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Relativism? The Pope doesn’t like it, but it is a valid creed

By Claudio Martelli • Translated by Denis Solomon from "Oggi" Magazine (Italian: "Today") • 11 March 2005

"Benedict XVI has branded this trend of thought as synonymous with superficiality. Not so. As Einstein teaches, it means the supremacy of reason and tolerance. And it negates neither faith nor morality."

One word has recently thrust itself into our thoughts. The new pontiff Benedict XVI has imposed it on our consciousness as the definition of what indeed is wrong with our way of thinking and living, and all that is negative in today’s world. According to the Pope, we are in the grip of a veritable “dictatorship of relativism”, a mentality that “recognises nothing as definitive” and thereby reflects the crisis of meaning and the shallowness typical of our times. Relativism permeates mass behaviour and is the true enemy of the Christian faith. The Pope writes: “Having a clear faith, according to the credo of the Church, is often labelled fundamentalism. While relativism, i.e. letting oneself be wafted hither and thither by any doctrinal wind, seems to be the only attitude consonant with the present age.”

Relativism, therefore, is not a specific tendency or heresy, but a much wider and more diffuse phenomenon comprising many fashions and many obsolete and mutually incompatible ideologies: “From Marxism to liberalism, from atheism to a vague religious mysticism”. Relativism is the effect of this vacillation, of this “letting oneself be jostled and swayed hither and thither”, almost without will or consciousness, that characterises modern life. And our daily life seems to offer us a wealth of confirmations of this judgement. Thus understood and illustrated, relativism encapsulates all the superficialities and weaknesses of contemporary humanity. Nevertheless, it may be objected that this trivial relativism is not the only one that exists. There is a different relativism that has noble antecedents and a different place in the history of ideas. It owes its origins and its vigour to the theory of relativity - the chief scientific achievement of the twentieth century - which, as Einstein wrote, removed even from space and time “the last vestiges of physical objectivity”. The philosophical consequences of the theory of relativity were and continue to be enormous, exemplified, in the final analysis, by the powerful counter-attack by empiricism on all absolutes and all dogmas - even ethical ones - on every pretension, even in science, to ultimate truth.

It is not, therefore, a question of humanity being jostled from one doctrinal fashion or trend to another, but of the effect of a powerful shock wave that has swept away illusions and prejudices and transmuted millennial certainties into archeological relics. A similar cataclysm had already been experienced at the dawn of modern society. Geographical and scientific discoveries cleared the way for technological revolutions and ruthless colonial conquests. These conquests, carried out under the sign of the cross, by revealing the plurality of religion, finally brought about another supremacy: that of reason. On the one hand they launched European world dominance, on the other they educated us in respect for others, in cosmopolitanism, in human rights, in the values of the enlightenment. The theory of relativity has merely renewed relativism and enriched it with fresh subject matter.

Relativism is not just one fashion among others, and it does not lack a morality of its own. This morality consists precisely in re-fashioning all pretensions to absolutism under the banner of experience, reason and tolerance, which have made possible, and often sow the seeds of, coexistence of values. In contrast, claims to possess absolute truth, and above all, to impose definitive laws in its name, are the fruit of a dangerous excess of pride or an excess of humility that would have us bow down before a stupefying mystery that we are allowed to venerate but not to understand. Relativism is what remains to modern man after the twilight of all the gods, the conflicting beliefs in a single deity, and after the collapse of all the ideologies that have spurred, divided and bloodied the world. It is the distillation of all our experiences and the sum total, revised and corrected, of all our mistakes.

Relativism knows that we are finite creatures in an infinite universe, and it does not negate religious beliefs, any more than it negates moral sense and the provisional truths of science. But neither does it exclude the hypothesis that the history of mankind may have no final end or purpose, though that sense of limitation does not deprive us of the freedom and responsibility of choice.