Church Voices

I woke up today, groggy as usual, thinking “I’m totally sleeping in first bell,” which happens to be an elective called “Single Living.” (In other words, loss of academic providence wasn’t too big a concern). But two things prevented my slumber: 1) the coffee I snuck in and 2) a surprisingly fascinating class activity.

For the past week or so, we’ve been ‘studying’ the importance of ethics and values in one’s personal development. Other than grotesque over-simplification, nothing seemed prima facie objectionable in the selected curriculum (a school textbook entitled Married & Single Life, 1992). Today, however, the reading therein expressed blatant espousal of some form of ethical relativism in its sub-chapter “Choosing Values.” Although with relativistic overtones, the section was littered with metaethical notions of right and wrong as intuitive in nature with statements like “how can you be sure the values you put high on your list are the right ones? [Emphasis mine]” For a section geared toward the choosing of one’s own values, the fallacy in the aforementioned sentence should be obvious. But that aside, it went on to attempt an answer to that very question: “When you are deciding what to value, ask yourself: Could this be harmful or destructive in any way to me or anyone else? If it could, it probably doesn’t belong on your list of values.” Then, to tie it all together with a real clincher of an example for the conclusion: “Since shoplifting is illegal and causes higher prices for everyone, the lure of excitement should not win out. In general, people agree on the basic issues of right and wrong. These are established in society and have changed very little over the years.”

The reading was followed by an activity in which nine concepts were given, the students being told to determine the value status of each from least to greatest. The options were wisdom & knowledge, spirituality, health, justice, wealth, power, love, physical beauty, and loyalty. The sad part wasn’t so much the inconsistency of the view proposed (moral relativism) in that it went from simply reducing values to being ‘established in society’ to assuming them inherently good as if platonic givens in just a matter of minutes. The sad part was observing the class’s decisions. Virtually the whole class was divided as to what they took to be the most valuable. There was no dominant category; not even love, which I thought would have been the winner out of sheer emotivism. But not one even held a majority vote. No worries, though, for the teacher was there to repeatedly assure the class that everyone was right, for it’s relative the individual (paraphrased, of course). Not that I was/am approaching this as if on some sort of higher ground than everyone else, but when you teach relativism, the result isn’t unity; that is, until an absolute is smuggled in. The class could not have illustrated more disunity about what ‘good’ was ‘best.’ But not one person stood out of unity with respect to rightly categorizing the concepts as good.

The fact of the matter is this; everything is relative until you relativise an absolute. The temptation to dismiss all the presented options as horribly perverse and to affirm rape and child molestation as good was almost overbearing. But such would have gotten me condemned by my fellow students as well as a trip to the counselor’s office at least! But so long as we take the textbook’s words as true, I don’t see how anyone could justifiably point fingers if I chose to do so, unless, of course, they thought what the textbook said was absolutely wrong.