Universalism and Relativism
This is an ancient battle. On the one hand, there are stable universal truths that are handed down from generation to generation like a sacred trust; on the other, each person and each group quite naturally tends to see the world through the personalized lens of his or her or their own needs.
Our favorite representatives of the two positions from classical Greece are Socrates and the Sophists; and a half-generation or so before Socrates, Herodotus, the "father of history," mapped out a powerfully attractive and to our self-satisfied minds strikingly "modern" relativist ethos, which he couched, paradoxically, in universalist terms: "Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best. ... There is abundant evidence that this is the universal feeling about the ancient customs of one's country" (3.38-39).
According to the universalist position, the center of all things is God, creator of heaven and earth, who was, is, and will be, unchangingly. God is the source of all truth and all stability. Anything that is true, therefore, is true for all times and in all places. Its truth is an inherent and essential quality; it does not depend on the perceptions of human viewers. Individual humans must therefore adopt a subordinate position with regard to truth: they receive it, or they block it; they receive it submissively and so truly possess it, or they attempt to foist their own personal predilections on it and so distort and destroy it.
According to the relativist position, the center of all things is the individual human, or at most a group of individuals ("man is the measure of all things," in the famous apothegm of the ancient Greek Sophist thinker Protagoras). Truth is always a matter of perspective. Greeks find the Egyptian custom of brothers marrying sisters repugnant; Egyptians find the Greek attitude incomprehensible. Individuals and groups therefore have enormous power to shape truth, and also enormous responsibility for the results of that shaping: some truths will make you free, but others will enslave you; some will make you happy, others will make you suicidal; some will inspire you to noble altruistic deeds, others will make you selfish and grasping; some will make you love others and want to extend yourself so as to understand them, others will make you rigid and intolerant.
The universalist position, clearly, is roughly the "pre-Kantian" mentality that I was so astonished to find almost unchallenged in translation studies when I first started reading it, and the relativist one is more or less the "post-Kantian" one. The universalist position explicitly assigns translation a stable essence, that of transferring the meaning of a text in one language to another without change, and it places primary authority over that transfer in the past, in the source author and source culture. Authority descends hierarchically from the source author to the translator, and from the translator to the target reader. The translator is subordinate to the source author, and must follow his or her lead in everything--and part of the reason for that is so that the target reader, who is subordinate to the translator, will remain subordinate to the source author as well. If the translator distorts the meaning of the source text, the target reader will gain access to distortion, not original meaning, and thus be cut adrift from the stable hierarchical transfer of meaning and authority and truth--a transfer process that is a priori valuable, because it is each individual's most reliable source of truth, someone passing it down from on high.
The relativist challenge to this position takes the leading form of a pointed epistemological question: "How do you know?" If the center of all things is God, if each individual is only at the tail end of a downward transfer process, how does anyone know what truth was originally? The weak version of this question is: what if there was a distortion at some point in the transfer process, and everyone who has received the ostensible "truth" ever since has been sorely misled? Human beings are subject to error; how can we be sure that some crucial error at one or more points in history hasn't skewed the whole process? Many revolutions have been based on the claim that this sort of "crucial error" happened at such-and-such a point in time, and that it is now necessary to start over fresh, with that error corrected: the Protestant Reformation and its conception of Roman Catholicism, for example (go back to the "early church"); Martin Heidegger and his conception of the Romans (go back to the ancient Greeks). But how is it possible for anyone to "go back" and even perceive, let alone correct, such an error?
The stronger version of this question is: how does anyone ever occupy a viewpoint not his or her own? I see the world through my eyes; I cannot see the world through God's, or Augustine's, or any given source author's. I can temper and complicate my own perspective by studying other people's viewpoints, reading their words, listening to them talk, and attempting to incorporate as much of each as possible into my own expanding one; but my perspective nevertheless remains my own. Sometimes I think I know exactly what someone is thinking, especially someone I live with, or interact with intensively, like a spouse or child; but I realize that I am just projecting my own experience onto that person's external behavior and making educated guesses, not really reading his or her mind. And in any case I would never presume to read a dead person's mind, or to claim to know God's "will" or "plan" for me or anyone else.
This is the relativistic assumption that is most powerfully challenged by spirit-channeling, which does offer a coherent explanation of how it is possible to be yourself and someone else at the same time: "I have come to recognize the unique texture and flavor of my own energy as it combines with other beings," Kathryn Ridall writes in Channeling: How to Reach Out to Your Spirit Guides, "and to recognize all channeling as a merging of my own higher self with other beings" (13). Spirit-channelers defy the rationalist/relativistic paradigm that has dominated Western thought for three or four centuries (and has been increasingly influential for well over two millennia) through access to an ancient mystical tradition that has never quite been displaced or discredited by that paradigm. According to that tradition, when people die they are not snuffed out; their spirits leave their bodies and continue existing on a higher plane, where we can communicate with them psychically. From that higher plane they can follow our activities back in embodied life, and without the distractions of the body they are also able to read our minds, so that spirit-channelers gain access to telepathic channels of truth that they themselves do not have. (Talking with another living person, the spirit-channeler cannot read his or her mind, but the spirit s/he is channeling can, so it may seem as if the spirit-channeler were telepathic.) Discarnate spirits continue to evolve after death, and the more advanced spirits become less and less interested in communicating with embodied persons; but when they do deign to communicate with or through channelers, they can tell us universal truths about our world and theirs.
What makes this model of universalism attractive to me as a counterstatement to my own quite rampant relativism is not its dismissibility--what good is a counterargument that offers no serious threat to one's own views?--but its coherence and articulateness. Conservative universalism has typically repressed so much of its spiritualist origins that its proponents quickly grow uneasy and defensive, without quite being able to defend their powerful investment in authority and the past. How do you know? How can you claim to know what a source author meant? Well, I ... I just do. And you would too if you had any respect for tradition. So stop asking stupid questions.
Spirit-channeling as a challenge to relativism is easily dismissable, of course, if you are absolutely (i.e., nonrelativistically) predisposed against mysticism. To dismiss conservative universalists who don't know why they believe what they believe, or how it might be possible for them to occupy a viewpoint not their own, all you have to do is call them on their ignorance--a demystification we relativistic rationalists are good at and thoroughly enjoy. To dismiss mystical universalists who do know why they believe what they believe, and base their belief on personal experience, you have to voice a rigidly universalist rationalism that declares of every mystical claim everywhere "it's all lies, it's a hoax, it's a fraud, it's impossible"--which has the unsettling effect of undermining relativism.
The relativistic post-Kantian view, therefore, according to which reality and truth are constructed experientially by individuals and groups and not channeled directly from God, leaves its proponents uneasily vulnerable to the experiential constructs of individuals and groups who claim to be channeling truth directly from God. Radical relativism leaves the door open to the possibility that mystical universalism too is a valid construction of reality. The relativistic rationalist who feels compelled to dismiss the possibility that spirit-channeling really works can only do so by reference to the authority of a universalizing rationalist past.
