Bearing the Real Costs: Relativism and Absolutism

This is a dialog built from conversation we have with fringes, elites, and mainstream power (individuals as we encounter them) between North Africa and Europe; in Spain particularly.


[Scene: There is a light breeze blowing through apartment curtains, a long porch patio of the 5th floor is bathed in bright summertime light of 9PM sunsets. It is cooling and football is on TV.]

“There is No Relativity. In suffering, there are only Absolutes,” he says to me.

I have an Uncle who has grown more resolute with old age. He does not accept our modern age’s use of relativism to lessen human acts which outrage him. He can become incensed with inhumanity.

“I was twelve and we had escaped our country to Havana,” he told us, “when we first saw the images of the Russians' discoveries in the Nazi concentration camps...we could not believe it.”

“I have friends who are survivors,” he went on, “I can assure you, there was nothing relative to theirs and their families suffering. What they lived was a pure horror - brought on by others.”

We could not agree more. I try to say as much, "As we have visited places of suffering from slave castles of Africa, mass graves of Egyptian pyramids, festering and old war zones on a Cambodian/Thai border, in the Balkans, in the horn of Africa, in our own town - from sites of mass starvation or disasters in Ethiopia, to the Concentration Camps of Serbia, the one characteristic that has united them is that the suffering which took place was absolute."

"I cannot stand this modern tendency to use relativism to dismiss people's pain!" he says.

I tell my uncle, “We relativize suffering then diminish it with our media. We teach violence to our youth. Our children see 20,000 acts of violence on TV and videos before they are seven. What craziness!!”

My uncle is elderly, he does not realize this much desensitization exists from TV and video games. His was a liife of full experience. While fiction and radio existed, a priori experience was valued above all else. He makes this case. Again, we agree but unconvivially....

“Human suffering, murder, violence and war are personal acts of outrage. They affect people’s lives.” I say to him.

I realize I am not aware of the absolute in suffering. There is absolute suffering in inhumanity.