Does Anyone Think for Themselves Anymore? Cultural Value Systems and Plausibility Structures in a Postmodern World

Marcus Honeysett   October 2008

Relativism and Plausibility

Go out into almost any high street or university campus in Europe and ask the following questions:

• Is sexual preference only a personal lifestyle choice?
• Is abortion a moral right?
• Is there only one way to God?

The overwhelming majority of the answers will be yes, yes and no, respectively. And people will answer with a fair degree of certainty regardless of whether those answers have been demonstrated with reliability by any means they recognise. No laboratory has proved there can't be just one way to God, but people just believe it.

Plausibility structures don't reveal what is true, simply what are the general preferences that have the highest currency in the public square at the moment. Ask the same questions in Saudi Arabia and the answers will be no, no and yes respectively. And so we in Europe should face the nagging question of why our worldview should trump theirs? Are they simply wrong? Or are cultural values merely matters of preference? If we conclude that they are just preference then we can't say there are real rights and wrongs to the questions, and our grandchildren will certainly overturn our views as we have overturned our grandparents'.

I put this case study recently to a group of Christian university students. Their answers to the questions reflected a broadly – though not exclusively – Christian worldview. But they stumbled over the idea that this was any more than their personal preference. They found it difficult to see why the answers to any of the questions might be considered as universal truth that is true for all. Therefore they struggled to see how they could ever argue or reason or persuade in favour of their preferred worldview. They were Christian relativists with regard to truth.

We went on to discuss how they know whether what they think in the area of values is correct. Perhaps they had just been forced into the mould of someone else's thinking. Perhaps they were just the victims of a plausibility structure – albeit a Christian one. Perhaps their friends and colleagues who disagree are just the victims of a different plausibility structure? By the end of the seminar a few had realised how important it is to know the grounds of what we think we know. But an alarming number couldn't see why the question was relevant to them.

Postmodernism is thus a tricky and amorphous term to put a clear definition on. People use the word to mean different things. What is clear, however, is that contemporary cultural features produce contemporary cultural theory which in turn leads to more cultural features.

Take TV, for example, the most powerful entertainment medium and cultural artefact of our time. It is so powerful that it produces value systems around itself. Fashions follow and grow out of it. That which is important in the world is defined as only what is in the news headlines. Those value systems (and the commercial, political, philosophical interests that lie behind them) in turn promote more of the same kind of programming as the script writers and producers try to reflect prevailing trends in the pursuit of ratings. Fashion breeds more fashion, what is newsworthy (and therefore important) is defined by the particular biases of the news editor (which is why Christianity always comes out so negatively).

There is a tight feedback loop therefore between values and belief systems (and therefore plausibility structures) and cultural output. Cultural output meditates on cultural beliefs. Cultural beliefs dictate a certain type of cultural output. That is a worldview. The cultural feature and the value system both have a vested interested in upholding each other. This worldview is not simply a core understanding of the world, it is also the spectacles through which the world is viewed. Worldviews are potent things precisely because they includes both cultural artefacts and cultural values, and because they are often held more or less subconsciously.

You Only Hear What You Are Told

Earlier this year the political and TV landscape in the UK furnished a good example of this with the public debate over technology that will allow scientists to mix animal and human genetic material. Actually it wasn't a debate, because the TV news overwhelmingly reported only the positive side, the economic and possible medical benefits, etc. Negative voices, of which there are many, were excluded. You would never have thought there was another side to the question.

My point is this. Our fundamental plausibility structures in the UK are based on relativism. The idea that there is no absolute truth, and no way to make absolute value judgements because there is deemed to be no external means to measure right and wrong. We have an instinctive idea, but can't dictate to others. Its up to them to decide what is right and wrong for them and for anyone else to do so is an exercise in tyranny.

Few would argue that we live today in a world where there are shared currencies of meaning and value. Where there is large-scale agreement on what is true and false, fact and fiction, right and wrong, good and evil. Indeed the very vocabulary of certainty is being changed. Fact and fiction depend utterly on your point of view and the categories of good and evil are transcended in a post-Nietzschian world to leave us with the merely impersonal good and bad.

In the absence of shared currency of meaning, there is also a void of shared values. Without a sense of pursuing meaning together then there are not, and can never be, any criteria for deciding what, if anything, is truly valuable in life. I may find a thing valuable, but its just personal preference and decision. You may find the opposite valuable and that's just your preference. We have no grounds for comparing our preferences or evaluating their respective merits, and are therefore forced to conclude that in a world without a shared sense of meaning it is impossible to share any sense of value. That is pretty much the definition of relativism – that all truths are now only personal and only available within a culture or interpretive community. I ascribe meaning to things that is important to me, but may not have universal relevance without inappropriately imposing myself on others.

Truth is replaced by preference, in the name of getting rid of tyrannical power systems controlling our lives. Don't let anyone define truth, don't let anyone talk about it in the public square, because that looks like a slip back into authoritarian dictatorship.

The Tyranny of Relativism

Here is the problem as I see it: in the absence of genuine public debate about what is right and wrong, where all can contribute, disagree and be heard, then it is much easier, rather than harder, for powerful agencies to force their agenda on us. It only takes the BBC to report one side of an issue but to deny a voice to the other to create a powerful plausibility structure. My contention is that far from allowing a voice to the Other, relativism plays into the hands of those who can most subtly capture the organs of public opinion forming and can most strongly deny access to those organs to any who disagree: the media, the law, the mechanisms of public debate in the public square.

To come back to the illustration of genetic technology, we currently have the bizarre situation in which most people in the UK are broadly negative about genetically modified foods, but are probably unable to vocalise specific reasons. Yet many people are broadly positive about genetic medicine, cell research and at least silent on the matter of mixing genetic material. But are probably unable to vocalise specific reasons.

