A complete relativist—like a die-hard traditionalist—would tie reverence to tradition so strongly as to make it impossible to break with tradition and not violate reverence. But sometimes it is right to break with a tradition, and in those cases, if reverence is a virtue, breaking with tradition cannot be irreverent.
A good relativist is hard to find. A well-tuned mind cannot overlook the differences in faith and morals between one religion and another. It is not reverent to say that all religions are the same deep down. Well-meaning people who say that they are the same may be setting the issue of belief aside (as would be fair enough for those whose religions do not involve belief). But if they are speaking of belief-based religions, then they are betraying either their own beliefs or the truth. If they don’t really care whether their beliefs are true, they betray their beliefs; if they think that every religious belief is true, they betray the truth. The same goes for morals: if you think that every religious system gives equal place to justice, you betray justice.
This judgment may strike you as harsh in view of the rising liberal fashion for passing over differences in religious belief. True, articulate belief plays a small role in most people’s actual experience of religion, but when beliefs are stated, they do matter. Anyone who is reverent toward the truth will want to avoid false belief so far as possible, and anyone who is reverent toward justice will want to stand against beliefs that call for violence and oppression. But the moral problem with relativism lies even deeper. A complete relativist would hold that there is a different truth and a different justice in each religion, and that these are true and just in the full sense. But this sort of relativism implies that human beings can create truth or justice as they please on their own, and that is irreverent.
A good relativist is hard to find. There is a logical reason for this as well as a moral one. If you could find any complete relativists, you would never disagree with them, because they would always grant that your opinions are as well grounded as theirs. But in real life we can almost always find something to disagree about. Plato tells us that Protagoras tries to be a relativist, but then Plato shows in a famous argument that even Protagoras cannot keep it up. The instant he defends his relativism against criticism, he implicitly abandons it—because at that point he has to disagree with those who reject his position. Of course, he could pretend he takes no position at all, but if he takes no position at all, he certainly does not take the relativist position. And if he’s not prepared to disagree with anyone, he can’t really take a position. Perhaps he is not a complete relativist but a skeptic who avoids all commitments of the mind. But we were looking for a relativist, and we now see that this is not what he is.
As a matter of history, we know that Protagoras was not a complete relativist; he defended strong claims on many subjects, and among these was his thesis that reverence could be learned and that learning it was important to the health of society. We do not know what he meant by the enigmatic quotation at the head of this chapter, “a human being is the measure of all things.” It comes to us without context, giving scholars a wide-open opportunity to invent interpretations. Whatever it means, however, it is about as irreverent a thing as you can say, and some ancient critics pointed this out, possibly with horrible consequences for Protagoras. Anyone who says that a human being is the measure of what is true or real cannot be reverently aware of human limitations.
The moral point was that complete relativism is arrogant. It tries to offer human beings an immunity from argument and refutation that doesn’t fit with human fallibility. Part of accepting your humanity is allowing for the possibility that you may be wrong and acknowledging your vulnerability to refutation. Many would-be relativists miss the moral point altogether, because they think that relativism is tolerant and kind. They think they are doing people a favor by granting them immunity from argument and refutation; they may even think that the moral advantages of relativism outweigh the logical problems Plato pointed out. They are making a mistake. Relativism has no moral advantages. In the world of ideas, relativism cultivates minds that are closed or lazy; in a world of ethical choices, relativism leaves human rights undefended by allowing no place for discussion or debate.
Relativists in the world of ideas seek a haven from which they need not defend their beliefs. The haven might be silence, or it might be a fast-moving game of words. For students, it is often silence. Most teachers have known a student like Rick, who has nothing to say to the rest of us—not because he is scared to talk and not because he thinks he is better than we are. He is a happy-go-lucky fellow with few cares in the world, not the least bit frightened, and not arrogant in the ordinary way. Early in the year he saw that the members of the class had their own personal views about the issues we discussed and that we all could give reasons for our views. When he realized that hardly any of us ever changed our minds even after hearing each other out, he gave up.
