On Relativism: 1- Individualism

First of all I would like to apologize beforehand to my friends FW & Python. I am not writing this series of entries now because of our conversations, but rather because this subject has been on my mind a lot lately... Our conversations were one result of that, this series is another.

I want to complain,

I want to complain, not only of myself, or merely of my people. But of nearly all people! For these days they are mostly forgetting to add the word "all" before the word "people".

These are my thoughts & feelings (strong feelings, actually!) on the subject of relativism.

Now, relativism is the faceless daughter of the sweeping popularity of Individualism,

Individualism as a mental school fought very hard to cut the ties people had to their ancestors & their peers. In short it tried very hard to sever all ties between all people.

In stressing that each man should choose for himself, it refused the idea of Common Sense.

In stressing that each person was free to choose whatever he wants to think (which is a noble cause, I am sure), that Men should think for themselves (Ah! if only that could come true), it also refused the use of the word "should"... which is effectively cutting its own throat!

As G. K. Chesterton put it (please don't hate me for quoting him again!) "Individualism kills individuality, precisely because individualism has to be an 'ism' quite as much as Communism or Calvinism.".

Meaning that for Individualism to become a mental institution, people had to belong to it. & when people did belong to it, they no longer thought for themselves anymore. Instead they were once again united under a thought-out idea, and this time it happened to revolve around the self.

"So far from really remaining a separate self, the man became part of a communal mass of selfishness." (conclusion of Chesterton's statement from which above quote was taken)

Which has been proven historically to be an inevitable outcome.

Men will always gather around a flag. To try to tell them to never gather around a flag is useless. The question then arises as to what flag Men should gather around.

Now concerning "should"s, if course there has to be a "should"!

Individualism (with the help of relativism) has led us to believe that we humans are all so different, and that it is quite natural (& healthy) for us to adopt completely different & mostly opposite views on every major & minor subject. It has stressed that this is perfectly OK.

Of course nobody would object to the observations upon which this idea is based, but I will strongly object to closing our eyes to the other plain observations, which show that we are all still humans!

Individualism values Logic above all else, & so implies a common set of rules for evaluating situations & standards. So at least Logic should be common.

But in addition to Logic, we all have the same needs, desires & weaknesses, don't we?

We all are pursuing pretty much the same things & we all are pretty much failing to get them! Now doesn't that mean anything at all?

How have we been led to believe that we are so terribly different?

The ancient thinkers noticed first how Nature was full of goups of things that are very similar. All horses belong to Horse, all men belong to Man. They argued to which extent that made them similar (and maybe even connected). Hiraclites, Plato & others devoted great attention to the problem of universals. They understood that to decide what we mean by Man is to decide whether we can know anything about Man.

It's drawing the line between the objective & the subjective.

It's drawing the border around Truth.

And I think we need Truth... Don't we?