In the early 20th Century, a physicist named Albert Einstein posited that space-time becomes warped around massive celestial objects. By building from Newtonian laws, Einstein crafted his famous theory of relativity and suggested that an object’s energy is directly proportional to its mass. Thus the equation E=MC² was born.
Many scientists over the decades challenged Einstein’s theories, but over one hundred years later, his ideas still stand as fundamental truths in physics.
Relativity has in some ways become a social and religious topic today. In an age where public officials and entertainers are judged and held publicly accountable for a variety of less-than-popular statements or actions, our society is exploring a new and more dangerous type of relativity.
“Moral Relativism” has been used to varying degrees of success for centuries. When we judge others based upon some past era, culture, doctrine, or construct on the idea of relativism, we begin to dwell in an extreme version of reality detached from the truths we thought we knew from the start.
Today, we are posthumously criticizing people such as George Washington and Alexander Hamilton for practices and ideas that were considered acceptable in their times. For instance, few today would argue with the belief that slavery is wrong, but in an earlier America, many considered the practice morally just.
Moral values may vary depending on culture and time, but the cornerstones upon which those ideas rest still anchor the common bonds we all share regardless of religion, race, or national origin.
How, then, did it become commonplace online to judge others based on upon our own positions and beliefs? This brand of moral relativism goes by another name: Whataboutism.
If you don’t know what that term means, let me break it down for you. One person does or says something most would find repugnant, but within days or hours, counterarguments arise. “But what about….? It’s a useful technique when one wishes to change the subject from something he or she can scarcely defend.
Whataboutism is one of the hallmarks of Soviet and Russian propaganda meant to make all truth relative. This fallacy, when used as a debate tactic, is flimsy at best. Truly, its common use is to highlight perceived failures of others in order divert attention from the one being defended.
Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, who is today notable for anti-Putin activism, noted that “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
The extremism in our society seems to grow starker by the day and our personal opinions on many matters more and more disparate. Attitudes like these suffocate cooperation and debate by falsely boiling everything down to only two ‘sides’ which can be pitted against one another ad infinitum.
Let me make one thing perfectly clear. No matter what you believe, evil is still evil. No politician or church leader can change that fact.
Whenever religious leaders like Jerry Falwell publicly err, online defenders rage on about abortion as a greater evil. That abortion does not absolve that leader of his or her sins isn’t the point.
While I don’t intend to stray into the abortion battle, I can offer well-reasoned thoughts as to why the issue is much more complex that most believe it to be. There is no easy solution for the problem, but few ideas have been offered in the first place. The debate goes nowhere because our two ‘sides’ are deeply entrenched and unpersuasive.
These same fallacies are cropping up in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Now, however, instead of using whataboutism as a defense, some personalities are celebrating a young teenager who traveled to Wisconsin from out of state and shot three people amidst the protests that have predictably turned violent. When we hail a murder as a hero, no matter the circumstances, we can see how far our society has fallen and how grave our religious failings have proven.
Kasparov proved himself a master of strategy, but his ideas on more potent issues are indisputably notable. “But evil does not die,” he once stated, “just as history does not end. Like a weed, evil can be cut back but never entirely uprooted. It waits for its chance to spread through the cracks in our vigilance. It can take root in the fertile soil of our complacency, or even the rocky rubble of the fallen Berlin Wall”
What I take from that notion in our era is that we need to stay informed and keep in mind the motives of fallacious propaganda. To fall for it is to continue to spread that evil because we have lost our ability to discern it.
Einstein offered cogent words to consider when on whataboutism and moral relativism: “The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.”
Moral choice often comes down to the “lesser of two evils” and rarely can one-sized-fits-all solutions be applied. Our greatest weapon to combat this evil is open-mindedness and empathy. If we wield those as a defense against the corrupting influence of propaganda, we can overcome the worst of our vices.