctrine that all men are created equal and are endowed with fundamental rights—these are the only grounds we have for asserting that we should respect our neighbor’s cultural differences.
Which brings me to the hugely complex matter of whether, when, and how we should thrust our own values upon others. Responding to these questions requires even deeper loyalty to the absolutes of justice, love, and truth and a careful study of history, language, culture, and politics. I am not foolish enough to claim that in such matters wisdom comes easily. In the history of the British rule in India, for example, it is safe to say that there was plenty of good and evil behavior on all sides. But consider what the theologian George Weigel writes about General Sir Charles Napier:
“As one point in his pacification of [the province of Sindh, now part of Pakistan], Sir Charles confronted the long-entrenched and religiously-warranted practice of ‘suttee’ [sati], according to which a widow was thrown onto the funeral pyre of her dead husband. Napier invited the local leaders to a meeting and said, ‘You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom. When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we shall follow ours.’
Underlying Napier’s declaration was the conviction that the sacredness of human life, including female human life, is an absolute. After pointing out that in the wake of Napier’s decision, sati was soon abolished in India, Weigel asks whether India would have been better off if Napier had said “who am I to impose my values on you?” [See the full article here.]
Only in light of absolute values can we avoid the moral confusion of cultural relativism, which justifies the abuse of women, the toleration of the violently intolerant, and the greater outrage over Abu Grayb than over the genocidal brutalities of the Janjaweed in Darfur, the Chinese in Tibet, and radical Islamist jihadis everywhere.
The question “who is to say?” really means “no one is to say”: There is no authority over me; there are no such absolutes as beauty, justice, love, or truth to which I am answerable. Under the dictatorship of this relativism there can be no meaningful discourse about values at all. To see this, all you have to do is to consider what answer to the question “Who is to say?” would persuade you. “Who are you to say?” “Well, I’m a doctor of philosophy in English and American Literature.” Ffft. “I’m a Harvard nuclear physicist who plays a Stradivarius violin, has won three super bowls as quarterback, written two novels, directed a hit movie, served with Mother Theresa, and been elected Secretary-General of the United Nations.” Ffft. I am Moses, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus. The relativist response is still Ffft.
When we ask “who’s to say what is right or wrong?” because we recognize no absolute authority, it doesn’t mean there is no such thing as evil. It means we are allowing evil to conquer. If we continue to dissolve absolute values in the corrosive bath of this all-purpose question, soon we will ask “who are you to tell me what to do?” and the only answer will be “I’m the one with the gun, that’s who.”
But the universal absolute values really do exist, and we must be faithful to them. Who is to say so? We are, every one of us. Whether we prefer it in a Chinese vase or a teen magazine, we know that there is beauty, even though getting it to appear in an essay we’re writing is not easy. Whether or not it is possible for anyone to be perfectly good, we know that justice is always better than injustice, even though it is hard to figure out how much weight to give mitigating circumstances in any particular case of plagiarism. We know that love is more than sex, even though plenty of pseudo-Freudians and TV episodes would have us think otherwise. We know that truth exists, even though no one person can know all truth and a lifetime is not long enough to know very much for absolute certain.
We can all perfectly well see for ourselves the value of absolutes if only we stop asking the fake question “Who is to say?” and recognize that unexamined relativism is a form of prejudice. Teachers and school and Cum Laude societies are not here to dictate that you must like vanilla more than chocolate. They are here to help you to become excellent at making sound judgments based on the absolute principles of goodness and truth. And precisely because that goal is not easy to achieve, we celebrate today the induction of new members into the Cum Laude society. May it inspire all of us in the pursuit of excellence.
I congratulate the newest members of the Cum Laude Society for their achievement of academic excellence. In honor of that achievement, I aim to achieve two things today: One is to help banish a certain rhetorical question from serious conversations at [our school]. The academic life is built on asking and trying to answer questions, but this question is deadly to the pursuit of truth. It is the question “Who is to say?”
My second aim is to help restore an unfashionable concept to respectability, a concept without which the meaning of the Cum Laude society and of education itself would cease to exist. That concept is absolute values.
