Thursday, October 23, 2008  10:05 PM
We sing, we dance, we steal things
I'd like to think that I'm waxing lyrical about this subject, but it gets me more riled up than I'd actually like to imagine.
As a final-year core subject, Media Law, Ethics and Policy shoots straight up to number one on the list out of all the four compulsory core modules we've been put through, all one hundred and eighty of us. It definitely beats the ineffectuality of learning about communication skills in the first year, becoming friends with Darwin, Freud and Marx in my second year and literally not remembering anything in media management class in my third year. Yes, this year's core module has been stimulating, and interesting in certain aspects and absolutely futile in others.
I usually don't devote whole entries to schoolwork, so you see how this class has really got picking on my brain - a rare occurrence.
The law component was tough, and failure to keep up with the hundred-page readings each week meant sinking quite surely to the bottom and not being able to keep up with the crossfire debates - in other words, attending a pointless lecture and coming out feeling stupider than you did when you first entered. Surprisingly enough, I liked it once I grasped the rationale behind each subject and it served the general purpose of intellectual conversation topics over dinner. I also enjoyed countering my father on issues which I knew more about than him. While I engaged in those conversations, I happily thought pinned-up chignon, classy black spectacle frames and the authoritative resonance of four-inch heels on marble flooring.
Ethics, however, is a completely different story. My world while growing up was perfectly black and white. Black was evil, the rogues that managed to shoot down Captain Planet and the ugly monsters with fangs. White white, the knight in the shining armour, princesses and their wonderful fairytale endings. I embraced white with childlike innocence, and wrapped it around myself like a blanket thinking that my life would be that perfect too.
I paced around in school today and watched the crowds rush by, and thought about how my life has now been clouded wtih grey. And grey, I won't label it a bad thing, I just call it inevitable. Differing opinions, measured on what scale, what standards and whose rules? Every single person walking past me grew up a different way, exposed to worlds another might not understand, and pain someone else might interpret as pleasure. How do you grapple with what's right and what's not? Sure, you can impose your moral values on someone else, but morality and ethics are not synonymous. Religion comes into play, and admittedly, it shapes my life - but are you going to impose those views on others with that self-righteous stand? No, they'll find every other way to counter you and that's where their hate begins.
So when I sit amidst a discussion on ethics, just like in class today, where my professor throws out situation after situation - Do you think it's ethical to take an MC when you aren't really sick just to get a day off work? Is it unethical to snub a junior colleague and treat him as if he doesn't exist? Is it okay to be in a group of ten colleagues, nine Singaporean Chinese and one from mainland China, and when the one from mainland China walks out, you imitate her and mimic her accent? - thoughts are running through my head like wildfire, but somehow I cannot bring myself to form a cogent argument to defend the ethics behind it. I throw out my opinions, but I find most of these issues personal choices as opposed to ethical issues, because what is ethical in today's society where everyone is so diverse and hold such varied standards? It would be easy to defend those obvious things, like murder, theft or adultery. But with these controversial everyday issues, everything we do is a personal choice, based on our beliefs and our conscience, but there is no one written book of laws when it comes to ethics. I find the discussions futile, useless, ineffectual, because everyone fights and it does seem like an interactive tutorial, but really, you come out of there learning nothing at all and simply sticking to the points you already had in your head formed years ago through your experiences or what your parents taught you.
There is no point at all discussing ethics. No point. It's parallel to the Democrats and the Republicans. Who's right and who's wrong? It all ends up in a great divide.
I think back about my perfect white world once in awhile, the stories I held so close to my heart. And I wonder if everything was one then, and there were laws for every single thing and situation. I doubt and then think maybe their standards were different, perhaps doing less charity was considered abominable because charity was part of everybody's life. See, that's when my grey creeps in.
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