Peter Kreeft on the dictatorship of relativism

John Mallon (who studied under Dr. Kreeft at Boston College) has posted a recent interview with Peter Kreeft about relativism, Kreeft's book, A Refutation of Moral Relativism (Ignatius Press), and today's university students:

How about your students? Are today’s students so embedded in relativism that they have difficulty recognizing it when it is pointed out to them?

I’m afraid so. Alan Bloom wrote a book, The Closing of the American Mind, which was a difficult and scholarly confused kind of book, but it was a best-seller because of its first sentence. It started out something like this: “If you’re a college professor in America today there is one thing you can be certain, or nearly certain of, and that is that every student, or nearly every student, will believe, or think he believes, that truth is relative.

He wrote that about twenty years ago. Has there been any improvement since then?

There has been a protest. Students of mine at Boston College, which I think are smarter now. They are not more informed, but they know they’ve been cheated of something, and they are looking for it. You were one of the few bright non-relativists of your time. For now, for every one like you there are probably ten more. So I think that things are definitely looking up.

That was my next question, do today’s students think right and wrong are simply equally valid “choices” according to one’s “lifestyle?” Or do they recognize the squalor that has been bequeathed to them? That something is not right?

They recognize the squalor until it has anything to do with sex, and that’s the problem area. In fact, the origin of relativism is certainly there, we didn’t start being relativists because we wanted to fight a few more wars or do a few more tortures or a few more insider tradings, or something like that.

Read the entire interview.

Visit the Ignatius Insight author page for Peter Kreeft.

Comments

[tioedong]

If you want to see how bad relativism is, read the NYTimes and the American anthropology organization's defense of female genital mutilation...LINK
and link

If you want the gory details go link or LINK... HERE...

From a commenter on today's NYTimes article:In sum, Judy, if “anti-FGM activists” were to actually take the voices of these women seriously and listen to what they have to say on the topic (a stance that Shweder, Ahmadu, and other anthropologists advocate), then I think the tone of the debate would change dramatically changed as we come to understand why these women get circumcised and the meaningfulness of the practice to them...

But of course, they ignore that such women are taught not to complain, especially to an outsider...

[Dan]

The interview has a great insight that apparently Mussolini stated explicitly: fascism derives from relativism. It makes sense since relativism recognizes only power (in this regard it resembles radical (and even many elements of mainstream) feminism.)