Giant Sucking Sound

I guess moral relativism was something to be feared, but like most scary things, only when they're somebody else's idea. The idea is that if everyone follows their own compass about what is socially acceptable behavior, we defeat the idea of an objective standard. Different standards is therefore the same as no standards since like anyone else at any time, I can opt out of the whole "don't covet thy neighbors wife" thing if my neighbor and his wife are two points forming one leg of some kind of polyamorous quadrangle. I flatter myself to consider, heck, they might even be into a bit of covetousness from me.

Those rules are fuzzy enough, but what if they're not even poly? What if he's just into cuckolding? Outwardly the marriage looks like a marriage, one from each pre-approved team, all Jesus-acceptable and no-man-tear-asunder-y, except they've taken it upon themselves to negotiate in--to even prefer--the occasional loosening of the cleaving-unto-each-other. If they're into it, is it OK? And does the moral authority the arrangement purports to flount--or further, relies specifically on undermining to make it all hot and stuff--come from some innate sense of base-level, immanent human natural code of ethics or does it just seem that way because the rules on that side have more "thy" and "unto" peppered in?

Or maybe the weight of God's law and the appeal to human nature are just the result of a sad system justification cognitive bias that has been dressed up in authority, homogeneity and cultural hegemony that it's slowly transmogrified over two millennia from liquid to bronze to an impressive edifice of veiny Old World marble eroded entirely by accident into the vague shape of a cracker-ass old white dude. What's the numerical tipping point for an agreed-upon collective moral relativism to achieve objective moral certainty status? Is there one? Or is it that if you get enough people--tens or even hundreds of millions maybe--together to agree on something, it's still not objective truth not because of the merits of the claim either way but because what is objectively true is always, always scientifically problematic. Remember, it's the hesitancy to make definitive declarations about truth that the God-truthers grab onto and run with when they're talking to actual scientists about things like archaeology and evolution. This is probably not coincidental.

The weird thing is, now that the election is over and the GOP wave has hit us, we're anticipating the pull of a strong riptide of relativism as the driving mechanism operating beneath the deluge. On something as basic and scientific as man-driven climate change, nearly all Republican members of Congress deny it's true, and now it's only going to get worse. What else is going to be "true"? That gay people are a problem, that Islam is a cancer, that their objection to Obama has nothing to do with race, all these new true things brought to you by the age-old methods of repeated, loud insistence and the implied violence of people gathered in a group. Or in this case, a caucus.

Look, elections happen. When I was 18 in 1992, I voted for Clinton and I remember thinking, as young people do, "This is it, this is THE moment" when... something, I don't know, was supposed to happen. Social revolution. The end of AIDS or discrimination or the war on the American poor. Instead we got NAFTA and don't-ask-don't-tell and the end of welfare as we knew it. Don't get me wrong, I'm still a Clinton guy, but idealism, mercifully, with all its attendant sharpness and emotional cramping, gets massaged away, sometimes with battering gusto, by exigencies and realities and, I dare to say it, the facts on the ground.

2014 happened and the best I can give you at age 40 is that "This is it, this is A moment..." The indefinite article is something I feel like I earned. There have been plenty of transitions this year that have made me feel old, that have stood me in front of the specter of not only death but infirmity and, most terrifying of all to me, complete social and cultural irrelevance. This isn't really one of those things. There hasn't even been a GenX president yet (and doesn't look likely to be one for another cycle  or two), so I know fading into pudding-and-checkers oblivion is a ways off. For the moment, it's a GOP year. They have the same ideas, the same demographic math problem in a national election, the same gaping hole in the resume where governance should be. There will be a Dem year in the probably very near future. And then another GOP one, etc. Permanent majorities are the fever dreams of factual relativists or the professional cynics. Tuesday wasn't a great day, but it was only one of them.