In which I solve for relativism

This may be the most important idea I have ever introduced, and it doesn't matter if I'm not the first person to have introduced it.

All that matters is that I have thought of it, and now you may think of it too.

There's an argument, and some of you may have seen this argument, that goes something like this:

• Are you a better person than you used to be?
• If so, you acknowledge that people can be better than they were.
• You also acknowledge that people can be better than each other. If the current version of yourself is better than a previous version, it logically follows that the current version of yourself may be better than the current versions of the people around you. (It may also be worse.)
• What about the culture in which you live? Is it better than it used to be?
• If so, you acknowledge that cultures can be better than they were.
• You also acknowledge that cultures can be better than each other.

You can see where this is going, of course – and although you can encounter this argument in a number of online communities (and it's most appalling when you find it tucked in somewhere you don't expect, e.g. a series of posts about nutrition and biohacking), I first read it in a book that was ostensibly attempting to prove the existence of the multiverse.

I don't want to name the book.

Nor do I care to call out the author.

I will note that nearly everyone who proposes this argument offers the same counterargument, which runs as follows:

• Well, if you don't believe that cultures can be better than each other, you must be a cultural relativist.
• Which means you must approve of [insert terrible thing here].

This, by the way, was an argument/counterargument we encountered in the Philosophy 101 class I took in college, and at the time we were unequipped to solve it – although if I recall correctly our professor steered us towards what might be considered "relativism as long as no harm is being done to physical bodies," at which point I suppose you have to send in the United Nations Department of Peace Operations.

Which bothered me, for decades, because I am not a mind-body dualist and I'm not even sure I'm a relativist. In fact, that one philosophy class was enough to put me off philosophy, as a discipline, until I finally understood that philosophy could be viewed as a form of systems thinking.

At which point I began to study it on my own.

And with Larry.

If you've been reading my blog for more than five minutes, you already know that I consider Larry to be the best person I've ever met, and the joke is always that I should have met more people.

And yet, at our wedding, I told everyone not only that Larry was the best person I'd ever known, but also that my family was the best family – and that I knew many of them thought the exact same thing about the people they loved.

In other words, I said –

and everyone understood this –

"Larry is the best, and our family is the best, because everyone you love is the best."

So much for ranking people by better or worse – and if you're going to take that argument to the same place people have often taken it, so much for ranking cultures.

How do you solve for relativism, then?

It came to me during a Unitarian service, when I suddenly realized that if love were in fact a superpositional state in which you were able to observe a person at both zero and one and actively want them to get to one, you could do the same thing for cultures.

(Or regions, or countries, or forms of government, or whatever you are tempted to rank and condemn.)

Observing the process towards integration does not mean wanting everyone to end up in the same place. Nor does it mean categorizing people, or groups of people, by who learns something new first.

It does, however, mean actively wanting universal integration, even though – and especially because – each individual integration may be unique.

(You might call this world peace, although that seems a bit trite for what I'm trying to describe.)

(It was also what Oscar Wilde was writing about, yesterday.)

Many people would prefer at least some disintegration so they could take control over people/cultures/countries they believe to be less capable than themselves, but you don't need me to get into that right now.

Instead I will stop here, and acknowledge that I still don't have the right words for what I mean by "actively want." It's not passive, but neither is it an interference. "Help" might be the better word, but sometimes the best help you can give a person who is trying to work something out is to leave them alone.

Because love, like quantum mechanics, does in fact resolve through nothing more than attention –

and every subsequent re-solving gets you that much closer to one, which is why you are a better person now than you used to be.