Backstory to “The Relative Absolute”
A meditation of the breakdown of certainty in Western thought, occasioned by my thinking over the cultural relativism of Spengler’s Decline of the West and Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word.
Much later, I came across this estimate of the work of Daniel Boorstin:
“Boorstin believed that the main points of American history were made by what the people agreed upon, rather than what they fought over.”
As of today (2017), technology, not unanimity of belief, provides the underlying unity in a world of widely varying opinions.
