Two things baffle me about politics and religion, from what I’ve seen: 1. that political progessives tend to be moral relativists and 2. that moral absolutists tend to be political conservatives.
In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis makes a fairly convincing case for moral absolutism tempered with relativism. The idea is that any time someone gets offended by an action, there is a sense of common decency or morals that is invoked by that outrage. If no one’s held to a standard, there’s no outrage. His second point is that while different cultures may have different ideas of what is offensive, appropriate, kind, etc., all cultures consider it desirable to be kind and appropriate and undesirable to be offensive. One culture may think giving someone the “thumbs up” is rude. Another may consider giving the “thumbs up” affirming. Both cultures would agree, though, that being affirming is a good thing and being rude is a bad thing. Rudeness and affirmation simply manifest themselves in different ways.
I don’t fit into either of the following categories, but I’d say the vast majority of Americans I’ve encountered fall into one of the following two profiles:
1. Conservative Christian: moral absolutist, political conservative
2. Liberal atheist/agnostic: moral relativist, political (or at least social) liberal
I view these two stances as being at odds with themselves, though. Moral absolutism, as I see it, goes hand in hand with progressivism. Take, for example, gay marriage. One of the arguments for gay marriage that social and political liberals rely upon is the argument that only a few decades ago popular morality frowned upon interracial marriage and that within a few decades people will realize (as they do now about interracial marriage) that gay marriage is a just occurrence.
The idea of justice and the idea of progress are based on the assumption that there is such a thing as justice or that you can be progressing “towards” something (a better society or whatnot). If morality is truly relative (what we think is abhorrent is perfectly acceptable in X time period or Y culture, so who cares?), then what’s the point of protest? What’s the point of progress? What is justice? Any kind of deviance from the natural course of popular opinion or general trend is an appeal to a universal morality. Without realizing it, most political and social progressives are really saying “What is happening right now is not right in some absolute sense that we don’t realize now in our relative culture.”
Then why don’t those two neat categories described above notice the inherent contradictions in their stances, particularly the liberal atheist/agnostic?
I don’t know.
My guess, though, is that most people don’t examine the full implications of a belief system. They just know their immediate concerns (gay marriage, for example).
Let me put it another way. If I lived in the sixties and opposed interracial marriage, what would be wrong with that? Do you have more respect for someone who is “ahead of her time”? Why? Why not fit in with your own time? After all, if morality is relative, you’re just fitting in with the morality of the culture you live in. If you’re “ahead of your time” it means your current time is behind. It means morality isn’t relative to time or culture. It means there may be a prevailing thought or feeling at the time, but that others are more “enlightened” (presumably more in touch with the moral absolutism built into each one of us).
You can’t make “progress” unless what you have now is not meeting a standard—that standard… is absolute morality.