Theory of Bar Line Temptation

Morality is a sticky subject. People have been going at it for years without ever coming to a definitive answer about many things, and at times it all seems quite futile, doesn’t it? (I most certainly do not number among these people! 🙂 ) However, there are some interesting threads that recur in different places, and I’d like to tell you about one that I find particularly notable. I dub it ‘Bar Line Temptation’. (If there is a technical term for it, you know it, and you tell me, I will knight you.)

So, a lot of people have some conception of right and wrong…that is to say, I hope that everybody does, but saying that up front seems a little overly optimistic. With the rise of Moral Relativism, the lines drawn by most people have gone a bit fuzzy, but they’re still there. There seem to be two different classes of lines, though, regardless of fuzz or lack thereof:

1. Classic, stereotypical, black-and-white morality. If you do something wrong, no matter what the circumstances, your emotions, or anything else, it’s simply wrong. No matter how hard it was for you to resist temptation, you should have.

2. Bar Line Morality. If you do something ‘wrong’ it might still qualify as okay. Not necessarily good, but not bad either. The way this comes about is through the intensity of temptation. If the temptation is too intense, you’re allowed to give in.

Essentially, your obligation is not to behave in a certain way, so much as to resist a certain amount of temptation. After your temptation level rises above the Bar Line (it varies between people) you’re relieved of responsibility.

I find this view of life interesting because it hinges upon not objective reality, but the person’s internal state. I don’t quite subscribe to this myself, but it’s recently come to my attention and I thought I would share it. Comments? Questions? As ever, friends.

I’m All Grown Up!

When exactly does one become a “grown up”? When exactly does one stop being a child?

I consider myself a child. I’ve always considered myself so. I believe I always will. You see, no matter how old you are, most people are older than you. Granted, most of these comparatively old folks died millennia ago, but they’re older none the less. (Nobody better point out that if the human race continues long enough, this won’t always be true; I haven’t thought of a justification for still feeling like a child then. Assuming I am somehow conscious of it in the event that this occurs.) Deciding when you’re an adult is rather like deciding where the coastline is when you’re at the beach.

Ever try to do that? Looking at a map, it’s clear where the landmass starts and stops. So go to the place you’re looking at on the map and find which part of the beach exactly the line refers to. Okay, it might take an inordinate amount of time, but you could do it. You could draw a great line in the sand and herald it as the official coast.

The problem is that you could move your line a centimeter to the right or left (or up or down, depending on which way you’re facing) and it wouldn’t be observably more or less accurate by any standards except that of the cartographer who made your particular map (and perhaps their guild). This harkens of the Coastline Paradox. Where do you draw the line, literally?

Well, in the case of the coastline, I’d probably draw a rectangle and say that anywhere in that rectangle I’d consider a reasonable coastline, and the further from the boundaries of the rectangle, the less reasonable I’d consider it. Thus, something a centimeter away would not be very unreasonable at all.

However, let us bring the metaphor back: when are you an adult? I take a less reasonable view on this; I believe that, if we can’t see a clear cut-off, we should assume there is none! 😀 Eternal childhood.

Please remark on my absurd immaturity in the comments.

Theory of Lack of Scale

“It’s a big deal. It’s a huge deal. It matters more than anything has mattered before or ever will again. Oh, no, wait, it doesn’t matter. It hardly transcends spilled milk.”

Scale is a relatively large part of our mindset as human beings. We need to know if they’re important or not. If they’re important, we shovel out big space in our memory for them, talk incessantly about them, and treat them with awe and reverence. If they’re not important, we dismiss them. But what exactly is this sense of importance or lack thereof grounded upon?

Who’s had their life changed by a passing comment? I certainly have. And the big things in life: weddings and funerals and the events commemorated thereby…these often disappoint. So what’s important? What’s not?

I suspect that nobody knows. Remember when you were a kid? Everything was of dire, monstrous importance. (Well, not everything, but permit me to speak loosely for dramatic effect.) You skinned your knee and you died. You ate some candy and came back to life. Sounds stupid, doesn’t it? But wasn’t that how it felt?

As we age, we back off. We simply don’t have the emotional energy to cope with that. (This is, I suspect, a big part of why kids sleep so much, not that there aren’t other reasons.) We learn to manage our resources a little more frugally. Do we really need to panic about that soft drink we just spilled? No? Okay, let’s save the panicking for later, then.

However, how much are we supposed to back off? Ultimately, humanity comprises an extremely small part of the universe. I’m sure we’ve all seen pictures of space, and heard the pale blue dot speech before. How much does humanity matter? Well, if the apocalypse comes…nothing else happens. Granted, a simplification, but a small one. Should we react on an emotional level to that?

Heheh, that leads to some problems. A lion attacks you. You stand and watch, knowing that Pluto will be fine no matter what happens on Earth right now. Um, dumb idea.

So we need to go somewhere in the middle. Where you go is largely up to you. Emotions, while not entirely at our beck and call, are ours in more than the sense that they envelope us. the problem is that there’s no guarantee that any scale by which we try to inform them may well be wildly inaccurate. Actually, ‘inaccurate’ may be the wrong word to use here; I challenge you to prove there’s a right answer, something concrete to be accurate about. It’s hard, perhaps impossible, to define ‘accurate’ and define a scale on any level except the ‘this seems right to me’ level. So where in the middle is the right place?

Who knows?

If you know, please comment. 😀 If you don’t know but feel like commenting anyway, please do. Any questions, even irrelevant ones (minus spam, please) are welcome.

Theory of Normality and the Sky

Sometimes you really hear a lot about what’s normal. As of 2006, Wiktionary ranked it 4280 on their list of frequent words: right between “companies” and “shirt”. Unless a lingual apocalypse happened in the last few years, that means that we talk about normality rather a lot. But…sometimes I wonder if we really know what we’re talking about.

Has anyone else noticed how nobody seems exactly “normal”? At first glance, most people do. But over the course of my life, fewer and fewer people have seemed worthy of the great and terrible title Normal Guy. I ask you, would you call yourself that? It didn’t take me long to stop using the adjective to modify people at all.

Then occurred to me the question: what do you mean by “normal”? What do we mean when we use the 4280th most popular word? Well, check the dictionary as often as you like (I’m afraid I can’t be bothered to do it myself 🙂 ) but I doubt you’ll find a satisfying answer. Synonyms about: ordinary, usual, typical, etc. Okay, so what do those mean?

Sometime ago I set off on a great and perilous quest in search of the answer. Id est, I asked around. Unfortunately, none of my daring companions had many ideas beyond the synonyms just relayed.

After some reflection upon my bold and glorious travels, however, I’ve come to this conclusion: our perception of normal is like our perception of the sky. Neither “normal” nor the sky is a tangible, defined thing. Rather, they’re the collective impression we get when lots of small components (individuals and oxygen particles respectively) contribute to create the impression we have.

Also, just like the skies look different depending on where you stand (Isn’t it always sunset somewhere?) so too we have varying standards for normality.

To extend the metaphor perilously far…is anybody normal? Well, some groups of people contribute to our impression of what’s normal more than others. But ultimately, people can’t be normal much more than one bit of air can be the sky.