Soft Relativism and the Malaise of Modernity
Russell McNeil
April 4, 1997

	The book "Malaise of Modernity" is extracted from the much 
larger philosophical work called "Sources of the Self -- the Making of 
the Modern Identity."   That work has been described as significant.  
Review comments include the following:

	"Surely one of the most important philosophical works of the last 
quarter of a century."
	    --Jerome Bruner

	"Undoubtedly one of the most significant works in moral 
philosophy and the history of ideas to appear in recent decades." 
               --Frances S. Adeney, Theology Today

	"Taylor has taken on the most delicate and exacting of 
philosophical questions, the question of who we are and how we 
should live...and he has made this an adventure of self-discovery for 
his reader. To have accomplished so much is an important 
philosophical achievement." 
               --New Republic

	On this work "Malaise of Modernity," which outside of Canada is 
titled "The Ethics of Authenticity" and which is which is derivative of 
the larger "Sources of Self," review comments go as follows:

	"The great merit of Taylor's brief, non-technical, powerful 
book...is the vigor with which he restates the point which Hegel (and 
later Dewey) urged against Rousseau and Kant: that we are only 
individuals in so far as we are social...Being authentic, being faithful to 
ourselves, is being faithful to something which was produced in 
collaboration with a lot of other people...The core of Taylor's argument 
is a vigorous and entirely successful criticism of two intertwined bad 
ideas: that you are wonderful just because you are you, and that 
respect for difference' requires you to respect every human being, and 
every human culture--no matter how vicious or stupid." 
               --Richard Rorty, London Review of Books

	"Reading Taylor's unexpected but always perceptive judgments 
on modernity, one becomes forcefully aware of the critical potential of 
that old philosophical injunction `know thyself'. This little book points to 
the importance of public reflection and debate about who we are. It 
also forcefully draws attention to their absence from our public 
culture." 
               --Ben Rogers, Manchester Guardian

	Taylor challenges a few pet ideas. Hits us all right where we live. 
Many of the precious codes, beliefs, and attitudes that many of us 
moderns espouse are misguided. More to the point: our basic values 
are in fact, debased, deviant, and meaningless! 

	Fighting words! Charles Taylor makes more than fine theoretical 
philosophical distinctions in this Massey Lecture. He's hits home. He's 
talking about us. He's talking about the criteria we use to make the 
choices we do; the careers we follow; the very impulse to "career;" the 
friends we make, the reasons  we choose those friends; the music we 
listen to; the reasons we listen to that music; the art we enjoy or avoid; 
the books we read or don't; the popular culture we absorb, the 
television we watch; the movies we select and why; the political 
positions we hold--or don't;  the people we love; the people we 
abandon; the questions we ask or don't; the lectures we give or dare 
not; the BA papers we write or should have!

	This is a book about the art of living, loving, and what it means 
to be human in the modern world.

	Of course it's controversial. It takes a strip off all of us. The 
report is  dismal. In all three areas: living, loving, and being human, we 
fail. And the failure is a major reason our culture is in distress. 

	Distress, malaise? The red flags are out there. Have we 
processed this yet? I'm a maritimer. I was born 51 years ago in a 
vibrant coal town, above coal seams teaming with human labour, a 
few hundred yards from a sea teaming with fish. In less than half a 
century the seams were emptied and the sea made sterile. The cod 
are all but gone.  Monday's movie Margaret's Museum here at 10:30 
explores the roots of that particular small town malaise. The movie -- 
set against a backdrop of viscous human exploitation -- explores, 
among other things, why living and loving are impossible in a modern 
industrial hell. That movie could have been made right here in 
Nanaimo -- our local history until the 1950's at least, parallels that 
sketched in Margaret's Museum.

	What is the connection to this? Taylor describes three 
interrelated malaises: one moral; one related to instrumental reason; 
and one related to a loss of freedom. The second of these, the 
malaise related to the rise in instrumental reason is one in which 
"rational" decisions are made increasingly on the basis of economic 
efficiency. It is easy in such a world to justify any means to achieving 
broader social ends: the effective sacrifice of the bodies and souls of 
the men and women in a small coal mining towns hidden away on 
Vancouver Island, Cape Breton Island or Wales, was a small 
"economic" price to pay for the enormous "benefits" of the then "coal 
based" energy economy of the western world. 

