On October 7, 2023, thousands of Jews were raped, tortured, kidnapped, and killed by terrorists. For many, what was most striking about the attacks was not that Hamas hated Jews, but the reaction in the West. Antisemitic attacks and harassment have reached levels unseen in decades, and many Westerners seem either willfully ignorant or tacitly supportive of Israel’s enemies.

Many intellectuals who do important work highlighting sexual assault and the burden of coming forward as a victim are at the same time downplaying or outright denying the mass rape of Jewish women on October 7. “Believe all women”—except when they’re Jews. Further, the same people who were rightly horrified by chants of “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville are perfectly happy to say that we “don’t get to tell Palestinians how to resist” occupation. 

The double standard is obvious, but its relevance is worth exploring. Why do otherwise smart, sophisticated people talk out of one corner of their mouths about the moral necessity of human rights but then pivot back to staunch moral and cultural relativism in other circumstances? The answer lies in the denial of moral absolutes and its ultimate expression in postmodernism.

Postmodernism is an intellectual movement that sprang up in the twentieth century, drawing on philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, and French thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. It’s often suggested that all of philosophy is a footnote to Plato, as a credit of his influence on what came after him. Something similar could be said about Nietzsche and postmodernism. It’s generally understood that one of philosophical postmodernism’s key innovations was the denial of moral absolutes. These thinkers wanted to move beyond good and evil, toward a world where a few great philosophers could give themselves new ends to aspire to, without regard to conventional notions of morality—indeed, one of Nietzsche’s seminal works is literally titled “Beyond Good and Evil.” Necessarily, the denial of moral truths called the nature of truth itself into question. Foucault followed a similar line, suggesting that there was no objective truth at all. So did the twentieth-century historicists who insisted that all values were contextual. So did American legal realists and social scientists who, high on the scientific revolution, found moral truths to be unprovable.

Somewhere down the line though, relativism seemingly receded. Over the past few decades, the relativist line has slowly been supplanted in academia by uncompromising moral absolutism from the left that aimed at combating various injustices—particularly those faced by certain identity groups. Indeed, as the threat of censorship has expanded on college campuses, many observers have explicitly noted that the problem with progressive academia is not relativism but a new kind of absolutism. Given this about-face, one would expect some explicit renunciation of relativism, or the development of some moral schema that would justify and ground liberal institutions and moral judgments against racism, sexism, and homophobia. Neither of those things happened.

As relativist academics witnessed the horrors of World War II and the barbarity of the Nazi regime, many began to try and find some grounding for American political institutions and norms. After all, their earlier rejection of natural law and embrace of philosophical pragmatism made it hard to justify liberal democracy on anything other than pluralistic and utilitarian grounds. Relativism pointed towards democratic pluralism and multicultural tolerance. The legal scholar Edward Purcell, writing in the early 1970s wrote, “Considered as a prescriptive political logic, for example, [the relativist theory] strongly pointed toward the need for the widespread sharing of effective political power, decentralization of economic decision-making, and a fundamental commitment to meaningful and broad individual freedoms.” Accordingly, American society was to be judged on those terms. But justification had to occur on the grounds of “what works”, which, Purcell correctly noted, “confirmed one of the most common criticisms of philosophical pragmatism, on which the relativist theory was based. The test of ‘what works’ was essentially delusive and circular, for practical efficacy was not an objective criterion.”

Legal process theorists had similar trouble. In the aftermath of the Second World War, with many legal realists seeking some grounding for American liberal democracy, legal process theory emerged. Legal process theory, an outgrowth of legal realism, maintained that legitimacy was found in the process by which laws are passed. But the same questions loomed: how could one judge the processes themselves if there was no objective standard to appeal to?

Critical theory deals with a similar problem. Richard Delgado, one of the central figures in the development of critical race theory, explicitly denies the possibility of objective truth. Critical theory more broadly relies on relativism. Critical race theory rightly tries to identify and fight racism, but can it explain why racism is intrinsically wrong?

Similarly, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a prominent Indian literary scholar, was dedicated to dismantling power structures that marginalized oppressed groups like her own. But at the same time, as a postmodernist, she was committed to the belief that group identity was an artificial social construct. Out of this tension arose “strategic essentialism”—the idea that even though essentialist categories like racial and sexual identity had no objective content to them, they were useful in fighting against oppression. In line with other postmodern relativists, Spivak maintained, “My search is not a search for coherence.”

Even many of the left’s most thoughtful moralists struggled with how to justify some form of moralism. Ronald Dworkin is one of the most famous and astute liberal thinkers of the twentieth century, but even he struggled with it. Dworkin rejected moral relativism, but struggled to articulate a sound justification for moral judgments. A Guardian article about him asked, “But if objective moral values aren’t in the world, where are they hiding? In the book, Dworkin finally tells us when we are justified in thinking any value judgment is true, namely: ‘When we are justified in thinking that our arguments for holding it true are adequate arguments.’ Isn’t that circular? Yes, but Dworkin argues it’s good circular, not bad circular.”

