Month: June 2020

The recent killings of African-Americans by the police in a number of cities in the USA has prompted a great social uprising demanding change captured in the slogans “I Can’t Breathe”, “Black Lives Matter”, and “Defund the Police”. It is believed that these police killings are a result of a “systemic racism” inherent in all aspects of African-American lives, and there is a demand for change in these systems and institutions with the elimination of their oppression of  the day-to-day lives of African-Americans, as well as women and members of the LGBTQ community. Here we will attempt to give some thought to how this “systemic racism” arose and from what and where are its origins.

For someone such as myself who remembers the social upheavals of the 1960s in the USA, I had, at first, perceived the current protests as simply another event in a long line of events where African-Americans protested against their oppression and that these protests would be either brutally crushed or simply allowed to wallow and eventually fade away due to the short memories of those of us who dwell within the technological society.

But these protests appear to be different from the protests of the 60s. For one, they appear to have the support of the white majority in the country. In the 60s, the protests were fragmented with the whites protesting the war in Vietnam while the African-Americans expressed their anger and outrage over the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. This fragmentation is not present in the current protests going on not only in North America but around the world. They appear to have evolved into a “movement” rather than merely a protest and this movement has gathered a significant amount of momentum..

To begin to give thought to the history of North America is to note two basic facts: the history of North America begins with the genocide of its Native aboriginal peoples; and secondly, North America itself, for whites, has no history from before the Age of Progress. While the genocide against the Natives peoples was already well underway, the first 19 or so African slaves reached what were then the British colonies in Point Comfort, Virginia, near Jamestown, in 1619, brought by British privateers who had seized them from a captured Portuguese slave ship. This was over 150 years before the American Revolutionary War and the Constitution which resulted from it. In a somewhat incredible irony (based on superstition, perhaps), the slaves were usually baptized in Africa before embarking, the irony being that enslaving a human being is perhaps the most un-Christian action that a human being can do to another human being.

The “systemic racism” that is seen not only in North America but around the world wherever white Western Europeans be they English, Spanish, Portuguese, French or Dutch, through their imperial adventures, was established when they arrived at the various shores of lands that were alien to them. Their subjugation of the aboriginal inhabitants of those lands required a “morality”, a racism, that was the product of a perceived “superiority” either in their Christian faith or the result of what they perceived as the superiority of their “civilization” which found its concrete realization in the superiority of their weapons. The views of those conquered peoples by their conquerors were those of “savages” and “barbarians”. One can update this racism with a look at how America has treated those who have come under the oppression of its imperialism and its building of its empire. It should not be forgotten that the price to be paid for the realization of the American Dream at home is in the human blood shed by the victims of American imperialism abroad.

The view of Nature held by the Native peoples of North America, for instance, was quite different from that held by the white conquerors who came with Hobbes and Locke and the Protestant or Roman Catholic Christianity embedded in their consciousness. The vastness and intractability of the land created a fear that could only be overcome through a meeting with it being a relationship of conquest. This innate fear remains present even today and manifests itself in multivarious ways in the North American psyche.

The early settlers of North America were unique Europeans. They brought with them the Calvinist Protestantism (Puritanism) which was a break from the traditional Christianity of Europe, and they also brought with them the new revolutionary philosophies of Hobbes and Locke as well as those of Rousseau from France which were breaks from the contemplative tradition of ancient Greece given to Medieval Europeans from the writings of Aristotle and Plato.

Rousseau’s conflict with the English philosophers remains embedded within the consciousness of North Americans even today. Many of the commentaries on the need to change American society from today’s protesters speak of the USA’s failure to uphold the “social contract” with regard to its African-American communities and peoples. There is no questioning of the goals of the overall deeper drives that provide the stimulus for the calculating technological reasoning and its conquering of the necessities of Nature,  but rather, for a just participation in the society of which this conquering relationship is a primordial given. The desire is for the upholding of the promise held in the originating liberalism that would provide the equity, justice and liberty to allow participation in that drive and the benefits that result from technological mastery.

To understand North America it is necessary to understand the connections between the new physical and moral sciences of Newton and others and their acceptance by the Protestants that first came to what was a new land. The differences between ancient and modern science can be found in the writings on The Natural Sciences in this blog. The Natural Sciences: Historical Background Both Max Weber and the Marxist historians, for instance, have demonstrated the practical connection between the early Protestants and property as primarily due to the “worldly asceticism” of those Protestants. But the deeper connection lies in the metaphysical connections between the new sciences and the new Christianity of those Protestants.