These two aims are related because we are all apt to react to the word “absolute” with the question “who is to say?” Bred for individual liberty, we Americans fear that absolutes lead to oppression and tyranny, and we sense danger. Overreacting, we retreat for safety into what Pope Benedict has called “the dictatorship of relativism.” “Who is to say?” really means “since everything is relative, no one has a right to judge me.” Whew! Safe. So we are tempted to think, or rather to feel without thinking.
But consider the illogic: To deny that any values are absolute is to make an absolute of relativism. And without faith in an absolute value like justice, a secondary value like individual liberty loses all meaning. If justice is relative, on what grounds can we argue that oppression and tyranny are bad?
Of course it is not easy to apply an absolute like justice to particular situations. What one calls joking another might call bullying. And often the absolutes themselves seem to conflict. Like the Duke in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, our own Ethics Committee must regularly balance the two absolute values of justice and mercy, and tempering the one with the other in any particular case is hard. However, the difficulty is not removed but only increased when we pretend that justice and mercy are not absolutes. The function of human intelligence is not to deny those absolutes but to do the hard work of approaching them as nearly as we can.
Certainly absolute values do not apply to matters of mere taste. If you say “I like chocolate ice cream,” no one is going to say, “you’re wrong; I like vanilla.” But when it comes to good and evil, right and wrong, truth and error, meaning and nonsense, beauty and ugliness—the most important subjects of human thought—replacing absolute values with relativism leads only to intellectual confusion.
A few weeks ago I said to one of my classes, “there is such a thing as beauty.” You should have heard the outrage. You would have thought I was advocating the torture of puppies and kittens. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” they shouted with passionate intensity, as if I must never have heard that cliché before. “Who are you to say what beauty is?”
It is true that the experience of beauty is always a relation between the viewer and the object. Something beautiful will not appear beautiful to one who is blind. Discerning people may find elements of beauty in something otherwise ugly. And there are many gradations of twilight between the high noon of beauty and the midnight of ugliness. But discerning those gradations is part of the challenge and the joy of life: making and comparing judgments is what human beings like to do, and will do no matter what. To renounce judgment by pretending that all beauty is relative—that there is no essential difference between the beautiful and the ugly—is to bury human discernment alive in a coffin made of error.
If a picture is worth 10,000 words, I’m going to save myself 40,000. Here are two faces and two vases.
[Images shown:
1. Painting by Quentis Massys, after a drawing attributed to Francesco Melzi, itself the copy of a lost original by Melzi’s master, Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1490)
2. Sculpted head, fifth-century Greek.
3. Porcelain Chinese vase
4. Ugly modern vase]
Relativists may kick and scream, but their empathic responses to these images tell the truth: one of the faces is ugly (as Leonardo meant it to be), and one is beautiful. And the same with the vases. You yourself may be more or less beautiful than your neighbor. Beauty is not and should not be a requirement for invitation to the Cum Laude society. But like it or not, true beauty—like true academic excellence—is real, and it is the farthest thing from ugliness.
The same is true for the other absolute values by whose light all human judgments are made: justice, love, truth. (We could add the Greek motto of the Cum Laude Society: arete, dike, time). To deny their reality leads, as I said, only to confusion.
One form of confusion is the self-contradiction I mentioned earlier: Relativists who deny absolutes make an absolute of relativism.
A second form of confusion is the abolishment of the grounds for moral judgment. I think you will agree with me that scientists should not falsify their data, that your friend should not date your girlfriend or boyfriend behind your back, that cutting in the lunch line is wrong, that the strong should not tyrannize over the weak. But who are we to say so unless we agree that the values of truth, loyalty, and justice are absolute? We might not like others to fake their data, betray our friendship, or push us around. But without faith in absolutes we cannot reasonably claim it is wrong for them to do so. Similarly, when relativism dissolves our faith in honesty, the rule of law, and the brotherhood of man, how can we assert that it is bad for CEO’s to embezzle, politicians to lie, mobs to lynch, or terrorists to blow up busses full of children?
The study of other cultures and civilizations is essential to education. But the relativism that goes by the fashionable name of “multiculturalism” leads to a third kind of confusion when it preaches that all cultures are created equal. For example, when we say that the principles of freedom, equality, and the rule of law are merely “Eurocentric,” on what grounds can we condemn other cultures who practice autocracy and persecution?
