On Discrimination

White doves help Cinderella discriminate among various grains and seeds.

A seemingly trivial example of our current moral confusion, or depravity: the ESL text I used this morning has a vocabulary exercise. One word tested is “discriminate,” and the possible answers are “a negative action” or “a positive action.” The student is expected to know or learn that discrimination is a negative action.

Discrimination is not an action, but never mind that.

First problem is avoiding the terms “good” and “bad” or “right” and “wrong.” The reference to morality is obscured. Instead, the author resorts to the pseudo-scientific terms “negative” and “positive.” We are not discussing mathematics or electricity. This seems calculated to confuse rather than clarify.

But, worse, it also gets the morality backwards. To discriminate is a good thing; yet the desired and expected answer is “negative.”

“Discriminate”; Merriam-Webster: “to mark or perceive the distinguishing or peculiar features of.” “To distinguish by discerning or exposing differences: to recognize or identify as separate and distinct.”

Thought itself is the process of discriminating one thing from another. Morality itself is a question of discriminating right from wrong. This is not just obscured, but perverted here.

This might be a lazy error; a question of confusing “discriminate” with “discriminating in employment on the basis of race or skin colour.” Never attribute to malice what is more easily explained by ordinary human incompetence. But this does look sinister. As though someone, either a constituency on earth or some Cartesian Evil Genius, or both, wants us to stop thinking in terms of right and wrong.