	As Taylor points out in several places here, instrumental "logic" 
obfuscates, obscures true meaning. It is really a kind of fuzzy logic 
designed to persuade through the magic of mathematics and statistics 
while ignoring, as often as not, the real human values instrumental 
reason circumvents in the exclusive pursuit of economic justifications! 
You can think of lots of examples of stuff like this. Think about how it 
works. Was putting a road though Malaspina and Nanaimo the `right ' 
thing to do? Is clear cutting old growth forests in B.C. the right thing to 
do?  Should you get married? Should you go to grad school? What is 
the right thing to do?  It is interesting when we scan our thinking on 
questions like these -- ranging from the very personal to the broadly 
social -- how often we admit to two conflicting responses: an inner 
sense of the right thing to do, and an external answer dictated by 
instrumental reason.  Do you understand what I am getting at here?

	The instrumentally guided decisions our culture has "made for 
us" in industrial decisions over the past few centuries has brought us 
to the brink of global disaster. We have instrumentally reasoned our 
species to the edge of an abyss. We're talking  big time life support 
here. Ozone depletion isn't an academic issue  anymore. For the first 
time in the few billion years life has been  working itself out here, the 
quality and quantity of solar radiation  reaching the biosphere is 
changing, in a fundamental way. We are  messing with the system, 
water, land and air, and messing with it at a time global population is 
expected to double from 5 to over 10 billion people in your lifetimes. 
Something has got to give. It's giving now. The tropical rain forests--
the  lungs of the earth are disappearing, species extinctions continue 
at an  unprecedented and alarming rate, greenhouse warming is on 
the way,  and the AIDS pandemic (which incidentally may be linked in 
a curious way to global stress), now in its 15th year, continues to 
expand  unchecked, and seemingly uncheckable.

	Of course we -- each of us -- should respond with political 
outrage. In fact we respond with political apathy. This is the picture of 
malaise. While Taylor attributes large parts of this malaise to things 
like instrumental reason -- as I have just talked about, and  soft 
despotism--a loss of freedoms, the main problem is right here. It is in 
the mirror. It is us. We have embraced a malevolent -- evil -- value,  
and,  it is killing us.

	What is this evil "value?" Its kindest characterization is 
"individualism". What matters most in my life, is my life, and my self 
fulfillment. My  beliefs, my values, my codes, my likes, my loves, my 
attitudes, and my aspirations come from within and I have a right to 
carry out my life projects free of  hassle and interference from others 
as long as I confer on others those same basic rights. I do my thing. 
You do yours. Here is our new social contract: I make no value 
judgments about you. You make no value judgments about me. 
Different strokes for different folks--peachy, peachy, peachy keen!!!

	I'm not sure about you, but coming of age as a student in the 
60's and 70's, this was really our currency. Our life paths were 
nobody's business but our own. All paths were equal. Self definition 
took various forms: coming  out, dropping out, tuning out, Maharishi 
worship, drug worship, nihilism, communism, spiritualism, apathy, 
activism, sex. It didn't really matter. The interest categories may have 
shifted today, but the impulse to self-fulfillment hasn't.

	Authenticity here takes the form of a "soft relativism." which 
disallows the claim that any way of being is "higher" than any other. 
The "good  life," in modern terms, is whatever the individual espouses. 
In fact  there is no moral position here at all. Morality is however you 
define it subjectively. "If it feels good, do it."

	So? What's wrong with this soft relativism? It seems like the 
ultimate in freedom. You cam rise or sink. But it is your choice--what 
Taylor calls a "liberalism of neutrality."

	What's wrong? Two things. Soft relativism, or authenticity 
"improperly understood" is used to justify two "evils." Evils? Having 
read Eichmann we're ready to listen up. Soft relativism--breeds evil. 
Okay. How?

Evil Number One: rejection of transcendent values

	One: soft relativism is used to reject anything and everything 
that  transcends the self. And what transcends the self? Just about 
everything.  the past does, nature does, citizenship does, religion or 
spirituality does, duties  of solidarity do, the environment does--to 
name a few.

	Let's try a few on.

	How about the past? The past is irrelevant. Try an example. 
How would a soft relativist approach a native land claim? What values 
does soft relativism attach to musty old commitments made by our 
great grandparents? Do we have any responsibility for any acts done 
by our predecessors? In the "flattened world," Taylor describes,  the 
answer is a simple "no," by definition. The past is beyond us. The  past 
has nothing to do with us.  As moderns we found ways of betraying old 
land treaties.  First, we "discover" a modern economic instrumental 
argument which -- had we had such an argument available to us two 
or three hundred years ago, we claim we would never have done the 
deal in the first place. With these modern "instrumental arguments" in 
hand we claim we are now "smarter" than our great grandparents were 
and therefore are completely justified in our betrayal: of course we 
don't call it betrayal--we break our treaties and betray our past with the 
stroke of a pen by inventing a legal concept called extinguishing: the 
treaties our ancestors signed become "extinguished:"  so eerily similar 
to the "language rules" used by the nazis to "extinguish" the citizenship 
and then the lives of millions during the holocaust.