“What’s the point?” he asked, when I challenged him to speak. “You have your truth and I have mine. It’s not going to make any difference what I say, or what you say. Your truth is still true for you, and mine will go right on being true for me.” Rick starts out wrong with his “You have your truth and I have mine.” But after that, his reasoning is impeccable. If different people have different truths, then everyone is equally wise. No one has any reason to listen to anyone else, and by the same token no one has any reason to speak to anyone else. On Rick’s hypothesis, all communication will be empty between him and me because the same thing will never be true for both of us. Why should I care what is true for him, if I know in advance that it cannot be true for me? And why bother with argument? No matter how well he expresses the reasons he has for his beliefs (he thinks), they cannot become mine.
The best answer to a relativist is no answer at all, because relativists are not interested in answers that are true for other people. “Nothing you could say would be true for me,” thinks Rick, closing himself off from the conversation. The best I could do for him is to change the culture of the class so as to draw him into the conversation. Arguing against him is not likely to do this.
A familiar strategy is to lure him into defending his relativistic hypothesis and then show him (as Plato does in the case of Protagoras) that any defense of his position is an admission of defeat. Once he defends himself, he admits that we disagree, and when he does that he has conceded that there is a common truth for us to disagree about. But that is what he was trying to deny. So I would have proven that he is not really a complete relativist after all. This logical strategy is good philosophy but bad human relations. Rick will probably feel that he is the victim of a logical trick and become even more silent. Much better to engage him in a vigorous discussion of some subject he cares about—perhaps the current standing of football teams—and about which he obviously knows a great deal more than I do. Afterwards, I can show how absurd that conversation would have been if there were no common truth about which he could set me right.
Rick will say that he wasn’t a relativist about football—just about the subjects that come up in a philosophy class, like ethics. There is no common truth about them, he will insist, but at this point it begins to come clear that he is grasping for reasons to keep his mind out of class. As he develops the patience to see how one argument might be better than another, even on highly abstract subjects, he will take a larger part in the discussion. He has a lot to learn from doing this, and at the same time he will be a better person if he develops a patient and open mind. When he made himself exempt from argument, he made himself exempt from learning. And that is as bad for a young student as it is for an old tyrant or a middle-aged professor. Reverence at any age is open to learning.
Some highly trained intellectuals are as bad as Rick, but with less excuse. It is not that they are silent; far from it, they publish frequently and are often heard at learned conferences. But for them the whole business is a game. They don’t think it much matters what they believe, or what you believe for that matter.
Take Professor Charles. He may begin an argument, “I happen to like realism on this point,” and then draw rigorous inferences from this principle of which the best he can say is that he “happens to like it.” His endings are as arbitrary as his beginnings, and the best that I can say of him is that he has learned to play the game he calls philosophy with skill. But ask him whether he thinks realism is true and he will brush you aside gracefully. That question is not for him. Charles says he is content with any theory, so long as the game is well played around it. He won’t admit he is a relativist (not, at least, as readily as Rick will), but he is as slow as Rick to engage in a serious defense of his principles.
To do Charles justice, I must admit that he has a rationale for this, and it has something to do with reverence. Claims about truth are too grand for Charles. He is humble about himself and about the limits within which all philosophy must work. No one (except perhaps God) is in a position to declare whether realism is true or false or somewhere in between, and perhaps it is no more than a useful hypothesis for explaining certain results (say, in number theory) that Charles does believe to be true. But Charles’ humility carries him too far—really into a sort of arrogance. The immunity he gives himself from argument separates him from other scholars; he is trying to be a community of one. But reverence knows that human beings are vulnerable, and especially so when they are alone.
In fact, Charles is not a very good game-player. He plays a good game until he is seriously challenged, and then he runs off the field. For all I know, Charles is right about realism, but he still owes his colleagues what my students owe each other—full participation in the rituals of ideas. A good game-player does not sit out in the middle of the playing field, silent and inactive, while others try to play around him. No taking the ball off into a corner and playing catch with yourself while the others lose patience. No running off the field mid-game. A good game-player is reverent through and through.
Reverence for truth leads to humility in the face of the awesome task of getting something right. But humility is not despair, and it is not skepticism. In communities that seek learning, it is expressed in the rituals of conferences and peer-reviewed publications. Arguments must be given, and counterarguments must be heeded, or else positions must be modified or abandoned. Reverence is not easy.
