skippertthomas said:
We must not deny law and rule breakers their 'spirit of the law' rights! We must make up the rules day to day and allow things like laws, the constitution and eternal truths to ebb and flow with the times and feelings..
...We must determine by each day, the polls, the spin and that 'good feeling' to lead us over any consistant moral code...
As someone who strives to be an intellectually consistent, principled critic of powerful people, social trends, and other aspects of the world we live in, I'm disturbed by the frequent implicit assumption that all people who critique the existing order are doing so from a relativist or even nihilist point of view -- that we're acting out of a kind of rudderless, anarchic nothingness. In reality, many of us have positive (in the use of the word meaning "substantial") moral beliefs of our own. (Certainly the civil rights crusaders of the 60s weren't out to "destroy race relations", but rather to establish their own moral belief that a person's skin color has no bearing on his or her worth as a human being. Similarly, many who engage in pirate radio do so out of an honest belief that the current consolidation of media ownership has detrimental effects on the ability to propagate a full range of opinions and beliefs, and a tendency to distort news and other content, potentially endangering our operation as a truly free country.) For some reason, however, the discord between our beliefs and those prevalent in the current power structure or dominant mode of thinking often gets mistaken for nonexistence.
This may well be a benign misunderstanding (and, in a fairly convivial setting such as a message-board discussion, is probably just that), but I've also seen it intentionally employed as an argumentative tactic by those who tend toward legal and philosophical positivism (basically a philosophy that people have an absolute moral obligation to follow the "letter of the law" or that of tradition.) In the latter case, the contention is basically that one's argumentative opponent must want to create chaos by knocking down ALL social barriers or recognized truths, simply because he disagrees with a particular one. (This tactic has frequently been employed in evangelical Christian rhetoric against permitting same-sex marriage.) In this context, the presumption of nihilism functions as a pretense to unassailable objectivity (essentially: "we're right because what is, is, and has been that way for years -- how could it not be right, you evil Antichrist?") Problem is, apply the Kantian categorical imperative ("what if everybody thought or acted this way?") to this, and you get a result that's inconsistent with even the moral objectivists' own views: everyone is unassailably right at the same time!
If we applied this mode of thinking to political debate, we'd end up framing Democrats as "anti-Republicans" or Republicans as "anti-Democrats." Now, of course, which one is the baseline and which the "anti" would depend on the speaker's own political point of view... so in our rush to frame the other side as being vacuous and fluffy (rather than merely disagreeable in substance), we would all -- on both sides! -- be denying that we even HAVE a "view" as such. We'd be denying that we even existed as moral agents, as the thinkers of the thoughts in question -- leaving no explanation for the origin of those thoughts out there, just floating around in the ether (perhaps they were "intelligently designed"?) And we would simultaneously be suggesting that no one other than ourselves was a serious thinker worthy of discursive engagement. This basically solipsistic worldview denies the existence of any thoughts other than the subject's -- i.e., posits a completely empty outside world -- I can hardly think of anything more nihilistic or relativistic than that. In short, positivism -- when applied in such a manner as to suggest that any disagreement with the letter of the law or the established truth is of necessity being done in the name of crime or chaos -- contains a dialectical reversal of itself.
