One of the things I've been talking/thinking about for a while now is what role absolute truth plays in our lives. I've definitely grown accustomed to thinking more in shades of gray than black and white, while still holding the belief that there are many things that are absolutely true. In that spirit, one of the problems I've been seeing lately is people taking positions on extreme ends of this particular idea, and it's really made me lose a good deal of respect for them.

Here's the situation as I see it. On one end of this belief are people who see that we're becoming more tolerant and accepting of beliefs and ideas. As a reaction, they analyze their own personal beliefs and ideas, and decide that they should be making many of them more rigid, applying the idea of absolute truth to them. On the other end are people who see that we're closing our minds off from differing perspectives. As a reaction, they analyze their own personal beliefs and ideas, and decide they should be making many of them more fluid, even if many of these beliefs don't warrant it.

I got in an argument this last weekend that I probably shouldn't have gotten in. A series of mostly harmless statements ended up in someone telling me, in a tone I took to be extremely patronizing (though I guess some people will never understand that you're an adult), that you should always be early for everything. I don't disagree that in his experience being early has always been beneficial, but in my experience, I've seen people that didn't get hired for jobs because they came to their interview too early. My personal opinion is that you should be right on time.

Disclaimer: Part of the argument was that you can't always be "on time" for everything. An example would be going to the airport to catch a flight. I'm not an idiot, I understand that there are some things that require early attendance. The thing is, if you're "on time" in an extremely nit-picky, technical sense, you're going to miss your plane. So obviously "on time" for a plane, in order to catch that plane, involves adding padding to that time. It's why the airlines explicitly state the duration of time before your flight leaves you should be at the airport. The time your flight leaves, minus this duration, is "on time". If you're in a culture where being 10 minutes early is expected, then your appointment time, minus 10 minutes, is "on time".

Trying to parse this over the last week, one of the only ways I've figured out how to make sense of his viewpoint is how often in the past he's asserted absolute truth about ideas and beliefs that didn't deserve them (for example, that listening to music with a beat makes you want to have sex). I've heard him express distaste about how my generation plays fast and loose with how we think and act. At this point, I view his way of evaluating his beliefs to be on that one end of the extreme, where someone has taken a pretty trivial belief and declared it absolute truth because they're afraid of giving in to the "chaos" that they see in the grey areas.

All that it's done is made me more careful about deciding what I declare to be absolutely true. Congratulations to him if his worry was that I was too lax in my beliefs. He's managed to make me consider making many of my beliefs even less rigid, and he's lost a good deal of respect from me at the same time, all because he wants to believe that you should always be early.