The Book of Absolutes: A Critique of Relativism and a Defense of Universals by
William D. Gairdner (Montreal, QC & Kingston, ON:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008)>
R.V. YOUNG is a professor of Renaissance literature and literary criticism at North Carolina State University and editor of Modern Age
“There is one thing a professor can be
absolutely certain of,” writes Allan
Bloom in the “Introduction” to The Closing
of the American Mind: “almost every
student entering the university believes,
or says he believes, that truth is relative.”
In the more than twenty years since these
words were published, things have hardly
changed for the better. Most of today’s
university students could not even articulate
their relativism as a “belief”; it is
rather an aggregate of assumptions derived
by a process of unconscious mental osmosis
from the post-modern cultural ambience.
There is nothing surprising in the
pervasiveness of relativism in contemporary
culture: a people deprived of defi-
nite moral standards and a clear religious
vision of the human condition will heedlessly
adopt the viewpoint that favors the
immediate interests and desires of particular
individuals and groups. The belief that
truth is relative is seductively persuasive,
since my “truth” always will pre-empt
yours. Relativism provides fallen men and
women a virtuous-sounding pretext for
indulging their selfishness by being “true”
to “who they are,” by seeking “empowerment,”
and by generally exploiting the
self-aggrandizing clichés that are such
a feature of a society driven by the mass
media.
Conservatism has, therefore, no more
pressing task than the discrediting of the
relativistic presumption that has increasingly
dominated modern culture for at
least a century. This is, to be sure, a task
that will never be done. The Sophists of
Socrates’ day were as beguiled by relativism
as our contemporaries, doubtless for
essentially the same reason. It must be
refuted again and again from age to age
with revised arguments designed to confront
the new ploys adduced by each new
generation of intellectual schemers—variations
of more or less sophistication on the
Serpent’s original deception of Eve in the
Garden of Eden. In The Book of Absolutes,
William D. Gairdner provides a potent
weapon for the struggle against today’s
sophistical reductionism that threatens
intellectual clarity and moral certainty.
His work is a careful and comprehensive
restatement of the position propounded
in The Abolition of Man, which takes into
account cultural and intellectual developments
during the six decades since C. S.
Lewis first defined the “Tao” in his brief
classic. Gairdner adds a wealth of detailed
evidence to Lewis’s laconic exposition and
offers an updated and expanded account
of the fundamental absolutes of human
nature and the realities of our creaturely
existence.
The Book of Absolutes begins by defining
its foe and placing it in context. The first
three chapters are “A Brief History of Relativism,”
“The Main Types of Relativism,”
and “Objections to Relativism.” Gairdner
is aware that relativism is ancient, and he
cites Protagoras’s famous remark from the
Theaetetus that “man is the measure of all
things” (although he could as well have
mentioned Callicles from the Gorgias or
Thrasymachus from the Republic); but he is
right to move quickly to the rise of relativism,
as we know it now, in the early modern
period. Like Richard Weaver in Ideas
Have Consequences, Gairdner calls attention
to the nominalism of William of Occam as
the first crucial step in the gradual decay
of the intellectual and moral vision of the
Western world. Descartes’ radical skepticism
and Hobbes’s reductive materialism
mark further stages on the way. This
very compact summary of how relativism
has developed is followed by a taxonomy
of the various kinds of relativism that have
emerged in the modern world—relativism
of “things,” of “the mind and senses,” “cognitive
relativism,” “ethical and/or moral
relativism,” and “cultural relativism.” And
this is followed by another summary chapter
listing an even dozen “objections,”
beginning with “relativism is self-refuting”
and concluding with “cultural relativism is
itself a form of morality.”
Having thus provided an overview of
the problem, Gairdner devotes the remainder
of the book to a comprehensive survey
of relativism in all its many guises, drawing
attention to its internal contradictions
and manifest absurdities, which would
drive off any adherents not bound by massive
ideological investment. For indeed
relativism is the master ideology of our
time, understanding the term to denominate
a set of propositions, perspectives,
and attitudes that function not to organize
reality or make it comprehensible, but to
reshape it according to the aspirations and
desires of the ideologue. As one example,
Gairdner points out in his fourth chapter,
“The Universals of Human Life and Culture,”
that for the better part of a century,
it was anthropological dogma that there
is no “single universally valid truth concerning
either human culture or human society.” This
assertion is simple nonsense: “One of the
purposes of this chapter,” he continues, “is
to ask: Why, by the end of the twentieth
century, did a young academic discipline
devoted to ‘the study of Man’ have nothing
very much it wanted to say about ‘Man’?”