Once you are persuaded that reverence may be found in many different cultures and across many different religions, you may come to believe that the reverence of one culture is just as good as that of any other. Each culture, you might think, should be exempt from criticism. When you visit a society that is new to you, you may believe that you must accept that its way of being reverent is as good for its people as yours is for you. But that too is a form of relativism, and it is wrong. A society has no better claim than an individual to being immune from criticism and argument, and the customs of all societies cry out, from time to time, to be changed.
Consider the case of child-marriage. Suppose a date has been set, the bridegroom selected, and Vaka’s parents tell her she should be pleased. Another year and she will be fourteen; at that point the price would go up, because most boys’ families would demand a higher dowry for an older bride. The family they have found for Vaka is not bad, considering the poverty of her family. But Vaka is not pleased. Her older brother is still going to the new school during the middle of the day when he is not needed for work, and she would like to continue attending school along with him. Instead of thanking her parents for arranging the marriage, as they expected, she cries all night.
Her parents blame the strangers—young men and women with a poor grasp of the village language who have brought new ideas about irrigation and drainage to the village. Some of those ideas seem to be helpful, but not all, and the new school has been a major threat to tradition—especially by allowing marriageable girls like Vaka to attend class. The elders of the village agree; these outsiders come from a place that has no respect for family and tradition. A girl must be taken into her husband’s home by age thirteen and taught the ways of her new family. She must serve the family mother in all things; otherwise, how will the family carry on from one generation to the next? And how will Vaka grow, through reverent observance of family tradition, into a good wife? No responsible parents would let their son marry a woman who had not been brought into his family as a child.
Vaka says that these new people have told her about a god who wants her to go to school and put off marriage until much later. The elders concede there may be a god who makes this odd demand of some people, but they insist that he could not be the right god for their village. The gods of their village have supported child-marriage for thousands of years. It is a divinely ordained tradition. They are appalled at even the suggestion that mere human beings set it aside. What could be a greater violation of reverence?
The young teacher is appalled when Vaka abruptly stops coming to school and she hears the reason why. She wants to say: “What arrogance of the village elders to claim that their backward ways were ordained by gods!” And as for passing family custom from generation to generation, that is a charming idea, so long as the customs do not infringe on human rights. But this custom—child-marriage—is tantamount to slavery, she thinks. It violates the fundamental right to choose a partner for life, and it allows the groom’s parents to exact untold amounts of unpaid labor, by force, from the bride. Worse, many parents think they have power of life or death over their sons’ wives. If reverence supports the village in this abominable sacrifice of young girls, then reverence is an abomination. The teacher would rescue Vaka by force if necessary, but her team leader insists that they not interfere with local customs. They are permitted to open the school to girls, but they must do nothing directly against the wishes of a girl’s parents, and they are barred from recruiting girls aggressively to further their education.
This is a hard case for reverence. Each side is appalled at the other’s values. The young teacher does not think that the reverence of Vaka’s village is a virtue at all, but rather something terribly oppressive, a rationale for slavery. The village elders see no good coming from a school education for Vaka. Apprenticeship in the home, they say, is nothing like slavery; it is reverent training for the role a girl will play as an adult. On the issue between them, the team leader is determined to make no decision. “We have our ways and they have theirs,” he says. “Who is to say which of the two is better?” But now Vaka wants to go to school, and the leader’s relativism will not help her or the villagers face the pressures that are coming from outside.
The same sort of issue—but this time concerning justice—arose in the debate about chattel slavery a century and a half ago. An abolitionist would complain that the system of justice prevailing in a slaveholding area is no true justice because it protects the rights of the slaveholder but not those of the slave. The slaveholder’s counterargument is simple: Justice forbids taking away property by force; slaves are property; liberating slaves is taking property away from their owners by force; therefore, it follows that justice forbids the liberation of slaves. Relativism would declare both sides right: it is unjust to suppress the rights of people who are enslaved, and it is equally unjust to liberate them.