	How about nature? Is there anything innately true about the 
"nature" of  all human beings.  For the soft relativist, there is nothing in 
the nature of human values which is innate. Sure there are values 
many of us hold in common--but that's a matter of choice, not a matter 
of nature.  So don't look to nature for the threads that bind--there are 
no threads.

	Duty follows a similar analysis. Citizenship and solidarity are 
matters of choice. If citizen responsibility turns you on, great. If not, 
that's great too. The very "idea" of community and solidarity to 
community loses meaning and importance under a soft relativist 
stance. At best communities are disposable, temporary. What kinds of 
communities suffer this fate? All of them. 

	Our families are communities--disposable.  Our friends form a 
community--disposable. There are larger communities too: 
neighbourhood, city,  province, nation, continent, world. All of these 
become expendable when they no longer serve individual interest. 
Add to these the many possible cross alliances we form in our lives. 
The College is a community--Liberal Studies is a community. Men 
form a community as do women, young people, old people, people of 
color, gay people, people who have been abused, people who have 
suffered from persecution. Workers form communities called unions. 
These cross alliances serve valid functions for us. They provide 
opportunities for us to act in common cause around issues that require 
collective support. The vibrancy of communities depends on the active 
engagement of all people who identify with the community--not only 
those who need the community. 

	As soft relativists we may indeed ally ourselves with 
communities but those alliances are at best temporary. Soft relativists 
abandon all of these communities the moment they no longer serve 
our purposes--of course this abandonment means that  there was no 
solidarity in the first place.  The communities are at best weak -- we 
characterize our experience in them as "apathy."  

	Membership in any of these communities can be seen in 
Rousseauian terms as analogous to the process of alienating part of 
what we are to a sovereign idea. In return for the protection of 
community we accept the duty of solidarity: we are prepared to pay a 
price. Solidarity requires that we be willing to step out of what is in our 
personal best interest when family is threatened, friends are in need, 
fellow workers are treated unfairly, or fellow citizens are persecuted. 
Solidarity  requires we be willing to make huge sacrifices if called to do 
so. Soft relativism permits us to ignore that call when duty lies outside 
our personal space. 

	What goes for community goes for the life support upon which 
all  communities depend: the environment. What's the nature of our 
duty here? Soft relativism ignores the question. Again, it is up to the 
individual. The very idea of "duty" to the environment implies that there 
is a direct connection between personal values and the commons: 
water, air and soil. If we accept connection we accept duty and 
sacrifice when called to do so. Duty to cod? Is this a strange idea?  
Duty to old growth forest or eagle habitat. What sacrifices are we 
prepared to make to do our duties here. What is our duty to earth and 
air? How do we express this duty in our lifestyles? What cars will we 
drive--will we drive at all? When a local developer plans to devastate a 
heron habitat in North Nanaimo or a spawning stream in South 
Harewood, how do we express our duty then?

	All of these things: history, community, family, unions, nature,  
the environment, transcend the self.  Soft relativism is used to reject 
anything that transcends the self when convenient. Duty is at best 
optional. 


Evil Number Two: Utility in Relationships

	Evil number two: relationships. For a soft relativist a relationship 
is defined in terms of self fulfillment. Any other relationship serves no 
useful purpose. Relationships come with riders and limitations. Duties 
can be suspended on the first rainy day. Loyalty has limits. What is our 
duty to a marriage partner who suffers a severe physical or mental 
disability? What is our duty  to a friend who falls on hard times? or to a 
colleague who falls into disrepute? or to a parent in old age? or to a 
neighbour who is arrested for a horrendous crime? or to a fellow 
citizen who suffers from persecution? or to the man across the street 
with AIDS? or to the street urchin in Thailand? or to a beggar at 
Granville and Davie?

	For Taylor soft relativism is inauthentic. It is authenticity 
"improperly understood."  There are no moral horizons for any of these 
questions. We may reject anything that transcends the self and, 
anyone who is unimportant to self fulfillment. Is this modernity? Is this 
malaise? Are these evils?


Discussion

	How can something as seemingly precious as "individuality" do 
so much harm? Wasn't individualism the greatest by-product of the 
enlightenment; wasn't reason and "science" its greatest gift?

