The Moral Code That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Peter Berger, Relativist Malgré Lui

Some comments on a discussion entitled “Between Relativism and Fundamentalism: Is There a Middle Ground?” held Tuesday, March 4, 2008, in Washington, D.C. (available at http://pewforum.org/events/?EventID=172), in which the primary speakers were sociologist Peter Berger, conservative political pundit David Brooks, and historian of religion Seyyed Hossein Nasr.

1. Berger starts by noting that the project that underlies his comments deals “with the question of how, using resources from different strands of the Judeo-Christian tradition, one could define a position that avoids both extremes: a relativism in which all assertions of truth are deemed to be irrelevant or unattainable, and a fundamentalism in which an alleged truth is propounded in an attitude of aggressive intolerance.” First, let’s note for the record that there really is no “Judeo-Christian” tradition, only a Christian tradition that developed out of a mix of Hellenistic and Judaic traditions while appropriating some and repudiating other of their tenets, while persecuting and reviling the Jews in its midst; and an ongoing Jewish tradition, which Christians long remained unaware did not become fixed in amber but continued to develop over the next millenia.

That aside, the major problem with Berger’s statement is the claim that moral relativists deem “assertions of truth … irrelevant or unattainable.” If that were the case, there would be no reason for a moral relativist to make any assertion whatever about moral values, given that his foundational belief would deny the “truth” of anything he says. Clearly, moral relativists are not shy of making pronouncements about morality, so either they are self-contradictory fools or something else is going on that Berger and those who try to paint moral relativism into this corner are failing or refusing to grasp. What is in fact going on is that moral relativists do not deem “assertions of truth … irrelevant or unattainable,” but hold that truths about moral values are relative to given cultural systems, and that when, and only when, the implications of those systems are assented to by a given community are agreements about moral values possible (which is in fact the very position that Berger and the other speakers later affirm—hence the title of this post)

Berger then claims that “there are some moral judgments on which we are indeed certain” and asks what they are and where that certainty comes from. But first he makes some questionable comments that will skew the subsequent discussion. Both relativism and fundamentalism, he claims, “are rooted in the same distinctly modern phenomenon”—the undermining of the “closed communities in which human beings lived through most of history, communities in which there was a very high degree of consensus about the basic cognitive and normative definitions of reality. Such consensus brings about a situation in which these definitions have the status of taken-for-granted, self-evident truth.” In the modern world, “diversity has taken the place of consensus,” and “relativism can be described as a world view that not only acknowledges but celebrates the absence of consensus… The moral end result of this world view can be captured by imagining a television interview with a cannibal. ‘You believe that people should be cooked and eaten. I certainly don’t want to be judgmental, but the audience will be interested. Tell us more.’… This is not all that fictitious.” Actually, it is wholly fictitious—the setting up of a straw man to serve as the butt for Berger’s joke. A moral relativist might be interested in other worldviews, but the adoption of moral relativism does not necessarily entail abandoning the belief that there are situations in which it is morally correct, from the relativist’s perspective, to attempt to impose his or her views on others.

The main issue at this point is that Berger defines relativism and fundamentalism as modern phenomena, in spite of the fact that for most of its history Christianity could have been described in the terms he uses to characterize fundamentalism: “seeking to regain absolute certainty about every aspect of their world view. No doubt is permitted. Whoever disagrees is an enemy to be converted, shunned or, in the extreme case, removed.” The danger of fundamentalism is that it “threatens the basic moral order without which no society…can exist… because it balkanizes society into mutually hostile camps that cannot communicate with each other.” But what is one to make of the fact that once it acquired the power of enforcement, heretic-burning, crusading, and Jew-hounding Christianity lasted for more than 1000 years before reformist dissidents managed to break away and balkanization finally began?

According to Berger, relativism also threatens the basic moral order, in this case “because it makes morality a capricious game.” Again Berger caricatures moral relativists, who generally do not say that anything goes, so pick whatever values you want, but rather, we need to find a means of agreeing on a foundation for sharing moral judgments in the absence of a supposed “absolute” standard for which the moral absolutist never seems capable of offering objective evidence.

Berger finally comes to the issue of how to arrive at moral certainty. He argues that, for example, although in other times and places slavery was acceptable, at present it is not. Why? Because, “in the course of history, there emerges a perception of what it means to be human. That perception makes it impossible to accept slavery.” How does a changing perception make something that was previously possible now impossible? According to Berger, “this moral judgment … only requires an act of attention: ‘Look at this. It must not be.’” And that’s it—we acquire the certainty that something is immoral when we notice that our culture considers it immoral. Unfortunately, Berger leaves unexamined some truly interesting questions, such as, how and why do cultural views change, and how and why are they accepted by some but not all subgroups or individuals at some but not all times and places? In any event, this seems like a pretty good endorsement of the notion that moral values are tied to specific cultural systems.

