dmb answered in a nutshell:
Relativism is the view that truth is relative to the culture or the
individual, that there is no way to say that one truth is better than another.
Here's the kind of thing I have in mind. It's from chapter 22 of Lila...
"The gulf existed between between Victorian evolutionists and twentieth century
relativists. The Victorians such as Morgan, Tyler, and Spencer presumed all
primitive societies were early forms of "Society" itself and were trying to
"grow" into a complete "civilization" like that of Victorian England.
Cultural relativists held that it is unscientific to interpret values in
culture B by the values of culture A... Cultures are unique historical patterns
which contain their own values and cannot be judged in terms of the values of
other cultures. The cultural relativists, backed by Boas's doctrines of
scientific empiricism, virtually wiped out the credibility of the older
Victorian evolutionists... The new cultural relativism became popular because
it was a ferocious instrument for the dominance of intellect over society.
"When people asked, "If no culture, including a Victorian culture, can say what
is right and what is wrong, then how can we ever *know* what is right and what
is wrong? the answer was, "That's easy. Intellectuals will tell you.
Intellectuals, unlike people of studiable cultures, know what they're talking
and writing about, because what *they* say isn't culturally relative. What they
say is absolute. This is because intellectuals follow science, which is
objective. An objective observer does not have relative opinions because he is
nowhere within the world he observes."
"Now, it should be stated at this point that the Metaphysics of Quality
supports this dominance of intelligence over society. It says intellect is a
higher level of evolution than society; therefore, it is a more moral level
than society. It is better for an idea to destroy a society than it for a
society to destroy an idea. But having said this, the Metaphysics of Quality
goes on to say that science, the intellectual pattern that has been appointed
to take over society, has a defect in it. The defect is that subject-object
science has no provision for morals. Subject-object science is only concerned
with facts. Morals have no objective reality. You can look through a microscope
or telescope or oscilloscope for the rest of your life and you will never find
a single moral. There aren't any there. They are all in your head. They exist
only in your imagination.
>From the perspective of a subject-object science, the world is a completely
>purposeless, valueless place. There no point in anything. Nothing is right and
>nothing is wrong. Everything just functions, like machinery. There is nothing
>morally wrong with being lazy, nothing morally wrong with lying, with theft,
>with suicide, with murder, with genocide. There is nothing morally wrong
>because there are no morals, just functions.
Now that intellect was in command of society for the first time in history, was
this the intellectual pattern it was going to run society with?"
dmb says:
There are many paths by which one can arrive at relativism. Scientific
objectivity is just one of them. But we can see what it amounts to, and what it
amounts to is a disaster. Nothing is wrong and nothing is right, it's all just
mechanistic functions. "Is this the intellectual pattern that was going to run
society?" I think Pirsig's question is asked with urgency and alarm. I think
it's quite clear that he's identifying relativism as a problem to be solved.
This is consistent with the fact the he takes the charge of relativism against
the Sophists to be offensive slander.
I really don't think you have any reason to wonder what the word means when I
use it. These passages support and elaborate upon the little nutshell
description. That's how Pirsig uses the word, how I use the word and that's how
it's commonly used. Sam Harris is pulling his hair out over that fact that we
can't say, scientifically, that female genital mutilation is wrong. The ghost
of Boas still haunts us. Call an exorcist.
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