This is an essay from The Culture We Deserve, by Jacques Barzun.#

Jacques will tackle the overuse and misuse of the word, "Relativism," in this essay...#

For several decades the world Relativism has served to explain whatever the user found morally reprehensible in the life around him. The term, both scapegoat and insult, has all the properties of a thought-cliche of the learned-sounding kind. It is in fact a gross perversion of a technical term, as well as irrelevant to the issues it professes to settle. [pg. 87]

Jacques describes how it is used and where it came from.#

Since the decay of religion, the western world has adopted the motto "Anything goes." Relativism has conquered all.

This bugbear cannot be sheer illusion. When the word is not a mindless echo, what people feel and fear arises from a confused impression that anything which varies with time and place, instead of remaining the same through all circumstances, is a menace: it shifts; it is shift. To hang anything of weight, you want a strong peg firmly held so that it may firmly hold. Thus Relativism is equated with general looseness, with unanchored judgment and unpredictable behavior. This is deemed bad, because, as Bacon said in his terse way about deceit, "It leaveth a Man without a Hold to take him, what he is." Society obviously needs such holds with which to challenge, reproach, condemn the transgressor. [pg. 88]

Continuing on this trend of explanation and examination he explains that morals cannot exist in a vacuum by definition of culture and thus any attempt to solidify them is like trying to fly without understanding the laws of gravity or lift.#

A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least. To find not a single cause but these converging conditions, we must therefore look first at the persistent desires of wester civilization for the past seven decades. We then see the worthiest endeavors-art, science, social science, education, human rights, criminal justice-like the least deliberate attitudes expressed in speech, manners, and dress, helping to do the work of looseness attributed to the quite innocent Relativism. [pg. 89]

To deny change is to deny life.

In any attempt to take this rather vapourous definition of Relativism (and its uses) back to Earth, Jacques lays out a scenario,#

The party of religion and the absolutist thinker posit the existence of "those great unchanging rules of life and conduct, eternally fixed and as old as the world itself." This code has one commandment for each offense, and the charged against relativists is that they vary the rule, depending on circumstances-"situational ethics." The charge rests on a distinction without a difference. For the absolutist ignores his perpetual predicament: his single rule will not cover all the actions it is supposed to govern. Make "Thou shalt not kill" an absolute, and at once conscience asks: What of self-defense? the death penalty? war to recover the Holy Land? [pgs. 90-91]

Jacques makes a point of showing that the "Golden Age of Morals" never was. From the times when "Thou shalt not kill" was bent to the Victorian age when honor and chivalry was not all they are cracked up to be.#

Throughout the Victorian, the very high and the very low easily evaded the sexual and other imperatives. Artists and members of the professions periodically escaped to Paris or the suburbs. Dickens kept a mistress and joined Wilkie Collins on his trips to France, and Samuel Butler visited an accommodating seamstress. All the while, London was reputed the world center of prostitution, and in the equally moral United States the age of consent in more than one jurisdiction was nine years. [pg. 96]

So there have always been hypocrites and morally magnificent boroughs with a hidden red light district.

Jacques continues to show that all forms of absolutism are baseless and lacking of all substance.#

First is irreverence, tt is a problem when individuals have absolutely no standards, life is a carte blanche free for all of pleasure and whim.

It is now accepted that intelligence agents who voluntarily swear perpetual secrecy will break their oath after retirement and tell tales to enliven their memoirs. There's freedom of speech, after all. And what if this old notion of self-respect were a mask for self-importance? "This I do not do" surely puts a pompous emphasis on I, with overtones of superiority. The very notion of "it isn't done" smacks of outworn convention. Anything may be done. Irreverence is a broad mandate. [pg. 101]

This paragraph is interesting in this section as well,

Moreover, the scoffing at formality partakes of a broader, more intellectual attitude, which has come to be held in high honor: irreverence. Celebrities are praised in print for this talent, which functions like an absolute. The possessor ridicules all things on principle, showing thereby that he is not guilty of any unfair discrimination. True, there is another, perhaps compensating absolute, which is compassion. If irreverence betrays a strong mind, compassion shows a deep heart, and neither entails a moral judgment: Pope John Paul II is described as "very committed and very compassionate." The question "committed to what? compassionate toward whom?" does not arise. We are left to suppose that nowadays everybody is an underdog in need of automatic compassion from committed souls. [pg. 99-100]

In closing, Jacques writes about our current moral state and its future.#

Of these [effects of societal shifts], the most disconcerting is that the desire for a better society has generated a neutralizing power in the form of high individual selfishness. Throughout our culture, the most visible trait is concentration on what is owed to the self. This characteristic appears in the proliferation of "rights" and the freedom of the artist to please only himself; in the demand for faultless performance by physicians and manufacturers; in the principle of consumerism promoted by the advertiser: since everybody deserves to have all the new enjoyable, life-enhancing articles, one owes it to oneself to get this one at once. And with the usual paradox of freedom proffered, the fit coerces: "Don't be left out of the parade of pleasure." [pg. 105]