(What happens when we put the truth into the compartments of our respective disciplines and start affirming that such relative truth is absolute, complete and unchanging.)
Prologue
(The contradictions of relativism.)
It was in ancient time, when wise men brooded
On definitive truths, that a lost cause, Protagoras,
Refusing to admit that he could be deluded,
Warned that absolutes were the preserve of swaggerers:
‘If reason is the rolling on the tongue of ideas,
Then let who will, pick his fruit from the stall
And be blameless! For truth is what each thinks it is;
There is no ‘good taste’ on which you can call.
‘When two views conflict, let’s not be cantankerous
And reject the glimmer for the broad daylight,¹
For some truths are esoteric.’ Now academic Protagoras
Lets light through chinks for the eyes of his proselyte.
Squint-eyed ² biologists say, ‘Truth is the credentials
Of lucky rabbit’s feet and erectile wit;
And altruism, for all its rational potential,
Rebels against genes’: - Does it make us unfit?
Psychologists say, ‘Truth is deterministic mind,
Where consciousness is set by the unconscious, not free’: -
But if they say thought is psychologically determined,
I must needs have their psyche in order to agree.
² I.e. peering with eyes slightly closed - as one figuratively does who concentrates on the micro-evolutionary world of genes and mutations (supposedly the raw material for natural selection) and ignores the macro-world, where biogeography or sociology apply.