We live in a world of moral ambiguity where the idea of black and white seems to have faded into shades of gray. Those who claim that the world is split into right and wrong truth and lies black and white— are labeled as dogmatic or fundamentalist. We cling to the postmodernist thinking that we can create our own truth.
Why? Because it’s easy. In a world of moral relativism no one has to make hard choices. No one has to take responsibility for deciding what is right and what is wrong. And many in our generation have simply used this concept to avoid taking a firm stance on any issue that really matters.
Many issues have a spectrum of grays. While we need to recognize this and accept it we also must accept that in some cases there are no shades of gray— only the stark and solid line in the sand between right and wrong. While we can generalize that a white lie causes less harm than another lie both are nonetheless lies. Half-truths are not truths by definition. The sky is blue whether or not I want it to be and murder is unacceptable whatever the motive.
I think most of us can agree that certain things are wrong. Partial-birth abortion domestic abuse pedophilia and hit-and-runs are generally frowned upon by society at large. Most of us believe Tiger Woods is in the wrong after his 14 or more mistress rampage. Yet conversely we often try to excuse marital infidelity. Movies barrage us with sad tales of loveless marriages where one or the other partner is unhappy. We watch them on the screen we sympathize and then we excuse it when they find true love (which in Hollywood means sex) with someone else. For some of us little voices in the backs of our heads scream “no this is wrong but we excuse them because we are led to believe true love is more important than marriage vows.
But where do we stop? How dark can gray become before it is too dark? Would we have been more accepting as a society if Tiger had had only one mistress because, as his managers tell us, he is emotionally traumatized by his youth and a sex addict?” The danger of living in a world where we claim that morality comes in shades and not definites is that there is no line to cross from right to wrong.
Here’s an object lesson: If you throw a live frog from cool water into boiling water it will jump out. But if you put the frog in water then set it to boil the frog does not notice the increase in temperature. It dies boiled alive. The point is that our societal idea of gray shades is dangerous.
How dark can gray become before the boiling point? The water is only a little hotter. If there is a defined right and a defined wrong then there can be no rationalization when one is in the wrong.
Perhaps there is a black and a white to every issue. Maybe right and wrong do exist. I think they do. We just don’t want to see them. We want a world that allows us to go just a little further without that annoying little pinprick on our conscience. Right and wrong may be relative but living in a society where we color in our own shades of gray as light or as dark as we feel at any given time is dangerous.
