My Mind Tells Me No...My Body Tells Me "You're Not In Charge Here"

Here I am again, attacking relativism.  Someone better get me all riled up on a different theme, or this blog is going to be as one-dimensional as Michael Cera's acting.

This is an important one, though.

Underneath all the searching, the asking, the judgments and prioritizing, there is an obvious tendency for people to assume purposes exist.  We experience in our thoughts and feelings that some things are right, some things are wrong, some things are good and some things are bad.  What things go in which categories are for the moment unimportant.  The critical observation here is that so much of our habits of thought require acknowledgment of the idea that outcomes do matter - and that's a big deal.

To say that one outcome is better than another is to say that it upholds, or fails to violate, some value better.  Thus, in order to make the claim that any action in history matters, one must also acknowledge an underlying value that it upholds.

Say a value is selected.  That selection has to be justified by something.  For example, it isn't enough to say that an action is good if it promotes life in some way - it saves human lives, it improves perceived quality of lives, it maximizes evolutionary potential, etc. - promoting life, as a value, must be rooted in something.

So the question, then, is what kind of thing can really function as a true, reliable root cause of a distinguishing between right and wrong?  The test is a counter question: why is that a justification?  What is its root?  Try this as many times as you feel is appropriate.  Eventually we see that something must just be.  An independent, eternally existing thing that is not derived from another thing is the only type of source we can blame for absolute things such as right and wrong.

So our conclusion is this: Believe in an eternal creator, or submit that nothing is right nor wrong, good nor evil, better nor worse.

This isn't a new argument by any means.  What's very odd though, is that many will consider the problem, conclude that morality is a purely subjective phenomena, and go on their way, considering this subjective, derivative, man-made, irrational morality as an important thing that good people uphold and bad people violate.  Why?  If it has no unwavering root, why would a person choose to consider it of consequence?

We experience convictions.  There's something that seems to keep people from accepting certain things as equal to other things.  People do not want to live in a world where choices don't matter.  Mankind just keeps on with its habit of establishing lists of unacceptable acts, along with this pesky feeling in their bellies that seems to say that there is some end that they perpetually fail to reach.  It's referred to as happiness most often.  I call it peace.

That didn't feel very thorough.  Screw it.

Relative Meaning

My earliest memory of  fine art was an elementary school field trip to the local art museum.  During our tour, the teacher would occasionally ask several students what they thought a particular piece represented.  Each kid had a different answer, and she responded to each one of them with "That's very good!".  

During my time in high school and college literature classes, there were discussion periods where we'd all speculate or attempt to deduce the meaning of various works.  As we did so, without exception, the instructor would remind us that "there's no right or wrong answer".

It's not uncommon for works of art to be deemed "up for interpretation".  In one respect, this practice is satisfying.  Since a work can remind different people of different things, it ought to make sense to say that they are all correct, so long as their perception is of real meaning and substance.  The problem arises when you reintroduce the artist into the equation.

The Everyone's Right doctrine operates under the assumption that art is by nature subjective.  It can't be said of a subjective thing that it has a meaning, because its identity is dependent on observation.  It would require that every artist always attempts to create something more like a mirror; something that is intended to absorb part of the viewer and reflect that input back out.  A mirror may have a purpose, but it does not have meaning.

Artists are expressive.  All forms of art(literature, dance, painting, poetry, sculpture, speech, etc.) are meant to operate as means of communication, sending an encoded message, through an obstructed version of an idea, from the artist to the observers.  Things can get lost in translation, so every observer won't accurately translate the piece into the correct idea it's based on.  That does not mean that any observer's translation is all of the sudden correct.  Say two viewers develop definitively contrasting interpretations.  Where does that leave us?  To say they could both be correct would deem art paradoxical, an thus practically meaningless.

Our differences will always affect our perceptions.  While acceptance and symbiosis are absolutely important, we can't let the pursuit of an "equality of ideas" deprive those responsible for the beautiful things in the world of the truth behind their creations.  This may even mean concluding that we can't ever know who's right or wrong, but it's far better to fail to understand than to obstruct.