What road got us here?

A friend of fifty-three years (we were high school classmates, he went on to become a judge, now retired) wrote me last night (from California):

Read the October 12, 2009 edition of The Los Angeles Times ["Fired commissioner in Texas execution inquiry says governor's aides pressured him": "The panel is looking into disputed arson forensics that convicted Cameron Todd Willingham, who was put to death in 2004"], page A-11.
    For the political crowd that pushes execution as good politics, science means nothing and they will stop at nothing to give it their own spin. Governor Perry is both trying to keep the truth from being published and spinning the denial with the same sort of dismal rhetoric and junk science that led to Willingham's execution in the first place. The trouble is that the country is full of people who don't want the truth. "There is no global warming or if there is it's a cyclical thing and not the result of human activity." "There is no credible evidence of evolution; evolution has been guided by divine intelligence." "Obama does not meet the constitutional requirements of being a naturally born American." Etc., etc.
    When it became intellectually fashionable to believe that all truth was the product of culture and that therefore there was no absolute truth, we got started down this path. Is there any turning back?
    Everyone I talk with agrees it's crazy, yet the public remains apathetic and caught up in celebrity baloney or worse yet, exhibitionism through Facebook, YouTube, etc.
    In the same vein, we learned today that Michael Pollan (the movie "Food Inc.") was prevented from speaking at Cal Poly [California Polytechnic Institute, in San Luis Obispo] because the Harris Ranch Beef Company threatened to withdraw a $150,000 grant unless some allegedly disinterested scientists (food experts hired by the company, no doubt) would also be allowed to present countervailing views at the same forum.

I agree with my friend on where we are now, but was cultural relativity the road that got us here? The vehement certitude with which people argue their positions sounds anything but relativist. When Texas Governor Rick Perry characterizes as "latter-day supposed experts" the scientists attempting to investigate the true nature of the fire that killed Willingham's children (for which he was convicted of murder and executed a dozen years later), he gives the impression of believing absolutely that they (rather than he) are charlatans.
    Those who utter the howling falsehoods quoted by my friend ("...no global warming or...not the result of human activity," "...no credible evidence of evolution...," "Obama...not...a naturally born American") utter them as absolutely true. Ironic if this came about because of cultural relativism. It seems rather the opposite, but with little more than raised voices and red faces to argue for a babble of preposterous absolute claims.
    I'm not up on the literature of cultural relativism, but I did read two classic, influential books that argued against relativism and for objective truth. They are William F. Buckley, Jr's God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom (1951) and Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987).
    I don't know how we got here, but I don't think it was by the road of cultural relativism...unless what we're seeing is a reaction to (even a backlash against) cultural relativism. That would tend to explain the raised voices and red faces, I think. "My position isn't just culturally relatively true, it's absolutely true. So there, and screw you into the bargain!"
    But loudness and redness won't gain anyone admittance to Buckley's¹ or Bloom's truth bandwagon.
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1. By the way, according to Buckley's son Christopher, in his memoir, Losing Mum and Pup, Buckley himself had a way of "raising his voice" in debate—by never yielding even an inch, even with his son—that struck both his son and me as curiously inconsistent with a proper regard for truth.