Thursday, May 15, 2008

• A life of moral stuntedness

  Currently Reading God's Passion for His Glory: Living the Vision of Jonathan Edwards (With the Complete Text of The End for Which God Created the World) By John Piper see related

  I started going to Concordia University Chicago when I was about 2 years old.
  
  I wasn't taking classes. Not that I can recall. Apparently, my parents handed me over to let the kids studying for education and M.R.S. degrees watch me or test me or practice on me or implant microchips under my skin coded with the Mark of the Beast. They can't recall exactly what I was doing there either. When Sarah started at Concordia, I asked her to look into this, see if they're still tracking me. She couldn't find anything.
  
  But this weekend my mom found the results of some other tests to which I was subjected, a "child observation testing assignment" my uncle completed for nursing school. It was one of many things, including a slew of my own baby pictures she foisted upon me this weekend when she and my dad came up to Naperville for Mother's Day weekend to look at apartments. Better those cherished family memories junk up my apartment than hers ...
  
  
  
  That's me, right. You can tell because my cowlick-y, Polish hairstyle hasn't changed much, or at all, in 22 years. Nor, apparently, has my tendency to "think a little preoperational moral-wise."
  
  The paper starts:
  
  

  Emily, the oldest, is six years 10 months old. She is 4 feet 2 inches tall and weighs 66 pounds. She was five weeks premature at birth. She has light brown hair and will be in the second grade this fall. Emily is a sensitive child and a fast learner. At times her understanding and speech seems to be quite advanced for a child her age.
  
  Annie, her sister, is five years 11 months old. She is four feet tall and weighs 50 pounds. Annie will start first grade this fall. Annie has dark hair. She's a little more soft spoken and not as outgoing as Emily. She plays more physically than Emily, who is more into books and art.
  
  ... I then asked Emily if she would come into the kitchen so I could do some testing on her. She didn't mind leaving the game, she loves to be tested.

  The first few tests yielded entirely unsurprising results: I am a nerd! I like books! I have a freakish memory. I wanted to be an artist when I grew up. Annie can put toothpicks in order of length.
  
  Then we started testing my moral aptitude. If I was the only witness to a fight at school and the principal asked me if my best friend was involved and he/she was, would I say what I saw and why?
  
  

  When I asked Emily this question she said yes she would say what she saw. When I asked her why she said she would have to if she (her friend) did something wrong. Then I said, "What if it would get her into trouble?" and Emily said, "It wasn't the right thing to do." Then I said, "But wouldn't you like to help a friend?" And Emily said "No, because it's not the right thing to do."

  This answer, my uncle wrote, was below my age level, indicative of "a kind of belief in a golden rule of right and wrong that her friend broke" and my "egocentrism in not being able to think about it from her friends point of view."
  
  I seriously question this conclusion. I also seriously question my uncle's disregard for the comma. And the apostrophe. And his qualifications to play moral arbiter. I'm not sure a professed belief in the Golden Rule makes me a selfish, ego-driven retard with the moral capacity of a 5-year-old. (To be honest, I'm not even sure "telling the truth" falls under the banner of the Golden Rule.)

  Nor my answer to a question regarding whether Jack stealing a yo-yo from a dime store for himself or Jill cracking open the store's cash register and stealing $100 for a poor woman committed a more serious crime. I said Jill did. And I've read enough police reports to be pretty sure police would still agree with me.
  
  I think those answers make me Lutheran. And a terrible postmodern. I still am.
  
  The test most indicative of the future personality of my sister Annie, the pretty one who is much-preferred by the opposite sex?

  Question 19 on my assignment sheet reads ... 2-12 year olds: Who do you like to play with (if boys or girls rather than names are given, record that)? Can you tell me who your friends are?"
  
  Results: I asked Annie these questions and to the first question she answered boys. When I asked her who her friends are she said Adam and Bradley.
  
  Interpretation: Although Annie has some girl friends, her next door neighbors are two little boys named Adam and Bradley and she spends most of her playing time with them. I believe Annie and Adam said something about getting married some day.

  Some things never change. But that's coming from me, the morally stunted anti-postmodernist.

  • 12:27 AM
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