The Values that Surround Us:
Teaching Ethics in a Postmodern World
Paper delivered at “Ethics and Spirituality” Conference
Canberra Girls’ Grammar School
April 2002
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I was very struck by Paul Sheahan’s opening remarks on the CD promoting this Conference. Standing in front of two photographs, one of happy, eager primary school children, the other of 18 year-olds leaving school, he says that somewhere in between “something happens” to these young people. Many pupils as they go through adolescence and enter adulthood feel uncertain and rudderless in a culture which seems to offer little more than a concern for self and the headlong pursuit of pleasure.
I don’t want to be glib – what happens is that they grow up and realise that the world contains challenges and complexities they could not have possibly imagined. But there are cultural and philosophical issues that we need to take very seriously.
So two more contrasting pictures. I am often drawn to Renaissance portraits (Holbein’s Henry VIII is a classic example), where the subjects have a certain confidence in the way they look at the world – eyes open, looking out at the world, staring confidently at the artist, as if to say “I undertstand my world, I am at home here, the philosophy I’m working with is coherent”. Compare these with so many contemporary portraits, like those of the British artist Lucian Freud, grandson of the famous psychologist. Here there is a visceral quality about the bodies and the faces are marked by introspection, anxiety, even self-loathing.
Or look at the paintings of Damien Hirst or Tracy Emin (what has become known as conceptual art). Damien Hirst has created installations which include swear words on glass and Tracy Emin, short-listed for the 1999 Turner Prize, scandalised many with her display of an unmade bed. Antoni Tapies became a leading abstract painter and sculptor of post-war Spain. Tapies caused controversy with his sculpture for the National Museum of Catalin Art in Spain in 1992 – a sixty-foot white sock with a hole in it! Or compare Van Gogh’s famous “Peasant Shoes”, which expresses a real world of rural misery, with Warhol’s “Diamond Dust Shoes”, which expresses a depthlessness with no link to any reality. Such art-works suggest a world where all is surface, there is nothing more to life than meets the eye. The same can be said of many contemporary films – recent examples such as David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive or the Cohen brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There. These are films which are very conscious of themselves as films. There is a sense that you cannot escape the world of Hollywood convention and depict some “real” world. All is image, all is surface, in productions where part of the game is to spot Hollywood conventions or references to other films, where any search for “meaning” is somehow inappropriate.
It seems to me that many young people operate with philosophies of despair that do not address the deep questions and needs they have. If I were to put names to these philosophies, the following terms spring to mind:
Relativism – morality is relative to time and place, merely a matter of context and upbringing, nature and nurture
Subjectivism (a related position) – what is right or wrong, good or bad is a matter of personal preference. What we feel and decide is right and wrong is right and wrong. There is no higher court of appeal to which we have access to make a better moral judgement. We’re all entitled to our own opinions but have no right to challenge those of others.
Hedonism – life is about the pursuit of “pleasure”.
Egoism – we should pursue our own desires and interests.
Pragmatism – ‘truth’ is unattainable so what’s right is what “works” – it is by their fruits that people and ideas are known. Truth lies in doing and getting things done.
Utilitarianism – the end justifies the means – values and principles are all ultimately disposable – nothing is right or wrong independently of the consequences.
If you discuss moral issues with any group of teenagers you will find that these philosophies surface, at least in embryonic form.
Obviously I am making value judgements here. I believe these philosophies need articulating and exploring, and alternatives made accessible (if not, we are simply bowing to the authority of peer group and media-generated culture. Religious Education has often not found a place in schools in the United States and Australia because people [quite rightly] are concerned about indoctrination – but not to address these issues is to allow a different kind of indoctrination to take place). Pupils need to be given a language with which to explore their beliefs and values, to be able to discuss the consequences, limitations and logical difficulties of the world-views they are forming….and we should enable this as teachers, not in a spirit of indoctrination but, perhaps, more as “fellow travellers”.
The Five Strands approach is a strong assertion of values (quite properly). But there are no value-free zones (to say there are no values is itself to adopt a value position). Schools are moral communities and it seems to me we need to be self-conscious and self-critical about the values we project, consciously or unconsciously, and the opportunities we create for discussion of values.
