There are, in truth, cold, hard facts, as well as some warm, fuzzy ones. You could call these facts "truths". Truths are not subject to (subjective) opinion, or desire, or will.
For example, the fact is that smoking cigarettes is very bad for you and may well kill you. It will almost certainly shorten your life. Smoking is a hazardous habit - the facts are indisputable - a phenomenal amount of evidence exists to prove this reality.
Now the problem comes when people allow things to get PERSONAL. A well-meaning aunty might advise you to stop smoking, but you may decide that she is wrong because you don't want her to be right. Instead, you want all your friends who smoke to be right when they tell you that there's nothing to worry about. Your aunty may also be a Catholic and this might make you want her to be wrong even more. There may be some people and institutions that you don't want to be right at any cost.
I think almost all of us exercise some kind of bias like this from time to time - judging words by who says them, rather than taking statements at face value. But by doing so - by choosing to ignore the facts, we make ourselves willfully ignorant.* The next step on from believing our own, self-deceived view of the world, in spite of the facts, is to become stubbornly adherent to outright lies.
You might enjoy riding your motorcycle at high speeds - speeds that break the legal speed limits. Concerned people might ask you not to, because they are concerned for your life and maybe the lives of others who could also be injured if you were to crash. You might decide, because you LIKE riding at high speeds, that they are worrying unnecessarily. In reality, they are quite right to worry, but you won't listen if you don't WANT them to be right.
Left to our own devices, we are willful, egotistical little creatures who like to have our own way, whether it is ill-advised or not.
But the truth is out there, and it is real, whether we want this to be the case or not. Even this issue is one that people have a biased, emotional perspective on - they do not WANT there to be such a thing as irrefutable truth. "Everything is relative" they will protest, because that notion allows them to make their own decisions, based not on what IS true, but on what they WANT to be true. Opinions that are formed from passions and desires, rather than from the truth, are a dangerous thing.
So the truth is not relative. The truth is everything that is non-relative. It's true.
* credit to Evangelical preacher Eli Brayley for that great insight.
1 comment:
I believe that relativism is the wrong answer to the question of human problems. For example, a starving man steals a loaf of bread from a rich man who hoards his wealth and goods. A relativist position would be to question the very idea of whether is was good or bad to steal. However, should we not really be addressing the nature of a society in which someone can starve while others have excess and also finding remedies to this situation?
In a society where goods and resources were shared fairly, to steal would indeed be a grave wrong. In our unequal society, stealing is still wrong, but we can exercise compassion and understanding for those in difficult circumstances without compromising that principle.
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