Relativism leads to this dilemma because it allows that justice is a human product, made differently by slaveholders and abolitionists. But no one who has reverence for justice can allow that it is whatever we say it is. Justice is an ideal that is imperfectly realized in codes of law, and it is the ideal—not the imperfect realizations of it—that merits reverence. Reverence is incompatible with relativism. And in the case of slavery, the relativist has made an obvious mistake about justice even as the slaveholder understands it. Slaveholders do not believe that they have simply invented justice to serve their interests; they appeal to justice because they think it is right.
Even slaveholders agree that it is never unjust to return stolen property to its original owner. If you buy a painting from thieves who stole it, and the police track it down, you must return it to the original owner, without compensation unless you can get it from the thieves. By the same token, if you buy human beings whose rights have been stolen by the slave trade, you must return them to their original owners—themselves. Generally, moral dilemmas are only skin deep; there is a right way to get out of them, and there is someone to blame for creating them (in these cases, the thieves and the slave-traders). It only appeared unjust to liberate slaves. In truth, emancipation serves justice, even though its cost in social disruption may be very high.
Now back to reverence. For Vaka to stand against village tradition only appears to be irreverent. That tradition is just another human artifact. It was not ordained by gods, and it is an act of gross irreverence to claim that it was. The beliefs of the villagers are simply wrong on the main point; no particular human customs were divinely ordained, any more than any particular language was god-given. We all must speak a language, and we all must follow customs, but there is no one language we must all speak or custom we must all follow. We must do our best with the language and customs we have inherited, and we must encourage others to do their best with their legacies. But a legacy can be stolen or fouled in other ways, and we need to know that too. Cultures are always undergoing change, and their guardians must be reasonably open to this, for both moral and practical reasons. God does not tell us how often to sweep a floor or at what age to marry or when it is permissible to split an infinitive. Our needs change, and so must our response to them.
It helps to base ethics on virtues rather than rules. Rules are hard to separate from culture because they are specific, but virtues are ideals of character. The practice of a virtue has to be sensitive to cultural differences, and this is especially true for reverence, which is expressed in a language of behavior. A reverent person will learn how to express reverence in different ways in different places; one who goes shoeless into a mosque should recognize that this behavior might be inappropriate in a Presbyterian church. But the reverence is the same.
Vaka’s elders would answer, if I made this case to them, that I am merely speaking for my own culture, and that I have no right to force them to accept these so-called freedoms, which in their eyes are mere rootlessness and anarchy. Perhaps I am right that child-marriage was not ordained by the gods. But for the sake of peace and stability the villagers are better off believing that it was. And if all of the Vakas are allowed to do as they want, the family—the very center of reverence—will begin to fall apart. The elders are right about that, and the teacher has missed their point. But the position I have taken is not exclusive to modern Europeans. The elders are wrong on the larger issue because their attitude will doom their village to poverty and disease, and because they have no respect for Vaka’s great potential or her own freely taken choice to develop it if she can. Human potential, too, can be the object of reverent respect.
Vaka is not irreverent to question the tradition in her village, but the elders in her village think their way is the only way, and they have made the common error of revering local custom in place of transcendent ideals. Truth, justice, freedom, God—all these are worthy of reverence. But mere custom—never. Not even the custom of nations.
The team leader has decided, however, so the school will bow to local custom and turn Vaka away, as her parents insist. The best that can be said of this decision is that it puts off a messy confrontation between school and elders and delays a transition for the village that will be painful for all concerned. But it is not a reverent decision or a just one; it serves neither an ideal nor the expressed interests of the person concerned—Vaka. Relativism, here as elsewhere, is an evasion of responsibility.
A tramp.
Not from here
Couldn’t be, or he’d never dare
To tread sacred earth!
…
Sacrilege! To see someone here.
To hear a voice!
…
You’ve gone too far and trespassed
On a sacred grove where water blends
With liquid honey and flows from lustral bowls.
Beware, stranger, go no further—
Stop now and back away.
Do you hear?
Decrepit beggar.
If you’ve something to say, say it
But not on sacred land.
Speak to us from a place where words are allowed.
Keep silent until
You have left forbidden ground.
…
A stranger in a strange land, poor man,
But he must learn
What offends our city
And what we hold dear.
From the chorus in Sophocles’ Oedipus
at Colonus,
translated by Peter Meineck, lines
122–26, 140–41, 155–68, 184–87.