Fuzzy Lines

I recently rented and watched Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, and despite the bloodiness of it, rather enjoyed it. Very well done. But this isn't a movie review entry.

Here's what is interesting to me in this - the viewpoints and reactions that I've read about the film. Let me zoom in on one that made me laugh out loud.

If you look up Apocalypto on iTunes and read reviews, you'll find an entry by Baern titled "Decent movie. Highly misrepresents the Mayans though" What I want to pick on is one of his comments. I'll quote it...

"Another issue is how the sacrifice ritual is seriously misrepresented and exaggerated. Mayans didn't sacrifice a bunch of people all in one day; they sacrificed one person every couple weeks or so. The movie makes them look like bloody monsters!"

The movie makes them look like monsters!? I had to laugh at the absurdity of it. Here's the logic:

Gibson portrayed Mayans as monstrous. How?
He depicted them as performing multiple human sacrifices in one day.
Baern says this is unfair: They are not bloody monsters. Why?
In reality, they only sacrifice about 2 human beings each month.

!?!

That's what I call a fuzzy line. (Granted, this was probably an off the cuff, not too thought out review, but whoa!) Baern is saying that the Mayans were not really monstrous, they didn't kill large numbers of people to appease their gods, they killed them at a much lower rate - only one every 2 weeks or so.

Baern seems to think that what makes a human-sacrificing culture egregious is found in the quantity of human sacrifices, not in the fact that human sacrifices are taking place. C'mon Mel - I can't believe you depicted Mayans as cruel people. It's not like the killed people every day! Just some days. Jeez! For Baern, Mel crossed a line he'd drawn.

We get what I call a fuzzy line when we begin making moral distinctions based on subjective opinions of "appropriateness." The lines seem to revolve around numbers, severity, or frequency of some kind of behavior and what I think is too many, too much or too often - it's fuzzy because people draw the line of right and wrong so differently.

I think it's human nature that, much of the time, we'll draw our own lines of "here is where too far, too much begins" but we base the moral location of those lines just below where we perceive ourselves on the continuum of morality.

In other words - when we decide for ourselves what is right or wrong, we rarely will self-condemn. We consider ourselves pretty good, and "wrong" must be something less than our own personal goodness.

The problem with that is that we all have different perspective on what's too far. If we base right and wrong simply on personal preference, should we condemn perverts, or violent men or financial scammers?

You could, and people do, argue that what we do is go with the good old American majority system. That would counter "obviously" egregious behavior. Let the voice of the people determine what's right. We're call something normative if there's a majority that agree it's ok. Of course, this thinking breaks down when the majority is wrong. (which, I suspect is a lot more often than we care to admit - consider 80's hairstyles) If we based our laws and morality on such a system, we'd have no such thing as speed limits. We might also have a problem when it comes to slavery. The majority thought it was good. The majority was wrong.

What we need are non-subjectives in terms of right and wrong. We need someone outside of ourselves to establish objective rules, truth, right and wrong. We need a standard to measure by.

I recently installed baseboards in a bedroom of my house. If I had a guy making cuts for me on the compound miter saw and I was telling him how many inches and at what angles I need the cuts, I would in no way want to have subjectivity about how long an inch is. I was us to operate on the same system, with the same establishment of standards. Otherwise, I would probably get some rather useless pieces of baseboard.

I think the same is true for those fuzzy lines of morality. Baern's complaint about Apacolypto was in terms of how many human sacrifices made a culture barbaric. Two per month, to him, didn't seem that horrible.

The presence of human sacrifices makes the society barbaric. The conversation about how many they make falls under the heading of frequecy, not in the debate of whether it is monstrous or not.

The conversation about whether we are, as human beings, good and righteous seems (in my mind at least) to be pretty clearly answered. (look at history!) When I compare myself to others, I think I'm talking about he wrong issue. Complicity and comparison are two different things. I think we would be better served if we talked a little bit less about comparitive morals, and talked a little bit more about the fact that we're all in the same camp and don't measure up to the standard of Good and Rightous and Whole. Those are more productive and more interesting conversations.