relativism for me, but not for thee

“He was a creature of his time.”

Thus we excuse past slave-owners, war criminals, and wife beaters – so long as they are notable for having contributed significantly to art, politics, civilization, or religion. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, but we are encouraged by polite history to gloss over this, or to emphasize instead his interest in gradual emancipation. Jefferson may even be presented as a hero precisely for holding less extreme supremacist views than his contemporaries. Reluctance to tarnish national or cultural heroes, resentment about having to revise naive preconceptions about heroes and history, lead to a falsification of history that does injustice to the very real evils that were accepted as natural, in past societies. Sacrificing reality to preserve narratives hallowed by cultural triumphalism and mainstream education, we excuse genuine material wrong on the basis of context. This is typical cultural relativism. Ironically, it is employed popularly by thinkers of a more traditional bent – not a demographic usually inclined to view relativism warmly – in order to defend idols of the past.

The extreme response to this, not only deconstructing but demonizing past heroes, is also an ironic move by an ideological faction not usually keen on ethical absolutism.

Both of these views of persons and history strike me as insufficient. Human beings are products of their time, but when one is wealthy, powerful, and well-educated, one has fewer excuses for not noticing glaring moral failures in oneself. On the other hand, perhaps, the “affluenza” epidemic was at work in the past as well. Perhaps power and wealth make one morally stupid. The problem may be, then, not so much that we excuse Jefferson, but that we don’t excuse everyone else, as well, while at the same time maintaining that certain objective evils remain objectively evil even as we blunder idiotically into them.

Wealth may lead to idiocy, and poverty to desperation, and middle-class respectability to blindness. Wherever and whenever we reside, we are situated in various intersecting structures of power, tempted here and coerced there, deafened by the rhetoric of politics and the marketplace. Religion is appropriated by secular power. Religion appropriates secular power. Standing against the status quo can get one hurt – or, worse than hurt, publicly shamed and derided. Misrule is rewarded, violence wins. Take sides, find a niche, find your tribe, and they’ll protect you, even though they’re completely wrong.

Might a human being extract herself from this mess of dissenting voices and conflicting authorities, isolate herself on a desert island of the soul, and achieve moral clarity? Probably not: first, because heteronomous imperatives are probably lodged firmly in the psyche from early on. And, how to find reality without communication and communion?

I am very, very sure that I am right about this. But I’m just a blogger. Don’t listen to me. I might be wrong. Be gentle with me in my wrongness, and gentle with others as well – with pro-choice advocates, creatures of their time; with conservative bigots, products of their culture; with saints who hid their dark side; with drunken artists; with hypocritical politicians. Be austere in judgment, cautious in acceptance, and willing to take time to overcome time.

(But, I’m just a blogger. Don’t listen to me)