The new physical sciences of Bacon, Galileo and Newton were accepted by the Calvinist Protestants because these sciences were a critique of Medieval Aristotelianism and thus of the Roman Catholicism which based some of its doctrine on the principles of Aristotle’s understanding of nature. The new sciences critiqued the  teleology of Aristotle’s science as causing human beings to view the world in a way in which it was not. The theologians criticized Aristotle’s science as a misleading road to “natural theology” that led human beings away from the Divine Revelation in the person of Jesus Christ and the reality of His Crucifixion. The tension between these two views existed within the framers of the American Constitution with Deists such as Jefferson, Washington and Franklin on the one hand and the practicing Protestant Founders on the other. The picture of Jefferson’s Bible illustrates that his Christianity would not sit well with most of today’s Christians in the USA.

How Locke made the Hobbesian view of nature compatible with the English speaking Protestantism of the early days of America is a subject that requires too much detail for this post. Suffice it to say that his doctrine of “comfortable self-preservation” as the highest end for human beings is hardly compatible with any notion of Christianity. The idea of “comfortable self-preservation” became re-worded as “the pursuit of happiness” in the final Declaration of Independence replacing Locke’s original word “property”.

Modern African-Americans have chosen the Rousseauian side of the tension between “natural law”” and “positive law” that was present in America from its beginnings, but the atheism of Rousseau would hardly find a place for the majority of them at the present time. At the heart of the current protests is the cry for the fulfillment of the “social contract” realized in the American Dream for all the citizens of the USA regardless of race.

To try to explore the reality of “systemic racism” and to provide some notes on its origins and its ultimate flowerings, it is necessary to speak of “liberalism”. In liberalism, freedom and reliance on technique are indissolubly linked, such that technology becomes the very ontology of American lives and defines who and what they are. This ontology itself is prior to any “-isms” and determines how those “-isms” are understood and interpreted by the people who hold them up as “ideals”. This ideal of what human beings are is encapsulated in the word “freedom”. This technological world-view is the common horizon that embraces both sides of what is currently understood as “the left” and “the right”. The “theory” and the “practice” within these “-isms” are indistinguishable and this must be understood if one is to gain access to the roots of who, what and how North America has become what and how it is.

The “systemic thinking” is prior to the systems and the institutions which are created from it and we must try, in this particular case, to understand how “racism” has become embedded in the systems and institutions that have been created in North America and that have since come to prominence around the world through the English-speaking and European empires and their victories in past historical wars and in the two great Wars of the 20th century. This is difficult for white people because that systemic thinking, in its commandeering, controlling and dominating stance towards the environment as “object” and in the novelty which it creates, prevents any reflection on its roots because it is primarily whites who have benefited from that thinking and its results and they have come to perceive that they must somehow be given the evolving truth of things. African-Americans wish to be a part of that hope and that truth, and to also benefit from that technological dominance that has made human beings the masters of nature. But the acceptance of the viewing comes at a cost.

The two most important documents relating to the establishment of American society and its institutions are its “Declaration of Independence” and its “Constitution”. The American Constitution begins: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Clearly, “the People” referred to “ourselves and our Posterity” i.e. the white founders. The African slaves, the Native Peoples, and women were not considered to be “the People”. The desire for “a more perfect Union” indicates the divisiveness present from the very beginnings of what is known as the USA.

The clarification of who gets to be a “person” and who doesn’t was at the core of the establishment of the “systemic racism” that is the bulwark of white societies and their economies. Determining a subservient order for those with darker skin allowed the American founding generation (and the generations after) to define “all men” and “the people” as “white men.” As a result, they guaranteed white men the rights and liberties promised by the Constitution while preserving a thriving economy based on racial oppression. It remains a matter of debate whether or not the American Civil War was due to “economic” factors rather than the freeing of the slaves of the South or whether the freeing of the slaves was itself an “economic factor”. Subsequent American history would suggest the former rather than the latter, and that the War was not undertaken with such “noble” motives as the subsequent mythology provides. It was a war over the price of commodities.

In “The Declaration of Independence”, the attempt to hold together the permanence of “natural law” with the changeableness of “positive law” is clearly in evidence: “”We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The ‘men’ who are ‘created equally’ are, of course, the bourgeois landowners and slave owners who framed the Declaration. The “pursuits” were meant to be enjoyed by a “leisure class” founded upon the labour of the slaves.

