YOU CAN'T HAVE A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS WHEN THERE IS ONLY ONE:

The fact of moral diversity therefore raises the issue of moral relativism. This, too, has become a part of the culture wars, especially as these debates have played out in the United States. Many moral traditions are based on the idea that there are universal values, perhaps rooted in human nature. Perhaps you yourself were raised with the universalist idea that there is a single true morality that applies to everyone, everywhere. But if living many different ethical ways of life is natural to human beings, then this encourages the idea that humans create multiple ethical worlds, and that ethical truth is relative to the world in question. Moral truth, like the truth about etiquette, simply varies from place to place. So far, so bad, for universalism.

When battles over moral relativism have featured in the culture wars, they tend to be framed in the following way. One side of the argument celebrates cultural diversity and unites this with an emphasis on the socially constructed nature of values. This is the outlook popularly associated with postmodernism, identity politics, and the rejection of universalist tradition. However, this seemingly 'relativistic' destination is precisely what alarms the moral conservative. Hence the other side of the culture wars: if there is no common human standard upon which to ground moral universalism, then something beyond the human is needed. This is the side of the culture wars associated with the need to return to religion, and a morally reactionary response to social diversity.

These debates about the sources of morality have become part of mainstream culture. The old-school secular humanist, faced with the difficulty of finding a universal basis for a human-centred morality, is presented with a dilemma: either choose a culture-centred ethics, or return to a God-centred one. Call it the anti-Humanist Fork: relativism or religion? Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury in the United Kingdom, recently stated in the New Statesman magazine that 'The modern humanist is likely to be a far more passionate defender of cultural variety than their predecessors.' What he didn't dwell upon is the following irony: that proper recognition of moral diversity has tended to undermine the universalism upon which humanism is typically founded.

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