Is Cultural Relativism Even Workable?

Roger Kimball recenly published some very interesting arguments in The New Criterion. I found the discussion fascinating, and want to share a few excerpts with others who might enjoy it as well:

Here are a few paragraphs, but the whole thing is worth a read:

It is often said that relativism is the conviction that, when it comes to morals, there are no such things as absolute values and, when it comes to knowledge, there is no such thing as absolute truth. It is worth meditating on the use of the word “absolute” here. If there were a law against abusing innocent words, we would be justified in contacting OSHA about this unfair exploitation of “absolute.

What a relativist really believes (or believes he believes) is that 1) there is no such thing as value and 2) there is no such thing as truth. The word “absolute” is merely an emollient, a verbal sedative intended to forestall unhappiness. What after all is the difference between saying “There is no such thing as absolute truth” and saying “There is no such thing as truth”? Take your time. Relativism is a Cole Porter view of the world: “The world has gone mad today/ And good’s bad today,/ And black’s white today… . Anything Goes.”

The first upsurge of relativism can seem like fun. It’s a Cole Porterish, jazz-age tipsiness: a moral and epistemological holiday from the stuffy concerns of … well, of everything that has nailed things down and inhibited one. The hangover is not long in coming, however. At bottom, relativism is a religious problem. “God is dead,” Nietzsche proclaimed in the 1880s. What he observed was an emotional, not a historical fact. The unspoken allegiance to something transcending the vicissitudes of human desire had been (among the elites, anyway) shattered. “If there is no God,” Dostoyevsky said, “everything is permissible.” Meaning what? Paul Johnson’s long book is in part an illustration of and a commentary on those pronouncements of Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky. “Among the advanced races,” Johnson notes, “the decline and ultimately the collapse of the religious impulse would leave a huge vacuum. The history of modern times is in great part the history of how that vacuum has been filled.”

...Part of the strength of the West has been its intellectual and moral capaciousness. Relativism pushes that capaciousness to absurdity. This, indeed, is a common temptation—one might even say a logical concomitant—of liberalism: to degenerate into its opposite by absolutizing its defining virtues. William Gairdner may be optimistic in thinking that the era of relativism is nearing an end—that “we are tired of that now.” But he is surely correct—it is a point made by several of the essays below—that “life without some foundation in reason and morality is in the end unbearable” and that “the recurring hunger for universals seems to be universal.” That is less a consolation than a call to action, but recognizing so was part of the point of our deliberations.

http://www.newcriterion.com/articleprint.cfm/Introduction--The-dictatorship-of-relativism-3981