Something happened today in class that troubles me. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, given the spirit of the age, but it’s still troubling, no matter how you look at it.
First, a little context. on Tuesday, I brought a BBC article to class about a practice that most people consider patently immoral: polygamy. A South Africa man married four women in one day. The groom pointed to culture and tradition to justify it’s acceptance, but the practice is not without controversy–many say that it tramples on women’s rights, for while men can marry as many women as they want, women can only marry one man.
I used this to launch into a discussion about morality in general. Our discussion was called, “to judge or not to judge?” Most students were unwilling to say the man was wrong. They might not engage in polygamy themselves, but they thought it uncouth to judge a practice from a foreign culture. “Morality is relative to culture, so one ought not judge,” some said.
Next, I turned up the heat a bit with a series of other scenarios, each more serious than the previous one. I asked them about a situation where an older white man shouts a racial slur at a black female co-worker. To judge or not to judge? Does it matter if the scenario happens in another culture? (some said yes!)
The last scenario was about the Holocaust: should we judge those who exterminated the Jews in the Third Reich?
My intention with each scenario was to pit two dearly held moral values against one another. In the first, it was belief in women’s rights and belief that morality is relative. In the second, it was belief that racism is wrong and relative morality.
You get the point. With each scenario, it became harder and harder for them to maintain their relativism. For the most part I stayed out of debating directly with them, opting to ask probing questions instead and soliciting feedback from opposing viewpoints.
The bottom line is that it’s hard to hold to competing statements, yet that is what many Americans do when it comes to morality. Many believe that all women, regardless of where they are from, have rights, yet they passionately declare that there are no absolutes or objective morals. Little do they know that those two cancel each other out: if morality is relative, then the Saudi who beats his wife for cooking a bad meal (to choose a slightly stereotypical example…happens, though) is not really doing anything wrong. Yes, we don’t believe that sort of thing is ok in America, but that’s our morality. The Saudi comes from a different culture, so who are we to judge?
One has to go: either women really do have rights, regardless of where they were born–in fact, wouldn’t the opposite be a rather pernicious racism, that we accord dignity and value based on where someone was born–or morality is relative and anything we call “rights” are fictitious conventions, akin to driving on the right side of the road…useful for us, but not rooted in reality.
Same thing goes for the other situations. Many hold that racism is horrible and wicked, but they miss the fact that for many people in other countries, racism is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. Are they wrong?
The “to judge or not to judge?” exercise is meant to cause some cognitive dissonance in the participants. We can only hold to contradictions until we really pause to think about it. In addition, living with the consequences of relativism becomes extremely hard when you really ponder things.
I mentioned that some, at this point, bring up that people in the East can hold to contradictory beliefs with ease. These folks, some object, hold to a “both/and” logic, rather than a Western-born “either/or” logic, and the law of non-contradiction and such applies only in the latter.
Nah. As Ravi Zacharias often notes, even in China, they look both ways when they cross the street, because they understand that it’s either them or the bus, not both (I don’t think my students really got that one. Oh well, they can’t all be homeruns). At any rate, people insist that when evaluating Eastern views, you use the “both/and” system *not* the “either/or.” See the law of non-contradiction (or excluded middle…sometimes hard to tell in conversations) pop up right there? Hard to get away from, you know.
Anyway, the discussion went well. The students were into it, and, though some clinged obstinately to their relativism, some actually changed their minds.
On to today’s lesson. I was lecturing on certain laws of logic–specifically, the law of non-contradiction–and ways of arguing, specifically–reductio ad absurdum.
I mentioned that I subtly employed a soft reductio (as opposed to a hard reductio. A soft reductio shows how a premise in an argument generates an unlivable or absurd conseqence, while a hard reductio shows that a premise in an argument leads to an outright contradiction.) in Tuesday’s discussion: if morality is relative, then the Holocaust wasn’t really wrong. We might not like what happened, but we can’t consistently say more than that if relativism is true.
Were my students willing to live with such a consequence? It’s a hard pill to swallow.
One girl–one of the brightest and most articulate in the class–raised her hand. “Mr. Bordner,” she said, “but the Holocaust really isn’t something that is either right or wrong. It’s neither.”
“So you mean it’s neutral? It’s not right or wrong, it just is?” I asked for clarification.
“Yeah, that’s it.” She replied. A few members in the class “uh-huhed” in approval. Not kidding. She said it with a straight face and didn’t blink an eye.
Sigh. If I had a teenage son, he would not be allowed to even think about going on a date with that student.
“How rude,” you might reply. “That’s not loving, not letting your son date such a nice girl.”
Think about it for a sec. If you had a daughter and your teenage next door neighbor believed that there’s nothing really, truly wrong with, say, rape, would you even let him near your daughter? Why would it be any different here?
Part of my job as a teacher is to shape character. It’s straight from the Ed Code. Getting students to really pause and think through the implications of their beliefs is part of that goal. I hope my precious, dear student really thinks about her views over the next few days.
The stability of the next generation depends, in large part, on that “pausing.” One need not be a Christian to see that.