In fact, the very idea that we should treat other cultures justly and without prejudice is derived from no other culture but the one into which we have all been born or transported: the English-speaking West. Several thousand years of Jewish and Christian teaching that all men are the children of God, a thousand years of English Common Law, and two centuries of American Enlightenment doctrine that all men are created equal and are endowed with fundamental rights—these are the only grounds we have for asserting that we should respect our neighbor’s cultural differences.
Which brings me to the hugely complex matter of whether, when, and how we should thrust our own values upon others. Responding to these questions requires even deeper loyalty to the absolutes of justice, love, and truth and a careful study of history, language, culture, and politics. I am not foolish enough to claim that in such matters wisdom comes easily. In the history of the British rule in India, for example, it is safe to say that there was plenty of good and evil behavior on all sides. But consider what the theologian George Weigel writes about General Sir Charles Napier:
“As one point in his pacification of [the province of Sindh, now part of Pakistan], Sir Charles confronted the long-entrenched and religiously-warranted practice of ‘suttee’ [sati], according to which a widow was thrown onto the funeral pyre of her dead husband. Napier invited the local leaders to a meeting and said, ‘You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom. When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we shall follow ours.’
Underlying Napier’s declaration was the conviction that the sacredness of human life, including female human life, is an absolute. After pointing out that in the wake of Napier’s decision, sati was soon abolished in India, Weigel asks whether India would have been better off if Napier had said “who am I to impose my values on you?” [See the full article here.]
Only in light of absolute values can we avoid the moral confusion of cultural relativism, which justifies the abuse of women, the toleration of the violently intolerant, and the greater outrage over Abu Grayb than over the genocidal brutalities of the Janjaweed in Darfur, the Chinese in Tibet, and radical Islamist jihadis everywhere.
The question “who is to say?” really means “no one is to say”: There is no authority over me; there are no such absolutes as beauty, justice, love, or truth to which I am answerable. Under the dictatorship of this relativism there can be no meaningful discourse about values at all. To see this, all you have to do is to consider what answer to the question “Who is to say?” would persuade you. “Who are you to say?” “Well, I’m a doctor of philosophy in English and American Literature.” Ffft. “I’m a Harvard nuclear physicist who plays a Stradivarius violin, has won three super bowls as quarterback, written two novels, directed a hit movie, served with Mother Theresa, and been elected Secretary-General of the United Nations.” Ffft. I am Moses, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus. The relativist response is still Ffft.
When we ask “who’s to say what is right or wrong?” because we recognize no absolute authority, it doesn’t mean there is no such thing as evil. It means we are allowing evil to conquer. If we continue to dissolve absolute values in the corrosive bath of this all-purpose question, soon we will ask “who are you to tell me what to do?” and the only answer will be “I’m the one with the gun, that’s who.”
But the universal absolute values really do exist, and we must be faithful to them. Who is to say so? We are, every one of us. Whether we prefer it in a Chinese vase or a teen magazine, we know that there is beauty, even though getting it to appear in an essay we’re writing is not easy. Whether or not it is possible for anyone to be perfectly good, we know that justice is always better than injustice, even though it is hard to figure out how much weight to give mitigating circumstances in any particular case of plagiarism. We know that love is more than sex, even though plenty of pseudo-Freudians and TV episodes would have us think otherwise. We know that truth exists, even though no one person can know all truth and a lifetime is not long enough to know very much for absolute certain.
We can all perfectly well see for ourselves the value of absolutes if only we stop asking the fake question “Who is to say?” and recognize that unexamined relativism is a form of prejudice. Teachers and school and Cum Laude societies are not here to dictate that you must like vanilla more than chocolate. They are here to help you to become excellent at making sound judgments based on the absolute principles of goodness and truth. And precisely because that goal is not easy to achieve, we celebrate today the induction of new members into the Cum Laude society. May it inspire all of us in the pursuit of excellence.
posted by G.Rap | 7:36 PM
13 Comments:
As I listened to you speak in the theater today (yes, students do peruse this site from time to time...) I couldn't help but consistently nod in agreement. I found it an excellent speech: provocative and resonating, yet demonstrative of consideration of the opposing viewpoint complete with true mastery of rhetoric with which to counter it. Nevertheless, I might be a little biased, considering I myself had already been concerned with the increasing attack on even the very idea of absolute values and found myself forced to defend it from all sides from time to time. Yet, while I wholeheartedly agreed with the premise and the arguments, the bit about the "imposing values" made me a little uneasy, and I wondered if you might be able to clarify a point.
