It occurred to me today that it can’t all be relative.

I saw a post on Facebook, from a former student of mine, and the student was talking about darkness, and how it always gets a bad rap. The post suggested that there isn’t any difference, really, between darkness and light and that people should give the same amount of respect and positivity to darkness, as they do to light.

My initial reaction was to logically dismantle the argument, which I easily could have done. Anyone with any scientific understanding at all would have no problem whatsoever showing that there are significant differences between light and darkness.

But I didn’t, primarily because I’ve come to understand that Facebook is never the place to engage someone in that kind of a discussion, but also because I recognized that this student’s post is a symptom of a much deeper disease that has been plaguing our country for the better part of the past century.

The problem is relativism, and the extents to which people are applying relativistic thinking to all sorts of things, things that aren’t necessarily capable of being thought of in a relative sense.

As many posts as I’ve written about relativism, I’m starting to come around to the idea that a little bit of relativism is probably necessary in society.

But, let’s not get carried away.

* * *

I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed the scene in The Little Mermaid where Ariel combs her hair with a fork, but I often feel like the world is heading in this direction.

I don’t know how you reacted when you first saw that scene. I was fourteen when that movie was released, so I can’t even tell you how I reacted when I first saw that scene. What I can tell you is that, when I see that scene these days, I think of Ariel as a little bit lost.

I mean, everyone knows what a fork is for. Well… obviously not everyone.

And that’s the thing. Ariel doesn’t know what a fork actually is, when she finds one in the sunken ship that she explores at the beginning of the movie. What is a girl (mermaid) to do when she doesn’t know something? Why, you head to someone with more knowledge, of course.

Ariel heads to Scuttle, the seagull. Her reasoning is sound enough: Scuttle is much more likely to be able to answer questions about the human world because Scuttle has more access to that world than Ariel has (which is almost no access at all, aside from swimming in to shore to stare at whatever might be taking place on a beach –> not likely any formal dining experiences including, but not limited to, the use of cutlery).

The problem with Scuttle is that Scuttle is a seagull, and only slightly more connected to the human world than your average member of the mer-kingdom. What Scuttle tells Ariel is that the object that she’s found is a dinglehopper.

Which it isn’t. It’s a fork.

And Scuttle tells Ariel that humans use dinglehoppers for combing their hair.

Which we don’t. It’s a fork.

The problem with this comes later in the movie, when Ariel is sitting at a dinner and she uses the fork in front of her to comb her hair; she ends up looking like a fool in front of the people who know better, including the guy she is trying to impress.

We will set aside the motives of a seagull who fabricates a story to explain something, to someone who doesn’t know any better, for the purposes of looking knowledgeable. However, this conversation (Scuttle’s motives) does have something to bear on our analysis of a world where someone might try to convince you on Facebook that light and dark are really not that different.

Rather than getting into that, let’s talk about the invention of the fork.

According to a quick read of an article from Wikipedia on forks, they’ve been around for more than a thousand years, as members of the “meal tool” family. As with anything that old, it would be impossible to say who the original inventor of the fork actually was. But, someone came up with the idea, and very few ideas –as a percentage of all ideas that have ever been thought– have the shelf-life to make it for more than one thousand years.

But, for the moment, let’s theorize about the existence of a man named Leonidus. Leo –for short– invented the fork, all of those hundreds of years ago. He invented the fork to solve a problem he and his friends were having at meals, a problem that begged for a solution. And, for more than a thousand years, Leo’s answer, to the question of how one if going to get a certain solid food item from one’s plate to one’s mouth, has stood the test of time.

Leo certainly never intended that someone would one day use his meal utensil as a hair-styling tool.

Now, whether or not you can effectively use a fork to comb your hair is arguable. Whether or not a fork is a better choice than a brush or a comb is probably also arguable. What is not arguable is that Leo didn’t invent the fork to style hair. Using it to do so is a misuse of the tool, regardless of whether or not one is free to do so.

Here’s where the relativism comes in. You see, there are many things that have been designed to work a certain way. Whether or not we know who designed certain things to work a certain way is irrelevant, and I know that it is irrelevant because people still think of Ariel as a fool when they watch her combing her hair with her fork, despite not knowing anything about the origins of the fork.

But, what if Ariel isn’t the only one forking her hair? What if a lot of people start doing it? What if, one hundred years from now, someone sits down at a table and uses a fork to pick up a piece of chicken from their plate and everyone around them gasps and laughs at them?

If you think I’m being ridiculous right now, then you’ve not been paying attention. The established ways for doing things are being slowly discarded for different approaches.

Not all of these new approaches are good approaches.

* * *

Just like anything else that I tend to write about these days, I feel like the extremes of relativism –and its sibling, absolutism– are to be avoided by anyone with a level head, especially in situations where these two philosophical approaches are used to legitimize extremist behavior.

And, if everyone –over the course of the next hundred years– decides to abandon the fork as a meal tool, in exchange for the fork as a hair-styling tool, it probably wouldn’t be the end of the world.

But, there are some things that aren’t up for interpretation. Some things have been designed to work a certain way, and they are not meant to work any other way.

Relativism would have us believe that everything is up for grabs. This isn’t true. Absolutism would have us believe that there is only one way to skin a cat. This is also not true. Somewhere between ‘skinning cats’ and ‘forks as combs’ lies this fact:

When you open a closet, darkness doesn’t pour out into the lighted room. Light pours in.