words of Norris, they claim ‘to have achieved an omniscient standpoint beyond and
above all other stories that people have told so far’ (cited by Hughes, 2002: 65).
We all know of ‘tall’ stories but these are things people say about themselves that
are not true. In fact, all stories are a mixture of truth and falsehood because people
are not gods. They are part of history and, therefore, however authoritative people
sound, future generations will always reveal parts of their story to be inadequate.
This is a problem whether the story is about one group of people in particular, or
about the world as a whole. Why should we assume that ‘grand narratives’ are
absolutely true (in a static and timeless sense) and then reject them? We should
never have made this assumption in the first place. An evangelical Christian might,
for example, regard the Bible as the source of timeless truth, but this is a fanciful
assumption. We do not need to reject it with the same firmness that it is advanced,
otherwise we simply turn the assumption inside out. To go beyond the assumption
rather than simply invert it, we need to see that like all assumptions it is a mixture
of truth and falsehood.
To argue that differences have no meaning implies that there is no wider realm
of reality by which we can distinguish between differences that are (relatively) ‘true’
and differences that are (relatively) ‘false’. It is true that Indian people have darker
skins than white Europeans but it is not true that one group is more intelligent than
the other. If we make no distinction between beliefs and reality or concepts and
objects, then how can we regard some differences as attributes to be celebrated and
some alleged differences as attributes to be challenged? Poststructuralists sometimes
reject the very distinction between a theory of knowledge (epistemology) and a
theory of being (ontology) which means that it becomes impossible to distinguish
genuine differences from false ones.
The truth is relative – different people see the world differently – but it is also
absolute – there is a world of reality that enables us to prefer one concept to another.
The word ‘omniscient’ (all-knowing) in Norris’s argument – that those who put
forward meta-narratives subscribe to an omniscient standpoint – is all revealing
since it assumes that if something is not timelessly and purely true, then it cannot
be true at all. But, as Sandra Harding a feminist philosopher has argued, why should
we take the view that in giving up the idea that there is one static and divinely
inspired truth, we must at the same time give up ‘trying to tell less false stories’?
We can aim to produce less partial and perverse representations about the world
‘without having to assert the absolute, complete, universal or eternal advocacy of
these representations’ (Harding, 1990: 100). But if we reject the whole idea of
‘representation’ (i.e. that ideas ‘represent’ or reflect a world external to them), then
it becomes impossible to use the term ‘difference’ critically.
Thus, to return to our example of women and men: they are different, but the
differences do not justify discrimination, and this, as far as we can tell, is true. But
in saying this, we could hardly deny that deeper insights lie ahead that will certainly
alter the way in which this truth is presented. This is why we can say that such an
assertion is bothabsolutely andrelatively true. If it were simply absolutely true,
then it would be a statement placed outside of human history. If it were just
relatively true, then it would be confined in its scope to the moment we uttered it.
By seeing the truth as absolute and relative, we are embracing a logic of ‘both/and’
rather than of ‘either/or’.472 Part 4 Contemporary ideas