Good things are good, yes. Another liberal luminary, John Rawls, tried to ground moral theory in self-interest and a form of public reason that rejected absolutist assumptions and comprehensive doctrines that not everyone agrees on. What this amounts to is the same pluralistic justification that ultimately fails to ground moral judgments. It may seem intriguing at the start of A Theory of Justice, but by the end of The Law of Peoples, it seems clear that he similarly struggled to ground moral judgments. And so the same problem persists.

Moral judgments against bigotry are the essence of left-wing politics, but the left never explicitly repudiated relativism. It’s impossible to square the circle of relativism and absolutism in a principled way. So why aren’t more on the left paralyzed by this? Likely, most everyday progressives don’t embrace moral relativism, but many of the most prominent intellectual voices did, and they were the ones pushing hardest for the moralist turn in leftist politics. Yet, as the world saw on October 7, they will gladly pivot back to relativism when it suits them. Why aren’t they paralyzed by this?

Imagine you’re talking to someone who first tells you that they don’t think there’s anything wrong with lying to get your way, and then adds that they promise they aren’t lying. You probably wouldn’t believe them. Accordingly, the academic left never abandoned its relativism. So we can assume that they have the same laissez-faire attitude toward truth that postmodernists more broadly have.

Nietzsche writes:

Are these coming philosophers new friends of “truth”? … It must offend their pride, also their taste, if their truth is supposed to be a truth for every man—which has so far been the secret wish and hidden meaning of all dogmatic aspirations. “My judgment is my judgment”: no one else is easily entitled to it—that is what such a philosopher of the future may say of himself.

Here, we find that even if there is a “truth,” the new philosophers of the postmodern era will be unconcerned with it. They don’t value truth itself.

The legal scholar, Steven D. Smith, attempted to explain a similar attitude among the ancient pagans. Smith suggested that postmodern leftism has strong elements of the pagan mindset, as the pagans were generally less concerned with the concept of belief in the gods than they were with outward displays of obedience and the performance of rituals. Metaphysical truth didn’t have the same importance in Paganism as it did in Christianity—which relied heavily on the Greek rationalist tradition that Nietzsche scorned. This allowed intellectual pagans to either allow the myths to be judged under a more relaxed epistemic standard than the physical world itself or reject them while continuing to affirm the civic religion of the city that was based on them. They could affirm that the gods were real in public, without getting too hung up on the myths’ literal truth. “My judgment is my judgment” they might say. Or, considered today, one could maintain that objective morality is hopelessly elusive in a metaphysical sense, but affirm it for the sake of a political program.

If postmodern leftism assumes that all values are culturally contingent, then we can say whatever we want about a given set of values—in that case, I can say something’s right for me and us, without it being correct in some deeper metaphysical way. In that case, you don’t need to do your homework in any meaningful way, or show your work. You can will the belief into existence, in a Nietzschean sense. Thus, it is no wonder that leftist intellectuals exhibit such rabid zeal when discussing things like racism, sexism, and transphobia. In an argument, it’s often the case that the one who’s secure in the truth of their position will stay calm, while his insecure interlocutor will begin to raise his voice, hoping that his passion and anger can substitute for his argument. And if you know, in some deep sense, that the only thing you have on your side is the volume and ferocity of your voice, you’re less likely to let the argument stand on its own terms. Absolutism becomes a performance—a performance meant to disguise a deeper relativism that would invalidate your entire argument.

In this way, it doesn’t make sense to term the woke defenders of Hamas either relativists or absolutists. They’re both. They don’t care about formal reasoning. And, like Nietzsche, they certainly don’t care about objective truth. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus must choose to sail close to one of two opposite monsters, Scylla and Charybdis. Leo Strauss wrote of how Aristotle and Plato avoided the “Scylla of ‘absolutism’ and the Charybdis of ‘relativism’” by charting a third way. Postmodernists somehow manage to escape neither, but in fact, embrace both.

Without objective truth and moral judgments, the only thing to rest your philosophy on is power. Indeed, this is what critical theory has done. Critical theory, while denying the possibility of objective moral truths, focuses on power dynamics. That is a “tell.” The entire philosophy focuses on elevating the “oppressed” in relation to the “oppressor.” If we’re to follow this argument to its logical conclusion, there’s no limit to the kinds of resistance the oppressed should use against their oppressor. Power dynamics are necessary to interrogate, but without an objective moral standard to judge against, it results in an amoral war of all against all—where the only limit on your action is your self-interest. Simply, I can do what I want to become as powerful as I can. That is how one gets from moral relativism to justifying rape and pillaging by Hamas.

Postmodern political leftism is not philosophy so much as it is performance art. Even though its progenitors were chiefly concerned with obscurantist religious absolutism, and quick to point out the inconsistencies and misdeeds of the powerful, postmodern relativism is no less obscurantist. Foucault maintained that even if the powerless were to come to power and overthrow their oppressors, they’d likely reconstitute that oppression in a new form. Accordingly, as we saw on October 7, sexual violence and bigotry are cardinal sins, except when they’re not.

Postmodern relativists might say one thing in private about the unknowability of truth, but to say it in public would be to destroy the public foundation for their entire political program. And so the only option is to lie, which they are quite happy to do. For what use is truth to them? Nietzsche writes, “For all the value that the true, the truthful, the selfless may deserve, it would still be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life might have to be ascribed to deception, selfishness, and lust.” Deception, selfishness, lust, and, ultimately, power.