Eating the Family Pet

If a man in an unknown country eats part of a domestic animal, like a dog or cat, in his meal in order to survive, and I as an American do not agree with this, does that mean the man is morally wrong? Although people with different morals than this theoretical man would be quick to disagree with me, in the grand scheme of things this man would not be morally wrong as it is acceptable in his cultural code. This conundrum based off of morals and ethics is known as cultural relativism. The basic idea of this conundrum is that there is no universal truth or right and wrong, only various cultural codes. In a perfect world, people would easily understand cultural relativism as true and would accept that others do not have the same morals and that that fact is perfectly okay. Yet, we do not live in a perfect world. In the book Things Fall Apart this obvious imperfect world is created where the natives and the foreign missionaries do not see eye to eye on morals. One issue presented by this book and seen in society in general is the need to force ones moral codes on other people. The missionaries try to push their moral codes onto the natives and although they do have some natives who come to agree with them, many of the natives do not. If cultural relativism was a reasonable concept, then the missionaries would not have attempted to push their morals out on the masses in this fictional case, but rather just accepted that the natives believed something different and left it at that. Another issue with cultural relativism is that at this time cultural code is no longer simply based of a country, but by millions of subcultures and beliefs. In America there is simply no two people with the exact same set of moral beliefs. Due to this increase of such drastic differences in thinking, it guarantees that there will always be conflict and lack of understanding on at least one idea, let alone a whole moral code. An example of this could easily be the division among the country about Darren Wilson. Half the country strongly believes that Darren Wilson is morally wrong for killing an unarmed teenager while the other half strongly believes that Darren Wilson did the right thing in this case. You could easily go even deeper into this and compare the reasons why people believe it is morally wrong or right, further showing this drastic difference in thinking of the people in just one country. Ultimately I think this whole idea that there could be an understanding that there is a variety of codes rather than one ‘correct’ set is nice but it is completely unrealistic and inappropriate in this day and age.

Do We Really Have a Chance?

During our discussion of Oedipus the King, I think that our class had a great discussion but did not seem to see what I saw when it came to question number 7. What initially struck me was the fact that other people in the class did believe that Oedipus had a chance but as soon as he realized where he ‘went wrong’, he was led to his doom. I began to notice that some people actually believed that because he knew the oracle, he should have had a chance to change it and ultimately was in the wrong for killing his father and laying with his mother because he had the opportunity to avoid it. After further analysis of my personal opinion and what occurred in the play, I have come to completely disagree with those conclusions. There is no way that Oedipus had a chance, even if he had tried to avoid the correct pair of parents. I think that it comes along with a question that the play raises which is, do we control our own fate? Since I believe that we do have some control over our own fate, I also believe that no one ultimately has a chance in this world. I believe that because no matter what we choose to do, bad things will always happen to everyone throughout their life. This is not to say that good things will not happen also, but those good things will not make up nor stop the bad. These bad things are what gives us no chance, because we have no foresight into what is to come and thus we cannot stop the bad things from happening. If there was a higher power completely controlling our fate, then there would be people who exist who never would experience a bad thing in their life. Since I do not believe that there is a higher power that completely controls our fate, no one should be considered to have gone wrong when bad things happen as we have no way of controlling how our decisions ultimately play out. A clear example that presents this concept is in the movie Run Lola Run. During the movie, there are three possible scenarios shown of how everything could work out. Despite each scenario being completely different, Mr. Meyer gets into some form of a car accident every single time. It is inferred that this was ultimately Mr. Meyer’s fate, and no matter what he did differently each time, he did not have a chance. 

The necessary hidden lessons

Over the summer I had a conversation with one of my closest friends over ice cream in a parking lot when he asked me if my parent’s had ever had the talk with me. Originally I assumed he meant the birds and the bees talk, but he was quick to correct me on that. He asked if my parents had ever talked to me about what to do if I was pulled over by a cop, or how to act in certain situations. I had told him no and he thought before responding to me that that was the same answer as all of his white friends. He continued on to tell me that every white friend he had asked had never had the ‘talk’, while every kid of color he had asked knew exactly what he was talking about. He explained to me that at a young age his father had taught him that if he was pulled over, he must keep his hands on the steering wheel and to avoid making any sudden movement. If he intended to make a move, he should state exactly what he was going to do to the officer before he did it. This conversation occurred over three months ago, but it still does not settle right with me.

 This unsettling feeling continued to grow as I read Invisible Man and The Power of One, where the brutal reality of racism can be blatantly seen by the reader. In Invisible Man I could see the application behind my friend’s words. The narrator is taught to please the white people from a young age in order to get through life, because that’s the only way to get by in the society without being seen as suspicious or questionable, and even that that does not always help. In The Power of One, Peekay come into contact with this problem when he starts the school for the blacks of the area and is forced to shut down due to the police. They cannot teach the people because for them to have knowledge is too much of a risk or an increase of threat in society’s mind, although they would never admit that that is the reason behind it. Peekay is one of the few characters to notice a problem with this, and continues to find ways to teach them regardless. 

 I think what unsettled me the most was the fact that I would have never thought about racism and what lengths people have to go in order to survive in a racist society if I had not sat in the parking lot, eating ice cream that night. That fact scares me, because many people probably do not think about it either, whether by choice or lack of knowledge, and remain blind to the necessary hidden lessons of the black community.