Reflections

If you look hard enough, there’s a moral to be found in anything. My most recent moral musing was triggered, oddly enough, by a musical. And not just any musical... but Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

    While I wouldn’t recommend the movie to a child or an adult with a queasy stomach, when viewed in the right light this story will show you a fascinating and disturbing parallel of modern society.  
    This ensanguined, little fable tells the story of a wrongly accused barber who, when released from prison, returns to his hometown of London as a bitter and revenge driven man on the border of madness.  His old shop has been taken over by an offbeat widow who owns a failing meat pie business.  In a frame of less than five minutes (the song “A Little Priest”, look it up on YouTube at your own risk) the two justify the murder and cannibalization of their customers.  
    While this is a rather extreme example, it can be used in its lyrics and imagery to highlight the three contributing elements  of moral rationalization.  These elements being: Avoidance, Denial and Blame. 
    Avoidance is when we focus on every aspect of a situation EXCEPT for what is morally wrong. In A Little Priest the two protagonists focus on the fact that Mrs. Lovett’s business is failing, they focus on the business of her rival, they list of the attributes of each of their victims, mention relatives... and basically focus on  anything except for the dignity of the human person. Avoidance is a vital step to morally justifying just about anything. 

Denial is when we do the best we can to avoid the facts of a situation. Often this is executed by changing the names of things. For instance in the lyrics of A Little Priest where they refer to the corpse as “a nice, plump frame”, reducing what was once the living body of a human being into nothing more than a piece of meat. The power of words cannot be underestimated in their contribution to moral rationalization.

This leads us neatly into Blame... the final shebang of the process. Nothing like shifting the spotlight from our own souls onto the sins of those around us to blur the moral boundaries. In his words, the avenging barber describes London society as “man devouring man”, therefor shifting the wrongness of his actions onto “society” in general.  Something that we, as Christian youth, are all too guilty of.  

I’m no clergy, and I hold no doctorate of theology, I am merely an all-up-in-yo-grill Catholic teenager whose been granted a virtual soapbox. But I write these words from a place of thought, a place of Truth with a capital T. Take it as you will and if it leads you to your own reflection than praise the Lord, if not... enjoy the music.

          

- Merwin <3