The key to how the Declaration and the Constitution came to be written was in the replacing of Locke’s concept of “property” with “the pursuit of happiness”. Locke’s original concept of property related to the body: each human being possessed a body through which it undertook “work” and in doing so made “worthless nature” amenable to human needs. If all “men” had a right to property, and primarily the property that was their own bodies, then slave-holding would, prima facie, be “unconstitutional”. White slaveholders and the States that benefited from slave holding would not agree to this, so as the Montpelier Organization notes: “The answer lies in the idea of compromise: the founders compromised their morals (many were recorded as being opposed to slavery), and power (in some cases, states bowed to slaveholding counterparts in order to ensure the Constitution would be ratified), in the name of economics. Slavery, when all was said and done, was both profitable and convenient for many white Americans—and not just in the South.” https://www.montpelier.org/learn/slavery-constitution-lasting-legacy The entry continues: “As lifelong bondage of enslaved African Americans became more financially viable, the indentured servitude of whites (their terms only lasted five to seven years), was phased out. The system proved itself so lucrative that law and legal precedent began to leave future governments leeway for prioritizing economy over morality.” Current events in American politics continue this compromise of morality to economy both with regard to the suppression of African-Americans and to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Two examples from literature illustrate how difficult it is for whites to gain some illumination of self-knowledge to recognize how they have benefited from systemic racism. The Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, accused the writer,  Joseph Conrad, of being “racist” in his great novella “Heart of Darkness”: https://polonistyka.amu.edu.pl/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/259954/Chinua-Achebe,-An-Image-of-Africa.-Racism-in-Conrads-Heart-of-Darkness.pdf, and also https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/11/06/the-trouble-with-heart-of-darkness. Today, statues of King Leopold II of Belgium are being torn down because of his imperial racist past. While there is no doubt that Conrad speaks out against, and condemns, this imperial racism in the novella, Achebe points to Conrad’s almost unconscious racism in Conrad’s use of symbols, motifs and metaphors in the novella which de-humanize the Africans that are presented there. A small point in Conrad’s defense, the descriptions Conrad uses are for all human beings, regardless of color, and of the thin veneer that is “civilization” separating us from the brutes; but the Africans are, nevertheless, still portrayed as brutes.

A second example is Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a source and inspiration for Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”. Twain’s novel is now the most censored book in North America (although this censoring is done with the best of intentions) as it uses language and terms denigrating African-Americans (the use of the “n-word”, for instance). But the novel, in illustrating Huck’s education and growth, demonstrates the need to overcome what had become “sivilization” as it was understood in the America of Twain’s time (and remains in our time), and that included the recognition of the “humanity” of African-Americans in the character of Jim. The core theme of the book is the search for a ‘higher morality” than that present in the America of his day and our day. Twain’s warning that “Those attempting to find a moral” in his book “would be shot” is part of his effort through his humour. If these two literary geniuses, Conrad and Twain, are to be labelled “racist”, it is difficult to see how we mere mortals can possibly avoid being called the same. It represents the long journey ahead for those of us who must attempt to overcome the “systemic racism” in our views of the world.

Under the future “technology of the helmsman”, the skin color of the “human resources” and “human capital” will be a matter of indifference. The corrosiveness of the nihilism that is at the heart of our technological calculative reasoning embraces both the American “Right” and the American “Left” within a common horizon greater than either. The American “Right”, those who would probably call themselves “Republicans” and the roots of whose thinking reach back to Locke, appear to be longing for some lost “golden age” which they do not specify exactly, though its paraphernalia seems to relate to the “lost cause” of the American Confederacy and its symbols of white supremacy and which is prior to the 20th century’s various migrations to America of people of colour, These Rightists adhere to the freedom of the individual to hold property and for the enforcement of the laws that have currently been institutionalized even though those laws prevent individuals from other races from ever attaining that property and the sense of feeling ownership for those laws created for the community. But both sides do not doubt the central fact of the North American dream which is to be realized in progress through technological advance.

This leads to a number of questions: do not the institutions as they exist and produce those benefits come from the same calculative rationality? are the benefits possible without those stifling institutions? can those institutions exist as participatory democracies since centralization and uniformity are part of the essence of technology? The spontaneity of freedom is made possible through the conquering of the spontaneity of nature. Both share the deeper assumptions that have made technological society possible.

