Mick Hartley

Even by the standards of CiF, Nicholas Blincoe’s article is, well, a little bit odd:

So many able commentators have waded into the Terry Eagleton-Martin Amis-Ronan Bennett-Christopher Hitchens confrontation that any contribution from me would be redundant. Yet a side issue has kept tugging at my sleeve, demanding attention: namely, Martin Amis’s attack on relativism. As long as I can remember, moral relativists have been villains. They are denounced by politicians and columnists, as well as by archbishops, imams and rabbis. My problem is this: has anyone ever actually met a moral relativist?

That’s the start, and that’s perhaps the only part that makes sense. It’s completely wrong-headed – yes, moral relativism is a common enough viewpoint, notably among post-modernists and apologists for extremism, though what we’re talking about here I think is more like its close relation, multi-culturalism – but at least it’s clear what he’s saying. But then the argument veers off in unexpected directions:

Our fear and dislike of relativism is surprising when one considers science and economics. Modern physics is all about forces and vectors, which can only be expressed in terms of relative measurements (whether “miles per hour” or E=MC squared). When Margaret Thatcher said, “You cannot buck the market”, she was arguing that all the variables of the world economy are so complex that they are beyond government planning. Yet she was relaxed about this dizzying relativism. Why are we happy to contemplate a logic of relations in every field aside from ethics?

The relevance of all this is far from clear, unfortunately. Because science – well, anything, in fact – deals with relationships between one thing and another, so it follows that an ethic which, say, condemns apostates to death, should be immune from criticism because it’s a belief from another culture? The logic is less than persuasive.

It gets worse:

Martin Amis uses the word “relativist” as one might throw around terms like “sheep-shagger”: it is a straw-dog argument, only one step removed from argument-by-insult (which Amis also used: claiming Ronan Bennett argues like an “idiot”). Yet Amis goes on to show how easy it is to slip into relativism. He says: “The ethos of relativism finds the demographic question so saturated in revulsions that it is rendered undiscussable.” Now demographics, of course, is a maths question: it is the science of comparing population levels relative to one another. Far from placing demographics beyond debate, it is only relativism that puts it up for debate in the first place.

I’m not at all sure I understand this. He appears to be arguing that, by mentioning demographics, which is “the science of comparing population levels relative to one another”, Amis has slipped into relativism. Is that what he’s saying? No, I don’t understand it.

Anyway, what on earth is a straw-dog argument? Is that something you have about gratuitous violence in the movies after watching a Sam Peckinpah film?