by Emrys Westacott

Of all philosophical doctrines relativism surely gets the worst press. It is routinely described by its critics as "foolish", "simple-minded", "sophomoric", or "obviously self-refuting." It has been blamed for everything from rising crime to falling rates of literacy. The received view among a large part of the philosophical establishment is that it was decisively refuted by Plato almost two and half thousand years ago. And in modern times many illustrious Champions of Reason, including Karl Popper, Hilary Putnam, Jürgen Habermas, and Donald Davidson, have all sought to slay once and for all what Richard Rorty labeled "the relativist menace." But this fact in itself should give us pause. For as Alasdair MacIntyre says:

"Nothing is perhaps a surer sign that a doctrine embodies some not-to-be-neglected truth than that in the course of the history of philosophy it should have been refuted again and again. Genuinely refutable doctrines only need to be refuted once."

The two main species of relativism are usually described as "moral relativism", which asserts the relativity of moral values, and "cognitive relativism" which asserts the relativity of truth. Some form of moral relativism strikes many people, including professional philosophers, as somewhat plausible, or at least not very easy to refute. A relativistic view of truth, however, is widely thought of as a doctrine for the birds. After all, surely, some statements are just true, period; others are just false. Anyone who thinks otherwise should go and jump off a high building and see if there is any possible world in which the prediction that that this will be bad for their health turns out not to be true.

In my view, though, cognitive relativism is, at bottom, just a form of pragmatism, a philosophical outlook that is generally treated with much greater respect. I believe an effective way of showing this is by means of an analogy. First, though, a brief clarification regarding what relativists assert is in order.

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David Marquand in Prospect Magazine:

Niall Ferguson belongs to an endangered species. In an age of academic specialisation, when most historians devote themselves to learning more and more about less and less, Ferguson is a polymath. He scorns disciplinary boundaries, mixing economics with computer science and anecdotes with sweeping generalisations. As he puts it, he seeks to undermine the “tyranny of the archives.” He uses evidence drawn from a much wider range of sources than most historians dare to examine. In the last two decades, he has published an astonishing range of learned and intellectually provocative books, ranging from a financial history of the world entitled The Ascent of Money, to a study of the bloody 20th century, entitled The War of the World. He is also the author of a biography of the banker Siegmund Warburg, and in 2015 brought out the first volume of a projected two-volume biography of Henry Kissinger, challengingly subtitled The Idealist. In some ways, The Square and the Tower is a summation of years of his intellectual achievement. It draws on the insights garnered in Ferguson’s previous books and on the research they reflect. But it is much more than that. In a host of ways it breaks new ground. Combining chutzpah, panache, imagination, learning and sardonic wit, it offers a new way of looking at and understanding half a millennium of human history.

Hierarchies, Ferguson argues, have been part of the human condition since the neolithic age. But in the 500 years since Gutenberg invented printing and Martin Luther pinned his 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg church, hierarchies have been challenged again and again by networks, through which like-minded people communicate with each other, independently of those set in authority over them. Sometimes hierarchies have crushed networks; sometimes networks have undermined hierarchies. But the tension between them has been constant and inescapable. Ferguson’s cast list is astonishing: from Alan Bennett to Anna Akhmatova; from Immanuel Kant to Joseph Stalin; from the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro, who annexed Peru for the vast domains of the Spanish crown, to John Buchan, the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps; from financier George Soros to traitor Kim Philby; from Donald Trump to Julian Assange; and from Hillary Clinton to Mark Zuckerberg. He has not chosen these seemingly disparate figures at random. They, and a host of others, illustrate a complex mix of interwoven stories.

But despite the complexity of Ferguson’s story, the basic argument is clear. Though he doesn’t say it in so many words, it is curiously reminiscent of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. For Ferguson, networks are more creative than hierarchies. Their members are more engaged than the hierarchies they confront. Without them, the world would be a harsher, bleaker and crueller place. But when hierarchies fall, and networks carry all before them, the result, too often, is an anarchic war of all against all—like Hobbes’s state of nature. Again and again, Ferguson reminds us, triumphant networks have run amok, plunging their societies into bloodshed.