The answer turns out to be the alarm of
Franz Boas, a principal architect of the new
science of anthropology, over the growth
of racialism in America and Europe early
in the twentieThcentury. Anthropological
relativism was promoted as a refutation of
the noxious notion that any racial, ethnic,
or cultural group is inherently superior to
another. In one of history’s droller ironies,
Margaret Sanger, “the ‘Godmother’ of
Planned Parenthood and one of the most
strident racialists and eugenicists of Boas’s
day, remains in our time a heroine to the
leftwing relativists who are the intellectual
heirs of Franz Boas.”
The unique value of The Book of Absolutes
emerges in the author’s painstaking
account of figures such as Boas. C. S. Lewis’s
diatribe against relativism in The Abolition
of Man is matchless for its crisp clarity
and finesse. Gairdner, however, fills in
the gaps. Lewis rarely takes up a particular
individual—the “elementary text-book”
that provides the occasion for the Abolition
is identified as “The Green Book” by “Gaius”
and “Titius”—and moves randomly among
instances of relativism in various fields.
Gairdner carefully rebuts numerous errors
by particular writers across a logically
ordered spectrum of human study and
endeavor. After demonstrating how serious
anthropological study has moved away
from the relativism of Boas and his school,
The Book of Absolutes proceeds to lay out
the scientific and scholarly evidence for the
existence of universal principles and constants
in the realms of physics, chemistry,
and biology—including innate differences
between the sexes—and in morality, law,
and language. An especially telling passage
explains how Einstein’s theory of relativity,
which Einstein himself wished to call
the theory of “invariant postulates,” was
illogically thought to imply relativism in
the moral, social, and political phases of
human life.
Gairdner is careful to trace the development
and motivations of relativistic
thinking and to spell out its implications,
devoting particular attention to the most
controversial areas of recent decades:
human biological nature, culture, and language.
He manifests an awareness of the
dangers accompanying any effort simply
to reject relativism in a reactionary fashion
and applies solid common sense to
his consideration of the “nature/nurture”
conflict that is prominent today in arguments
about human behavior. “It turns out
that both these views,” he writes, “when
taken as the whole truth, have led to the
darkest atrocities.” The idea that nature is
perpetually fixed has provided a pretext for
the racialism that led to eugenics, Nazism,
and other assorted horrors of the twentieth
century. But Hitler himself was not devoid
of the idea of “human plasticity” such that
the state could manufacture a populace of
any kind it wished, and a confidence in
social construction is essential to revolutionary
ideologies and “the conflagrations
and massacres engineered by the ‘nurturing’
totalitarian systems of the twentieth
century.”
Gairdner is adroit at making use of
the valid insights and discoveries of various
fields of study as well as individual
researchers without yielding to their dubious
theorizing about the significance of
their own work. Darwin’s account of
natural selection, for example, is a problematic
basis for the notion that human
problems can all be ameliorated by adjustments
to social institutions and practices.
The evolutionary biologists and sociologists
whose polemic over the existence of
innate or “hardwired” human propensities
and capacities continues to roil the
academic waters are all Darwinian materialists,
but both sides—the biologists no
less than the social scientists—write as if
human beings were capable of free, ratio
nal choice and individual self-determination.
It is easy for Gairdner to demonstrate
that their ideological disdain for any kind
of spiritual reality or religious truth is at
odds with their commitment to what they
conceive as social justice; hence, both sides
can be marshaled for the sake of Gairdner’s
own traditional view of human nature.
Similarly, he makes good use of Stephen
Pinker in the explication of evolutionary
biology and of Noam Chomsky’s concept
of the inherent human capacity for language.
It doesn’t matter that neither Pinker
nor Chomsky (nor evolutionary biologist
Edward O. Wilson) qualifies as a conservative
or a traditionalist.
I introduced The Book of Absolutes with
a comparison to C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition
of Man, and the comparison obtains in the
way both books conclude. Lewis includes
an appendix, “Illustrations of the Tao,”
which he then calls “illustrations of the
Natural Law.” Gairdner’s volume likewise
ends with an appendix, “Some Universals
and Constants of Nature and Human
Nature.” The difference between the titles
suggests what Gairdner adds to Lewis’s
argument. The more recent book treats
not only the natural morality pervasive
in humanity—St. Paul’s “law written in
their hearts”—but also provides a broader
account of the constants undergirding the
structure of natural universe that harmonize
with rational human nature. The
Abolition of Man will remain an indispensable
prophetic work of the conservative
vision of reality. The contribution of The
Book of Absolutes is to bring Lewis’s arguments
up-to-date and to demonstrate that
even natural science, which relativists persist
in treating as an ally in their campaign
against moral and intellectual certainty,
provides yet further evidence for traditional
wisdom.