	How did we get into this mess? Where did this notion of moral 
"relativity" come from?   From science? The concept of relativity in 
modern physics asserts that physical values like time and space have 
only relative meanings. Perhaps we can blame Einstein for our 
malaise? Yet Einstein never did do away with absolutes. In fact, 
Einstein  gave us a deeper understanding of space and time by 
describing how  they were linked. Sure it is no longer possible to make 
absolute claims about the sequence of events in space or time, but it 
is possible to make absolute claims about something deeper, the 
space-time interval. Furthermore, within any reference frame the 
subjective experience of space and time never changes. So let's not 
blame physics for relativism.

	Perhaps then moral relativity can be thought of in a similar way. 
Perhaps there still are moral absolutes in the modern world. All we 
need to do is to define them in a deeper more meaningful way. This 
offers the possibility that relativism can be understood in  "harder," 
more connected ways. This form of relativism--more like Einstein's--
would allow for differentiation against a background of differing life 
experiences,  and differing frames of reference.  

	Taylor talks soft relativism as a "deviant" form of atomism bread 
by a combination of mobility and instrumental reason.  This deviant 
atomism expresses itself in our cultures: popular culture and high 
culture, as nihilisms, postmodernisms, and other variants. If I may 
offer a modest opinion: these deviant disconnected ideas make no 
god damn sense. Every atom in nature is connected to every other 
atom: connected and affected by universal fields of force and energy -- 
atoms have no choice, no option, no will to step outside and invent a 
new physics. Soft relativists seem to feel they can do that in the 
human domain.

	Let's try an example? Abortion. Pro choice favours choice 
including the  choice to abort because it protects and affirms the 
dignity of a woman's right to sovereignty over her body. Pro life 
opposes such a choice because it denies the dignity of the life of the 
fetus.

	As radically opposed as these positions are, there is common 
ground around the question of dignity. Human right and human dignity 
lie at the core of both positions.  There is a way in which both 
arguments can be seen as arguments for human rights to life and to 
dignity. The core values are the same. Switching reference frames 
leads to different articulations. This doesn't solve the problem, but it 
might allow us to respect the possibility that there are authentic moral 
claims on both sides and that both sides experience subjectively 
identical moral experiences. 

	So, back to authenticity.

	Taylor has attempted to take us towards a perspective in which 
true authenticity is seen not as an expression of a soft or deviant 
position, but as a valid ideal when "properly understood."

	Taylor traces the roots of this new idea to an 18th century 
concept that humans are endowed with an intuitive moral sense of 
right and wrong. That contrasts with the older computational model 
that morality was laid out on a cosmic grid of truths and consequences 
(i.e. the Great Chain of Being): step outside the grid and you sink into 
the  appropriate circle of hell.

	The road to this newer position is traced from Plato's idea of the 
good  through Saint Augustine's idea of reflexive self awareness. 
Rousseau expresses it as coming from a notion of morality which 
follows the voice of nature within us. Moral salvation comes from 
"recovering" authentic moral contact with self. One is free when one 
decides for oneself what concerns us, and not by external influences. 
Hey, at first blush this Rousseau stuff sounds a lot like the 
individualism we have been dumping on here. I assure you it isn't. The 
key to the difference is the phrase, "not by external influences."

	Taylor makes this distinction clear. The freedom that comes 
from this  personal "work" or "recovery" is not a negative freedom. 
Negative freedom is the freedom to do whatever we want without 
interference. But this is really the opposite of what Rousseau means. 
Rousseau is talking about a recovery of something that is already 
there. 

	Negative freedom, the freedom to do whatever attracts us 
usually means the freedom to follow a social convention; the freedom 
to assume values that come not from recovering authentic moral 
contact with ourselves but from someplace else. We could call this 
"cult" freedom.  It's as if the world were a giant supermarket offering 
hundreds of prepackaged belief systems from National Socialism to 
Heavens Gate. We go shopping. We choose the one that "feels" best 
for us without reference to internal recovery. In its extreme it may 
express as "seig heil" or a trip to Sirius, or voyage to Halle-Bopp under 
a purple shroud.  In more mundane forms this expresses itself as it 
does for many of us as a "mood" morality: we blow with the winds -- do 
whatever our moods dictate with little reference to a moral framework.

	But such choices have nothing to do with following a voice within 
or  making moral contact with our self. It is as if each of us roams the 
world and picks up the most appealing prepackaged belief system we 
can find. What soft relativism really offers is the freedom to belong to 
the cult of our choice, the freedom to follow "a flow".  Rousseau's idea 
of individual freedom is completely uninfluenced by any flow.

