The Cancer of Relativism

If there is no such thing as Objective Truth, then every opinion becomes equally valid. The Relativism informing the narrative of the contemporary Left spells the end of civilized discourse, indeed the end of Western Civilization itself. While this thesis will of course be dismissed as just another “far-right” conspiracy theory, evidence of the subtle but relentless assault on the efficacy of the Post-Enlightenment West’s devotion to Science and Reason is everywhere. That this assault is led by our “intellectuals” is absurd. Let me cite one stunning example of this trend.

In July of 2023, Rebecca Zhu of Canada’s Epoch Times published a piece on a recently released statement by educators in New Zealand announcing their intention of “modernizing” the teaching of Science in both their Secondary and Post-Secondary schools. What alarmed many science teachers in the country was that physics, chemistry and biology were never actually mentioned in the declaration. Michael Johnston of the U. of Melbourne saw the change of focus being proposed as a response to the U.N.’s Agenda 21 which is primarily concerned with Man’s impact on the Environment. Not surprisingly, subjects such as climate change, biodiversity, food supplies, etc. dominated the document in question. But without knowledge of the basic facts of Science, Johnston opined, meaningful discussion of these issues is utterly futile!

A July, 2024 article on a site bearing the title “Why Evolution Is True” discussed what it saw as the “decline of New Zealand science.” While the title is that of a book by Jerry A. Coyne published in 2009, the writer of the article is not identified. His main concern, however, is quite clear, and that is the insistence by the nation’s “intellectuals” that Indigenous “ways of knowing” need to be studied in the context of both the geographical and cultural milieus that produced them. This implicitly relativistic notion leads inevitably to the recommendation that, for example, Maori “ways of knowing” will henceforth be given equal consideration to those of Western Man in New Zealand’s schools. The writer of the article finds this attempt to equate primitive superstition with Reason and Science, utterly absurd. But really, it is just another example of the Left’s assault on so-called White Supremacy, an assault based on the ignorant assumption that traditional Western Intellectuals’ disdain for the various non-rational cultures encountered during the era of colonialism, was rooted in Racism rather than anything of genuine intellectual merit. To put it as simply as possible, Human Intelligence and Achievement are no longer significant factors in the valuations of the political Left. The genius of Socrates, Shakespeare and Galileo, apparently, in no way validated the assumption of Western colonialists that their civilization was light years more evolved than, let us say, that of the Maori of New Zealand. Hence the ludicrous determination of that country’s “intellectuals” to teach that Maori “ways of knowing” were just as worthy of respect as Western Rationalism. What this clearly entails is the subversion of the teaching of Objective Truth, at the behest of the political biases of the contemporary Left.