Radical Relativism

Spirit of the Age

T. Zara Thustra

 

A Paradox: Radical Relativism, Problem Child of Enlightenment, provides its' faithful with limited choices. For the sincere, it offers paralysis. For the Once Sincere, guilt, cynicism, irony are its' rewards. To those free from the shackles of conventional morality, it grants opportunism through the technological imperative, posturing and shock. As with most fashionable impulses, it must in time devour itself.

The essential premise of relativism, that values are in the head of the beholder, denies the possibility of meaningful communication. It likewise, by definition, denies the very possibility of its own logic and existence as a conceptual position. Truth, beauty and Virtue, the former gods of Western Civilization are ghosts wandering through a pre-industrial dreamscape. These once proud Dieties were forced from their thrones, publicly humiliated, and made to stand amongst the Opinions. As values became relative, their universality challenged by Irrational Rationalism, collective structures, both conceptual and physical, were necessarily dismantled. 'Humanity' or 'human nature', once assumed to be immutable, has likewise been denied its relevance in the face of the empirical. In short, the triumph of radical relativism is the wake of the 'disenchantment of the world' has brought objective dialogue, and its physical expression (the city), to its knees.

It is here argued that the city may be understood as the formal manifestation of an objective value structure. It is by nature a perpetually collective and inherently political project. It cannot survive as a showcase for subjective expression or libertarian indulgence. Its endurance depends upon an euqilibrious relationship between individual and collective, public and private, subjective and objective. It exists by virtue of some social contract. Manhattan's riotous skyline is governed at the street level by the relentless clarity of the Grid, which, with no pompous ass may trump without difficulty. In Manhattan, the Grid is the spatial representation of the Social Contract. With a few notable exceptions, the vanishing American city is a necessary result of Relativism's triumph. A society without common values is a society without cities. A society without cities is a society without civilization.

It is here argued that an objective value system, a new social contract, must be reformulated in order to salvage the remnants of the American Project. To the baby boomers shocked at Columbine and Woodstock 99', remember this: these are more than literally your children: The indulgences of '68 have born rotten fruit, and you are the farmers. In your defense, it would have been difficult to foresee the darkness of the Post-Values Age you were constructing. But now that we are privy to the results of your 'Liberation', can we now make a sober assessment of its failure?

Contrary to the prevailing and seductive winds of Relativism, it is here argued that primary human impulses, biological, political, emotional, are largely immutable and universal. Technology changes the landscape but not its' occupants. The walls of Culture are no match for Nature's winds. It is from this premise that the record of previous human experience, or history/anthropology becomes relevant. It is likewise from this premise that one considers the applicability of paradigmatic solutions to a universal audience.

It is here argued that an objective value system may be constructed through an analysis of our common humanity, with both the living and the dead. Lessons learned by generations past inform decisions present, translation rather than "invention". Identification of 'types', or ideals, that has persisted in its premise, varied in its manifestation, adapted from pure idea to circumstantial reality - a typological argument.

One must ultimately choose: Pluralism or Community? Libertarianism or Civilization?