2. In his initial remarks David Brooks seeks a “prudent way to approach truth that is neither relativistic nor fundamentalist.” He begins with “the secular, conservative stream of thought,” according to which the approach to truth is based on epistemological modesty (“the idea that we are very limited in knowing what we could know or will ever know”) and “the slowly accumulating wisdom of mankind.” He also refers to the results of cognitive scientists, according to which “most of cognition happens below awareness, …we’re highly social creatures formed in subconscious ways by the loops and social contagions and norms around us, and …we really learn emotionally more than rationally,” which, combined with the conservative tradition in political science, teaches “us to discount pure reason, … to be intuitively aware of the world around us, … [W]e should only be loyal to truths that have stood the test of time.” In other words, trust your intuition and adopt the values of your community. This again seems an adoption of moral relativism.

3. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, speaking as a “philosopher and theologian,” claims that “even relativism cannot evade the question of truth. Secondly, relativism itself is based on an absolutism, because if you say, ‘All things are relative,’ that statement itself is absolute.” One would have hoped that a tenured professor of philosphy could have avoided this sort of high school debating point. The discussion is about moral relativism. The moral relativist does not say, “All things are relative”—he or she points out the culturally grounded nature of moral values, which is a far more nuanced and non–self-contradictory position.

Nasr goes on to discuss the foundation for moral judgments. “First of all, I think all moral judgments require an act of faith. Secondly, they consider themselves to be certain because they are functioning within a certain world view.” For example, even though “George Washington … had slaves in Mount Vernon,” we are not entitled to say that he was not “a moral and upright person”—he had a different worldview. Although Nasr disavows the label, this seems to be nothing less than yet another presentation of moral relativism.

4. Berger returns to the question of the source of his moral certainty: “when it comes to morality, there are some things I’m absolutely certain of. Then the question was, where does this come from? … it’s not the result of a philosophical argument; it’s the result of perception….It seems to me the rock-bottom moral judgments we make are not theories or the result of theories, but are things we see, we perceive, both things that we feel we must do and things that we must never do.”

An audience member, Matthew Crawford, seeks clarification. “You talked earlier about a taken-for-granted horizon within which we perceive and make our way in the social world. Here [in the case of Huck Finn, discussed earlier by Berger] is a moment when the taken-for-granted horizon of opinions—somehow, he overcomes or finds a wormhole through it, and he apprehends this moral demand that goes against all of that. How does that work? How does [one have a] moral apprehension that isn’t simply replicating a horizon of opinions in the culture at large?”

Berger replies that “of course there’s a history to this. In that sense, it’s relative. If I were a person in classical antiquity, probably I would never question the acceptability of slavery. So in that sense, it’s relative. But once the perception occurs, which has a historical process behind it, I think it claims absoluteness. That’s the very interesting paradox here. Where does one allow doubt, and where does one decide, ‘I’m not going to doubt this at all?’ I don’t know how else to respond.” In other words, it just happens that something that at one moment seemed moral now seems immoral. But calling the new judgment “absolute” ignores an additional meaning of the word when used in this context: a moral value may be “absolute” in the sense that one holds it with complete certainty and that one believes it applies universally, and yet it may still need an objective foundation to be considered “absolute” in the sense of being true. If you can’t provide such a foundation, your value is still relative.

5. Berger returns to a contrast he made earlier between the doubts he has about his religious beliefs and his certainty on at least some moral issues: “ it seems to me that certain moral judgments – not all moral judgment, but certain moral judgments – are of a very different sort [than those on religion], and I think I know these things. It’s not that I believe them; I know them: not in the way I know this machinery is sitting here, or that I am in Washington, but I know it on a different level.” He again speaks of the “perception” that certain things are morally right or wrong but again fails to clarify the mechanism by which his manner of “knowing” differs from subjective, relativistic judgment. Later he states, “Once the perception is there, as a result of the historical process, I think it has implicit in it, necessarily, a claim to universal validity. If it was wrong to regard women as chattel in medieval China or whatever, it is wrong. If it is wrong today, it was wrong then, but people did not perceive it as such. …. In other words, these perceptions take time, sometimes over centuries, to develop.” It’s hard not to see in this process of cultural development that may extend over centuries a relativistic explanation for the development of a shared system of values, even one with an implicit claim to universal validity.

6. More issues are addressed in this discussion than my comments suggest, including the political effects, both positive and negative, that derive from some people’s conviction that their views are absolutely correct. And yet the antidote to the sort of fundamentalism that the participants decry lies in the direction that the very framing of the discussion forbids taking: toward the relativism that the participants condemn as being at the other dangerous extreme from fundamentalism but that in fact is encompassed by their descriptions of the culturally specific nature of moral decision making.