Today is the 20 year anniversary of the begining of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest, which is most famously known to a lot of people from the image above. A single man standing defiantly before a column of tanks.
It has become synonymous with defiance in the face of insurmountable odds. More people would know this image than know about the events beyond the lens.
This tank defying man isn’t exactly my point though. Due to the immense amout of media coverage todays lockdown of the square is garnering, it is understandably a hot topic of conversation world wide, including in my general vicinity earlier today.
A friend of mine spoke up after a radio broadcast mentioned the topic. ‘All these people did was protest, and the Chinese government just sent the troops in there to kill them. They don’t even know how many people died because the information was suppressed. They shouldn’t be allowed to do that… Surely we have a moral obligation-’
Stop.
A moral obligation? What does that really mean? What is a moral obligation and how does it affect you and I?
Morality is an idea of right and wrong, a set of rules. It is wrong to murder somebody. It is right to help the needy. Life isn’t so black and white. We can all think of a number with plenty of zeroes after it and say boldly ‘Well of course it’s worth 1 life to save X many people’. I challenge you to think about something smaller, what would it take for you to take one life? To save two? The numbers seem to add up on that. What about to save a family member’s life, would that be worth somebody else’s? That person is somebody’s family too. My point is that morality is not black and white, and just because we think something is wrong does not give us the right to judge it, and this means in no way that I side with the men in the tanks over the man on the ground. But somebody, a human being, ordered those executions, and that man had his own moral code too.
So we’ve established (loosely) that morality is an individual thing, that is defined by each person’s choice of right and wrong. When are you obliged to act on that? Because your morals differ with those of the person involved strong enough? Murder is immoral, and people are punished for it. Can you punish a man for acting immorally with your wife? Is it right if you beat a man who beat someone for their sexual preference? He was just acting within his code of morals, did he surpass his moral obligation?
Does a moral obligation become a right to judge somebody else’s values? How can you enforce your own morals without becoming the persecutor? Do you even have the right?
Our governments have requested the names of those killed in 1989 be released to the public, and that any people still imprisoned be released. This is a PR stunt, they know their requests will fall on deaf ears, but they cannot be seen to be doing nothing. All they can do is voice their moral objection, but not act.
Our only obligation is to stick by our own morals, our own code of conduct. Lest we think we know better, and punish a country whose morals we disagree with. We’ve seen this before, we’ve all bought the T-shirt. It’s not a pretty T-shirt.
Your right, life is never black and white. One of the most eloquent symptoms of the moral bankruptcy of today’s culture, is a certain fashionable attitude toward moral issues, best summarized as: “There are no blacks and whites; there are only grays.”
This is asserted in regard to persons, actions, principles of conduct, and morality in general. “Black and white,” in this context, means “good and evil.” (The reverse order used in that catch phrase is interesting psychologically.)
In any respect, if one cares to examine, that notion is full of contradictions. If there is no black and white, there can be no gray — since gray is merely a mixture of the two.
Yet, before anyone can identify anything as “gray,” one has to know what is black and what is white. In the field of morality, this means that one must first identify what is good and what is evil. And when a man/woman has ascertained that one alternative is good and the other is evil, he/she has no justification for choosing a mixture. There can be no justification for choosing any part of that which one knows to be evil.
If, in a complex moral issue, a man struggles to determine what is right and fails or makes an honest error, he cannot be regarded as “gray”; morally, he is “white.” Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience.
But if, in order to escape the responsibility of moral judgment, a man closes his eyes and mind, if he evades the facts of the issue and struggles not to know, he cannot be regarded as “gray”; morally, he is as “black” as they come.
Some people believe that it is merely a restatement of such bromides as “Nobody is perfect in this world” — i.e., everybody is a mixture of good and evil, and, therefore, morally “gray.” Since the majority of those one meets are likely to fit that description, people accept it as some sort of natural fact, without further thought. They forget that morality deals only with issues open to man’s choice (i.e., to his free will) — and, therefore, that no statistical generalizations are valid in this matter.
If man is to be “gray” by nature, no moral concepts are applicable to him, including “grayness,” and no such thing as morality is possible. But if man has free will, then the fact that ten (or ten million) men made the wrong choice, does not necessitate that the eleventh one will make it; it necessitates nothing — and proves nothing — in regard to any given individual.
There are, of course, complex issues in which both sides are right in some respects and wrong in others — and it is here that the “package deal” of pronouncing both sides “gray” is least permissible. It is in such issues that the most rigorous precision of moral judgment is required to identify and evaluate the various aspects involved — which can be done only by unscrambling the mixed elements of “black” and “white.”
The basic error in all these various confusions is the same: it consists of forgetting that morality deals only with issues open to man’s choice — which means: forgetting the difference betwen “unable” and “unwilling.” This permits people to translate the catch phrase “There are no blacks and whites” into: “Men are unable to be wholly good or wholly evil” — which they accept in foggy resignation, without questioning the metaphysical contradictions it entails.
But not many people would accept it, if that catch phrase were translated into the actual meaning it is intended to smuggle into their minds: “Men are unwilling to be wholly good or wholly evil.”
The first thing one would say to any advocate of such a proposition, is: “Speak for yourself, brother!” And that, in effect, is what he is actually doing; consciously or subconsciously, intentionally or inadvertently, when a man declares: “There are no blacks and whites,” he is making a psychological confession, and what he means is: “I am unwillling to be wholly good — and please don’t regard me as wholly evil!”
Just as in epistemology, the cult of uncertainty is a revolt against reason — so, in ethics, the cult of moral grayness is a revolt against moral values. Both are a revolt against the absolutism of reality.