My starting-point, then, is that we must take seriously the beliefs and attitudes that pupils bring to the classroom. We have a responsibility to allow students to examine their beliefs and assumptions, acknowledged and unacknowledged, and create an environment where questions of meaning and purpose can be discussed in an open and honest way. It is a matter, I think, of giving students a vocabulary, or a complex voice, with which to explore their values and concerns, and in the process open up new vistas of possibility. Pupils can take part in an ongoing dialogue between the different truth claims they encounter in the classroom and their own developing self-understanding, beliefs and world views. John has already mentioned some excellent resources which adopt this kind of approach. I have always been concerned in my courses on Ethics to begin with ground-clearing questions which require serious thought about the nature of “right” and “wrong” and force students to think about what they care about and value:
So is it really the case that “right” and “wrong” are social constructions which change with time or place? If not, where do these values come from? Religion? Conscience? Nature? Reason? Weighing up the consequences?
If Religious Education ever gets a bad press, it is because we have often worked with models which create a gap between the subject matter and pupils’ deepest concerns (but more on that later).
So in the first part of this talk I want to explore the values that surround us. We are often told these days that we live in a postmodern world, though it’s often not clear what this means. What I’m interested in here is Postmodernism, or Postmodernity, as a cultural condition. Many of the, particularly French, philosophers often lumped into this category would not, I think, recognise themselves, but we can speak with some confidence about postmodern culture and that’s what I’m going to do here.
One commentator sums up Postmodernism as follows:
Postmodernism moves beyond the ‘modern’, scientifically based view of the world by blending a scepticism about technology, objectivity, absolutes and total explanations with a stress on image and appearance, personal interpretation, pleasure and the exploration of every spiritual and material perspective.[1]
Quite a good summary, I think.
Let me trace the historical origins of this term.
The 18th and 19th centuries, often known as the age of Enlightenment, saw the apparent triumph of the modern way of life and thinking. Science in particular seemed to offer an explanation for everything and a way of controlling our world so that we could create a far better life for us all. The harsh realities of world war, rationally administered death camps, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the threat of nuclear destruction, the ecological disasters facing the world, the failure and collapse of political ideologies like Marxism, and the sheer dehumanisation of human beings by the pace and nature of modern life have combined to give us a very different view of the world. The idea of a gentle growth towards a perfect society collapsed in the trenches of the first world war, and then the second world war showed how people fail to learn the lessons of history.
Paul Klee’s painting “Angelus Novus” shows the “angel of history” - The storm of progress irresistably propels the angel backwards into the future, the debri piling up in front of him.
It seems that this has been a regular theme in Australian literature (Patrick White, David Malouf and others) - the disparity between the Enlightenment culture out of which Australia was born and the great untamed interior (a rich metaphor for the internal world and for everything that is tamed and suppressed by scientific rationalism).
Coupled with environmental and ecological crisis is the reality that the world is divided in two – the wealthy western world which consists of only one third of the world’s population and consumes two-thirds of the world’s resources. Despite forming two thirds of the world’s population the rest of humanity lives in comparative poverty. In other words, there is a growing consciousness that the achievements and the wealth created by science and technology benefit a minority and come at a price.
The collapse of Marxism, which had been such a powerful ideology, cast doubt on the idea of any one philosophy being an adequate base for life. The French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard talked about Postmodernism as “incredulity towards metanarratives”. A metanarrative is a “big story”, or a way of seeing and interpreting the world. A metanarrative is a way of making sense of reality, a text, history, human being and human life. It is a belief system, like Christianity or Communism, which allows one to make sense of whatever happens and to fit each event into a whole picture or framework of meaning. One of the features of Postmodernism is a rejection of such metanarratives. This may lead to a cynical attitude towards any attempt to understand anything at all and a belief that we cannot get further than our own view. We might shrug our shoulders and make the best of life as we perceive it. This is the pathway to hedonism – living for pleasure in the here and now – and materialism, as we grasp for anything that might give intensity to our experience.
You can see this rejection of grand designs or metanarratives in developments in architecture. In many ways the rejection of modernist architecture and experimentation with new forms represented a dissatisfaction with dreams of utopia born of reason and science. Modernists like Le Corbusier had believed that architecture should use new materials such as steel and reinforced concrete, and new construction techniques. This new architecture was to be rational (it was to create machines for living) – away with ancient, cluttered, nineteenth-century styles. It should exhibit mathematical order – here human beings were creating their own rational universe. But the world has grown tired of failed utopias. Huge utopian modern housing projects had alienated the very inhabitants they were designed to house and turned into wastelands of graffiti, vandalism and neglect. Thus in the late 1960s and early 1970s they were dynamited. The commentator Charles Jencks maintained that on July 15, 1972, at 3.32 p.m., modern architecture died, as a huge housing project in St Louis was dynamited. Postmodern architects prefer buildings which display an eclectic mix of styles. As Jim Powell puts it, “Let postmodern buildings express irony, along with comedy, sorrow, paradox, and the unauthoritarian qualities needed for living humorously in a society made up of different races, sexual orientations, classes and cultures”. [2] Philip Johnson’s AT&T building in New York City is a good example. A classical broken pediment perches upon what appears to be a typical oblong skyscraper. We may pick out a number of possible references: modernist skyscraper, Italian Renaissance chapel, Chippendale furniture, the radiator of a Rolls Royce, a grandfather clock.