Nevertheless, as I have written elsewhere, at the present time liberalism and its “values” and “ideals” are all we have, and it is our duty to ensure that the institutions and their laws which have been and are being created are directed in such a way that all human beings can enjoy the benefits of the dynamic technology that were originally envisioned in the writings of the philosophers who were the founders of what we call “modernity”.

 

 

History: Is it a science or an art?

History is different from the other Human Sciences, or indeed other sciences in general, in that the knowers or researchers cannot directly observe the past in the same way that the object of research can be observed and studied in the Natural Sciences. “Historiology” is the study of history in general, the search for what its essence is, what its purpose is. “Historiography”, that is, a study of the writings of history, is not a study of all of the past, but rather a study of those traces or artifacts that have been deemed relevant and meaningful by historians; and this choosing of artifacts and evidence is the most important aspect of the study of history as it attempts to aspire to “scientific research”. This is where the importance of “shared knowledge” comes into play; what we call our “shared knowledge” is “history” and what we choose to select is determined beforehand by our culture.

We must distinguish between “shared knowledge” or culture, what is commonly called history, and “personal knowledge” as independently acquired knowledge. By shared knowledge we mean the scientific or philosophic knowledge that a human being takes over from former generations or from others, what we would call “history”; personal knowledge is that knowledge, whether it be scientific or philosophical in nature, that a mature scholar acquires in his unbiased discourse which is as fully enlightened as possible regarding its limits and horizons with an awareness of its presuppositions within any area of knowledge i.e. what you are attempting to learn to do here in TOK .

In the modern, this distinction between personal and shared knowledge tends to lose its crucial significance due to our belief in progress. In TOK, it appears that we tacitly assign the same cognitive status to both shared and personal knowledge and this impacts how we understand history and what we feel its importance is to our futures. What we deem to be “historical” first appears and coincides with ratio, calculation, and thought understood as ratio and calculation. What is chosen to be called “history” arises with a pre-determined understanding and definition of what human being is (the animale rationale) and this, in turn, determines what “will be held to account” in the selection of what is deemed to be important in relation to that understanding of human being.

The question of whether history is an art or a science is as old as “historiography” itself. Aristotle in his Poetics distinguishes between the poet and the historian and the philosopher and the historian. The historian presents what has happened while the poet is concerned with the kind of things that might, or could, happen: “therefore poetry is more philosophic and more serious than history, for poetry states rather the universals, history however states the particulars”. (Poetics 1451a36-b11) History might be called pre-philosophic in that it concerns itself with particular human beings, particular cities, individual kingdoms, or empires, etc. The historian must choose between the important and the unimportant things when writing her report, and in her choices illuminate the universal in the individual event so that the purpose of her recording is meant to be a possession for all times. You have done much the same in your Exhibition (if you have done it correctly). The presentation is analogical.

The availability of those relevant traces of the past and their relevance and meaning may be influenced in many ways by factors such as ideology, perspective or purpose, but this is a “modern” version of how we examine things. As knowers we seek to clarify the past and to determine whether or not what is claimed is true. In doing so, we will face problems of reliability and attitudes, and may consider the purpose of historical analysis and the issue of the nature of historical truth. “Historical truth” is bound together with our understanding of truth as “correctness” and “correspondence” arising as it does from ratio and calculation.

The spirit of historicism (the understanding of time as history) permeates every aspect of every text and every approach to the study of and knowledge of the things of our world, and it is particularly present in the IB program. Plato viewed time as “the moving image of eternity”, an infinite accretion of “nows”; we tend to view time as the “progress” of the species towards ever greater perfection, much like how we view the latest models of our technological devices and gadgets as being more “fitted” towards accomplishing our ends and purposes. Our “evolution” and “adaptation”, we believe, are signs of our progress and growth as a species as we move towards ever greater “perfection”, both moral and physical. It is sometimes called “the ascent of man”, but such a concept of human being, as an “ascending” creature, is only possible within the technological world-view.

