I don't know how many times I've taken part in conversations where someone is making an argument only to be challenged with the question of relevance. And yet the questioner is not asking if the speaker's issue is germane, to the point, or even enlightening (the root of relevant being from the Latin relevare "to lessen, lighten"); they are challenging whether or not the point is contemporary, modern, "with the times." We have merged the terms so well in common usage that they seem synonomous. Yet in actuality we use the term relevant as a stand in for contemporary because the former is so much more powerful rhetorically.
Listen the next time someone accuses you of making a point that isn't relevant. Ask yourself if what they really mean is that your point isn't contemporary. If this is the case, ask them the same. Given our times prejudice towards the modern, the contemporary, it's no wonder the terms seem so similar in usage; it assmues that only those things "with the times" are "enlightening." Yet to succumb to the challenge is to leave the prejudice at the heart of it unchallenged.
Are we in such a new era that only those things that are new are relevant? There are those who still see the past as Henry Ford wanted it to be: "History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history that we make today." (Chicago Tribune, 1916) If you too believe so, then the contemporary is the relevant. I however tend to think of the past as Santayana would have it: "Those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (The LIfe of Reason, 1905) And I think one need only look at the current economic crisis and the Republican insistence on more tax cuts or the recent lapses of the Vatican regarding Holocaust denial to see the destructive power of this forgetting. And I'd prefer not to let others push me towards the same kind of forgetting by the simple shifting of a simple word.
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