Relativism Is Everywhere
by Thomas A. Droleskey
October 23, 2000
Each of us
knows how relativism controls practically every single aspect of
our social life. We know that contraception, abortion, euthanasia, divorce
and remarriage without a decree of nullity, pornography, sodomy, sex
instruction, and a host of other evils are founded in relativism. However,
there are many hidden ways in which relativism has manifested itself quite
insidiously in our national life.
Relativism may be defined as the
belief that there are no absolute truths that exist in the nature of things
and bind all human consciences at all times. Relativists believe that both
morality and reality are relative to the individual person, dependent upon
the circumstances of time, place, and the motives of individuals. Reality
and morality are culture-bound. Different people in different cultures can
have different beliefs and values, all of which contain equal possibilities of
being true. Socrates himself debated with the relativists of his own day,
the Sophists, who contended that man is the measure of all things and that
all things are negotiable. Socrates quite adeptly pointed out that the
Sophists (the forerunners of our modern relativists) believed in a complete
and total absurdity: the very belief that nothing is absolutely true is itself
an absolute belief and thereby a contradiction of their self-serving
contention that nothing is true.
Nevertheless, relativism is the basis
of American education, both public and (in many instances) parochial. The
goal of outcome-based education, for example, is to empty academic
subjects of objective content. Educators must reaffirm the
self-esteem of their students by refraining from correcting
any errors they might make in spelling or grammar or mathematics or
history or geography. Objectively incorrect errors must be called
creative answers derived by imaginative pupils (who must
be praised for their originality). Students so indemnified from correction of
their mistakes come to believe that there is nothing they can do that is
wrong, especially concerning their personal moral conduct. It is, sadly, the
case that by the time most of those students arrive at college, they actually
come to resent any professor who dares correct anything they do. That
attitude is carried over into the workplace once students graduate from
college, causing all manner of conflicts with employers who demand that
their employees actually know things pertinent to their field of
employment.
However, some of the seemingly
more intelligent graduates of outcome-based and ideologically based
education programs wind up planning and administering corporate
programs and policies that are based in relativism. Indeed, the New Age
movement (which is relativistic) controls much of the ambiance of the
workplace in corporate America today. Reality is what the company says it
is. That Orwellian construct, which relies upon mind-numbed robots who
have been robbed of their capacity to rationally and logically think their
way through to conclusions, is designed to create an atmosphere in which
profits can be maximized, employees can be reduced to the level of
automatons, and customers can be treated as utilitarian objects whose
very humanity must be subordinated to the demands of the synthetic world
created by corporate relativists.
Indeed, an entire culture of
relativism has been created in corporations, which use New Age
sensitivity training to advance all manner of ideological
goals, especially as it relates to the promotion of sodomy. Also important
to the reality of corporate America is to force all Christians
to remove any displays of their religious faith from the workplace
and to refuse to grant concessions to Catholics who want to observe the
Holy Days of Obligation or to make their Sunday Mass obligation. Those
who are caught telling politically offensive jokes must be disciplined. And it
is in that culture of corporate relativism that employees must be
programmed to reject common sense and plain truth in order to maintain
the facade created by the corporation.
For example, the bright lights who
run the telephone companies that provide directory-assistance
information have decided that it is more cost-effective to regionalize their
operations. Thus, the products of outcome-based education who are hired
to provide you with the telephone number you are requesting are most
likely totally ignorant of the area where the person or the business whose
number you are trying to find is situated. In most instances, corporate
policy requires them to provide a number within nineteen seconds.
Consequently, the person who is requesting the information is
depersonalized. Gone are the days when the local Bell Telephone
Company hired operators familiar with a particular area who were
trained to skim and scan through the white pages with the eyes God gave
them a particularly efficient form of providing information and
something the old information operators took great pride
in so the operator must look up the number in a computerized
file, which may or may not contain the number you
want.
If the computerized file does not
contain your number, the operator tells you that the number does not exist
(when the actual truth of the matter is that the telephone number you want
is not listed in that particular system). If you try to explain that the number
does exist (perhaps you had just gotten it but failed to write it down), you
are considered to be a crank who must be cut off immediately. The line
goes dead as you are, in effect, aborted. The relativism that guides
corporate America has taught employees to believe only what is found in a
computer file. Any argument to the contrary must not be brooked, as
reality for one particular corporation is what it says it is,
the actual facts of a matter notwithstanding.
As is the case with almost every
major corporation in the country, employees who deal with customers are
no longer courteous and respectful. Common sense? Perish the thought.
Employees have been trained not to think for themselves. Considering the
customer to be a distinct human being made in the image and likeness of
God? Come on, there are profits to be made and realities to be maintained.
Customers must be talked down when they present
problems to customer-service representatives. That is, employees are
taught never to admit that the corporation is wrong. That would be fodder
for lawsuits and bad publicity, after all. Thus, employees are taught to
wear the customer down by stonewalling him so much that he just gives up
in frustration. Truth is what the corporation says it is. Plain facts must be
denied. Corporate America is producing a veritable army of future Bill
Clintons and Al Gores.
