21 February 2006
Good and Bad are NOT culturally determined and relative
Let’s not be confused. Good and Bad are objective things. They are not a subjective experience, any more than Truth and Beauty.
There may be many opinions about what is good or bad, what is true or beautiful. But this does not alter the fact that these are basic, bedrock concepts, that preexist our understanding of them, and that will still be around long after we are gone — whether we go through further evolution or just plain boneheaded stupidity.
So why are we confused? Because we are. The best lack all conviction when it comes to this idea. The kindly mind has confused tolerance with a universe of constantly shifting mores. And to believe in fundamental values has been discredited by what we call ‘fundamentalists’ — because the fundamentalist takes the position that there is right and wrong, and good and bad, but that these are as narrow as is possible to be defined. With the fundamentalist, the basic quality of values is a security issue.
Whenever something becomes a Security Issue rather than a Truth Issue, beware, beware, beware.
Where shall we start to look for Truth? I think the best possible place is in Humility. If we realize how limited our receptors are, and if we look at ourselves honestly, we can’t help but realize this, we will find ourselves nowhere else.
Remember how you saw your parents when you were a child? And how you saw them when you were older than they were when you were a child? That view should have changed radically (if it didn’t, you’re frozen at an inappropriate stage, and your poor aging parents are probably bearing the brunt — but that’s another story).
Think of ourselves as a culture as still being children. Overly Wise Children, as Santayana pointed out about American culture not too long ago. But still children.
Our ideas of Good and Bad, and of Truth and Beauty, under this formulation, would obviously be quite painfully basic. But in the same way that our ideas of our parents — individuals in all their complexity — would have been painfully basic when we were adolescent, those ideas do not prove an understanding of their object. Not at all.
What are Good and Bad? Some examples. Good is the supported autonomy of the individual. Bad is coercion of individual growth for someone else’s profit. Good is the recognition of another human being as fully human. Bad is to reduce them to a painfully constricting concept.
Bad is to treat a human as a commodity. Good is the understanding of the entire aura of the individual.
These are basic values. They do not shift. As Pseudo-Thucydides will no doubt point out in his essays on the Peloponnesian wars, it was the violation of those values that helped to end the Athenian empire. And it was those values that Socrates and his friends debated just as we debate them today.
They haven’t changed. They’re still there. They’re there for us to find. And then to act based on their call.