Relative Ontology

Yesterday while on the long drive to Vegas for a wedding, one of my best friends, Ben, and I had a chat about context, space, and time. He brought up how strange it was that humans are human regardless of what space or time they are born into; however, this definition is purely based on biological premises. The human born in the 1950s is not the same human as me, because our contexts are so vastly different. Our lens of reality is layered with filters of place, history, culture, technology, etc. Ben related how ontology is therefore highly relative to place and time. He brought up an example from the scriptures, when one of the prophets had a vision of all the Earth’s inhabitants, and tried to describe what he saw. His descriptions sound crazy and almost unidentifiable to us, but many speculate that he was describing technological advances that would not have been present back then, such as an airplane. Ben and I tried to think of a future human’s existence that could be so contextually different from our own that if we could look into their timeframe, we would not even have the terminology or explaining concepts in our ontology to accurately describe events or devices they might interact with regularly.

Later, I forgot entirely about this conversation, and we met up with friends downtown on the Vegas strip. I used to live in Las Vegas, and am pretty familiar with what sights can be seen on the strip – at least sights open to those younger than 21. Casinos blast their mind numbing game sounds, people drop thousands on overpriced food, clothing, alcohol, etc, old men walking around with scantily dressed younger women, or women their same age who look like they eat Botox for breakfast. There are tipsy and drunk people stumbling around on the sides of the hectic main road (including one of the non-LDS friends we had met up with), openly drinking, holding 4-foot tall alcohol cups. Casual sex or sex entertainment is glorified and on display on billboards, on pornographic call cards, or in the public Treasure Island pirate ship show, where old men stand watching with their hands on their wives’ shoulders, or little kids are hoisted onto shoulders so they can get a better look. So… how does this relate to Ben’s and my conversation?

I thought about this American cultural experience, in one of the United States’ biggest cities, and thought about how it might compare to Accra, Ghana, or any other big city in Ghana. What are the similarities, or the differences? Just from some of the video clips we have watched in class I can pretty well guess there are some major differences. I am guessing there are concepts in big cities in Ghana that are too foreign to Americans to even cross our minds, or terminology that is just not included in our ontology because of our different context, and vise versa. How does context become so very different between humans across the world, or thousands of miles away, or hundreds of miles away, that even our epistemology cannot be defined the same. Are the differences based on history? Or are they a-historical? Is it based on geography and resource availability? When did cultures diverge? And what makes them end up so drastically different, where meaning cannot even be reconciled, especially when we are all born with the same biological brains and bodies?

These questions probably cannot be asked. However, they lead me to one conclusion – that whether there is or is not a universal ontology, humans’ variable epistemologies will never allow for it to be discoverable without the intervening of some higher power. Therefore cultural relativism is vital to human studies, including the research I will be doing in Ghana, because no matter where one hails from, they cannot legitimately claim to another that they know “pure reality.”