Telephone companies are
particularly adept at creating their own reality insofar as billing is
concerned. A minute may be less than sixty seconds in some instances. A
billing period may be twenty-eight days some months, twenty-nine other
months, yet thirty to thirty-three in other months. Its all relative,
right? And you may think you live in a distinctive community, one that is
recognized by the august United States Postal Service with its own ZIP
code. Indeed, the community in which you live may be incorporated by your
state as a village or city or a town with its own municipal government. No
matter to the phone companies. I pay rent to keep my belongings (and
occasionally my little self) in an apartment in Bethpage, New York. It is an
unincorporated village in the Town of Oyster Bay in the County of Nassau
on Long Island (which is a geographical entity, not a political subunit of
the State of New York). What does Verizon (which used to be Bell Atlantic
and NYNEX and New York Telephone Company) list on my bill when I call
home to check for messages? Bethpage becomes Hicksville, another
unincorporated village where I did actually reside for twenty months
between April of 1990 and August of 1992. But I havent lived in
Hicksville since I left there over eight years ago to move to Sioux City,
Iowa, for the year that I taught at Morningside College. Tell that to
Verizon. Bethpage is Hicksville in Verizons self-created world. Yes,
everything is relative.
Relativism has even made its way
into baseball, especially under the leadership of the ever
politically correct Commissioner Allan H. Bud Selig. In
Seligs world Marge Schott must be punished for unplanned
insensitive statements while Ted Turner must go unpunished for
deliberately malicious attacks on Catholics and Protestant Christians.
(Turner repeated his attack on Christianity at the United Nations
Millennium Conference recently. Idiot that he is, it probably did not dawn
on Turner or on the assortment of tyrants and murderers ruling
the worlds nations who gathered for the conference that
the millennium they were celebrating belongs to our Lord and Savior Jesus
Christ!) Selig has strongly suggested that the thirty clubs composing Major
League Baseball designate one home game a year to AIDS
awareness. He is a master of making his own reality, something he
did quite consistently in his correspondence with me over the Ted Turner
business in 1999.
There are many other ways in which
relativism has worked its way into the game of baseball itself. The Official
Baseball Rule Book spells out in quite some detail what constitutes the
strike zone. Major League umpires, however, largely make up their own
strike zone, calling pitches that are visibly out of the strike zone as strikes
in many instances (and calling many strikes as balls). Some umpires who
work behind home plate calling balls and strikes in a particular game are
so inconsistent that neither the pitchers nor the batters have any idea what
the umpire will call a particular pitch, though a good deal of the art of both
hitting and pitching depends upon decisions that are based on the type of
pitch that will be thrown and where it will be targeted. An inconsistent
strike zone leads to a diminution of performance in a world where the
official rules are superseded by the whims of one who creates a reality of
his own making.
Even the spherical object known as
a baseball has itself been the subject of relativism and its natural offshoot,
social engineering. A study has concluded that the manufacture of
baseballs has been changed so as to make them fly faster and farther when
hit forcibly by the vortex of a swung bat. In other words, Selig and his
fellow relativists wanted to produce more home runs because home runs
put people in the seats, something that means money in the bank accounts
of the owners, enabling them to pay their overpaid players and have
something left over for themselves. The beauty of a well-pitched game?
Largely a thing of the past. The great national pastime must be tailored to
meet the needs of a relativistic world.
As I have demonstrated on a
number of occasions, relativism is rife within the Church herself. Bishops,
chancery officials, priests, directors of religious education, theologians,
liturgists, and a variety of pastoral ministers have created a
synthetic religion that has no relation to the true faith. A synthetic,
relativistic theology has been created. Anyone who dissents from that
theology is a heretic and troublemaker. Those who point out how bishops
and their minions have misrepresented the doctrine of the Church
say, as Bishop Robert N. Lynch continues to do with respect to solemn
Eucharistic exposition in the Diocese of St. Petersburg must be
denounced without regard for nasty little things known as facts. Those
who continue to foster our synthetic liturgy have created a world where
the Mass is simply a community banquet and where people cannot sin
seriously unless they have made a fundamental option
against God. Reality is what those people say it is, thereby deceiving a lot
of good Catholics who look askance when others try to inform them with
actual facts and Vatican documents about the truth of a particular
matter.
The relativism facing us today in all
aspects of our national life has many roots. The remote cause for
relativism is, of course, to be found in the Fall from Grace in the Garden of
Eden. Original Sin has given rise to all efforts to deny reality, to make
ourselves the equal of God Himself. Relativism is simply one of those
efforts. It has been given expression by the Sophists of Athens and the
Epicureans of the declining Roman Empire.
Although eclipsed by the triumph of
the true Faith in Europe during the course of the first millennium,
relativism underwent a renaissance during the Renaissance (which really
gave rebirth to the old sophistries of the Sophists). Secular relativism,
which quickened during the so-called Enlightenment and made itself
manifest in violent terms during the French Revolution, found an ally in
the theological relativism of Martin Luther and John Calvin. For it was
the theological relativism let loose on the world by Luther that helped
expedite the triumph of all forms of relativism. If the truths of our Lord
can be relativized into meaninglessness, then, as Pope Leo XIII noted in
Immortale Dei in 1885, atheism becomes the norm.
A world that rejects our Lord and
the authority of his true Church must create a reality of its own. But it is
only the true Faith that guides us to see reality clearly by fixing our gaze
always upon the wood of the Holy Cross, upon which our Divine
Redeemer saved us by the shedding of every single drop of His Most
Precious Blood. We must never waver in our insistence that the world and
everyone in it must be converted to the true Faith. For the clarity of vision
given us by the Church is the means by which we can see the plain reality
that the tendency of human beings to equate themselves with God is what
leads to all of the crime and horror and bloodshed and dehumanization
that are the fruits of all forms of relativism.
Invoking our Ladys
maternal intercession, may we always stand fast in our efforts to pray and
to work for a world wherein the shadow of the Holy Cross defines the
reality of who we are and how we are to treat others as fellow
redeemed creatures.
Our Lady, Seat of Wisdom, pray for
us.
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