The Absolutists

Some people are instinctively absolutist. If they do not know a person absolutely they claim they do not know that person at all - as someone who worked for President Reagan said of him.

An absolutist might miss that a person can be rational in some areas of thought and irrational in other areas. An absolutist divides people into those who are evil and those who are not, failing to recognize the ease with which otherwise good people can fall into evil deeds. An absolutist might sound like a Zoroastrian and reduce an issue to what he calls a war between good and evil or between light and darkness.

In 2007 an absolutist might see William Jefferson Clinton as totally without morals or political merit because of his womanizing more than a decade ago. An absolutist looks at some narrow part of a person and condemns the whole person.

When William Kristol's conservative Weekly Standard editorialized in favor of the Clinton administration's military response in Kosovo, it was an absolutist who cancelled his subscription to the magazine.

There are absolutists who make choices based on certitudes. They tolerate no degree of doubt. They think in blacks and whites. In ancient times, Pyrrhon claimed that because humanity could not be absolutely certain about anything that humanity could know nothing, but still he rambled on as if he knew something. A few people in this political season are absolutist about political choice. They cannot have everything in an available candidate so they claim there is no significant difference between this candidate and others. In 2003, before the war in Iraq, a few were arguing that if you do not attack everybody doing bad things you should attack no one - not one of the better arguments against going to war.

Absolutists have difficulty accepting interplay between chaos and laws of nature. Like Albert Einstein they are unable to muster enthusiasm for the principle of uncertainty (Einstein responded to Heisenberg's princple with this statement about God not playing dice.)

Some absolutists have difficulty believing in an economy that mixes private enterprise and government participation in economic activity - called by some a mixed economy. They label it with an absolute: socialism.

Mothers can be absolutist about their child, seeing the human side of their child and refusing to see psychopathologies that got him into trouble with society. For her, her little boy is a good boy forever.

In other words, someone is an absolutist when he or she confuses a part with the whole. Put another way, they oversimplify. Analyzing the origins of a war, someone might reduce it all to oil when a variety of issues are involved.

An absolutist might have difficulty making decisions not realizing that sometimes we need to make choices between alternatives each of which has pluses and minuses.

There are absolutists who complain about relativists, saying such things as "we no longer teach absolutes or right and wrong values." They accuse academics of teaching relativism without bothering to read what academic ethicists are proclaiming. Few if any proclaim that people should judge all values equal. All of them, believers and non-believers, recognize that people have to develop values in order to function adequately with others. What bothers the absolutists is that these ethicists do not believe what they believe.

Absolutists present themselves as in possession of incontrovertible facts and reason and the whole of reality. They are not open to the possibility that they might need a better argument or more facts. They are struggling to hold onto their beliefs. They fight doubt, fearing a failed point here or there will cause their vision of right and wrong to fall apart like a house of cards.

Absolutists might not see their beliefs as interpretation. This kind of thinker will acuse those they disagree with to be interpreting, and for them interpretation is alway poor interpretation. This kind of thinker sees himself as have a direct connection to reality that bypasses the process of association and differentiation.

In conversations, absolutists are rigid and tight in their responses to people who point out contradictions in the point of view. There is no working with ideas while conversing, trying to resolve the contradictions they have expressed with rewording or some kind of resolution. These are people with whom one does not have a dialogue. One merely lets them explain.

(Dec 25, 2007) The British historian Andrew Roberts in appearing today on C-SPAN2 spoke of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany describing Jews as mosquitoes and therefore being "absolutely" like Hitler. This is a shocking statement coming from a historian. (His recent book is A History of the English Speaking People since 1900.) Anyone who has studied these two should know that Wilhelm as Germany's monarch leading to and during World War was not identical with Hitler's leadership before and during World War II. Moreover, Wilhelm was a sincere and devout Christian, a man who read the Bible. Yet on C-SPAN Roberts built on his comment of their absolute similarity as destroying any argument that World War I should have been fought. This is ridiculous. But not being absolutistic myself I'll not say that there is nothing worthwhile in Roberts' new book. Maybe somewhere in the book he makes a valid point.

An absolutist might change that what is being promoted here is the idea that there are no absolutes. Not so. Absolutes are invented as tools of thought. An inch is an inch is an inch. Perfect is not about degree, so there is nothing more perfect than something else. The word "no" does not mean "maybe." There are absolutes in electrical circuitry and the binary system used in computers. Black can be thought of as an absolute - reflecting no light. Our minds are like black and white photos, containing absolutes as dots without an overall absolutism.

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