The Thursday Wolf

1) Three thoughts on the bathroom crisis:

1. As a man, I have no dog in this fight: the brutal truth is that the number of "trans people" wanting access to men's washrooms and change rooms is going to be infinitesimally small. 
2. Women do have a dog in this fight: every voyeur and sexual assault perpetrator on the continent is busily figuring out how to exploit this to their victims' disadvantage.
3. It's up to women to watch out for their own interests. I hope this doesn't turn out badly for women but it's up to them to do something about it not me.

2) The American election is now narrowed down to three nasty little shits: Clinton, Sanders and Trump. We can only hope that whichever of them is elected fails so miserably and so quickly that no one misses the object lesson that comes from electing such people to high office.

3) Jack Donovan is one of those guys who has a tendency to go too far on a pretty regular basis. That said, the following is pure gold:

Strength, Courage, Mastery, and Honor are the alpha virtues of men all over the world. They are the fundamental virtues of men because without them, no “higher” virtues can be entertained. You need to be alive to philosophize. You can add to these virtues and you can create rules and moral codes to govern them, but if you remove them from the equation altogether you aren’t just leaving behind the virtues that are specific to men, you are abandoning the virtues that make civilization possible.—The Way of Men

Achilles was, quite frankly, an asshole. Hector is the real hero of the Iliad. That said, the character of Achilles was admired for what he could do: he was a fast-running, killing machine. That such an ideal of human excellence in action, however flawed, would be reduced to a person (usually a woman) whose distinction was their ability to resist action (usually sexual action) is degrades humanity.

4) It's interesting to compare Donovan's alpha virtues with the cardinal virtues: Prudence, Justice, Temperance and Fortitude. That's the order that Thomas Aquinas lists them in. Something of a rationalist, Thomas favours Prudence because it [rough quote] "exists in the very act of reason". I'm not sure about that as I don't see reason as any kind of act at all. Rationality can be a quality of an act but to reason is to do nothing at all unless an action follows. Because he was concerned with political order (an understandable thing for him to want as it was in very short order in the middle ages) Thomas next lists Justice as reason that puts its order into something else. Given the emphasis on rational now established, it isn't surprising that the remaining virtues are, in Thomas's view, about curbing passions. Temperance is about curbing those appetites that arise naturally from within us (concupiscible passions) and those passions that we stir up in response to obstacles to our appetites (irascible passions).

5) Many years ago I did a quiz on which moral philosopher most closely approximated my views. It turned out to be Aquinas but number two on the list was Nietzsche. In this case, the Nietzsche side of me wins out. A virtue that is only about controlling passions is no virtue at all. I don't mean to say that controlling our passions is a bad thing, quite the opposite, but it isn't a virtue. A virtue is an excellence; it is the ability to do something well. Controlling passions may be a quality of a virtue but virtues produce excellent action or they are nothing at all. 

6) If we were to simply match up the lists of virtues, we'd get the following:

Strength and Fortitude
Courage and Temperance
Mastery and Prudence
Honor and Justice

Strength and Fortitude: 

At first glance, I think most people would be inclined to give this match to Thomas. There is a fatal problem with his definition, however, and that is that his "fortitude" is only the ability to control something and not the ability to actually do something with excellence. 

We might try and save Thomas by rethinking fortitude but I think it's better to save Donovan as his virtue is actually a virtue to begin with. It may seem too narrow but we can think of strength in broader terms. To repeat, strength really is a virtue. I mean physical strength. It's too narrow a virtue to rate mention in the top four but it is easily broadened by extending it to include strength of character. 

Okay, but should it be first on the list? Here, I think Donovan's point really strikes home: without strength, no "higher" virtue can be obtained. So, yes, top of the list. (That we also call this sort of strength "moral strength" is a further hint to its rightful place.)

Courage and temperance:

Again, Thomas has made controlling a passion into a virtue and it isn't. (While it's often a good idea to be patient, patience is not a virtue as it requires inaction. Patience only makes sense in service of another goal; patience is not and cannot be its own reward.)

Courage, on the other hand, is unquestionably a virtue and a good one.

Now, the objection should be raised that strength or courage by themselves are useless. I could be incredibly strong and courageous but if I don't have the good sense to distinguish between good causes and bad ones I'm just as likely to side with evil people as good. And that is absolutely true but it is equally true that Prudence is useless without Strength and Courage and neither Thomas's Fortitude nor his Temperance is an adequate replacement for these.

