The Intolerance of Relativism

 

Last year, our local multiculturalism festival ran into some trouble: some Arabs were giving some grief to the Jewish booth over the Israel-Gaza strife. 

I do not know the details. All I know is that the organizers this year, to solve the problem, have banned any expressions of religion.

An example of the general prejudice that religion causes discord. As if the Gaza situation was about religion. 

The PLO was formed as a Marxist organization; it had nothing to do with religion. To its left, the PFLP, was run by George Habash, nominally a Christian. Only in more recent years, religion has been tagged on as a further premise for the hostilities; they would have continued regardless. It is about ethnicities, not religions. It is worth noting that the most devout Jews in Israel refuse to fight; and the more Muslim states, the Gulf states, have remained aloof from the Gazans.

Except for Iran. Hamas is funded by Iran. But Iran is Shia Muslim, while Gazan Muslims are Sunni. Not the same guys; like Catholics and Protestants. Iran is not supporting them on religious grounds.

So why did the organizers jump to the weird step of banning crosses and crucifixes; instead of banning Israeli or Palestinian flags?

Because of the wider prejudice, or deliberate lie, that relativism is tolerant, while any claim of absolute truth—any religious claim—is oppressive to others. 

And this used everywhere to justify the suppression of religion.

Yet the opposite is demonstrable from history. The most prominent relativist regimes in Western history were the Nazis and Fascists. They were, definitively, cultural relativists: nothing was above the folk and the state, and conventional morality was expressly rejected. Mussolini declared in so many words, “Fascism is relativism.” 

We see where that led. It was not tolerance.

Marxism is also relativist, and rejects moral codes. In a sense, it is culturally relativist, although it would use the term “ideology” instead of “culture.” What is supposedly truth is entirely conditioned by the current system of material production.

And again, the result was grave intolerance: the Holodomor in the Soviet Union, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, North Korea’s hermit state, the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge.

For a fair comparison, What states can we cite as absolutist: as officially claiming to know and commit to some absolute truth? That is, nations which declare a state religion. The most obvious example is the United Kingdom; we could also cite Norway and Denmark. Not famous for their intolerance, surely. Also on the list would be modern Greece, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar. Not bad places to live unmolested for your beliefs. 

Granted, not all absolutist regimes are so nice. Iran is also officially absolutist; Saudi Arabia; Pakistan; Sudan; Myanmar. I can personally vouch that Saudi Arabia is really rather a pleasant place to live; and chaos may be the real problem in Pakistan. But still …

And not all relativist states are guilty of mass murder: we could cite the present Chinese government, or that of Vietnam, as not being all bad. 

But at least, we can say that officially absolutist states are among the most tolerant, while officially relativist states are among the most intolerant.

Let’ consider some history.

Under an absolutist mandate, expressly claiming that their official mandate was to lead the Muslim world, the Ottoman Empire was a relatively pleasant place for its many religious minorities to live. This changed when the Young Turks came to power, making the ruling principle Turkish language, culture, and identity instead—cultural relativism. The Armenian genocide soon followed, then the Greek genocide and mass expulsion. And this changed when, in the rest of the Middle East, Islam as a unifying principle was replaced by Arab nationalism—culture instead of religion. 

Then we started to get wars in the Middle East and terrorist attacks. If the official justification was sometimes religious, those who committed the attacks were curiously not known to their intimates to be religious at all. They were generally Westernized and secularist. They were fighting for their culture, of which religion happened to be one component. They were “cultural Muslims” as we talk about “cultural Christians” or “cultural Jews.”

Calling them “Muslim extremists” has always been an egregious lie.

And so it goes: relativism leads to intolerance, and religious commitment leads to growing tolerance.

The reason is fairly obvious if you think about it. If you believe in unalterable ultimate reality, what could cause conflict? Nobody can harm it simply by not believing it; that is their misfortune. If someone does not believe in gravity, I’m not going to fight him over it. Good luck!

If, on the other hand, you believe there is no fixed reality, you have every incentive to impose on others a “narrative” that is favourable to you. The stakes could not be higher: all or nothing.  The only thing left is, in Hitler’s phrase, the triumph of the will. You will or theirs. Conflict is certain, down to the last man or woman or non-binary whatever standing.

And that is where we have been rushing headlong.

Hockey Night on the CBC

 

According to this piece from the CBC, NHL players are “ostracizing” gay and transgender people by not wearing rainbow “gay pride” jerseys. We should perhaps be happy they do not go so far as to call it genocide. Brian Burke, of the Pittsburgh Penguins, insists that resistance on religious grounds makes no sense. He was, he says, born and raised a Catholic, and “I don’t see any conflict” between Catholicism and affirming—not just tolerating, but affirming, or, to use his exact word, “honouring”—gay sex.

Anyone who knows the catechism of the Catholic Church knows he is simply lying, or apostate. 

Paragraph 2357: “Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’ They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.”

Paragraph 296: “Among the sins gravely contrary to chastity are masturbation, fornication, pornography, and homosexual practices.”

The CBC interviewer, supposedly neutral, asks two gay advocates the leading question, “do you think religion is being used to disguise bigotry?” No advocate for religion, or for the dissenting players, is invited to give their point of view.

But one of the gay spokesmen gives the game away. Cyd Ziegler emotes, “I grew up Christian. I grew up hating myself, because I was gay. Because I felt that I would go to hell for eternity.” Bayne Pettinger agrees with him an endorses what he just said.

Obviously, then they know perfectly well that they are in opposition to Christianity and Christian beliefs. They know that Christianity teaches that gay sex, or endorsing gay sex, leads to hell. They are not prepared to live and let live; they want to ostracize Christianity from the NHL, or crush the conscience of individual Christians.

Cyd Ziegler insists otherwise: “The players have the right not to wear the jersey, if their teams allow it. But guess what? I have the right to criticize them.” 

This is a false parallel. The players are not criticizing gay sex. His demand is that they affirm it, or face criticism. There is a difference between objecting to speech, and objecting to silence. He wants compelled speech.

For a proper comparison, think of requiring the players to wear a scarlet A to affirm their support of adultery, or requiring them to endorse on camera theft or the telling of lies. Or, conversely, imagine him as a gay man required to come on the CBC to condemn gay sex; or risk losing his job and his livelihood.

The important and most interesting question here is why homosexuals and transvestites cannot be satisfied with tolerance, and insist on universal public affirmation. Why do they need to compel assent? Why, for that matter, do they need “gay pride parades”? Why do they even need to “come out of the closet”? Straight people, after all, have no parades on the topic of sex, and are content to and expected to remain in the closet their entire lives, keeping their sexual interests behind closed doors.

It is presumably because they have a guilty conscience. Gays and transgenders must constantly be reassured that they are not doing anything wrong, precisely because they at least suspect they are doing something wrong. And because the problem is their own conscience, they can never be satisfied by any speech or action taken by any other. Their demands will just keep escalating. And they will grow more hysterical, beginning to speak of “revenge” and “genocide.” Ultimately, quite possibly, leading to egregiously violent action, like shooting small children in a Christian school. For the Erinyes pursue them, and they are relentless.

Orestes pursued by the Erinyes