Who Were the Sea Peoples?

We typically fine people occupying one of two extremes on the issue of moral relativism. Some people wish to impose rigid rules across all of time and space, regardless of circumstances: e.g., "The ancient Israelites were wicked because they practiced animal sacrifice." Others sense the (partially) historical character of right and wrong and leap from that genuine insight to the unwarranted conclusion that right and wrong are subjective, or whatever any particular society happens to deem them to be. In Religion and Society , Collingwood explains why both extreme views are wrong: "What is right for one society," we are told, "is wrong for another. It would be sadly narrow-minded to wish that every portion of the human race could live under the same kind of social organisation. On the contrary, to confer the blessings of civilisation upon the savage often means nothing but to force him into a mould for which he is quite unfitted and in which he can never...

Here is famed software developer Eric Raymond telling Mozilla not to let the door hit it on the way out to oblivion. Why? The company "betrayed one of the core covenants of open source." Which was? "One of the central values of the hacker culture from which Mozilla sprang is that you are to be judged by the quality of your work alone." Which is, of course, exactly what Raymond is not doing in reference to Mozilla! He is judging them because they forced Brendan Eich to resign . But that is very much not their quality of their work (which is mostly Firefox): it was a political decision they made. Now, I happen to agree with Raymond that Mozilla should have showed a little more spine! But despite my agreement, I am forced to note that is argument is self-undermining: you cannot use a universal ban on "judgmentalism" to judge those who violate it! It simply makes no sense.

Apparently Leo Strauss, and certainly many of his acolytes, use the term "historicism" as if it were a synonym for "relativism." Now, it is possible for someone to practice "relativist historicism" I guess, but for most important thinkers who might be labeled "historicists," the charge of "relativism" is false. It might help to think of this first in areas aside from ethics as it relates to historical cases, so we can understand it in a less charged atmosphere. Let us say that a critic of the Ancient Romans declares, "They were fools: they had to calculate things all the time, and yet they never invented the computer." This complaint is, of course, ridiculous: there were centuries of technological development that had to occur before the computer could be invented, and so it is no fault of the Romans that they failed to invent it. Similarly, imagine someone scolding a three-year-old child as follows: "By watching tha...