Mastery and Prudence:

This is the crux of the matter and here the judgment goes solidly in Donovan's favour. Thomas is simply too rationalistic. To be fair, some might argue the "historical Thomas" might well have been able to stand up to Donovan here. And it could be further objected that I am no Aquinas scholar and correctly so for I am not. To which I would reply, if a less rationalistic understanding of Prudence can be teased out of Thomas, it would, in any case, have to be much more like Mastery.

Honour and Justice:

Thomas finally gets his win. Honour is part of Justice but it's a long way away from being a sufficient understanding of Justice.

7) The final word on Honour and Justice goes to the Wolf:

The main characteristic of an alpha male wolf is a quiet confidence, quiet self-assurance. You know what you need to do; you know what’s best for your pack. You lead by example. You’re very comfortable with that. You have a calming effect.—Richard McIntyre

Privilege

My first instinct is to dismiss the whole notion of privilege as just the latest manipulative trick of fascists social justice warriors. And that is partly correct.

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)

That's Saul Alinsky's rule #12 and when SJWs accuse people of having privilege that is what they are doing. "Privilege" is just a stick to beat people with for them.

But that doesn't mean there isn't something to the concept.

If we get privilege wrong, it's because we start off thinking it's a boon for the person who has it. It isn't. Being a parent's favourite, about as clear an example of privilege as you're likely to find, is as likely to be a curse as a blessing.

Another reason we misunderstand privilege is that we imagine those who enjoy it have it good:  that, because society judges them to be “good,” they are "loved, get their needs met, and have a problem-free life.” Robert Glover tells us this is the contract that "nice guys" seek to make with life. Much of our belief in "privilege" is based on the assumption that some people get this without earning; that they are just blessed.

Truth be told, people with privilege are just as lonely and frustrated as anyone else. Often, they are worse equipped than the rest of us precisely because their privilege leads them to fail to prepare for life and this will come back to haunt them for most privilege is temporary.

Which leads me to the issue of attractive young women. Although no one acknowledges it—it doesn't suit the purposes of SJWs to say so—attractive young women are the most privileged group in our society. They are valued for what they are and not for what they do. They have easier aspect to entry-level jobs than the rest of us (and those are the only kinds of jobs available to the young). They get little helps and boosts every day. And yet, if my experience is anything to go by, they are no happier than anyone else and often end up very unhappy in the long run.

Idolatory

While shopping I heard a pop song in which a woman sung about how happy she was to have a man who loved her, "Just the way I am". And it struck that it's odd that so many songs, so many books, so many movies take it for granted that an extraordinary person will come along and love us just as we are.

Why would they? Wouldn't you expect an extraordinary person to hold out for someone extraordinary too?

We think it's okay to hope for this and what we hope we expect and what we expect we feel entitled to.

The song is by Ingrid Michaelson (amazing thing the internet). She shows expresses her gratitude for this love by offering to do all sorts of things for him. What she most definitely not do, the whole point of songs like this, is want to be the sort of person someone else would love. I know I go on about narcissism a lot but it's because of stuff like this.

Why wouldn't you want to be a better version of yourself? Why would anyone think that anyone would want someone who wanted to be loved for being just the way they are?

Amoris Laetitia: bureaucrat versus lawyers, lawyers get stomped

"...what the lawyer wants is authority, the newer the better ; what the historian wants is evidence, the older the better." Frederick William Maitland

There was a writer in the sailing world back in the 1970s named, if I remember correctly, Jack Knight. He once described how nice guys respond when they think the other side is cheating. The example he gave was team racing where boats are swapped after each race. A dirty crew might deliberately mess up a few things on their boat before passing it on. The nice guys in the new crew immediately find the most obvious problems but, not wanting to appear like whiners, they fix the problems rather than complain. But somewhere around the fifth or sixth minor act of sabotage they lose it and sail over to the committee boat to complain. And the committee members say, "What are you a bunch of whiners? That's only a little thing." The enraged crew say, "But what about ..." and abruptly realize that they have nothing to point to.

