My friend’s wife recently gave birth in a Kalamazoo hospital. Her doctor wasn’t available, so a female doctor from New York handled the delivery. The doctor had the stereotypical New York mannerisms, including sassy remarks in a “poisonous Eastern voice,” to borrow a phrase from Flannery O’Connor.
Whenever my friend or his wife questioned a procedure, the doctor would sneer, “Do you wanna dead baby? Is that what you want, a dead baby?” My friend said it irritated him, but he went to law school with similar people, so it wasn’t so bad. “That’s just the way they are,” he explained.
I once had a venomous secretary who constantly insulted and snapped at co-workers. Some of us wanted to discharge her because her attitude was dragging down office morale, but one partner repeatedly came to her rescue, saying, “That’s just the way she is.” Similarly, there’s a man in my town who is very good-looking, successful, arrogant and unfriendly to people who don’t walk in his social strata. His friends dismiss his arrogance and unfriendliness with the explanation, “That’s just the way he is.”
There’s something nice about such tolerance, and no doubt many of us have benefited from it. When a person says, “That’s just the way he is,” he’s adopting a peaceful response to rude behavior, saying that a person means no offense so we shouldn’t take offense. There’s an element of truth here, but it’s only a half-truth, and even this half-truth may be flawed.
Mannerisms are a tricky thing to judge, but that doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as manners. A person may be rude out of custom, arrested development, a troubled life, or unwitting aloofness, but that doesn’t change the objective reality of the rudeness. To dismiss it on grounds that the person subjectively meant no offense is ignoring half the game — the objective part — not to mention it means we presume a subjective state that we can’t possibly know: the person might be acting intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly. How do we know?
Now, I’m all for overlooking faults. After all, no one’s perfect and a person might indeed be “faulting” innocently. But that doesn’t mean we should deny that there are faults.
Saying, “That’s just the way he is” detracts from the truth that there are ways we ought to be and ways we ought not to be. “That’s just the way he is” is the perfect cliché for the relativist because it allows him to say something without saying anything, and the relativist doesn’t want to judge conduct, unless the harm emanating from it is unequivocal, immediate, non-consensual and physical. If a man routinely rams his knee into a man’s crotch as part of his greeting, even the staunchest relativist will not gasp, as he walks away doubled over, “That’s just the way he is.” He will eventually (after a few minutes) stand up straight and strongly condemn that type of behavior.
But he ought also be willing to stand up and say that it is unacceptable to threaten nervous woman in labor for the first time, or to make churlish remarks to co-workers, or to snub a poor man. If that’s just the way a person is, then he needs to be admonished and counseled, not to mention forgiven and prayed for — after all, only those who are willing to forgive can properly admonish, and only those willing to pray for a person are in a position to counsel him.
But the wishy-washy relativist does none of these things because he denies that there are wrongs to be made right, faults to be eliminated, weaknesses to be strengthened by grace, or sins to be forgiven.
© Copyright 2006 Catholic Exchange
Eric Scheske is an attorney, the editor of The Daily Eudemon, a Contributing Editor of Godspy, and the former editor of Gilbert Magazine.
