There’s a telling scene in the documentary Food, Inc where industrially raised cows are getting E.coli due to the cramped and unsanitary conditions they live in, and because they're being fed a diet unnatural to their systems. In order to combat this, food writer Michael Pollan suggests that if the cows were only put out to pasture for five days (to be fed on grass, their real diet), the problem of E.coli would be self-correcting. It would go away. What does the industry do instead? It builds an enormous space-age looking factory where men in fully enclosed suits put all the meat into stainless steel kettles where it's treated with ammonia to remove the contamination. Forget about the condition of the cows or the final quality of the meat- the solution chosen is the one that will continue production unchecked so that outputs can continue to be maximized.

Are you a relativist?

If you ever hear yourself saying phrases like “Who’s to say” (meaning who is to say which opinion is better), or “That’s just your opinion” (meaning all opinions are equal), chances are you’ve absorbed the relativism so central to the postmodern zeitgeist (1). About five years ago, the Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn wrote a book called Truth: A Guide, in which he challenged the relativist position with some gusto. For Blackburn relativism is a serious and charged topic. Blackburn accuses postmodern relativism of being “something which corrupts and corrodes the universities and the public culture, that sweeps away moral standards, lays waste to young people’s minds, and rots our precious civilization from within” (2).