Our little crew of relativists and scoundrels

 

I am among the crew of nominalists, relativists and other scoundrels, who think that universals are made, not given. This crew is often accused of being insufficiently condemnatory of the Holocaust and the Gulag – although the people who make these accusations often shuffle their feet when it comes to the genocide in the Trans-Atlantic slavery trade and the wholesale mass slaughter of indigenous people and the theft of their territory. The latter group often wants us to remember the good things about, say, Thomas Jefferson, and not the fact that he lived on a kidnapped and enslaved work force, and chose his mistress, aka raped, among that work force. The idea is you absolutely condemn Hitler and Stalin, on the one hand, and eyeroll about giving America back to the Indian nations, on the other.

Nominalists can be as excited in their denunciations of Auschwitz as anyone else. It is just that they don’t see the invocation of the absolute, here, as doing any real moral work. Not that the vocabulary of absolute denunciation is useless – it might help create a real institutional response to mass murder. So, from the point of view of universal-making, it would be a great idea for there to be some international go-to court to try all torturers, from Saddam Hussein to George Bush. But so far, in spite of the spirit of absolute moral law promoted proudly by the anti-relativist, the real law goes on rewarding the strong and punishing the weak.

In the name of what or who, that is the question.

An Italian politician and  historian, Vittorio Emmanuele Orlando, delivered a remark, quoted in an essay by Sciascia, that rather sums up the Hegelian point of view: “If history is universal, referring to humanity as a total ideal, its vital center is still squeezed into a determined point: this would be, from epoch to epoch, a little territory like Mesopotamia or the Nile Delta, or a city like Athens, Jerusalem or Rome.”

We know by heart the catalogue of cities and territories, and we know that it is not going to include, say, Khanbaliq, or Tenochtitlan, or the longhouses of the Penans. Instead, the standard catalogue is of places where, gradually, the total ideal of humanity developed, although always with the codicil that the grander form was embodied in the smaller scale of a particular story, according to the teller.

Sceptics have long roamed, like dogs - -cynics by nature – outside the walls of this idea. Voltaire’s Micromegas  is a comic expression of the cynic’s doubt, while Blake’s bird with its “world of delight” which we can’t penetrate is a romantic expression of it. The Saturnian in Micromegas complains of having merely 72 senses, but converses very well with otherwise differently constructed beings, while Blake’s bird converses with other birds.   Neither the Saturnian nor the bird, however, claim to embody the universal.

In a sense, I am not opposed to universal-making. In the name of what or who would I oppose it? However, as the universal comes to earth and becomes this or that project, I find my tongue and oppose it now because of a principle of justice, now because of my own moral feelings, now as a member and on behalf of a collective, etc. Human rights, good taste – the nominalist doesn’t doubt that these things hold power, and function as rules. In practical terms, the absolute works the way any superlative works. It is just that the nominalist, Blake’s bird, and Micromegas’s Saturnian are concerned with the way absolutes tend to go wrong. When they go wrong, they are merciless.

That’s when the dogs outside the city begin to howl.