In your speech, through the story of Sir Charles Napier, you discuss the necessity of sticking by absolute values, even in the face of varying cultural mores and religious customs. You argue that absolutes such as justice, evil, truth, and beauty never waiver. While this is true, that the morals never move, different cultures simply view their customs as fitting in perfect alignment with these absolutes. Later, you said that without absolute morals, morals are defined by "the one with the gun." However, is not the only reason "justice" preserved in the case of Napier's rule, because Napier had physical control? If the Hindus in India had wrestled control back from the British and reinstituted suttee, they would have rejoiced at reestablishing justice. In this case, the British knew the suicidal suttee was wrong, yet the Hindus knew it was right, as a mainstay of their religion. In essence, the only thing that made the British more right in the end was their hegemony.
It may sound like I’m making a case for relativism, yet I’m not. I have no doubt that the absolutes exist in our world, “set in stone” by God, and are not flexible. Yet, I’m just concerned with the interpretation from culture to culture. How do I know that my right is the closest right to the right? Do I simply have to trust that my interpretation is more correct? To answer the question “Who is to say?” you proclaim “We are to say.” But what if every culture says that, along with its own unique interpretation? We can’t all be right and especially not in every single category all the time. So is it truly dominance that defines how “right” is presented, regardless where “right” actually lies?
Thank in advance for your time and thoughts. Again, excellent and, obviously, thought-provoking speech.
". . .the very idea that we should treat other cultures justly and without prejudice is derived from no other culture but the one into which we have all been born or transported: the English-speaking West. Several thousand years of Jewish and Christian teaching that all men are the children of God, a thousand years of English Common Law, and two centuries of American Enlightenment doctrine that all men are created equal and are endowed with fundamental rights—"
If this is so, than I find it odd that only my Chinese student, alone in a room full of English-speaking in-heritors of Western thought, had an ethical answer to a scenario I posed regarding the sharing of an egg. All but he asserted that to share was foolish if it caused the potential loss of the prize. He insisted that the prize was only worth winning from a basis if equal opportunity. The others all but shouted him down, condemned him as a fool. He stoically cited his Confucious, and the bell rang. . .
To Anonymous 1:
It is good that the idea of “imposing values” makes you uneasy. It should. Because that means you feel, rightly, that it would be wrong to impose those values unjustly. In other words, your resistance to simply asserting the superiority of your values or cultural traditions is rooted in your loyalty to the universal absolute.
How do we know that our right is closest to the absolute right? Well, not being God, we don’t, at least not with absolute certainty. As I said in my talk, it isn’t easy to pick our way through conflicting legitimate concerns. But it is not our job to know with absolute certainty. We are not God. It is our job to do our best. In many respects the British in India had no good grounds for feeling superior to the Indians they ruled. In the matter of sati, however, their grounds were good.
No you must not “simply trust that your interpretation is more correct”—at least not before you do the very hard work of examining that interpretation in the light of the absolutes as best you can. Is this particular cultural difference a matter of mere personal distaste or strangeness, or does it threaten a fundamental principle because of which I am obligated to take a stand against it on universal moral grounds? The point of my talk was to emphasize that if we don’t recognize the obligation to do such examination, then what prevails is simply power: “I don’t like what you do, so change.”
You say “In essence, the only thing that made the British more right in the end was their hegemony.” This is false. Their hegemony allowed them to succeed in this matter—Napier was able to abolish sati because he had the guns. But guns are not what made him right. He was in the right, whether he had succeeded or not. Women should not be killed because their husbands have died, no matter what the cultural/religious tradition says.
You are correct, however, that in many matters the right is not so clear. But one thing is clear. Might does not make right. We hope and strive that greater might should rest in the hands of those who are also concerned with right. But when we are tempted to think that power defines right, as Thrasymachus does in Plato’s Republic, we have abandoned the absolutes entirely. And then all discussion of right is pointless. We are left with nothing but whatever the stronger wills.
