Liberalism and Relativism

Michael Stickings had a great post the other day that I've been meaning to comment on. In the context of discussing the political strategy behind the movement to teach so-called 'Intelligent Design' in schools, Stickings wrote the following.

"[T]his strategy . . . betrays a serious
misunderstanding of their opponents, and that
misunderstanding results from a simplistic
understanding of liberalism long fostered by its
right-wing critics. Forget for a moment that
American conservatism is essentially a distillation
of classical liberalism, neo-liberalism, mixed with
various illiberal strains of modern and pre-modern
thought. Forget that America is the liberal nation
par excellence. Conservatives have largely
succeeded in vilifying liberals and liberalism in the
public imagination. If you're a liberal, you're
somehow un-American, well out of the mainstream
of American life and belief. But they've done this
by reducing liberalism -- the political philosophy
of life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of
happiness -- down to relativism, that is, to moral
bankruptcy, to an absence of what are generally
referred to as values. In reality, liberals may
defend the natural rights of the individual, as those
rights were set down by Locke, America's
philosopher, and his early-modern liberal
contemporaries, but conservatives want you to
believe that they represent a profound threat to all
things American.

To be sure, some of today's liberals are relativists,
more or less. But liberalism is the philosophy of a
rival absolute truth to creationism, an absolute
truth discovered in nature through reason and/or
experience. It is not relativism. Relativism, which
denies even the primacy of reason and the certainty
of experience, is illiberal, just as much so as any
illiberal ideology of the right. In short, conservatives
have attempted to reduced liberalism down to
an element of postmodernism, where nothing is true
except the absence of truth, and this is where the
proponents of intelligent design have hoped to
catch their opponents in that bind."

This is a crucial distinction. Liberalism is NOT relativism. The fact that some lefties embrace a silly form of post-modern cultural relativism says nothing about the nature of true liberal thinking. Liberalism, in its truest form, does indeed rely on a "truth discovered in nature through reason and/or experience." I think Stickings goes a bit too far, however, in describing such truth as "absolute truth." The core of liberalism, after all, is empiricism, and for a good empiricist, conclusions are always provisional. It's not hard to see why absolutists would mistake liberalism for relativism. After all, a good liberal is always prepared to change his mind when confronted with new, compelling evidence. To people whose worldviews are based on immutable truths (often divinely revealed truths), such a philosophy often appears no different than relativism. But they're far from the same thing.

Absolutists often try to exploit this "relativistic" quality of liberal reasoning by repackaging their own ideas in a more palatable form. When liberals/empiricists/scientists ridicule these ideas, frustrated absolutists often react by criticizing the "dogmatic" views of their opponents. Besides being bizarrely hypocritical, this entire strategy betrays a poor understanding of empirical reasoning; in order to change a liberal's mind, or even get one to pay attention, you have to offer an alternative view that is at least as logically and empirically sound as the prevailing view.