The idea of truth—the very possibility of truth—is now dismissed by millions of Americans as mere prejudice, opinion, or perspective. Increasingly, people prefer to hear, read, and believe whatever makes them feel good in the moment. Whether what they consume is true or not seems irrelevant. Many no longer value truth, or they doubt that truth even exists.
This raises serious questions. First: Can it be true that there is no truth? The claim contradicts itself. Those who insist there is no truth inevitably assert their claim is…true.
Second: If truth does not exist, what can it mean to be educated? The English word education derives from the Latin ēdūcere—to lead out. Plato’s allegory of the cave captures this: the philosopher is led out of darkness toward the light of truth. Education, in its highest sense, is about turning toward that light and discovering what is real.
To deny the existence of truth is to assume there are only prejudices, opinions, and perspectives—none more or less valid than any other. But without truth, genuine communication—what the Greeks called logos—becomes impossible. How can meaningful conversation exist if words themselves have no stable reference to reality?
Without truth as a standard for resolving disputes, differences of opinion degenerate into struggles for power. In such a world, the views of the powerful become orthodoxy, enforced only so long as they hold power. When truth is denied, the will to power is the only important thing that remains.
Cultural and moral relativism flow directly from the denial of objective, timeless moral truth.
According to relativism, statements of right and wrong are nothing more than expressions of personal or cultural prejudices. For example: one culture may hold that human sacrifice is right, another that it is wrong. On relativist grounds, neither judgment is correct or incorrect—both are merely “different.” In the modern United States, such relativism fuels celebrations of “diversity” and “inclusiveness.”
Modern relativism can be traced to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th-century thinker who rejected the classical view of man as a rational animal. Rousseau claimed that human beings in the “state of nature” were solitary creatures, lacking both reason and language. Language and thought, he argued, were not natural but invented—emerging by chance, through disasters that forced fearful individuals to interact.
If Rousseau is correct, human language and thought reflect nothing but cultural and environmental accidents. Reason itself is reduced to a habit of particular peoples in particular times and places. Anthropology, the academic discipline fueled by Rousseau’s ideas, often treats reason not as a universal human faculty, but as merely one cultural custom among many.
From this view, disagreement among cultures over moral questions—such as human sacrifice—proves there is no objective standard of judgment. Each culture’s “values” are as valid as any other’s. Thus relativism concludes: the only wrong is believing that it is possible to know what is truly right.
Yet relativism suffers from glaring problems. First, it is not truly multicultural. Moral relativism is almost exclusively a Western invention. Chinese communists, militant Islamists, or tribal chieftains do not claim that their values are mere cultural prejudices. They insist their values are objectively true.
Second, relativism contradicts itself. It claims that the truth is that there is no truth. It claims to be good to believe there is no good. By its own standard, relativism is nothing more than one prejudice among others, with no ground to defend itself.
Finally, relativism blinds students to the past. Great works—by Aristotle, Locke, Madison, or Lincoln—were written on the premise that moral truth exists. A relativist who denies that premise cannot understand them as they understood themselves. Aristotle can understand a relativist, but a relativist cannot understand Aristotle
For these reasons, teachers should not ignore relativism but confront it. Ask students directly: Are you open-minded enough to consider the possibility of objective moral truth? If they are, they can begin to understand the great texts of civilization—documents that shaped liberty, justice, and self-government. If they are not, those texts will remain closed to them.
Education in the truest sense is not about multiplying opinions but about turning minds toward what is true, good, and beautiful. To teach well in an age of relativism is to help students rediscover that truth is possible—and necessary—for genuine communication, for just government, and for human happiness and flourishing.
