Diversity is a great idea. To promote diversity with respect to race, age, art and music, nationality, and the like is to encourage a broader perspective and a more fully human experience of life. It’s a marvelous way to uncover and correct blind spots in one’s outlook.
Like most great ideas, though, diversity can be over- or under-applied. To promote diversity with respect to moral standards is to over-apply it, and ultimately to deny what is true. Yet we under-apply diversity in other areas. C.S. Lewis famously wrote on one such:
It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.
June 8th, 2010 | 9:02 pm | #1
Why is diversity a plus when it comes to race, age, nationality, and so on, but a negative when it comes to moral standards? In other words, what makes diversity overplayed when it comes to moral standards and under played when it comes to age?
–because diversity in moral standards is to “deny what is true” seems a bit empty. Be more specific, please.
It seems that as an observable matter–there are different moral standards. Why is it not that by observing these different moral standards, by taking in the diversity that I see before me, I can refine, compare, alter, and correct moral blind spots that haunt all of my (and our) limited perspectives?
That there are different moral standards is an observable matter and it is not necessarily a point of insecurity in our own commitments. Commitments are just that only in the face of alternative possibilities!
June 8th, 2010 | 9:16 pm | #2
Consider the extreme cases, Jacob, and it should be obvious that moral diversity cannot be the same kind of good as other kinds of diversity. Music or art that is massively different from my own is enriching. Moral standards that are massively different from my own might include genocide. You can interpolate from there to less extreme situations. Why promote moral diversity when one could instead promote moral goodness?
“To deny what is true” means to deny what is true about God’s moral nature and the values and duties appropriate to humans made in his image. The difference between morality and other matters of diversity is that one nationality, race, or language is not more true or correct than another; and with certain conditions the same is true of approaches to art. But there are more (or less) good or correct approaches to morality (to feed an innocent, hungry child is more good or correct than to gun her down). To refine, correct, compare, etc. our moral blind spots is a good thing; but for that, we do far better looking to the truth in God than by promoting variants from what is truly good.
“Insecurity”? Who brought that up?
June 8th, 2010 | 9:49 pm | #3
“Music or art that is massively different from my own is enriching.”
You may want to rethink that one, Tom. Heavy Metal by bands that celebrate death and deviance, punk rock, Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” etc. are, I’m sure, “massively different” from your own artistic expressions… but enriching?!?
Beauty is not merely in the eye of the beholder (that’s a cute thrown-away phrase used to bludgeon people in the unstated name of permissiveness). Art order to the true, the good, the beautiful is enriching. Art order to death, deviance, falsehood, etc. is anything but. Plato and Aristotle and St. Thomas had some good things to say in that regard.
June 8th, 2010 | 10:32 pm | #4
Why promote moral diversity when one could instead promote moral goodness?
Someone who is a pluralist at heart would argue that moral goodness and moral diversity depend on one another. How do they depend on one another? The way of Jesus and his followers, both in the Bible and in everyday life, is constantly fraught with the possibility of other gods and sinful ways. It is this diversity, all of the diverse creation, that makes the narrow way of Jesus so special. It is commitment to the way of Jesus in the face of diversity that challenges us and, indeed, marks our struggle as exclusive to that, say, of Buddhists or Muslims.
Diversity and goodness are not distinct, I would argue. So, to promote moral goodness is to promote diversity. But not diversity unrestrained. Just the opposite, diversity must be tempered by the advocacy of trusting commitment.
“Insecurity”? Who brought that up?
I brought up insecurity because in relation to diversity, insecurity and defensive measures are often closely associated. In my own experience, it seems that too much diversity can generate insecurity and trigger defensive measures. In DC, for instance, when Muslims had a prayer day on the Mall, a number of Christian leaders and laypersons indicated that they saw their actions as a threat to the nation and the Judeo Christian tradition that they celebrate.
This energized group of outspoken Christians acted in the face of religious diversity–in the face of elements they saw as threatening.
June 9th, 2010 | 5:18 am | #5
Do “moral goodness and moral diversity depend on one another”? What a strange thing for someone who considers “the narrow way of Jesus so special” to suggest! God is good without needing evil to help him be that way!
Would promoting moral diversity help us be better followers of Christ? May it never be! (Romans 6:1-2 NASB, only slightly out of context.)
God uses the good and the bad to cause our growth, but there is plenty of sin to go around without our cultivating more.
June 9th, 2010 | 6:01 am | #6
Holopupenko,
I agree with you, as I wrote later in the comment, adding the qualifying clause “with certain conditions.” I was trying to keep it brief. I suppose it would have been helpful had I likewise qualified the statement you responded to here.
June 9th, 2010 | 8:47 am | #7
My point is simply that throughout the Bible and throughout our daily lives, good is mixed with bad. Neither exists independently of the other. Good and evil, in this sense, are relational. And I don’t think that it is strange at all to recognize that good and evil are part of the Biblical narrative and part of everyday life.
June 9th, 2010 | 8:53 am | #8
And that is your answer to the question, “Why promote moral diversity when one could instead promote moral goodness?” That was what you were ostensibly answering in comment #4.
Also, do you hold that “good is mixed with bad, and neither exists independently of the other” is true of God?
June 9th, 2010 | 12:42 pm | #9
I hold that in the Bible God is presented as always in a relation of opposition to Satan, and always in a relation of love (and sometimes loving anger) with his followers, and sometimes in a relation of burning and destructive anger in relation to his enemies.
June 9th, 2010 | 3:01 pm | #10
I think that adequately explains your position, and adds insight to what you have written previously on this thread. What you do not say is as interesting as what you do.
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