	This contrasting idea of freedom (Rousseau's) amplifies the idea 
of individualism which proclaims that each of us has an original way of  
being human.  If I am not human in my way I miss the whole point of 
being human at all. This is a powerful idea. Cults and conformity 
threaten this human right. Cults and conformity are a threat because 
cults and conformity inhibit us from following the authentic voice 
within.  Cults and conformity make us feel that we are "doing our own 
thing"  We in fact are not doing our own thing, we are choosing from a 
menu of "things" out there, choosing one, and calling it ours. 
Discovering "our own thing" is what recovery requires. And that 
requires work. But it guarantees uniqueness.

	How do we do the work of discovering our own thing? How do 
we discover authenticity "properly understood?"  First, we recognize 
that human life is dialogical. We discover and recover our identity in 
dialogue with "significant others."  Second, we recognize that things 
take on meaning only against a  background of intelligibility-a horizon 
of significance

	Taylor discusses the example of non-standard sexual 
orientations in developing his argument. He notes how justifications 
here can be based on the contemporary soft relativistic 
understandings of authenticity. One decides to follow a gay lifestyle 
because of "choice."  It's one of those neat packages out there. The 
subjectivist position underlying "soft relativism" implies that no one 
"choice" is better than another.

	So when choice is the reason for following this path, the path is 
really no more significant than say a preference for tall people, or red 
hair. The soft relativistic choice to be gay is completely without 
significance.

	The assertion of a same-sex orientation and life has to be done  
differently if it is to have significance. It has to come from an 
examination of what is our nature, and that is unique for each of us. 
and it has to be made in dialogue with others. And it has to be done 
against a horizon of significance. To be significant the assertion must 
derive from a conversation with meaning. We don't just choose but we 
choose against a horizon. And what horizons are significant are not of 
our choosing.

	The infinite variety of unique identities that emerge authentically 
from the process of meaningful conversation against intelligible and 
significant horizons are equally significant. The identities are 
significant because they encompass equally significant bases for 
comparison. 

	What is it really that makes men and women equal? What is the 
basis for equality in terms of authenticity properly understood? For 
Taylor the answer would be that men and women are both beings 
capable of reason, memory, love, and dialogical recognition. Any other 
differences are trivial in comparison. This is where the idea of equality 
comes from. 

	The same sense of equality would apply to other "identities" 
discovered or recovered through this process: be they based on 
culture, age, race, race, religion, sexual orientation or social status.  
Soft relativism would exclude identities not essential for our self 
fulfillment. Authenticity properly understood would recognize the 
equality of legitimate identities.

	The ideal of authenticity properly understood condemns the self-
centred variants of authenticity that motivate our culture.  In Chapter 
VII La Lotta Continua, Taylor proposes an interesting project, a way of 
reconciling the differences between the knockers and boosters of 
contemporary culture.

	What does he say? Let's not condemn soft relativism root and 
branch. There is something of value here. The root ethic of soft 
relativism is fine, but its practice is debased. Rather than 
condemnation let's undertake a work of retrieval to rediscover the 
higher ideal behind the debased practices.

Is authenticity really worth the work?

	Is the struggle worthwhile? If a fuller more self-responsible and 
differentiated life is more important than the prepackaged choices 
available to us now, the answer must be yes.

	How do we begin?

	Dialogical conversation against significant horizons? Humm. 
How does that work? How for example do we talk to the past? Does 
this have something to do with the way we read a book? Does it have 
something to do with the ideas we examine? Do we select our 
relationships and cultivate interests around only those things that lead 
to self-fulfillment, or are we willing to look squarely at ideas and people 
who challenge our most precious beliefs.

	Do we recognize and celebrate that which is truly equal in 
others? Are we prepared to sacrifice our comfort, career, personal 
safety, reputation, and even our lives to defend this equality? Soft 
relativism ignores these questions. Authenticity properly understood 
places some harsh demands on us and you -- I argue -- because you 
cannot hide from this argument.  

	But, if change can make a difference, as Taylor believes, this 
project may offer the only option for human and ecological survival 
that preserves human dignity. Other schemes might save some of us, 
but we've seen those, as recently as the 1930's in Germany--cult 
thinking, following the herd, can be an effective  strategy, but there is 
nothing in these strategies that seems particularly authentic. La Lotta 
Continua--the struggle continues. It's an old struggle. Plato started 
something "good." But the project is far from over. Each of us is still 
part of it.