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Patrick Kurp at The Quarterly Conversation:

Robert and Mary Bagg have written the first biography of our greatest living poet, now age ninety-six, borrowing their title from Bogan’s prescient review of The Beautiful Changes, published seventy years ago. The Baggs draw upon previously unpublished journals, family archives, and interviews with Wilbur, his family, and friends, and these constitute the most valuable and interesting portions of the book. Wilbur is eminently quotable, in prose, verse, and conversation, but the book as a whole is a rather plodding affair. More about that below.

In an age when poets have jettisoned prosody and much verse is indistinguishable from prose, Wilbur has “remained true to his own poetic identity, refusing to develop fashionable, and usually transitory, styles,” in the words of his biographers. He has written precisely one poem in free verse, today’s lingua franca. In 2008, Wilbur told an interviewer: “The kind of poetry I like best, and try to write, uses the whole instrument. Meter, rhyme, musical expression—everything is done for the sake of what’s being said, not for the sake of prettiness.” Throughout his writing life, Wilbur has been accused of being effete, reactionary, elegant, and insufficiently transgressive and progressive. We learn from the Baggs, Wilbur was politely left-leaning as a young man, dabbled with pacifism, and has never been particularly interested in politics. Born in 1921, he served in World War II as a cryptographer with the 36th Texas Division.

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Kevin Power at the Dublin Review of Books:

So, as of 2017, the Amis Canon is still in order, with only some mild fluctuations in market value to trouble us (Updike, down ten at close; invest heavily in Bellow futures). With remarkable consistency, Amis has been praising more or less the same small group of (mostly male, definitely straight, definitely white) writers for four decades now. He even uses them to critique one another: “Bellow is quite unlike, say, Vladimir Nabokov and John Updike, to take two artist-critics of high distinction.” His critical insights are drawn from deep familiarity with a rigorously winnowed corpus. There have been no lately discovered enthusiasms; no essays in praise of younger novelists; certainly none in praise of writers from non-Anglophone countries (with the obvious, and meaningless, exception of Nabokov); and, increasingly, no full-length pieces about women writers of whatever vintage. (An essay in The Rub of Time on how Jane Austen’s novels have fared at the hands of filmmakers was originally published in The New Yorkerin 1997.) In much the same way, Amis’s critical principles, across forty years of reviewing, have remained intransigently firm. “Only connect the prose and the passion,” instructed EM Forster, at the crux of Howards End (1910). For Martin Amis, of course, the prose is the passion – or perhaps I should say, the passion is the prose.

To make Team Amis, you must be a writer, not necessarily of brilliant novels, or even of brilliant chapters, but of brilliant sentences and brilliant paragraphs. Amis’s critical method is to quote the bits he likes – the brilliant bits – and to point out why he likes them; or, conversely, to quote the bits he doesn’t like, and to point out that they are clichés.

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Zoe Williams at The Guardian:

Does Thomas ever hear a couplet that’s a little bit trite and panic that that’s the real Dylan and the genius is just an accident? Shaking his head confidently, he replies: “Too many accidents.” In a way, the classical allusions of Dylan’s later work bring him back to his earliest roots in blues and folk, albeit in a roundabout way. “Think about melancholy – the song ‘Not Dark Yet’ ends with the singer getting near the end. But it’s just such a beautiful song. The beauty of the song is compensation for the melancholy. We’re all going to die, so how do you deal with that fact? You can believe in an afterlife, or you can focus on the beauty that the human mind can produce through art. I think that’s why, like Eliot or Dante, or my guys, Virgil, Ovid, because of his genius, he’s always hooking into poetic traditions. Gospel, folk, always folk. There are folk traditions in ancient Greece and Rome, they’re what people sing, how they deal with mortality. Take someone like Virgil, whose Eclogues is really at the root of western pastoral poetry: he has these songs, which are shepherds competing with each other, it’s a cultural reality turned into high art. Dylan could hear a song and absorb it probably within a couple of hearings. When he gave the Nobel lecture, he talks about becoming all of these characters, from the ballads, from the folk songs.”

