What if relativism is right?

The Case for Christian Schools Part 5

The story so far: relativism is the idol of the post-truth age. Choice and neutrality are the velvet gloves it wears to hide its totalising authority. Tolerance is the prime virtue, “thou shalt not offend” the new commandment of its cult.

But so what?

Maybe the moderns are right, and this is the only way to ensure a peaceful, ordered or at least bearable society. One in which, even if we do not achieve perfect harmony, we can at least put up with each other’s differences as long as other people do not get in the way.

There are worse possibilities. Authoritarian regimes, acts of uniformity, prisoners of conscience, persecuted sexual minorities, ethnic cleansing. History has seen enough of those, many (though by no means all, or even the worst of them) under the aegis of religious “truth.” Such truth, history seems to teach, is not worth the cost. Maybe we should, like Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, respectfully return our tickets.

But in contrast to the bad old days of religion, has modern secular relativism really proven such a panacea?

I ministered for a short while in inner-city London. Our church school was predominantly made up of first- and second-generation Muslim immigrant families. Somewhere around 60-70% of our total number of pupils, in fact. Most of the minority were white, English working-class children, with a few middle-class children whose parents were part of the gradual gentrification of the area. 67% of the pupils brought the school a substantial deprivation “pupil premium” grant because they they qualified for free school meals or had been looked after under local authority care: in other words, because they were poor. This is an extraordinarily high proportion even for London.

Standards of behaviour and academic performance at the school were excellent, especially given that many of the pupils could not speak English when they arrived. Yet, there were noticeable differences between the poor immigrant families and the poor white English families.

One was belief in God. For the Muslim families, this was a given, and part of the reason why they would rather send their children to a Christian school than a secular school. This was a contrast to the predominantly white, English middle-class schools I had worked in before and have worked in since. Muslim children helped show their nominally Christian peers some sense of what the influence of God might bring to their lives.

But socially speaking, the other big difference was in family structure and cohesion. Basically, the immigrants had it, and the British didn’t.

There were of course exceptions. I cannot say how happy the cohesive families of subcontinental immigrants were behind closed doors, especially given that so many of the women could not communicate in English (my Urdu is regrettably limited).

The outward signs, at any rate, were telling. In the non-Muslim minority community, fathers were more absent; mothers were more likely to be jabbing at mobile ‘phones than talking to their children, even while pushing prams; some parents shouted, publicly and in the foulest language, at one another and even at their infant children; alcoholism and drug abuse were rife in the area.

But who am I to criticise their “lifestyle choices”? If that’s the way they want to live, isn’t that up to them? Shouldn’t I mind my own business, tolerate this diversity of behaviour?

The convenient doctrine of relativism removes the burden of caring about how the poor live or bring up their children. It would be patronising and judgmental to suppose that my values are any better than theirs. It’s their choice. In other words: not my problem.

How liberating for the middle classes, who can teach relativism in the classroom, preach it in the newspapers and from the pulpit, but who have strong enough family ties and bank balances not to suffer the consequences. For them, choosing to bring up children as an unmarried couple or single-handedly, or being able to choose to divorce and carve up their amassed common goods, are painful but possible. They can choose to split up amicably and keep working while they get a childminder to look after the children, because they can afford to.

Yet in practice, most middle-class liberals do not actually end up living the bohemian lifestyle they publicly applaud. They are far more likely than poorer people to get married and to settle into the very family units which they profess to be mere matters of individual choice, or worse, relics of patriarchal oppression. It just happens that they all freely choose the stability and longevity which they learnt from their parents, but without the hassle of needing to look too closely at the collective beliefs which sustained that way of life for centuries.

Meanwhile, the middle classes leave the poor actually to put into practise what they preach, and the results are disastrous: particularly for women and children, when the man of the family makes a new “lifestyle choice” which does not include them.

White, working-class boys are among the most academically underperforming and ill-behaved group of children in Britain, doing just better than boys of African descent. This is emphatically not the simple black/white divide so heavily politicised in the United States. Children from Caribbean, Indian and Chinese ethnicities tend to do better than their white working class peers in the UK.

The decline of religious authority in tightly-knit familial communities and the rise of secular freedoms does not seem to have helped middle-class children much more than working class ones, either. The mental health of teenagers is showing signs of appalling decline. You can supply your own anecdotes, especially if you’re a teacher or parent of teenage children, suffering from unprecedented levels of anxiety, stress, depression and self-harm.

But don’t dare to suggest that this might have something to do with the relativisation of the nuclear family, the rise of individualism, the rejection of merely ‘social’ constructs: because if all values are relative, then what right have we to criticise anybody else’s?

So let’s tolerate the rising gang-related violence. Let’s tolerate the rise in fatal stabbings. Let’s tolerate the teenage prostitution, the County Lines, the drug use, the broken families, the constant swearing, the bullying, the xenophobia, the alcoholism, the self-harming among the young. Yes, let’s all just get along.

Or might there be a better way?