J. Edwards*: Color Relativity (1942-1949)
*Newcomb College Art School Student

"…I will remain confident that I understand what constitutes some relatively absolute Decencies."

Like everything else, Decency exists on a sliding scale. Few absolutes seem appropriate when considering it. One person’s Decency might well prove to be another’s downfall. Further, it often appears in know-it-when-I-see-it guises. I sometimes feel surprised to find that what I thought might degrade me turns out to elevate me instead. Likewise, some actions initiated in good faith and lofty intentions leave me feeling humiliated. Even with my considerable decades of experience, I have yet to develop a foolproof method for classifying Decencies. Yet I continue as if I understood, as if I could know how to tell Decency in action. I’ve many times proven myself fully capable of fooling myself. What could be preventing anyone else from fooling me, too?

I still consider myself firmly on the side of Decent. This conviction, like many, could be a delusion. My metric for goodness is under continual revision. This might be another way to say that I continue to learn. None of us was born understanding very much of anything. Though many consider Decency innate, an inevitable element of everyone’s behavior, the history of presumptions about innateness does not inspire much confidence in this belief. We might most often guess wrong before concluding otherwise, discarding earlier expectations as they fail to satisfy intentions. The space between indecency and Decency only seems glaring, perhaps, because in the most extreme cases, it really seems convincing. But how many experiences can we rightfully claim that we experience in such extremes? The relative rarity of extreme cases hardly encourages certainty—quite the opposite.

I am therefore no reliable harbinger of Decency. You probably aren’t either. Yet, together, we often agree on what we see before us. Maybe we’re sharing subtle cues that lead us to reach a shared conclusion. Who knows? Who properly cares? I know, though, as you know, that a whole population presently believes Decent what we cannot ever understand. Those who perceive our incumbent’s actions as Decency incarnate quality as nothing more than aliens to me. They could not possibly share even distantly similar perceiving and reasoning systems. There’s just no way those behaviors appear to qualify as ambiguous, either, yet here we are, separated by more than mere dichotomy. We apparently experience entirely different realities.

I have been counseled to seek to understand these counterparts, even if they do usually seem to be from Mars. If only the difference seemed more geographical, because being from Mars doesn’t seem as if it would present even half the barrier RelativeDecency brings. I cannot imagine a language that could carry such a conversation. The term ‘values’ seems absurdly abstract when the other clearly appears to carry no discernible values at all. I might as usefully attempt to carry on a conversation with a dog or a blade of grass. This sort of difference seems to accompany every Decency discussion. They each seem destined to fail even to find a premise upon which the differences might be discussed. By necessity, we hold our convictions mutely.

I expect to continue confidently declaring what I consider to be evidence of Decency. I might even prove to be mostly wrong in these assessments. I do not anticipate modifying my approach in the face of contrary evidence. You see, relativity cannot exist in any moment. It must reside simultaneously in two different places. There must be some comparison for relativity to exist. Since I have no way to inhabit two separate time slices simultaneously, I’m stuck with one. The one I choose to be stuck with must necessarily be the one with which I hold the greatest confidence. Confidence isn’t proof. It might not even quite qualify as evidence. It seems capable of bolstering adequate conviction to draw convenient conclusions. I will retain a vestigial understanding that my convictions might not be conclusive evidence, and I will also hold that alternative universes and understandings most likely exist out there, somewhere else, but I expect to remain faithful to the one world I inhabit. I might be wrong, but I will remain confident that I understand what constitutes some relatively absolute Decencies.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Decency, #PureSchmaltz