I opened a book this morning about what’s wrong with our schools, and before I’d finished the first chapter my mind had already wandered off the page and into older rooms — rooms with names like objectivism, relativism, utilitarianism, doors I hadn’t opened in years. I wasn’t hunting for which one is right. I’ve come to suspect “right” is a word we inherited from people more certain than the evidence deserved. Righter, maybe. There’s no absolute truth I can hold up to the light and see all the way through.
The first room: objectivism. The claim that somewhere out past the walls there is a fixed star, an absolute, and the whole work of a life is to climb toward it and grow into its shape. Standing in that doorway, I found myself wondering whether Teilhard de Chardin ever really lived there — a man reaching for the Omega Point with such longing that it looked, from outside, almost like faith wearing a lab coat. My gut says objectivism is the least likely of the three to explain a universe this strange, this improvised. Existence doesn’t feel carved. It feels grown, crooked, the way a root finds its way around a stone instead of through it.
The second room is relativism, the shadow-child of objectivism’s opposite. Here, truth stops being a star and becomes weather — it shifts with the epoch, with the tribe, with whatever century happens to be doing the asking. There’s a seduction to this room I won’t pretend I don’t feel. It lets you slip out the back door of stuffy old mores without the guilt that objectivism nails to every exit. I lean here, if I’m honest. But leaning isn’t the same as being carried by reason, and I can’t swear my comfort in this room is anything more than comfort dressed up as a conclusion.
The third room is utilitarianism, and it’s the one crowded with the loudest furniture these days. It says the mind’s hunger for meaning doesn’t obligate anyone to build a courtroom of good and bad — better to ask only whether a thing is useful. Not virtuous. Useful. It’s the native tongue of a culture drunk on gurus and thought-leadership, every idea packaged like it’s been polished under gallery lighting. Up close it gleams. From a little further back, I can’t help wondering if what I’m looking at isn’t philosophy at all — just utilitarian bones wearing the costume of popular culture, applause standing in for proof.
Three rooms, three ways of standing inside a house that may or may not be on fire. I walk from one to the other some mornings before I’ve even had coffee, and I still don’t know which floor I actually live on — only that I keep checking each door, as if the right one might finally hold still long enough to be named.