This is why I wanted to remind everyone not to dismiss the absolutes. Without them, we languish at the mercy (or, more usually, the mercilessness) of the powerful.
To Anonymous 2:
Thank you for your comment. It gives me the opportunity to emphasize how important it is to make careful distinctions.
My point was not that only the West is ethical. The absolutes being universal, every great religious and philosophical tradition has access to them. My point was about the doctrine of political equality under the law. The fact that everyone in the room asserted that to share was foolish only goes to show how Westerners have lost their loyalty to the absolutes and succumbed to relativism, which boils down in the end to selfishness. If the people in that room had not been brought up believing the absolutes to be nonsense, they would have been in touch with their own ethical roots as the Chinese student was, and would have seen that he was right.
Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and other great religious traditions also teach the reality of universal absolutes. My quarrel is not with them. The particular doctrine that I had in mind that comes from the West is equality under the law, because of which we care about not oppressing those of different cultural traditions. Those Chinese who live by the absolutes taught in Confucianism and Taoism and Buddhism are to be respected and admired, of course, and we have much to learn from them. Those Chinese who support the oppression and destruction of Tibet could use a dose of the Western ideal of equal justice under the law, and we betray both Eastern and Western versions of the universal absolutes when we neglect to say so.
This does not mean I think the West is better in all things. In fact, one could argue that the poisonous doctrine of relativism is also a Western idea.
No one is spared by his or her culture from the necessity of making judgments based on the absolutes. And no culture is above reproach in light of them. Neither is there safety in a moral relativism that pretends to make all judgment pointless. If judgment is pointless or only a matter of preference and power, then we lose all grounds for morally opposing evil.
You know the one Chinese student was in the right. You know it because there is such a thing as right.
Ah yes… I remember one fine spring morning three years ago a young Evander walked into Dr. Rap’s class after a heated argument with the young O.T. about whether or not the sunrise that morning was indeed beautiful (it was, of course; though C.S. Lewis would’ve corrected me: it was sublime).
But Master O.T. refused to admit it, and since he was passenger in my car at the time, I pulled over by the beach and asked him to take a second look, a third, and, if necessary, a fourth—at which point his sister, sitting in the backseat, anxiously hoping to get to school on time and seeing no end to the battle between relativism and absolutism unfolding in front of her, decided she’d be better off to finish the final leg of the trip on foot.
The argument filled my car and spilled over into the senior rec-room leaving many students soaked and arriving to Dr. Rap’s Literature class or Mr. Milling’s Physics class still dripping wet and late in the sort of way that forces any teacher to pause class, acknowledge the interruption, and ask: “what happened to you?!” For me, this discussion has continued all through college, and—I’m told—was actually started hundreds of years before I was born.
And though I’m one of those ridiculous dreamer-folk, those odd fish that live in fantasy worlds of chivalry, love, poems, and adventure (real or imagined)—the sort of folk who occupy, as it were, a strange corner of society and live like tortoises and other such creatures who are both animal and house simultaneously, whose entire world depends on ideas of absolutism, honor, justice, and greatness, I’ve yet to reconcile fully this problem of absolutism and relativism and commit my sword to one side or the other.
The best, livable solution I’ve come to so far is to hold myself to the standards I’ve discerned are ideal, and not expect anyone else to do the same (this is what any knight does). Others will have their ideals, or lack thereof, but so long as their actions don’t impose upon the freedom and happiness of others, they ought to be free to be wrong.
Evander's "livable solution" seems reasonable, and it is also rather common. The problem with it is that "so long as their actions don't impose upon the freedom and happiness of others" is itself a fantasy. We all have freedom to be wrong, but not freedom from the consequences of being wrong. And it is I think impossible honestly to imagine a world in which the wrong actions of one do not impose upon the happiness of others to some degree. Donne said "Every man's death diminishes me," and it is also true that every man's wrong actions affect my happiness, whether a little or a lot, whether visibly or not, because we are all part of a single fabric. This interconnection is an article of faith among the ecologically minded, but somehow it is shunted aside when it comes to the human ecology called society.