When we speak of History as an area of knowledge, we are speaking of “human history” not the history of rocks or plants or other objects that are also part of our world. These are covered in the Group 4 subjects as part of the Natural Sciences. History as an area of knowledge deals with human actions in time whether by individuals or communities so it is considered a “human science” for the most part, and the approach to the study of it is a “scientific” one. This attempted approach to the study of history is the same as that carried out in the Natural Sciences wherein history is looked at “objectively” and demands are made of it to give us its reasons. We seek for the “causes” of events. This approach has given rise to one of the complaints against history and how it is studied nowadays: we can only learn about the past; we cannot learn from it. Nor do we today feel that we need to. This dearth of knowledge of history is most in evidence in America, and this is not surprising as America is the heartland of technological dynamism.

The spiritual crisis of our “civilization”, our “culture”, and thus our history, is that the historical moment of technological mastery of the earth comes forth from the same science which gives us the historical sense or historicism. In the past reason, virtue and happiness were united as giving to human beings purpose and meaning for their actions. The “age of progress” realized its goal of freedom in the democratic equality of all human beings. But what evidence is there for the equality of all human beings when the evidence from the biological sciences would clearly suggest that human beings are not equal when it comes to what are considered the most important matters and traits? Not all human beings are “fit” for the ends which our culture aspires to. The question of this “fittedness” is the dark question of “justice” in our time. Josef Stalin’s cynical statement that “Only the winners get to write the history” equates “winning” with the ever-evolving process of “truth” and its realization of the “empowerment” of those who can claim to be “victorious”.

Modern science has shown us that the “values” of rationalism are not finally sustained in the whole of the things that are; that is, Nature is finally not rational and it is only human beings that give to nature its “rationality” and, thus, its Being. Reason is only an instrument and it is used to provide meaning and purpose to our willing, to our desiring and creating, our knowing and making. The “happiness” sought for for all human beings is only achievable through the “lowering” of the understanding of what that “happiness” is; and its foundations are not to be found in “reason” and “virtue” (which only the few are capable of) but in the instincts and their “liberation” (which is a real possibility for the many). “Happiness” as it is understood in its modern form is only possible where “nobility” and “greatness” are forgotten or are not important as ends and have been replaced by “recognition” or “15 minutes of fame”. Human beings know that they create their own “values”, and this is upheld by both the nihilists of the political right and the democratic libertarians of the political left.

History: The Absolutist and Relativist Approaches:

Knowledge Questions: What methods do historians use to gain knowledge? What is unique about the methodology of history compared to other areas of knowledge?
On what criteria can a historian evaluate the reliability of their sources? If our senses are sometimes unreliable, does this mean that eyewitness testimony is an unreliable source of evidence? Have technological developments enabled us to observe the past more directly? What challenges does archive-based history emphasize about how knowledge is shared and preserved? Is there less emphasis on collaborative research in history than there is between researchers in other areas of knowledge? How do the methods and conventions of historians themselves change over time?

History deals with memory and time or temporality, the past, present and future. The knowledge questions and issues that arise in the study of history rest in two mutually exclusive positions with regard to the writing of history (historiography) and the “re-searching” or study of history (historiology). The two positions are commonly referred to as the absolutist position and the relativist position. The discussion below attempts to illustrate both positions.

According to relativism, all human thought is historical and hence unable to grasp anything eternal or “unhistorical”; there is no permanence to things or to thoughts. Plato views time as “the moving image of eternity”. According to Plato (an absolutist), philosophizing means to leave the cave where things may be viewed in their “absolute” truth beyond opinion. To we moderns, all philosophizing and thinking essentially belongs to the “historical world” or the cave, what we call our “culture”, “civilization”, and involves opinions based on these contexts. This belief is what is called historicism and it is a recent arrival on the historical scene (early 19th century) but it continues to gain preeminence in our thinking and viewing of the world as it erodes what we have come to believe during the age of progress. The two most prominent thinkers of historicism are the German philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger; and while these thinkers are reviled in the English-speaking West, their thought permeates many aspects of the shared knowledge in the West through its interpretations and applications by lesser thinkers.

History always concerns “individuals” whether those individuals be individual groups, individual human beings, individual achievements, individual “civilizations” or the one “individual process” of human civilization from its beginnings to the present, and so on. In the IB, Group 3 subjects are called “Individuals and Societies” and History is listed as a Group 3 subject although it is given a special distinction as an Area of Knowledge in TOK. History can be our “personal history” or our “shared history”, and both provide knowledge of some type. The historical sense shows us that we create history, whether by “just doing it” as far as our own actions are concerned or by living in a society along with others and sharing their beliefs, customs, etc. The outcomes of our personal and social/political actions are matters of chance so we study history so as to control the outcomes making chance as ineffective as possible. History is determined by the technological and its rendering is “a giving an account of” or “giving an account for”.

