Solitude, please.

There is Norah from a Doll's House and there is Edna from the Awakening. People argue that they were both fighting for freedom, for identity, just for anything that wasn't being so oppressed by society. They both made two very different decisions when it came to staying or leaving, starting or ending. Norah left and Edna died. I was so bothered by both endings for reasons I didn't understand. Through wrestling with those thoughts and quotes talked about in class, I realized that it seemed as if both women lacked ever experiencing solitude.

We discussed two quotes in class,

"At long last you may no longer distinguish what binds you from what is you." - M.T. Anderson

"No human should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength." - R.W. Emerson

I think these men were seriously on to something with these words. How were either one of these women ever suppose to know anything about "who they are" or freedom or identity without solitude. I'm starting to learn how no one can embrace one without the other. It is a pretty well none fact, at least I think, that when we as people are always around other people our habits, attitude, or stance tends to sway or conform to the people around us. This happens in the most innocent way between friends that start to say the same words or laugh at the same things. Still, it can occur in much deeper ways through someone forgetting what they even think until someone else voices their opinion first because sometimes we forget what our voice wants to say when we have for so long never let it be told. Therefore, in the mist of people no one can ever see "what binds them from what they are." It is next to impossible to discern between the two when we're in a sea of opinions and storm of voices.

For anyone to know who they are from what binds them they need solitude. I hope and like to think that Norah left her family and comfort in search for solitude, that she was going to allow herself to simply be until herself is organically revealed because there is nothing else that can be revealed when there is only you. So originally I was so uneasy with the ending of A Doll's House because it just seemed like Norah was leaving, but then I realized her leaving was actually her starting. Once Bradley Cooper said, "If you don't know who you are then you'll never know what to do." Norah was at the start of solitude, therefore the start of her and knowing what to do. But then Edna left and ended. I realized the difference between the two leavings was really just the opportunity for solitude.

As humans we need solitude to ever hope to experience any kind of freedom, identity, or worth.

Cultural Relativism

       "Therefore, there is no objective 'truth' in morality. Right and wrong are only matters of opinion, and opinions vary from culture to culture." I can agree that this statement can be true. Right and wrong is usually an opinion. It's only a problem when it is projected on to the absolute world. Yes, people saying what is right and wrong is an opinion, but that doesn't mean that there is not a concrete truth. Depite what some opinions are. "There is no 'universal truth' in ethics---that is, there are no moral truths that hold for all peoples at all times."  Therefore, this is probably my biggest beef with Cultural Relativism; the idea that there is no concrete reality of truth, it just bends and forms depending on the current society it is within. This, consequently, reminds me of the Invisible Man. Ralph Ellison writes, 

"When one is invisible he finds such problems as good and evil, honesty and dishonesty, of such shifting shapes that he confuses one with the other, depending upon who happens to be looking through him at the time."

Cultural Relativism suggests that we, as a people, are all just invisible men or all just invisible societies conformed to the current circumstance. I understand that societies possess morals that can very much so be independent to the united mind of their culture. But regardless of opinion, I think we all have a absolute truth to answer to, that transcends all cultures.

       

       This brings me to another misunderstanding with Cultural Relativism. "The society's values are only one of them." Now, I am aware that I am not use this statement in the way it was intended, but it is a prime way to describe what I mean. A society's standards are made of the people, it them that makes it the standard anyway. You can only be stuck within Cultural Relativism if someone is stepping out of the box to reach the society's already accepted standards. The only problem I have with this theory is progress, which has been accepted as a flaw in the theory. There are examples like the 1%, the 70,000 young adults at Passion 2013, and Ellen Degeneres. 

        

       As a world, I think every society is only ever striving for progress and achievement. So if that can't be a part of Cultural Relativism, then that bids the question; why are we doing anything we do? This past I was at a conference in Georgia called Passion 2013. The 70,000 college-student aged adults there  were raising there voices against the 27 million slaves that still exist around the world. In our society iPhones are accepted some would even say "necessary."But slavery isn't acceptable at all. Yet slaves are used in metal industries and in the very construction of that electronic. So which standard does a person choose to live up to? Progress is only reached through busting past old standards and making new ones. We can fight against slavery as a society and reject products that are the definition of hypocrisy. And there is no doubt, that we would unite to make a new coming-age phone that is untainted and can be a whole new kind of standard. 

       

       Culture Relativism has many hang ups. But it is making me think of one question the most above all the rest. You see, I suppose I just don't understand being a reformer to reach a current society standard that is already established. I mean, if your society isn't abiding by one of their values then is it really a moral standard in your society in the first place?