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Emily Raboteau in Orion Magazine:

IT WAS UNUSUALLY HOT FOR JUNE, and the heat was dry at the desert’s edge. The semiarid South Hebron Hills were stubbled with brown scrub and thistles and strewn with bone-colored rock. Though it was not quite summer and not yet noon, my guide, Ahmad S., estimated the temperature at thirty-seven degrees Celsius or, as my mind translated it, almost one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. “Drink,” Ahmad, a water lab technician, reminded me. I lifted my canteen to my lips and, without thinking, drained it. A first-world privilege, this—to be thoughtless about water. We were at the ankles of the West Bank, far off the utility grid, in the cab of Ahmad’s dusty truck. Ahmad, twenty-nine, Palestinian, comes from a town northwest of Hebron called Halhul. When I met him he was a newlywed. His new wife had been married once before. Because she was a divorcée, Ahmad’s brothers looked on her as used goods but he’d dissented from that point of view and married her for love. With his light-brown skin, gelled hair, gold chain, slim-fitting jeans, and Nikes he could have passed for one of the Dominican guys in my neighborhood in New York City. But apart from Ahmad’s slick look, I found nothing familiar in the desolate landscape. We may as well have been driving on an asteroid. The desert was bewildering to me as a city dweller, and not just because of its harsh quiet and the vast field of vision it offered, but also because of the pitiless way it exposed one to the sun. No buildings to offer cover or shade. No straight lines. Just rolling hills of rubble and saffron-colored dust. I felt jet-lagged, carsick, and ill at ease.

Emily Bobrow in The Economist:

Andrew was in his late 30s when he started feeling that his masturbation habit was getting out of control. He was indulging several times a day, while using pornography. These regular sessions were easy to schedule, as he was single and working from home. But his preoccupation with porn was getting in the way of the rest of his life. He wasn’t going out with friends or pursuing leads for work. “It inhibited my income,” he says. “It inhibited my relationships.” Feeling increasingly isolated and ashamed, Andrew tried raising these problems in therapy, but his therapist was uncomfortable talking about sex. When a friend mentioned he was going to 12-step meetings for sex addiction, he was fascinated, even relieved. It was the early 2000s and he wasn’t aware that such a thing existed. “I thought, ‘Wow, there’s this thing called sex addiction? That sounds like what I have’,” he recalls. Andrew started going to 12-step meetings and found it “tremendously useful” to have a place where he could talk about his problem and plan constructive ways to address it. He became more introspective, masturbated less and eventually stopped using porn. He felt so grateful for these changes that he decided to become a certified sex-addiction therapist himself.

For people like Andrew who are troubled by the scale or nature of their sexual desires, the notion that they are suffering from a disease can be a comforting one. After all, the sick cannot be held fully responsible for their actions; addiction blurs the line between culprits and victims. That may help explain why Harvey Weinstein, who spent decades abusing women without showing signs of remorse, is reported to have checked into sex-addiction rehab when the storm broke. Yet a growing number of therapists and addiction specialists are questioning whether these problems should be seen as an addiction at all. They argue that by pathologising certain sexual desires, we are failing to deal with the underlying causes of this behaviour. Given how often the term is bandied about in the news and on therapists’ couches, it is worth probing what we are really saying when we label someone a sex addict. More importantly, what does using this label encourage us not to explore, not to say?

Daniel C. Dennett at Edge.org:

Having turned my back on propositions, I thought, what am I going to do about this? The area where it really comes up is when you start looking at the contents of consciousness, which is my number one topic. I like to quote Maynard Keynes on this. He was once asked, “Do you think in words or pictures?” to which he responded, “I think in thoughts.” It was a wonderful answer, but also wonderfully uninformative. What the hell’s a thought then? How does it carry information? Is it like a picture? Is it iconic in some way? Does it resemble what it’s about, or is it like a word that refers to what it’s about without resembling it? Are there third, fourth, fifth alternatives? Looking at information in the brain and then trying to trace it back to information in the genes that must be responsible for providing the design of the brain that can then carry information in other senses, you gradually begin to realize that this does tie in with Shannon-Weaver information theory. There’s a way of seeing information as "a difference that makes a difference," to quote Donald MacKay and Bateson.

Ever since then, I’ve been trying to articulate, with the help of Harvard evolutionary biologist David Haig, just what meaning is, what content is, and ultimately, in terms of biological information and physical information, the information of Shannon and Weaver. There’s a chapter in my latest book called “What is Information?” I stand by it, but it’s under revision. I’m already moving beyond it and realizing there’s a better way of tackling some of these issues.

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