Gotham Diary:
Relativism Disposed
13 February 2015
Usually, I know when I’ve done it. But I was so entranced by my blatherations about changing tastes and Joseph Smith — the Venetian consul, not the Mormon — and the Canalettos and Vermeers in the Royal Collection that I didn’t notice that I’d knocked Kathleen out. She had been scrolling through eBay while I went on, and on, and on. It was only when I startled her with a question that I realized what I’d done. Kathleen came to, momentarily, from the deepest sleep, and I’m not sure that she was fully competent to agree to an hour’s postponement of dinner. But I saw that that was what she needed.
I had begun by talking about — well, we’ll get to that later. As long as I’m talking about my life as a doofus I ought to tell you about an embarrassing encounter with the doctor the other day. I was boasting about Kathleen, and telling him that she is one of the very few lawyers in the land with a personal brand. All you have to do is Google this brand name, and voilà. The problem was, I didn’t know the brand name. I thought it was “Spider Woman of Wall Street.” When I told this story to Kathleen, she said, “Oh, you made up the part about Wall Street.” And of course it’s not “spider” but “spdr,” for Standard & Poor’s Depositary Receipts, the name of the first exchange-traded fund. (The ticker symbol is SPY.) The doctor was not very impressed by the results of my search. When I got home, I fiddled around at the computer until I got it right. Spdrwoman. Quel moronicus.
***
As a rather naughty boy, to put it mildly, I was spanked fairly often. After I pulled down my pants (but not my undershorts), I was spanked with a hairbrush. Later, as I approached adolescence, I was flogged. Isn’t that the word? I bent over and a belt lashed my derrière. This was all my mother’s doing. Neither of us thought that there was anything wrong or unfair or disproportionate or in any way objectionable about my punishment: I was only getting what I deserved. I don’t know when this controlled violence stopped, but 1960 sounds right.
Oh! I almost forgot. At Iona Grammar School, which I attended for a few years, the Brothers had a block of Cat’s Paw shoe soling. I really don’t recall its dimensions — you didn’t see it, you just felt it — but it must have been long enough to flex a bit. A few whacks of Cat’s Paw hurt a lot, and of course standing out in the corridor and being told to bend over was humiliating. It was supposed to be.
Things have changed. A New York court recently ruled that spanking by hand was a reasonable use of force. It seems likely, however, that belts and blocks of rubber would not have been approved. And as for teachers doing the spanking — ! Old-timers cluck and shake their heads. It is recalled that the great Doctor Johnson held that no boy ever learned Latin without its being flogged into him. But no one is studying Latin anymore — not in grade school, anyway. That has changed, too. The world is, as usual, going to the dogs.
Is nothing sacred?
But things do change. That is one of the characteristics of modern life. It has bedeviled thinkers for several centuries. How do we know that anything is true? More recently, the question takes this form: is there anything true to know? Attending these questions is the suspicion that humanity would be lost if there were no certainties.
Think of it as a connectivity problem. There’s you here, looking up things on your computer. Out there, there’s truth, and what’s really real. You need a connection of some kind to get to truth and reality. What if there is no connection? What if there is no truth to connect to? Then what do you do?
A lot of people seem to be dismayed by the possibility that there is no connection, and/or that there is nothing to connect to. It can’t be right! How are we to distinguish good from evil?
I call this bundle of anxieties the old model. In the old model, individual human beings sought meaning and validation through private channels. They prayed; they had visions; truth was revealed to them — personally. (The Roman Catholic Church tried very hard to interpose itself as the source of meaning and the fountain of virtue. When priests behaved themselves, this arrangement brought a lot of comfort to a lot of people.)
In the new model, here is what happens:
Something is “real,” a statement about that thing is “true” and therefore has to be taken seriously, when what I say about it withstands all the criticisms and questions people can bring up to discredit it. I’ve always thought that’s how sociologists should work. You anticipate what serious critics — people who really don’t want your conclusion about whatever-it-is to be true, people who have a stake in showing you are wrong in any way they can do it — would say. Then you do whatever you have to do to counter those criticisms, so that those critics can no longer make those criticisms, because you have answered them so well that they have to accept your conclusions. This is not the same as shouting louder or having greater political skills. Instead, it refers to the agreement between you and your critics that their complaint isn’t, by their own standards, logically or empirical anymore and therefore they will stop making it. (173)
That’s what I’d been talking about to Kathleen. It’s from Howard Becker’s remarks on “relativism” in What About Mozart? What About Murder? It makes sense that a sociologist would produce these definitions of reality and truth, shifting the locus of fact-finding from the individual’s connection to some out-there, superhuman authority to the multiplicity of human beings. This multiplicity, unlike group of human beings, has no leader. It has no common sense, only a small collection of propositions against which no one has managed to argue successfully. Individuals rigorously challenge other individuals, and the result is more rigorous than a consensus. It is also “relative” (ie, subject to change) only temporally, and not with respect to individuals. Given the conditions in which civil society can thrive, the important matters of right and wrong are settled. Ideas about right and wrong may change over time, but at any given time everyone is bound by the prevailing understanding. So relativism doesn’t come into it, except for those old enough to recall a different dispensation.
Civil society, then, guarantees what is right, and that is a good-enough grasp of what is real and what is true. Clearly, however, the prosperity of civil society is vastly more important to the functioning of the new model than it is to that of the old.
No wonder Kathleen dropped off.
Bon weekend à tous!