Context is key

I saw an interesting thing coming into work this morning: a small Chinese woman taking a picture of a parking sign with her cell phone.

What made this interesting wasn’t that she was cursing in Chinese (at least I assume she was cursing), nor was it that difference between her high and the height of the sign made for a visually comic juxtaposition, nor was it the fact that after she was done taking her photograph she got into the parked vehicle, a white Cadillac Escalade, one of the largest SUVs on the market. No, what made this amusing was she took the photograph to prove she’d parked legally yet the image provided no context of her vehicle parked by the sign.

The national dialogue about controversial issues often frustrates me largely because it lacks context. No framing is given, no background, just the facts of a single, specific instance which is then used by whatever commentator is presenting the story to frame a position on an issue that likely affects many people in different ways. But thinking about context makes me wonder about moral relativism.

A new(ish) study by the Pew Research Center gives a detailed age breakdown of the American electorate on a number of issues including whether or not our nation’s values have changed.

Pew concluded, “Among Millennials, only 54% say the change in moral values has been for the worse. This compares with 70% of Gen Xers, 77% Boomers and 78% of Silents. Millennials are twice as likely as Xers to say the change in moral values has been for the better (19% vs. 9%), and they are more than three times as likely as Boomers and Silents to view this change positively.”

Conservatives look at this, and at Lost in Transition
The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood, a recent book detailing the results of a survey of young adults (18-23), and claim this means that younger people have no fixed idea of morality.

And I can see where conservatives might look at the Pew survey’s results on moral issues and conclude that anything goes for the Millenial generation. On specific social issue questions Pew writes,

“As discussed in Sections 1 and 4, different generations of Americans have starkly different views on some of the social changes occurring in the country today. That’s particularly the case when it comes to trends related to diversity, homosexuality, and secularism.”

While Millennials tend to take a more liberal position on most social issues, this is not universally true. Most notably, there is no significant generational difference on one of the most divisive issues in the nation: abortion rights.”

 

 

 

No survey can speak for everyone in a given age group. The generational voting history outlined in the Pew study certainly doesn’t reflect me for my age cohort. And yes, there are certain things that are always wrong; child p0rn springs immediately to mind as a prima facie example.

But maybe what those who don’t want to dig into the details see as “moral relativism” is just the manifestation of the idea that what is subject to fixed morality is a lot narrower than it was even 20 years ago and that many issues dubbed “immoral” really only need context to be seen in a different light.