It's All Relative, Said the Rabbit

The Madding Crowd

In his book, A Hobbit Journey, author Matthew Dickerson reflects upon why aspects of the writings of J R R Tolkien jar so gratingly upon the ear of the modern Westerner.  The world view of the Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion reflects a cosmos with moral absolutes and true moral guilt.  It portrays evil as a personal hatred and malice towards others.  Increasingly in the West, this simply "does not compute". 

Such notions of true moral good and evil are being washed out of the modern mind.  Or the attempt is being made to wash them out.  Firstly, take materialism--the dominant worldview in the West, along with its kissing cousins of atheism, secularism, and progressivism.  In all these variants, there is no such thing as absolute, objective good or evil, right or wrong.  So-called evils are merely the result of particular or societal programming.  Morality and immorality is akin to--in fact, can be identified with--programming the machine.  We are what we are because of the alignment of electrons and quarks.  "We are what we are because we're not what we used to  be."

Anthropologist Ruth Benedict, writing in 1934, described this Brave New World: 

We do not any longer make the mistake of deriving the morality of our locality and decade directly from the inevitable constitution of human nature.  We do not elevate it to the dignity of first principle. We recognize that morality differs in every society, and is a convenient term for socially approved habits.  Mankind has always preferred to say "it is morally good" rather than "it is habitual", and the fact of this preference is matter enough for a critical science of ethics.  But historically the two phrases are synonymous.  [Cited by Matthew Dickerson, A Hobbit Journey (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2012),  p.129.]

It is not often that this increasingly popular Western ideology is stated so baldly.  But there it is.  Moreover, no card carrying member of the Western zeitgeist would deny it.  The presuppositions and assumptions driving the modern madness of "gender identity" is an apt illustration of the dominant belief that ethics are no more than social habits.

Writes Dickerson:

Whether or not one comes to the question of morality from a materialist worldview, in the modern world objective morality is out and subjective morality is in: good and evil, if they exist as categories at all, are only personal or at best societal. [Ibid.]

Of course such conceptions are brutally dissected and torn apart as soon as one asks, Is the notion of relative morality itself absolutely true or not?   If relative morality is construed as absolutely true, the construct collapses in a heap of contradiction.  Or, if the notion of  relative morality is itself construed as a mere conditioned habit, it is vacuously worthless, neither true or false.  It is without meaning.

The reason we reject today's crowd pleasing relativist is not because of his relativism, but because he is not a sufficiently serious relativist.  He is a mere dilettante, hardly a major player.  Like the village magician, he grandly performs his tricks of perception, all the while asserting that what he is doing is real.  But his relativism is not real.  It is not serious.  He is sufficiently self-befuddled not to see that he is a mere charlatan, hardly genuine.  Like all such, because his case is riddled with inconsistency and contradiction, he seeks self-affirmation by shouting more loudly.

If he were a serious and genuine relativist he would say, "All truths are merely habit and the product of conditioning, including this one."