Opinion Sur
Currently produced worldwide there is a growing rise of conservatism and fundamentalist phenomena manifested by homophobia, xenophobia, anti-feminism, racism and all forms of discrimination.
The fundamentalist believes that his is the only truth and everything else is a deviation from or out of the truth. This is recurrent in television programs of the various Pentecostal churches, including sectors of the Catholic Church, but also in the unique thinking of political sectors. They believe that only the truth, theirs, is entitled. The error must be fought. This is the origin of religious and political conflicts. Fascism begins with this narrow-minded way of seeing things.
How are we going to face that kind of radicalism? There are many ways and I think one of them is to rescue the good concept of relativism, a word that many do not want to hear. But there is much truth in it.
It should be thought in two directions: First, what is relative wants to express the fact that we are all related in some way. In the perspective of quantum physics, the encyclical of Pope Francis insists on taking care of the Common House “everything is intimately related; all creatures exist and depend on each other “(n.137; 86). For this relationship we all carry the same humanity. We are one species among many, a family.
In second place it is important to understand that everyone is different and has value in itself, but always in relation to others and their ways of being. Hence it is important to relativize all modes of being; none is absolute to the point of invalidating others. An attitude of respect and acceptance of difference is also needed because, for the simple fact of being there, s/he has the right to exist and coexist.
That is, our way of being, of living in the world, thinking, judging and eating is not absolute. There are a thousand other ways of being human, from the shape of Siberian Eskimos, through the Yanomami in Brazil, up to the inhabitants of peripheral communities and those sophisticated from the Alphavilles, where the wealthy and fearful elites live. The same applies to the differences in terms of culture, language, religion, ethics and leisure.
We must broaden the understanding of humanity far beyond our own realization. We live in the phase of the geo-society, global society, one, multiple and different.
All these human manifestations are carriers of value and truth. But they are a relative value and truth, that is related to one another, interrelated, since none of them, taken by themselves, is absolute.
Then, is there no absolute truth? Is the postmodernist “everything goes” valid? Everything goes? Not everything. Anything goes as far as it keeps relationships with others, respecting them in their differences and not hurting them.
Each one carries truth but no one can have a monopoly on it, not a religion, nor a philosophy, not a political party, not a science. Everybody, in some way, participate in the truth, but can grow to a fuller understanding of the truth, to the extent they relate to each other.
Well said by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado: “Not your truth. The truth. And come with me to look for it. Yours, keep it for yourself.” If we look for it together, in the dialogue and mutual relatedness, then my truth disappears to give way to our Truth, agreed upon by everybody.
Western illusion—that of the United States and Europe—is to imagine that the only window giving access to the truth, to the true religion, the authentic culture and critical knowledge is their way of seeing and living. Other windows only show distorted landscapes.
Thinking in that way, thus, condemns them to a visceral fundamentalism that, at another time, made them organize massacres to impose their religion in Latin America and Africa, and today by wars with great slaughtering of civilians to impose democracy in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and the whole Northern Africa. Here there is also the Western-style fundamentalism.
We must make good use of relativism, inspired, for example, in the culinary arts. There is a dining alone, preparing human food, but embodied in many forms and in different cuisines: mining, the Northeastern, Japanese, Chinese, Mexican and others.
Nobody can say that only one is true and tasty, for example, the mining or French, and that the others are not. They are all tasty in their own way and they all show the extraordinary versatility of culinary art.
Why would it be different with the truth? The base of fundamentalism is that arrogance that their way of being, their ideas, their religion and their form of government is the best and only valid in the world.
