(W)righting Our Own Rules

“Conventionality is not morality.” - Charlotte Brontë

Making one’s bed is not normally a moral action. Nor is tying one’s shoe, riding the subway, or walking from one block to the next. These daily actions do not gather enough social momentum to be considered ethically meaningful.

However, in relation to their surroundings, these actions have great potential to create moral consequences. Smiling at someone, or calling a friend, may put you into a state of mind that later influences one of your more serious decisions. The boundary between the routine and the moral becomes unclear. Meaning sometimes departs from our known ways of living, and we must make our way on individual ethical paths. It is in ambiguous situations such as these that Charlotte Bronte’s assertion that conventionality is not morality has its truth.

In this entry, I will discuss the ways our society forms its moral perceptions of itself. In particular, I hope to reach some conclusion about whether our social hierarchies reflect our moral ideals, how individual ethical choices meet up with collective understandings of correct behavior.

Do we, as Americans, make decisions based on independent observation or on perceived social norms? Also, which is right?

Two cultural institutions seem to me to have more influence over moral points of view than most others: religion and art. Religion gives explicit ethical guidelines for living, while art suggests mores of meaning through the way it represents natural and social environments.

Unlike a piece of moral philosophy or an opinion article in the newspaper, art does not speak authoritatively. It creates a perceptual, rather than cognitive, understanding. It is ethical in that it puts forth a specific view of social worlds, but does not outline how to interact with those worlds.

Religion, although more straightforwardly moral in nature, also fails at times to provide moral guidance. The process of living resembles a moving piece of art more closely than it does the formality of religion. We perceive events and people in a more chaotic format than theological arguments can explain. Religion is good at creating guidelines for behavior, but is often too rigid to be helpful at the moment when a moral decision arises.

What, then, is the place of art in religious life, and vice versa? Do these forms of cultural convention complement each other in helping us towards ethical self-definition, or are they both empty ways of coping with the paradox between believing and living?

One possibility is that both art and religion’ usefulness lies in their ability to fulfill the ambitions of a culture’s socially dominant groups, that hose in power perpetuate artistic representations and religious dictates that support their dominance. This form of convention, as Charlotte Bronte might point out, eliminates the voice of popular experience in moral meaning making.

Another possibility is that our societal modes of being follow popular points of view. Our system of democracy is meant to include the public in its decision-making process. However, as political conservatives point out, popular opinion is often too scattered to be a vehicle for progress. Each person perceives public events in a slightly different way. Everyone has an opinion based on his/her conventional experience, and no group convention ever takes shape.

Perhaps we, as Americans, don’t form ethical standpoints through dictated or practical conventions. Social privilege - and its absence - does seem to me intimately connected to the development of artistic and religious moral agendas. Yet America was founded largely upon the ideals of class mobility and individual choice. Our ideals may have carried us together for this long because each group in our society insists on defying its own conventions.

The next time you go to tie your shoe, think about the conventions that your action supports. No matter what class you’re in, in America, only you can say for sure whether your shoe is tied right.

Instigations Towards Communication

The human use of language has evolved to a point of demanding complexity. Whereas at one time, our most abstract needs could be expressed by pointing and half-articulated grunts, we now live and connect through a dynamic network of information and coding.

Our current level of development allows us to convey an amazing degree of intimate thought and feeling. Yet with this ability we have gained an equally amazing capacity for alienation. Ideas can become so involved as to stand between us like giants.

What, then, motivates an individual at this stage of history to face up to the task of communication? The pain of realizing one’s confusion, one’s aimlessness in an ocean of information, would seem to be a powerful deterrent to using language. Why try to reflect one’s inner state in words when the mirror has become clouded?

A specific tree I saw recently comes to mind as one answer to these questions. I was driving around a corner I had passed many times while coming home from errands when I saw it. This time, I stopped my car short. I put it in reverse, accelerated backwards, and stopped where I had a head on view of the tree. It had turned a striking red, and its leaves were dotted with rainwater. It glowed in the light of the setting sun. I sat and stared in pure pleasure for several minutes before continuing home.

Even if I knew I would never succeed in expressing the essence of that experience, I would probably insist on trying to re-create it with words. The power of the tree’s beauty touched me so strongly that it hurt more to contain it within me than it does to express it insufficiently. In these cases, it is less a human choice to speak than it is nature’s choice to speak through you.

Another situation comes to me in response to the question of why we attempt communication amid interpersonal information fog. During an independent study in undergrad, my professor for the course and dean of the college told me she prefers the stress of the school year to having to structure free time in the summer.

I believe her general meaning in this statement can be analogized to the way we use language. We often associate meaning with fullness and activity rather than emptiness and stillness. Therefore, filling the space between two people with words – even absurd words – seems to solve the problem of distance between understandings. There is a pride in the very intention of connection.

In our age of incessant and often conflicting information, I see two key motivators to dive into the struggle with language: one internal, and one external. Both involve a lot of stubbornness.

The first is the desire to expand the small moments of grace that our lives provide. To me, that tree was more than branches and leaves, and I take that as a gift to share with whomever I can. The second is the will to condense the empty spaces around us into understanding. A summer full of solitary awesomeness is less meaningful than an ordinary semester lived out in community.

Drawing these two together is an even greater draw towards communication. It is the need to reveal new, if not authentic, ways of being to each other.