What relativism truly is, and what it implies at a deeper level, will need to be explored later. For now, let us rest content with this surface-level understanding and ask whether our era has indeed abandoned the idea of objective values.

On closer examination, no such abandonment appears to have taken place. First, there is a resurgence of religious sentiment, and even of fanaticism. A religious believer does not attribute merely subjective value to their God; they confer upon Him full objective value—all the more so in the case of a fanatic, who would never willingly rush towards death for something they considered only subjectively valuable. More broadly, the violence that shakes the world suggests that most people continue to believe in the objectivity of value.

Shall we then conclude that this abandonment is genuinely widespread among 'those who matter'—those within 'knowledgeable' circles? Even within the academic and intellectual community, the abandonment is far from complete. A number of recent attempts to establish the objectivity of value, and of moral value in particular, are beginning to emerge: M. Conche (Le fondement de la morale), A. Léonard (Le fondement de la morale), R. Misrahi (Qu'est-ce que l'éthique?), H. Putnam (The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and other Essays), D. Wiggins (Needs, Values, Truth), to name but a few.
If the concept of objective value has been abandoned, then, it has not been abandoned by humanity as a whole, but by certain segments of it.

Strictly speaking, ours is an era in which relativism is more openly expressed than ever before. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that relativism is the only perspective our time affords. Were that so, it would mean that our era does have a horizon—a vantage point encompassing and giving meaning to all others—namely, relativism itself.
On the contrary, what is distinctive about our era is that it allows all axiological theories to exist side by side: objectivism and relativism, optimism and nihilism, atheism and fanaticism, and so on. It therefore seems fitting to describe the post-modern era as an 'era without a horizon', in which no single axiological theory holds sway over the rest. To think otherwise would be to misread the insights—and the deeper truth—of thinkers like Lyotard and Sartre. It would mean continuing to perceive our time as a melody rather than a cacophony.

The literary image that best captures post-modernism may be Lautréamont's vision of a chance meeting on a dissection table between an umbrella and a sewing machine. This absurd convergence of unrelated objects stands for the rudderless post-modern juxtaposition of incommensurable axiological theories.
To reduce post-modernism to mere relativism would be to confine human history to a 'grand narrative'—if not a fairy tale: Marxism in the past, relativism today. What truly characterises our time, by contrast, is the cacophony of competing hierarchies of values which, unleashed by liberal democracy, assert themselves with force, colliding in both rhetoric and conflict.

Our world, then, is not one of meaninglessness but of the proliferation and assertion of all possible meanings.