In the intellect Evander may find himself teetering on the imaginary border between absolutism and relativism for a good long time. But living is choosing, and I suspect that in his actual choices, Evander has long since plunked for living as if the absolutes are real, and a jolly good thing that is for the rest of us too, Evander being the influential presence he is in the lives of those who know him.
Sunrise, sunset. Sunrise, sunset.
There is no easy answer; and that's the easy answer.
You can live in the recognition that absolute truth exists without ever knowing absolute truth absolutely. Yet you can confirm its existence in relationships: That vase is beautiful in a world where not all vases are. If it were the only vase you ever saw, would it still be beautiful? As beautiful? No. And, yes.
Mary asked us to define "art" in her "Art and the Inner Life" course. Several factions defended their respective answers having to do mainly with intention, some with beauty and other qualifiers. Her answer: "Art is anything made by man." That surprised just about everyone, and not just because she said 'man'. The beauty crowd clashed with the intentionality crowd, and the other factions had their say as well.
I left the class with three conclusions. 1) Mary is right, I think. 2) If Mary is right, 'art' is so expansive a category as to render the term meaningless or, at least, too meaningful. 3) I'm taking a course whose very subject I can't define.
Still, I would have thought I knew what art was before Mary asked. It, like too many things in life, can only be seen with your peripheral vision.
Mary opened the next class meeting with another simple question: "What is good art?" With that question we were 300 factions of one.
Mary's answer -- "You just know it. But you can unlearn it or be talked out of it." -- produced loud protests.
Was Mary Socrates to our Meno? Do we already know what art and beauty are? Can we know they exist without being able to define them?
Art, vases, and sunrises. Good art and beautiful vases and sunrises. I'm pretty sure I can tell you exactly what a sunrise is. A beautiful sunrise? That might take some doing, or you might just know it.
Paradox and Discernment. That's the Dr. Rapp course I'm waiting to take.
I would firstly like to extend congratulations. That's a marvelous little essay, Dr. Rapp, and it must have been a marvelous speech.
Oftentimes I find myself living in a world where the law, the advice of well-meaning relatives, and the lessons of well-respected and very old stories simply don't chime with my sense of what's right. I find myself torn between the idea of a democratic good and the feelings that come from my own stomach. From here things only get muddier as I start to doubt my gut and analyze where my sense of right might have come from. Did it come from my bat-shit crazy immediate family? My experiences since I left home? An unlikely combination of chromosomes? A young man's desire to jam a wrench into whatever gears he can find?
The practical application of absolutism is not easy. We are ALL trying to do the best we can. Sometimes we slip and don't know any better. Sometimes we slip, know better, and regret it. And sometimes we do what we feel is right and get told that we've slipped.
If christianity has anything to teach us, it is that we cannot judge one another. We are all imperfect and striving towards the same ideals without any ability to achieve them.
So shouldn't we just allow everybody to apply his own morals as he sees fit, and leave the punishment to God?
Hells, no! This form of absolutism is indistinguishable from relativism in its application. The Calvinists and the fundamentalist muslims tried to create a world where people behaved out of fear of god, and both ended up applying vicious punishments to crimes that we would consider to be minor. A world where you're hanged for stealing a toothbrush is a world few of us would ever want to inhabit.
Which leads me to another Christian idea- saints. The existence of saints- people who never steal toothbrushes, merge in front of other drivers, or lie to their parents- means that the rest of us are obviously not up to snuff. Nor should we really be expected to be.
The most beautiful thing about the world, to me, is that it is hopelessly messy. We fuck up, and what could ever be more perfect, more ABSOLUTE? All of us know somewhere way back in there that there is a perfect way to live, a perfect thing to say to a heartbroken friend, a perfect combination of colors or musical notes. But none of us can actually visualize it. Artists have been struggling with this problem since there have been artists. Vergil was so disgusted with the Aeneid that he ordered it burned from his deathbed. Funny sentiment from a poet whose hero time and again found himself strung between his divine need to found Rome and his own human imperfection.
In my humble, two-time-college-dropout, societal fuckup and all-around ne'erdowell opinion, The Aeneid is the most perfect piece of art out there. But it is so BECAUSE it is so bewildered at the irony of being human. The fact that the book's own author was disgusted by it makes it all the more beautiful.
