Postmodernism and Relativism

‘It is,’ some folk will say, ‘all relative.’ This is something to do with the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, rather vaguely deriving from an almost equally amorphous movement in modern thought, postmodernity. The usual understanding of the postmodern is that there are no over-arching narratives which are valid. Thus, for example, the late Victorian idea of ‘progress’ is dismissed as imperialism, colonialism and anti-environmental industrialisation which exploited the poor, rather than raise them from poverty. The ideas of ‘progress’, ‘empire’, ‘improvement’ and so on become relativized, along the lines of ‘if it works for you then do it (or believe it)’.

There are a number of issues that arise here, more than could possibly be encompassed in a text of this nature, but let me have a go at starting, at least. Firstly, I think we need to separate postmodernity (or, if you prefer, ‘late modernity’) from pure relativism. Relativism is quite easy to show to be fallacious. There are, after all, plenty of counter-examples to the assertion that everything is relative: try driving your car along the wrong side of the road and see what your insurers, other motorists and the law enforcement officers think of your claim that it is all relative and therefore you were doing nothing wrong. Or consider adding two and two and making five, because the answer is relative and if you believe it strongly enough it will be true.

The silly examples, of course, are simply reflections that the world is not relative at all, and that that is not what postmodern means. The assertion of relativism, ‘it is all relative’ is in fact self-stultifying. If everything is relative, then the statement ‘it is all relative’ is also relative, and therefore is as groundless as the next statement. I may believe that it is all relative, but in fact, I believe that everything is relative except the proposition that ‘it is all relative’. Why should you, or I, or anyone, privilege that statement among all the others?

Pure relativism therefore, does not work and cannot work. Postmodernism, however, is a lot more complex and really does not affect our chances of being right or finding the truth. What, in this context at least, postmodernism does do is indicate that truth is a lot harder to find, a lot more difficult to be sure about, than we might once have thought as a society.

It is very easy to criticise historians of a previous age. They found a set of documents in an archive and read what they said and reported it as fact, or at least, as ‘what happened.’ They asked questions of their sources in what today might seem like a rather naïve manner. Of course, they asked questions from their own context, such as ‘How did Great Britain come to rule the world?’ This is not a question which would arise in our own context, where Great Britain clearly does not rule the world, but from the viewpoint of the 1930s, or 1900s or similar, the truth of the standpoint was more or less unquestionable.

Our context therefore does condition the questions we can ask and the answers we can found. Classical scholars, for example, have spent some effort in recovering ideas of homosexuality in the ancient world. This was not done before, even though works like Plato’s ‘Symposium’ were clearly known about. Homosexuality was, however, legally suppressed in many countries (in the UK until the 1950s, I think) and so no-one interrogated the sources with questions about homosexuality in mind.

In a similar vein, it is often reported that the Athenians, both male and female, exercised in the gymnasium naked. Now it may well be that I am naïve here, being no classical historian, but often it is reported with a degree of frisson, or at least as a note to get people interested in the Ancient Greeks. It was not until I (reluctantly) started to take some exercise that I realised what seems to be the true reason for nude gymnastics: Greece is a hot country, and exercise makes you sweat. Sweaty clothes smell. Therefore, if your culture and environment allow it, exercising naked saves washing clothes.  

Whether that is correct or not, it illustrates my point. The questions we can ask depend on our context. Without taking some exercise the point about sweaty clothes would not have occurred to me. Because my context changed, I could ask the question and find some sort of answer. The Greeks were not necessarily parading naked bodies around for fun, but to save effort. In that context, who can blame them?

In this sense, then, our view of the past is mediated by our present. We ask questions that our grandparents could not have done. We can read their answers to the questions they did ask, of course, and agree or disagree with their answers, but in doing so we ask questions of their context and understandings from our own. On this basis, we see the past through a complex of lenses, not ‘as it was’.

Physical science does not work like that. The questions asked are contextually driven, but the answers we obtain are not usually accepted to be driven by what we want to find out about. As Richard Feynman once observed ‘Nature cannot be fooled.’ We might want to travel to the furthest stars, but physics, at least as we know it, does not permit it. We might make discoveries about the physical world which might permit interstellar travel, but they will also encompass our current theories and experimental results about the universe.  Einstein’s relativity theories did not replace Newton’s laws; they encompass them as low energy approximations. Quantum mechanics did not replace dynamics, it encompasses it as what happens at large scales. You cannot negotiate with the laws of nature as you might be able to argue against a historical hypothesis.

Postmodernity then, in its less silly forms, is not opposed to us finding the truth, nor does it claim that truth is impossible to find. It simply observes that finding the truth is hard and contingent.