Devil on One Shoulder
I majored in philosophy in college because I wanted to know how to live life right. Naive? You bet. I've since realized that to determine whether a person is living the "right" way, you first need a way to measure "rightness". You need a variable that correlates roughly with how right a person's life is.
Unfortunately, there's no easy tool for this measurement. The favorite way for us Americans to judge each other is through the amount of cash we've accumulated (or are in a position to accumulate in the future). Sexual conquests is another popular option, and one that is becoming increasingly trendy with the ladies, for whom virginity used to be the gold-standard. Other figures in a person's numerical inventory that are often used as rightness indicators include number of contacts in cell phone, letters after name on business card, circumference of biceps at rest, and mixed drinks sampled by palette.
To me, none of these ever seemed satisfactory because the grizzled authors of my dusty philosophy books had a preoccupation with rightness defined as, not surprisingly, doin' the right thing. This is usually the point at which the stoner in the back of the class would say, "What exactly is the right thing?" Well, Hashish, I would bet that when you're cheating on your girlfriend, you know--in fact you are positively certain--that on some moral landscape you are doing something wrong with every thrust. And when you insider trade stocks from your dad's pharmaceutical company, you also feel kind of guilty that you've just fucked some guy with a family in Toledo to cover your gain. And despite all the wonderful uses the international space station has for hemp, you know it was wrong to drive to school today high on the chronic you're now coming down from to ask your question.
Whether or not some philosopher has tacked it down to a precise and satisfying definition, I am certain that we all have a sense of right and wrong. The bigger question for me is whether doing the right thing matters. The problem is that there's no space on the score-card to record when you've done the right thing. And likewise, there's nothing to subtract from when you do the absolute wrong thing. In fact, I would guess that doing the right thing will usually decrease and doing the absolute wrong thing will usually increase at least five of the aforementioned indicators. And these days, we can rationalize just about everything to at least give the appearance of rightness.
So why actually go through the trouble of doing the right thing? The devil on my shoulder is so much more persuasive than the angel. He wears Sean John sweats, politely stops the conversation at times to enter some messages into his blueberry, and smiles with just the corner of the left side of his mouth. The angel, well, kind of sucks; he's just bitch bitch bitch and has the annoying habit of bringing up "Super Size Me" whenever I eat fast food.
I'm looking at my score-card, and I'm not scoring high in any category...
Unfortunately, there's no easy tool for this measurement. The favorite way for us Americans to judge each other is through the amount of cash we've accumulated (or are in a position to accumulate in the future). Sexual conquests is another popular option, and one that is becoming increasingly trendy with the ladies, for whom virginity used to be the gold-standard. Other figures in a person's numerical inventory that are often used as rightness indicators include number of contacts in cell phone, letters after name on business card, circumference of biceps at rest, and mixed drinks sampled by palette.
To me, none of these ever seemed satisfactory because the grizzled authors of my dusty philosophy books had a preoccupation with rightness defined as, not surprisingly, doin' the right thing. This is usually the point at which the stoner in the back of the class would say, "What exactly is the right thing?" Well, Hashish, I would bet that when you're cheating on your girlfriend, you know--in fact you are positively certain--that on some moral landscape you are doing something wrong with every thrust. And when you insider trade stocks from your dad's pharmaceutical company, you also feel kind of guilty that you've just fucked some guy with a family in Toledo to cover your gain. And despite all the wonderful uses the international space station has for hemp, you know it was wrong to drive to school today high on the chronic you're now coming down from to ask your question.
Whether or not some philosopher has tacked it down to a precise and satisfying definition, I am certain that we all have a sense of right and wrong. The bigger question for me is whether doing the right thing matters. The problem is that there's no space on the score-card to record when you've done the right thing. And likewise, there's nothing to subtract from when you do the absolute wrong thing. In fact, I would guess that doing the right thing will usually decrease and doing the absolute wrong thing will usually increase at least five of the aforementioned indicators. And these days, we can rationalize just about everything to at least give the appearance of rightness.
So why actually go through the trouble of doing the right thing? The devil on my shoulder is so much more persuasive than the angel. He wears Sean John sweats, politely stops the conversation at times to enter some messages into his blueberry, and smiles with just the corner of the left side of his mouth. The angel, well, kind of sucks; he's just bitch bitch bitch and has the annoying habit of bringing up "Super Size Me" whenever I eat fast food.
I'm looking at my score-card, and I'm not scoring high in any category...
posted by Shawn Schwartz at
9:28 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home