Picture 2I am about halfway through Kevin Roose’s book “The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester as America’s Holiest University.” It’s a moderately quick read about a Brown University student’s experimental semester at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. It is a book that, as Columbia University professor Randall Balmer suggests, “eschews caricature and the cheap shot in favor of keen observation and trenchant analysis.”

The book interested me for several reasons. From the perspective of personal biography, I went to a religious school for undergrad, and reading the book is like getting a take on a piece of my history from the outside. That being said, to Liberty students and professors, Calvin College probably looks like a bastion of progressivism/ liberalism, and the differences between the schools are in many ways more numerous than their similarities.

The second reason for my interest however is more theoretical; specifically, I find it fascinating to see how students from these two sub-cultures differ in how they approach the ethical domains of life. This is much more engaging analysis than the tried and true story of ‘look at what Liberty teaches in their biology classes (e.g. creationism),’ though this is also a major component of Roose’s book. In constrast to curriculum decisions, questions around ethics involve moving from the clearly descriptive (the earth rotates the sun at x mph) which can be derived from data, methods, and measurement, to the murky realm of prescription (I ‘ought’ to live this way), which do not as easily flow from this type of sensory data.This point is driven home in Wittgenstein’s famous lecture on ethics, in which he writes:

Although all judgments of relative value can be shown to be mere statement of facts, no statement of fact can ever be, or imply, a judgment of absolute value.

Picture 1Given this ambiguity, there will obviously be great differences on what is entailed in a ‘good life,’ a point brought home in the contrast between Roose’s former life at Brown and his semester at Liberty. Let’s consider sexual ethics for example, one of the more interesting subplots of the story as Roose begins to date a Liberty student. The prototypical Brown student has a very different view of relationship etiquitte than Liberty’s ‘holding hands and 3-second hug’ rules.  In this relationship, Roose has to navigate anew what a ‘healthy’ relationship entails, and the role of goals/ rules/ norms in shaping his behavior.  Going back to the problems of identifying absolutes, while proponents of both sides can identify ‘facts’ that buttress their case (the risk of STDs or pregnancy, the role of intimacy in relationship health, etc.), in neither case does a clear ought flow out of such facts, at least not without risk and uncertainty.

The differences of ethics between students at Brown and Liberty extend far beyond sexuality– influencing job decisions, choice of major, the way to interact with friends, choices of what is a valuable use of time, etc. For example, at Calvin, I thought that being an education major garnered a higher level of ‘prestige’ than being a business major, especially when the former was geared towards private religious school education. Within business majors, the benefit of the doubt was given to those who chose to participate in small family-run enterprises. And for work in the social sector, many students felt that ‘international’ work was given a prestige bump over similar work stateside– the former having a higher degree of ‘sexiness.’ My friend Dave’s take on his decision to move to Uganda is a helpful description of how this intuitive stance influences decision-making. Its prominence in our cultural imagination is obvious as well, as seen by Angelina Jolie, international adoption-star, “rockstar economist” Jeffrey Sachs (ironic?), and musician turned Africa activist, Bono.

But when ethics are ambiguous, and decisions have to be made, how are specific behaviors decided upon? Festinger’s work on social comparison suggests that the less concrete reality to justify one’s views, the more one will turn towards observing and interacting with other to build certainty.  In this absence of absolutes that emerge from facts of the world, we look to others to form our own views.

And that is where Brown and Liberty, despite all their differences, share a characteristic that will influence individual ethical decision-making– their internal similarity of student bodies. Ivy League or other selective institutions, my school Washington University included, indubitably homogenize their pool of applicants by setting certain standards of admission. You are much more likely to get into WashU if you went to a prestigious private prep school, participated in school council and related scholastic activities, and grew up as a child of WashU (or similar institutions) alumni.  And while Liberty doesn’t discriminate on academic lines as stringently, you are much more likely to go there if you are the child of an Evangelical missionary, know the right ‘language’ to speak in your application and faith statements, and grew up attending private Christian school or similar home schooling environment. As a result, both schools have a great deal of similarity in their student bodies, even though the dimensions of this similarity differ greatly between schools.

When forced to wrestle with ambiguous ethical issues, students at both schools are able to see a clear perspective on how to live life when there is agreement amongst their peers, even if the final agreed upon standard at Brown and Liberty are drastically different. The ambiguity of ethical decision-making is hidden, and “how could you not live this way?” becomes the default position at both institutions. Psychologically, we experience ethics as an absolute, even if Wittgenstein suggests this view is a chimera.

What ultimately makes Roose’s book so interesting, is the shattering of individual confidence and certainty when individuals from isolated sub-cultures interact. The real ‘risk’ and ‘choice’ in these behaviors becomes apparent, when we, like Roose, realize the complexity of the task.  As Wittgenstein concludes:

The tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language… Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science…. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.