Why the difference? It's the same issue! But opponents of genetically modified food have garnered a lot of media coverage to make their case, while the positive case has been covered less strongly. And the advocates of genetic medicines have garnered a lot of coverage to make their case while the negative case has been covered less strongly, or deliberately sidelined. In a relative world the most important factor in forming opinion is not truth. It isn't debate. It is who controls which voices can be heard. Relativism, for all its promise of equality and fairness, is the foundation and ground for the current culture of spin.

A Crisis of Knowledge

Jurgen Habermas described our current situation in terms of a crisis of legitimation. He said it is no longer possible to legitimate our knowledge. The argument goes like this: there is no universal knower, no god in the machine, so I am the centre of everything. But the upshot of that is that I now have to decide the grounds on which I can verify what I know. How should I decide what is true and false? To do so I need further knowledge, but this in turn needs to be verified. And so ad infinitum. Knowledge effectively collapses under its own weight leaving the objective world unknowable because it is not verifiable.

Habermas is not the only philosopher or theorist to reflect negatively on whether anything can be known. As far back as Nietzsche's famous obituary on God there was the sense that knowledge had become so self-contingent that we cannot say with confidence that we know anything any more. It is no longer to talk about facts and truth and reality. And in the absence of those it is not possible to talk about genuine communication. How should we verify that we are talking about the same things in a world without consensus?

This is not a theoretical construct or academic plaything. My Christian student friends and their non-Christian peers were basically unable to say why knowledge is reliable, why truth matters, how it might be accessible or why what they think should value to anyone else. And they are therefore most ill-equipped to stand for Christ in the public square. Perhaps some might even be tempted to think that a God who is there, who communicates authoritatively and who makes demands on us for our good sounds like an evil dictator. If they don't think it, their peers certainly do.

Reclaiming Truth

How do we set about reclaiming a position for truth in the public square when even bright Christians can't say why they believe what they believe? One route that we must take is to cast doubt on the seemingly liberating claims of relativism whenever the opportunity arises. Especially the claim that meaning and truth have been replaced by individual knowledge, and the authority of the author by the textual appropriation of the reader.

We have to contend that far from being liberating, far from combating oppression or enfranchising the individual, in reality this understanding does exactly the opposite. When the meaning of the text rests with the reader or the interpretive community and the author is dismissed then the text is captured within the gravitational pull of what the reader already thinks and believes. It is appropriated in support of existing agenda. This doesn't get rid of power plays, it introduces a whole new one – that the reader is now so powerful that they do not have to listen to, respond to or relate to anyone else. A text whose meaning is only reader-determined allows no voice, no face, no debate from the Other.

When an author is allowed no say then we never allow them to reveal themselves to us. They may not challenge us, debate with us or say for our good that our decisions are wrong. We do not admit to their help or their persuasion. We do not admit to the need to really hear another person, maybe disagree even fundamentally, but still be committed to working out life together.

Essentially the dismissal of authorship leads us not to the empowerment of the individual but to extreme individualism. Deciding that truth, value and revelation may not be discussed (and then by due process are should be removed as topics that is even possible to discuss by media bias, political will and possibly legislation) leads not to justice, listening and community, but to isolation.

In pulling down foundations of knowledge to establish the age of uncertainty we have, in the process, surrounded ourselves with defensive demilitarised zones of non-communication. The point at which we refuse to listen and do not allow the Other to reveal themselves to us is the point at which we put our hands over our ears and merely tell ourselves what we already wish to hear. Everything else becomes subservient to what I wish to hear. Eventually voices that I do not wish to hear are removed and silenced.

Truth and Revelation

Our contention is that knowledge and truth are both vitally important and actually possible, precisely because God is there and is not silent on questions like these. He is knowable because of revelation. Therefore no discussion about truth is possible without discussion about revelation. Revelation is the guarantor of truth. It is crucial to maintain in the public arena that the exact claim of the Bible is that God, the creator of all, the person who made everything, speaks. He reveals Himself. He may be known. He may be known about but may also be known personally. He invites people into a relationship with himself.

Contained in that contention is the idea that God is the creator. He created the universe, but he also created and defined value, knowledge and meaning and he speaks those things. What relativism says cannot be known, the Bible says God reveals. What contemporary theory says is impossible – namely communication – the Bible says God does faultlessly. He communicates Himself. He speaks. And He came, personally, and spoke.

Saying this we commit the ultimate heresy for the postmodernist: claims to certainty. We will be accused of arrogance, but we are not arrogant. It isn't arrogance to bear witness to truth. We do not claim that we are great and wise, but that God has come and spoken. In fact it is the opposite of arrogance. We claim we know nothing because of ability in ourselves, but only because of one outside ourselves before whom we are humbled.

The plausibility structure of our society is such that people want to dismiss this claim without ever investigating it. It just can't be true, can it? It isn't easy to break into this mindset. Perhaps the most we can do in the short term is raise dissatisfaction with relativism and challenge people to think about another possibility for knowledge – revelation.

I think the best way to do this is to show that there is literally no meaning in relativism. If you take any defining relativistic statement and apply it to itself then it doesn't work on its own terms. Most crudely the statement that "all truth is relative" is nonsensical. Literally there is no sense in it because it is only ever self-refuting.

And then to point out that the reason people unthinkingly accept relativism is because of the plausibility structure. They are not thinking for themselves, but are being led to dismiss God without investigation and accept relativism without reservation. Led along like the crowd applauding the naked emperor. Dismissal without investigation is intellectual suicide. It is the chief aim of spin, and it is not worthy of us. It's time to reveal that the emperor has no clothes.