Many years ago, an historian friend engaged in what I thought was and remain to believe was “soft relativity”. He had read Max Weber on the sociology of religion and come to the conclusion that Weber was a relativist. Each of Weber's books, one on ancient Judaism, one on ancient China, one on ancient India, using the best available scholarship of the time, were describing the distinctiveness of the various religions. The particular points of view and quirks of each are insular and therefore incomparable on a common yardstick. They were therefore all culturally equal and all that could be said was that human society was splendid in its diversity. But that was to read Weber incorrectly. Weber was showing that most great religions were each defective in that they came short of being rational, while Christianity was different in that it was wedded to reason, as Pope Benedict said a century later than Weber, by declaring that Greek rationality was an essential part of Christianity rather than simply a cultural artifact of the time with which might then over time become antiquated. Weber would and did go further. Only Protestantism was rational, for the reason, I suppose, that all Protestant experience is mediated by consciousness and so belief is an expression of thought, people feeling in their hearts that they have heard the voice of God, while Catholics insist on believing in miracles and other transactions between the natural and the supernatural. To Weber, some religions are superior to others rather than subject to a putative equality that is to be identified with the concept “relativism”.
The same sense of relativism is also applied to ethnic groups, where we honor each one for their distinctive qualities, including their cuisines, their mannerisms, their culture, their points of view on politics or religion, all or most of them devoted to the American dream that the next generation should do better than the older one, and that no ethnic group is inherently superior to one of the other, even if they are differentially subjected to persecution. That preferred belief, however, is at odds with an accurate picture of the dynamics of ethnic groups and it is not based on the order of when groups come to these shores, the sons and daughters of Plymouth Rock the most prestigious and down to the recent arrivals of Asians, because it is clear that Asians are regarded as the “model minority”, reflecting that ethnic groups are ranked by a set of economic and social measures, though not exclusively that in that West Virginia opioid addicted are treated with symphony, they being white, and of English and Scottish stock, while Black heroin addicts are treated with disdain, responsible for their own mess and many of them to be punished for that. So Blacks remain the lowest of the ethnic groups, even if in fact in my lifetime having been transformed from a caste to the status of an ethnic group, which means that they are allowed to eat with and sleep with members of other ethnic groups, at least by law, in that Italians and Jews and any number of other ethnic groups mostly prefer that they deal with their own kind.So the relativism of ethnic groups is a charade or at best an idealization which is generally recognized as not actually the fact.
Are there any groups or collectivities which are actually rather than putatively equal and so allowed to be left alone so as each to pursue their own cultural distinctiveness? Actually, there is one and this is deeply embedded in English and American law. It concerns the idea that every person, whether subject or citizen, is treated as equal under the law, which means each capable of going on with their own ways and aims, their own lives, everyone a culture of one, because no one is subject to intrusion by the law except by means that can be applied to any other person subject to law. That is a very high standard whereby law is viewed if it is to be considered legitimate and it reduces the idea of relativism to a perfectly objective standard of equality. The Founding Fathers were very concerned with just this issue. They went out of their way to make sure that criminal penalties, the bane of unjust monarchies, were made more equitable by including in the Bill of Rights, among other things, trial by jury and bail, so that a fair judicial system gave everyone a chance for an accuser to vindicate himself. And that idea has been refined so as to make the judicial system ever more equitable. The accused are entitled to counsel free of charge and are warned of their right not to admit anything. Yes, there are inequities, such as happened with lynching or unequal penalties ranked as one more repulsive than the other. That happens when the same drug is used in a different form by the rich and the poor, crack cocaine having a greater penalty than powder cocaine, presumably because the ravages to the poorer community are worse than the ravages to the individual Wall Streeters who snort up before continuing their stock trading. But the idea of law as a universalist principle remains. Killing Black people for traffic stops is thought illegitimate even if it still goes on.
It is very difficult, however, to remain the equipoise of what we might call the oxymoron of “absolute relativism” even with regard to law. It always seems that two kinds of law and order are separated from one another and that they are then ranked one superior to the other and in the present instance the valences are opposite to one another for political reasons. It would seem that all violence is bad and so subject to police and judicial powers. But that is not the case. Conservatives think that department store looting after a political demonstration is bad and should be prosecuted even though some police departments go easy on looters so as not to kill perpetrators and further incite violence while those same Conservatives will not find Jan. 6th insurrectionists as so blameworthy because it was a legitimate political protest that did turn ugly. Liberals, for their part, take the reverse view, that looting is a bad thing but not nearly as bad as trying to overthrow the government. So some law and order is better or worse than other law and order rather than regarding law and order as a single standard for allowing people to be free to cultivate their gardens or their political constituencies
Is abortion rights relative or absolute? Taking an absolute stand does not solve a problem if there are diametrically opposed absolutes waged with one another. Abortionists and anti-abortionists go past one another. Abortionists always side with the mother even with regard to late abortions because there are likely to be circumstances that favor it. Anti-abortionists are in favor of the fetus at whatever stage of development and regardless of the fact that many early stage embryos are not implanted or result in miscarriages. The Dobbs decision left the decision of when to allow abortion up to the states but no one seems happy with that in that both sides want Congress to enact either a national ban against abortion or anational permission for abortion to take place. A relativist position is that abortion is a cultural and historical matter and that Congress should pass a law where the two sides compromise and recognize the number of months of gestation whereby abortion would be allowed, adding certain caveats about incest, rape, age of the woman, and health of the woman. We will see if relativism prevails.
Here is an issue concerning relativism that is not identified with one political party or the other. That happens if you pursue the matter of relativism versus absolutism to a higher level of abstraction. Relativists think that absolutists are just one point of view among others. In that case, Catholics have their point of view and Musllims have another, each within the context of each of their histories including the families into which their families were born and having pet arguments and feelings that feel persuasive and dominant within their own group but neither persuasive nor compelling outside the group. So be it. We are all inevitably relativists. But absolutists think that relativists are mushy in that they do not get to the basic principles that support everyone and can be recognized as such as inevitable or merely factual. An atheist like myself may think religion is a human phenomenon but all of them get it wrong unless you get rid of supernaturalism and then it is no longer religion. It is also simply the case that slavery was bad, perhaps for the sociological reason offered by William Graham Sumner that it had been antiquated. Whether it was antiquated is true or false rather than a matter of opinion about, let’s say, Blacks are also God’s children or are separated from other human beings via an interpretation of Scripture.
So which one of the two encloses the other as an aberrant version of the single truth of either relativism or absolutism? I cannot find a clear political side to the question. There are Conservatives that think in an absolutist way, believing in natural law and that there cannot be more than two sexes rather than ascribe to a new fangled notion that sex is a matter of degrees while also accepting the relativist argument that people should be judged by their historical context and so the Founding Fathers not thought bad people because they had slaves. Burke, a founder of current Conservatism, was a relativist in that the present was a response to the weight of past generations, that legacy which legitimated current practice. And Liberals are absolutist in thinking that what the Founding Fathers said was a discovery rather than an invention of the nature of human rights and that we reapply those principles time and again under different circumstances even as recognizing that different groups have different points of view. The matter seems unresolved even if my own view of sociology is to regard social laws as immutable for otherwise how could society work? Friendship is as old as Gilgamesh and love between men and women as old as Samson and Delilah but there was a time before that, and so the basic question is unresolved.