And we now know that even the absolute, timeless, "perfect" universe fucks up, a fact that Albert Einstein refused to accept. "There is no spooky action at a distance!" he cried. "God does not play dice with his universe!" he exclaimed. And yet. And yet. People forget to set their alarms. Cells mutate. And atoms decide to become particles instead of waves for no damned good reason.
The philosopher might say "Nothing is perfect, but perfection exists." The bumper sticker would say "Shit happens."
My personal version is as follows-
Never stop fighting. Never be satisfied.
Craig's comment is eloquent (despite the unnecessary profanity). The only point I'll make in response to "Never stop fighting. Never be satisfied" is that fighting and dissatisfaction are not themselves absolutes. The absolutes are eternal ends; fighting and dissatisfaction are sometimes necessary temporal means. To make ends of the latter is to renounce the true ends that alone give meaning to all our means.
I agree with Evander that there ought to be a balance between the absolute and the relative. I would be very interested in hearing your response to my comments.
I think your speech was very excellent. However, I don't think you can include God in the discussion because it makes the discussion less honest. Firstly, not everyone is religious, and not all religious people (esp. in this generation) actually believe in the existence of a superhuman "God". For example, I'm faithful but not religious and I think faith and religion can in many cases different things. I think faith is a great value that can be used very positively, but in conjunction with religion can be dangerous (I'm sure you are aware of the many examples- forget 9/11, even the practice of sati is one of them)
Secondly, I think the bit you wrote about "We aren't God so therefore we don't know what the absolute truth is", is dangerous. This is dangerous because human beings will do many things in the name of religion based on what they BELIEVE. But there is no way to realize those beliefs. There is no way to prove that there is a superhuman God that somehow knows all the truths.
What we can do, is appreciate the nuances between relativism and absolutism. That is democratic. Democracy is pragmatically listening and contributing to what other people around you think. Democracy isn't going into the world and saying "You are wrong, and we know." Democracy is having doubts. Take your example of sati, which existed because of a religious belief. No one ever "doubted" that sati was wrong. If they had been introduced to more democratic values, they could have fixed the problem themselves.
I actually thought your speech did a good job because sometimes in our generation we overemphasize the relativism. But throwing God into the discussion eliminated the honesty of the dialogue.
Honestly, Being so sure that God knows what is right, or that God exists, is dangerous. I'm not against religion or faith as I come from a catholic family and attend church every week, but I think doubt is good. Even if the religious institution never existed, we still would have developed to where we are today. As social animals, we would have been able to recognize that killing a widow is wrong. We don't need God to make these judgements.
Obviously I don't advocate strictly for relativism, and I do agree it is somewhat of a "plague". But you do need the balance. Having no doubt endangers the ability to make informed decisions that would otherwise make you sound dumb. Doubtlessness defined the conviction of white southerners who genuinely believed that the black race was inferior. Doubtlessness defined the ignorance that fueled the rage of gay-hate crimes. Introduce a little doubt.
See a new post for my response to this last comment.
Would it make sense to temper absolute values with the overarching theme of suffering? Indeed, we may agree that absolute principles include love, truth, etc; however, taking into consideration man's unique ability to err, realize, and later recalibrate/correct oneself, is it not too harsh to condemn an individual as a "liar" simply because he tells what he believes is a white lie? How does the framework of absolute principles take into account an enraged and emotional murder of a killer by the mourning kin?
Instead, if we were to ask “Did the man’s white lie cause undue suffering?” then we might be more forgiving. If we were to take into account the grieving kin’s passionate rage, perhaps we would conclude that he should not be punished so mercilessly.
Yes, I do find it troubling that in many cases, this may lead to a plausible defense of what should be indefensible actions, but the gravest of sins are clear cut. Did medieval Europe’s feudal system cause undue suffering? Yes. Did suttee cause undue suffering? Yes. Did the stoning of a woman simply because she was violated cause undue suffering? Yes.
However, this issue can be remedied by seeking minimal suffering. Yes, this does allow for some wiggle room, but this “tempering” of absolute values seems to be an iron fist in a delicate velvet glove, rather than just an iron fist.
