The debates on Australian values and stem cell research this month have made it clearer where Prime Minister John Howard stands.
In voting against wider stem cell research he said, “To vote in favour of this bill is to embrace a relativist view of society and of the value of human life and what leads to it. This does, to use that cliche, get us perilously close to if not on to the slippery slope.”
He said also, “I think we live in an age where we have slid too far into relativism. There must be some absolutes in our society.”
He expressed a similar attack on relativism in the teaching of history on Australia Day this year.
He said, “Too often it is taught without any sense of structured narrative, replaced by a fragmented stew of ‘themes’ and ‘issues’. And too often, history, along with other subjects in humanities, has succumbed to a postmodern culture of relativism where any objective record of achievement is questioned or repudiated.”
Relativism suggests there are no absolute or objective truths.
Take abortion or the destruction of embryos (even if formed outside the body). The simple absolutist view is that it is immoral and therefore should be illegal. That view does not require a great deal of sophistication or weighing of issues.
What if the woman was raped or the foetus grossly deformed? What if the pregnancy endangers the mother’s life or health? What if the externally created embryo could be used to help fight diseases which cause great suffering?
These questions take us to grey areas which require difficult balancing acts. The absolutist position is an easy line to draw. A more relativism position yields a hazy line indeed. Or in the words of the English judge Lord Denning: We may not be able to define the line; we can only decide on which side of it a particular case falls.
That requires more difficult reasoning than a glib reference to a “slippery slope”. A slippery slope suggests that once you move even slightly from the absolutist position there is an inevitable, uncontrolled descent into the worst case – say abortion at 31 weeks.
Similar things could be said about euthanasia and contraception.
In the teaching of history, an objective or absolutist method is easy. Goodies v Baddies. Simple lists of causation and straight-forward chronologies.
Absolutism has its appeal to those who do not like complexity, particularly if the application of the absolutist view affects other people: poor women, people with diseases and children in the classroom.
However, the same choice between relativism and absolutism applies in politics. Here, Howard puts absolutism aside.
The absolutist position that people should live up to their pledges is diluted to a relativist position of having “core” and “non-core” promises. The absolutist position of “never-ever” becomes “we will change if circumstances change”.
Is there a slippery slope here? I don’t think so. A politician’s broken promise or a change of position does not mean descent into eternal mendacity.
As it happens I think Howard’s non-core promises were quite reasonable – they were peripheral. Also, his reversal on the GST, which almost cost him the 1998 election, was reasonable. Australia needed the tax and it was presented to voters before being introduced.
Also, on the political front, the Enlightenment (and absolutist) view that it is self-evident that humans are born equal and have rights to be free from arbitrary treatment, have access to the rule of law and so on is watered down by Howard into some relativist ones.
The universal statement on human rights becomes a commitment to relativist “Australian” values – which are different from other nations’ values and can only be defined in some cultural context, the very thing Howard rejects in the teaching of history.
Also those absolutist statements of human rights are replaced by the Howard Government because of the relativist circumstance of the “war” on terror. In the face of that “war” we must abandon positions of a right to silence, detention without trial and so on, according to the Howard Government.
As it happens, I think that in this complex world there may be circumstances in which you abandon absolutist statements on human rights. We applaud arbitrary detention (albeit brief) at random-breath testing stations in order to stop road slaughter.
Howard’s “war” on terror is not a cause to applaud five years’ detention without trial in a Cuban hell-hole, or nearly all of the other measures recently introduced. But faced with a real invasion it might be a different story.
How are we to reconcile, or at least explain, these seemingly contradictory stands of the Prime Minister: the appeal to absolutism on some things and the “descent” into relativism in others? On its face, there is a hopeless philosophical incoherence here.
There are a couple of explanations. One is that Howard, having been in politics so long, is relaxed and comfortable with complex and subtle arguments on political matters. He also understands (though might never admit it) that you need a bit of relativism to succeed in politics while you make an absolutist stand where it does not really matter.
The other reason is that the two positions are largely consistent with an appeal to attributes of a lot of the voting population today: insecurity, lack of sophistication and lack of desire to understand complex issues.
The appeal to relativist “Australian” values is an appeal to the tribal and the tribe’s fears of outsiders. It is almost hard-wired because we have needed it, until now, for survival. Obviously, there is no need to articulate details; this is not an appeal to sophisticated minds.
Lock up the terrorists and back to basics in the schools are similar appeals.
To date, Howard’s working of the democratic flaw — apathetic voters in a complex world – has been successful. He has read them well, and he has been lucky.
Consistency is an over-rated virtue in politics when philosophically you stand for, well, retaining office.