During the Enlightenment period there was the hope that somehow all human knowledge could form a unified whole – a hope which inspired the modern university. Now we are conscious of living in a world of many different specialisms which may not form a coherent whole. This complexity leads to alienation, a sense of a lack of self-worth and significance.
It is also hard to under-estimate the importance of multiculturalism. More than ever before, through immigration, travel, the media and the internet, we are conscious, particularly in large cities and in many schools, of living in a world of differences. So there is not one reality but many different, often conflicting realities. This is where that all-pervasive relativism comes from. We are so conscious of being surrounded by different cultures and religions that we find it difficult to believe that any one of them can be true. Our ideas about truth are not, it seems, eternal but made, and so we are reticent about imposing our values and customs on others.
There are, of course, problems with relativism. Is the claim that “everything is relative” an absolute or relative statement? If it’s an absolute statement then there is one absolute (that everything is relative) but if it’s a relative statement it has no particular status! And in any case the relativist does seem to adopt one absolute – the value of tolerance – but should we tolerate intolerance? There have been some interesting examples of this dilemma in the UK news recently. A dismembered body was discovered in the Thames, apparently the victim of Voodoo. Do we really believe that all cultural practices are equally valid and to be tolerated? A state-funded school in Gateshead, in the north of England, has been teaching that creationism is scientifically respectable. Can we really avoid making judgements about what is morally or intellectually acceptable?
One writer paints a grim picture of our contemporary condition, but one that we will all recognise in part:
“Generation X is the sociologists’ term for the kind of postmodern people we have become. We are cynical about everything and everybody. We poke fun at and deflate anything that smacks of pomposity … We are anti-authority. We don’t believe anything we read in newspapers or what politicians say, and we don’t trust traditional figures of authority like teachers, the police or church leaders. They are all out for themselves, corrupt and hypocritical. We are selfish. No-one can be relied on and fully trusted. So we flit from one relationship to another. Marriage has given way to serial monogomy. Friendship is about what we can get out of a relationship rather than what we can put in. We are deeply hesitant to commit ourselves to ideas or people. We are interested in our own little world and our own grasp of things, and don’t want anyone telling us what to do or what to think. There is no big picture of life or ultimate meaning in the universe. We are an instant generation looking for what works. We are highly doubtful about whether there are any absolute truths except what we come up with ourselves. We want to have fun. We want the good things in life and we want them here and now. Our needs are at the centre of our existence. Appearance is reality; so what matters is style and image. The more and the quicker the better. We want wall-to-wall pictures and music. The ultimate evil is being bored. We will do anything and everything to avoid that. We can be anything we want, and if we don’t like it we can change it. We are the arbiters of what is true, real, right and wrong and no-one is going to make us do or be anything we don’t want.”[3]
The roots of postmodernism are usually located in modern trends in art and architecture. So in art we move away from conventional realism to exhibits which include rows of bricks, piles of tyres and cows in formaldehyde. Anything goes and it is for the viewer to create meaning. For example, the rather beautiful abstract expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko are in a sense a screen on to which the viewer projects meaning.
Philosophically we need to look to the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, and those who have followed him, to understand what is happening here. It is a philosophical position known as expressivism – what is real and true is a construct we create and which has no existence above and beyond us and our subjective consciousness. Once there is no truth, once the search for truth, meaning and beauty has disappeared, then all that is left is the artist’s own creation and the viewer’s own interpretation.
Peter was speaking yesterday about “becoming human” – ethics as self-fulfilment or self-realisation - and he spoke of the tradition from Aristotle and Aquinas which believes that we possess a potential which is ours and that we can develop over time. If you look at the self-portraits of Rembrandt, one thing you notice is that although the older Rembrandt has aged physically, the eyes, the window of the soul, remain the same. The postmodern self is very different. The postmodern self creates itself and can be what it wants to be.