History and the approach to it is most closely related to inductive argumentation similar to experimentation in the natural sciences. Things are explored through what is called research, and an attempt is made to arrive at the “timeless” philosophic questions regarding the incident, individual or event chosen in order to get at its “what”, “why”, and “how”. This method is possible because of the positivism that lies at the ground of how we view the world: we no longer discern any difference between historical and philosophical questions. The concepts which we use are viewed as entirely historical in that they are seen as products of our own individual societies and their historical backgrounds. Technology and The Human Sciences Pt 2: Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx

Is the study of history relevant? What is the purpose of its study? Many people today hold the relativist view that the standards that we use to make judgements in history are nothing more than the ideals adopted by our society or our “civilization” that are embodied in its way of life or its institutions. But, according to this view, all societies have their ideals, cannibal societies (indigenous societies, if you like) no less than “civilized” ones, fascist societies as well as democratic ones. If the principles of historical choice are sufficiently justified by the fact that they are accepted by a society such as is understood by the pragmatists, are the principles of fascism or fanaticism or cannibalism as defensible or sound as those of democracy or “civilized” life?

If there is no standard higher than the ideal(s) of our society,  are we unable to take a critical distance from that ideal? But the mere fact that we can raise the question of the worth of the ideals of our own society shows that there is something in human beings that is not in slavery to society, call it “freedom” if you will, and that we are able (and obligated) to look for a standard with reference to which we can judge the ideals of our own as well as any other society (c.f. Plato and the Cave). All societies are caves. This standard that we are driven and obligated to search for, according to Plato, is the Good, the “best society” or regime, “the good life”, the “good human being”, etc. One of the purposes of the study of history is its aid in helping us to discover what these are through the “shared knowledge” that has been handed down and over to us.

Our modern study of History teaches us that we can become wise in all matters of secondary importance, but that we must remain ignorant in the most important matters: the historian cannot have any knowledge regarding the ultimate principles of his/her choices i.e. regarding their soundness or unsoundness other than blind preferences. Our inability to gain any genuine knowledge (of the absolutist type) of what is good or right or to recognize all preferences as equally respectable leads to the position that only unlimited tolerance is in accordance with reason; but this leads to an “absolutist” position from a position that rejects all “absolutist” positions.

Absolutist positions, so it is said, are based upon the false premise that human beings can know the good. The Chinese, for example, wish to tell the Japanese what needs to be included in their textbooks regarding Japanese behaviour and atrocities during WW 2. With the relativist position, the Japanese are correct in rejecting this intrusion. Japanese citizens cannot know what behaviours occur when societies become imperial, including their own. What, then, is the purpose for studying history? What “truth” can we learn from it? What standards need to be applied to it? Parallel studies can be made with regard to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or to the history of African-Americans. Clearly, Americans are being given different views of their imperial wars and their domestic oppression of their people than the views of those who are suffering from those imperial wars and that oppression. The current Covid-19 pandemic and the protests over police killings of African-Americans illustrate that the “truth” and the “facts” of science and history are now being put to the test as they clash with the desires and views of the political populists.

The relativist position has a respect for individuality and a respect for diversity. Tolerance is one ideal or “value” among many and is not intrinsically superior to its opposite: intolerance. But it is practically (in practice) impossible to leave this at the equality of all choices or preferences. If this equality of choices is the case, then genuine choice is nothing but resolute or deadly serious decision. Such decision is more akin to intolerance than to tolerance. One sees these outcomes of these decisions in the world’s daily news events or in the discussions that you may be having in your TOK classes.

The relativist position is a late product from the “age of progress” and it is also a consequence of the thinking contained in “logical positivism”. The “belief in progress” was the belief that the current age is superior to all previous ages in that the evolution of the “historical process” showed a “progression” to the current historical situation which was far superior to previous civilizations, much like the human species in its evolution is “superior” to the apes from which it evolved; this superiority rests in reason. The past was only a preparation for the present. The positivists’ approach began as an overturning of the idealism of Hegel in favour of a realism that looked at “facts” and “reality”, and that life itself delivers evidence of this progress so that the “winners of history” are somehow in touch with an  “evolving truth of history” and therefore get to write the history. That which is new is superior to that which is old.

We are in need of historical studies to familiarize ourselves with the complexity of these issues.