For years, CESJ’s chief volunteer was a Southern Lady (note
the capitalization) who, on occasion, was wont to make a comment or two about
persons who lacked what she called “standards.”
Generally this was in response to an enquiry about why she chose not to
associate with certain individuals or groups.
Her almost inevitable reply was, “I have standards,” implying that they
did not.
This had nothing to do with race, creed, color, or belief in
the Great Pumpkin. Her “standards”
consisted of having a consistent code of behavior, some kind of predictability
in what one considers right and wrong, true and false, or anything else, a way
of determining which way something is going, whether up or down, according to
some objective unit of measure.
She didn’t have to agree with you, but she could get along
with you, even become very good friends, if she could figure out where you were
coming from and where you were going.
She, whose grandfather was in the Army of Northern Virginia under Robert
E. Lee, could be friends with someone whose great-great-grandfather was in the
Army of the Potomac and died in a Confederate POW camp. She knew where you stood.
This is perfectly rational.
You don’t have to agree with someone to get along with him or her. You do, however, have to know what the
standard is for relating to that person, letting your yes mean yes, and your no
mean no. That’s from Matthew 5:37, if
you were wondering.
This is the same in everything. Regardless what you are measuring, you have
to have some standard of measure that everyone dealing with whatever is being
measured agrees on. If you’re buying
yards of cloth, but someone is only selling ells, you probably won’t come to an
agreement. Or, if your yard has 36
inches, but the other fellow insists that his
yard is 42, 27, 18, or even 12 inches, there won’t be a meeting of the minds,
and thus no contract. Let your yard mean
yard, and your ell mean ell. That’s not
from Matthew 5:37, if you were wondering, but you get the point.
The bottom line here is that if you don’t know what the
standard is, or what a word means from moment to moment, your relationship with
whomever you’re trying to communicate or deal is going to fall apart. Fast.
If a society has no standards, then what you have is
chaos. This could be as simple a thing
as a unit of weight or measure, or as complex as the code of moral
behavior. Once fundamentals are thrown
into question, then everything falls apart.
After all, if you don’t know what anything is, how do you know that it
is?
