From Relativism to Wokism: A Path of Confusion, Fallacy and Self … – C2C Journal

Clearly, to tolerate, or respect, people is not the same as to tolerate all their attitudes, beliefs and ideas. Its easy to see how the same can be said about conduct: to be tolerant of a person is different from being tolerant of all their behaviours, especially if damaging to others or lawless. Obviously, restraining someone from engaging in a criminal act does not violate any meaningful standard of tolerance.

Yet it has become a norm for politicians, academics and educators alike to accuse others of intolerance due to mere disagreement on a particular subject. When disagreement is definitionally removed as a key component of tolerance, disagreement itself becomes unacceptable. In that case, no idea or thought can ever be confronted, regardless of how graciously, without invoking a charge of civil offence or hate crime. Any difference in views becomes equated to intolerance or even hatred. This is, sadly, a widespread practice.

With a redefinition a near upending of tolerance, the new normal has become to approve of, embrace or even promote potentially anything, without judgment. One can see how this had to happen for relativism to continue on its course. If tolerance means to have respect for people while practicing discernment and moral judgment, this definition has to go to facilitate the relativistic mindset.

Political Correctnessand Onward to Wokism

Since their pompous entry into university classrooms, relativism and tolerance were turned into ideological weapons through the introduction of yet another related concept, a rival of any intellectual discourse, political correctness (PC) and, more recently, an even more radical descendent.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, PC means conformity to prevailing liberal or radical opinion, in particular by carefully avoiding forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against. To avoid expressing disagreement is essentially the same as to show tolerance. Hence, PC is akin to tolerance, yet not of anyopinion or behaviour one may disagree with; instead, it is externally imposed tolerance towards a designatedview.

Beckwith and Koukl call PC an offspring of cultural relativism. Indeed, if no culture has any superiority in advancing the knowledge of truth, then all opinions become reduced to what a majority (or, in some instances, a ruling elite or a determined opinion-forming minority) in a given culture perceives as correct/incorrect and just/unjust. In this case truth, including moral truth, becomes subordinate to dominant societal norms, varying from society to society and in some cases within a society.

This is in essence what Barbara Herrnstein-Smith, author of Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory, conveyed by saying, all value is radically contingent, being neither a fixed attribute, an inherent quality, or an objective property of things. Further, there is no knowledge, no standard, no choice that is objectiveEven Homer is a product of a specific culture, and it is possible to imagine cultures in which Homer would not be very interesting. Herrnstein-Smith does not seem to have considered the possibility that a culture which cannot appreciate Homer is deficient in some way, because Homer isnt the problem.

Indeed, if discussion of absolute truth was revolving merely around ones literary preferences, Herrnstein-Smiths statement would not be as horrifying. But imagine it equally applied to societally agreed-upon anti-Semitism, child sacrifice or euthanasia. At the end of the day, moral assessment of these matters, along with all others, is limited to an individual culture, isnt it? Herrnstein-Smith would evidently have agreed.

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From Relativism to Wokism: A Path of Confusion, Fallacy and Self ... - C2C Journal