than aknowleging and accepting the relativism and collective pragmatic utility of "agreed sets of values".

You make it sound as though we have a choice, CS. I don't believe we do. Everything we are is thus pre-determined, even down to the words we use to talk about it.

But we ARE well and truly adrift.

Or maybe that's just another story we tell ourselves in the dark, not so much the quell our fears, but to experience them more vividly, like a ghost story, which might frighten us because even though such things as ghosts might not be real, our capacity to fear them is real enough.