Compromise and Death

This essay has been written for an upcoming issue of Distracted Masses Magazine
 and will be published soon.

Plato presented the dilemma of the absolutism/relativism dyad in his dialogue Crito, a conversation about justice and injustice between Socrates and the wealthy Crito.   Socrates is encouraged to escape his execution but, his belief in upholding the law would not allow him to do so.  Socrates holds the absolutist position that he will uphold his principles even if it means he will die.  This situation is being played out today in American politics where shutting down the government to make a deeply held political belief has become an acceptable tactic.  The dialogue develops many of the arguments between the philosophies of absolutism and relativism.  Philosophical absolutism is the view that there is an absolute reality which exists independently of human knowledge. Philosophical relativism, on the other hand, advocates the idea that reality exists only within human knowledge, and that reality is relative to each individual. 

Absolutism has historically been the dominant paradigm in most world cultures driving politics and driven by belief.  The shamans, touched by the supernatural preceded emperor, pharaoh, and king anointed by their gods to lead with divine guidance.  If god says it is so there can be no arguments about what should be done.  Unless, of course, you don't believe in that god or any god.  Then that decree becomes relative to the beliefs of others.  Crito, the relativist, believed the law was too harsh and was willing to help Socrates thwart the decree that he die.  Socrates, the absolutist, believed that the laws of Athens must be upheld at any cost.  

Throughout time history has admired men and women of principle and told their stories as morality tales. In his book, After Virtue, Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre known for his contribution to moral and political philosophy believes that moral views of cultures are typically about how it is best for human beings in general to live, and not just members of that culture. Relativism rejects universal truths where truth is transitory believing that moral values should be viewed in context of the environment of the individual and the cultural norms of their society.  Promoting one moral truth as superior to all others causes cultural and individual conflicts leading to the violence of suicide bombers and abortion providers murders by zealots for their convictions as well as, wars between cultures.

The willingness to die for a just cause has long been viewed a virtuous trait but survivors of wars for a just cause often reassess those beliefs.  In an article for the Atlantic Magazine, Allen Guelz viewed the civll war through the lens of absolution/relativism and concluded that the violence of the civil war caused the popularity of religious absolutism in the United States to decline.  Post-war a large number of men reflected on their part of a struggle rooted in absolutism and began to understand that giving ideas like abolition and freedom the status of truth destroyed a generation.  The same dynamic is at play in the middle east and other parts of the world where opposing ideologies, Sunni and Shite or Kurd vs Turk, declare the  truth for everybody, destroying the lives of millions of people with war and intolerance.

“The truth” is under assault by forces that began centuries ago and by current trends in the research of inner and outer space. Although absolutism has been the glue of many societies, the growth of relativism has been inevitable since scientists such as Galileo and Copernicus ventured beyond “the truth” and began investigating both inner and outer space.  Perhaps the Age of Absolutism and the excesses of it’s monarchs had the same effect on people of that time as the Civil War did in the United States. The Enlightenment and science driven Age of Reason followed the monarchs absolute rule.  Western religion went through a period of crisis but, the protestant revolution loosened the grip of the church on curious minds that questioned the way things were.  Relativism seems to thrive on curiosity and change.  The technology we use today would have been magic to most of the earth’s past inhabitants and a testament to scientific method and reason.  

Reality is being redefined by studies that reflect a relativist point of view.  This has brought about a deconstruction of universality and a closer focus on the individual’s role in creating their own reality.  At the most basic level, the world is constructed by a person’s brain. Making sense of the world and its happenings is nothing more than our individual brains’ interpretation of the signals it receives as we interact with our environments.  Because a being receives so many signals the brain actually predicts and creates much of what is sensed. Quantum mechanics suggests that we perceive at most a tiny sliver of reality and Swiss linguist, Ferdinand Saussure believed that language constitutes our world where meaning is always attributed to the object by the mind and constructed by and expressed through language. These findings seem to refute an absolutist view of the world where absolute reality exists independently of human knowledge..

Richard Wright, in his book The Evolution of God, proposes that history demonstrates that once a culture has been defeated by a rival they begin compromising until their religions merge and they believe in the same God.  This indicates that the absolute truth, which brought about war between different viewpoints, is compromised once there is a winner and a loser.  This also points out that the dyad is not a polar system but, rather a spectrum upon which individuals and cultures fall in different places. Perhaps we are shifting our culture to a point where relativism plays a more important role in providing a viewpoint that can keep us from killing each other before we find a compromise.