Woke in Plain English: "Relativism"

Relativism. The word “relativism” means everything—like culture, morality, art, and law—is subjective. That is, there’s no outside or external view of something. For example, the relativist believes there is no way for a Westerner to make a moral judgment about women’s rights in Pakistan. That’s because any judgment the Westerner would make is from their particular cultural perspective. In other words, there’s no way to step outside of a system and make an independent, objective judgment. Another way to think about this is that there’s no God’s-Eye view of anything. Things are just true for some people and not true for other people. And because everything is viewed from a particular position, there is no objective truth.

This is convenient if you’re trying to defend behavior that is morally reprehensible, like female genital mutilation. If you’re a relativist, you merely state that anyone who is criticizing such behavior is only doing so from their own particular cultural point of view. It’s just your opinion. The woke relativist can also add that any criticism of female genital mutilation is racist if the people doing the mutilating have dark skin.

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Relativism in a nutshell

There are different types of relativism. The most common are:

• cognitive (thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and even consciousness),

• moral (what one should do),

• epistemological (how one comes to knowledge),

• and cultural (macroscale, at the level of society) 

The basic idea behind each is that there’s no external, God’s-Eye view of things. Everyone is “situated,” that is, we all come to our beliefs and views from a particular perspective. And because we cannot escape our perspectives, our frames of reference are relative to other frames of reference and not universally true. Another way of thinking about this is that certain things are “true for” some people and not true for other people. And while there may be a truth “out there,” we’re similar to blind people feeling different parts of an elephant.

For example, a relativist would assert foot binding, a practice long outlawed in China where young girls had their feet tightly wrapped to make them smaller and thus more attractive, was “true for” or morally acceptable for the Chinese. As such, because we in the west were not born into that system, we ought not to criticize the practice because we’d be doing so from our western perspective. There’s no truth of the matter about whether young girls should have their feet bound to inhibit their growth.

Here are the basic arguments against relativism:

1) If a relativist says, “X is true,” that’s not a relativist statement, it’s a declaration of objective fact. In other words, it falls prey to contradiction.

2) Most veins of epistemological relativism fall into the idiotic category. There are certain ways to come to knowledge that are vastly superior to other ways. Anything that uses the scientific method falls into the vastly superior category. There are ways, for example, to figure out how to design computer chips, and sacrificing a goat on the hood of a car is not one of them.  

3) I’ve long held serious doubts that anyone is an actual relativist.

• Cultural relativism: When one’s child is severely ill, are they more likely to take them to the hospital or to call the witch doctor? If they know a child comes from a culture where the witch doctor would be called, are they likely to honor that “cultural knowledge”? 

• Moral relativism: When the KKK are burning a cross on one’s neighbor’s lawn, should one say, “How sweet. That’s just true for them,” and then continue, unbothered, with their evening?

• Epistemological relativism: Do people actually believe that if a large number of people think casting spells directly and immediately influences the world and can cause crops to grow more quickly or to wilt, that makes it true? If they do, why doesn’t big agriculture hire spell casters to increase crop yields?

Relativism, then, is a type of verbal behavior. It’s something one professes for reasons other than that they are actual relativists.

Here’s how relativism is being used in our current culture war.

People who make moral, epistemological, or cultural judgments are accused by the woke of all manner of heinousness: cultural chauvinism, white supremacy, perpetrating western imperialism.

These arguments are founded on the belief that western civilization is the product of white supremacy and all western principles aim to colonize black and brown bodies. This includes things we take for granted like being on time, hard work, and rational thought. Note that “western civilization” is not given the benefit of relativism by the relativists. Only “other” cultures should not be judged, which is an epistemological nightmare (and a fun topic for psychoanalysis).

Relativism is a kind of one-stop shop for the intellectually lazy. Why do the work and make arguments (which is itself considered a master’s tool and thus part of the problem) when you can just have a blanketed position to fall back upon? This has the added benefit of sounding academic so you can come off as smart, too.

Nearly two years ago, I went on a mini university tour with Dr. Corey Miller, the head of Ratio Christi. He’s a devout Christian, I’m an atheist, and together we spoke about why intellectual diversity in universities is crucial. Early on, it came to our attention that we were being criticized because neither of us were relativists. We were told that because we think there are objective truths, we were both “guilty” and that our talks should be boycotted. The irony, of course, is that the claim that “they believe in objective truth” is itself an objective truth. Maybe they should have boycotted themselves.

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If you want to dig deeper, I recommend these books:

Relativism, Cognitive and Moral, edited, 1982

Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism, Paul Boghossian, 2006