I just got a paper back from my Early Music professor, who marked it well, but was unafraid to point out every instance where I effectively avoided making judgments about musical performances by using weak language. He even commented on one of my sentences "A little too relativist/wishy-washy." I was very happy to do well on my first paper in the class, but one hundred times happier to have a professor willing to point out my bad academic writing habits: "Agree or disagree—you're the expert." A small triumph in the face of relativism I suppose, but it made my day nonetheless.
Thank you for posting your speech: it's a great post in itself and a good reminder that there is no such thing as having read The Abolition of Man too many times.
My response to two comments by different Anon.’s is the same (so I’m posting in both places): Both Anons. are citing situations in which it is difficult to discern the best thing to do in light of absolutes (truth, justice) that they in practice acknowledge. As I said in my talk, it is the difficult business of life to apply the absolute values to particular situations which may be far from clear. This necessity is not logically the same as saying there must be a “balance” between absolutes and relativism. The absolutes are absolute; they are not open for discussion. (Justice is good.) What is open for discussion is how to apply them to real-life situations. Trying to discern in a specific situation what would be the just thing to do does not mean there are gray areas between absolutes and relativism (the belief that everything is relative and there are no absolutes). There is no gray area between justice and selfishness, for example. Selfishness is natural, our default position; it is not a value. The question is when and how and under what circumstances we are obligated to overcome our selfishness in the name of justice. And here the gray areas in life are many. But their grayness consists in our uncertainty about how and when to apply the absolutes or which absolutes to apply.
My use of extreme examples was not to illustrate that I know what beauty is and can tell you in every case. It was to illustrate that you recognize that there is such a thing as beauty. When I talked about sati, I was doing so only to signify some fundamental universal values—like the sacredness of human life—are not negotiable, though how to hold to them in particular cases is always a challenge.
If a student cheats on an essay because of parental pressure and fear of failure and lack of time due to previous illness, the ethics committee of the school must BOTH hold to standards of justice AND mercifully take mitigating circumstances into consideration. Members of the committee might disagree about whether the committee should punish with the full force of the law or let the student off with only a warning or something in between. But this does NOT mean that the committee is balancing absolutes with relativism. What they are doing is trying to balance justice and mercy in their application of both values to the case.
As for “Hmm, let’s stop fighting because it’s not getting us anywhere” as a foundation for human morality, Anon. is dreaming the pragmatist’s dream that values arise from practicality. In fact, some fights get the winner a lot, and too bad for the loser. Only if we acknowledge the basic absolute values—it is wrong to steal; love your neighbor as yourself—can we say that unjust fighting is wrong not only when both parties suffer from it but even when one party only stands to gain.
The second Anon. thinks that by asserting the reality of absolute values I am advocating being judgmental and harsh, and he (or she) wants me to be a little more forgiving. But of course my argument was not for harshness or arrogance in making judgments. It was only for acknowledging what he, inadvertently, is also acknowledging—that we can make no judgments at all without the foundation of absolute values upon which to rest them.
When he asks us to temper absolute values with the “overarching theme of suffering,” he too is asserting an absolute value without realizing it. He means that avoiding suffering should be considered an absolute value that trumps all others. In this he is no more a relativist than I am. He is simply trying to apply to particular situations the absolute values of justice and mercy in the light of a third absolute value, loving one’s neighbor as oneself. (Why else SHOULD we try to reduce suffering?) In any case, again, this is not a relativizing of the absolutes themselves but an argument about how they ought to be applied, which is precisely the kind of human discourse that acknowledgement of the absolutes makes reasonable.
Anon. would understand my position exactly if he were to be asked “who’s to say that causing suffering to others is wrong?” Suddenly he would be forced to say, “Well, that ought to be self-evident. If you question that, then I can’t talk to you about it at all.” In fact, in asking us to be “more forgiving,” he is simply confessing his own belief that mercy is an absolute value
That is exactly my position about all the absolutes. I am not saying I or anyone always knows how and when to apply which absolute values to any given specific human situation, or that in any such situation the right is ever totally clear. I am only saying that without agreement about the fundamental values, there can be no meaningful moral discussion at all.
To Natasha,
I'm glad there's a prof out there willing to challenge you not to be "relativist wishy-washy." My point is that relativism, at its worst, is a lot worse than wishy-washy! Thanks for your good words.
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