Similarly, having put a positive spin on what he has done before, even though they had to hold their noses and grit their teeth together to do so, traditionalists are now reading Amoris Laetitia and finding themselves in the position of suddenly thinking, "This is too much," but having no credibility to make the point they want to make. They played along because they thought there was a sharp limit to what he can do; they thought they had him over a barrel because a pope cannot change established church teaching. And they're right, he can't—not even the smallest letter or stroke. But, wily old bureaucrat that he is, he knew all along that that supposed trump card was nothing of the sort.

If you search "Pope Francis Pastoral" you get about a half-million hits as of today. The impression you get scanning the links is that this is a very pastoral pope—even his critics say so. Search "Pope Francis bureaucrat" and you get another half million hits and a quick scan of those suggests that Francis is to the very core of his being opposed to bureaucracy. What you wouldn't guess from any of that is that Pope Francis has virtually no pastoral experience. Nor would you guess that he spent almost his entire career as a church bureaucrat.

As a bureaucrat he understands perfectly well that praxis trumps the law every time. In that regard, I put it to you that these are the most important sentences in the entire exhortation:

I would make it clear that not all discussions of doctrinal, moral or pastoral issues need to be settled by interventions of the magisterium. Unity of teaching and practice is certainly necessary in the Church, but this does not preclude various ways of interpreting some aspects of that teaching or drawing certain consequences from it. 

Read the harshest critics of Amoris Laetitia, you can a bunch of links here, and you will note that what upsets them most is not so much what Francis does as what he doesn't do. He faithfully restates Catholic teaching but he doesn't provide narrowly proscribed guidelines for interpreting that teaching. And that is where the traditionalists are finding he has them over a barrel. They can claim two thousand years of tradition but what really matters to lawyers is authority, and the newer the better, and Francis has just taken that authority away from the lawyers (many of whom are only self-appointed lawyers) of the Catholic Church.

That said, I have to hand it to the traditionalists that they, at least, understand what is happening. This, as musicologist Peter van der Merwe and psychologist Jonathan Haidt note in very different fields, is not unusual. People wrapped up in "revolutions" rarely understand what they are doing. The traditionalist has a better grasp on what the revolutionaries are really up to. 

He is not repudiating in principle the objective truth of any revealed dogma or moral norm; but at the level of praxis he is shifting the emphasis away from objective standards of right and wrong behavior and placing it instead on presumed subjective sincerity and individual conscience.

Exactly right. Liberals talk about a revolution led by Pope Francis. There is no such thing. Rather, Francis is assuming that there has already been a quiet revolution at the grassroots level and all the magisterium has to do is stay out of the way for it to be completed. As Bing Crosby says to Grace Kelly in High Society, "I'd like a piece of that bet."

How many divisions has Pope Francis?

So how does this play out from here on down the line? All Francis has done is to take the cap off the toothpaste tube. The toothpaste is still inside and he isn't going to do anything to change that. But, good bureaucrat that he is, he's betting that his assessment of the Catholic zeitgeist is better than that of his opponents (who, it should be noted, still outnumber his supporters among the bishops if the final decisions of the two synods on the family are anything to go by).

Assessing this is more complicated than it might seem at first glance. You might be tempted to look at polls that show that Catholics overwhelmingly support a more lax approach to teachings on sexuality and marriage but the majority of those polled don't go to church regularly. The church that matters the most is the one made up of people whose bums are on pews more than 52 times a year. And here, as Father Z sarcastically notes, traditionalists would seem to have an advantage:

But wait! 

Are liberals or fallen away Catholics or people in “irregular” relationships beating down doors to get into confessionals? 

Maybe we don’t have such a big problem and not much has changed after all.

Alas, I think Father Z is going to be disappointed (and I'm pretty sure he knows it). 

I've been in traditionalist Catholic circles all my life. And I mean that quite literally, from my baptism to the present day. And I think that even there there is a solid plurality of people who, while not necessarily in "irregular situations" themselves, have a whole lot of family and friends who are and who are inclined to support a more charitable approach to these people. When push comes to shove, they'd rather emphasize presumed subjective sincerity and individual conscience. Francis has correctly judged that, even on their homeground, the traditionalists will lose this battle in the long run.

Barring the possibility that this papacy turns out to be very short-lived it's all over but for the shouting. And I would think that short-lived would have to mean months not years; even then there is no assurance his predecessor would change direction enough to make a difference.

"You don't share any of my values!"

About a decade ago, a couple I know got a dog. Both the man and woman were of strong feminist views and regarded their relationship as being one between equals and they attempted to share power in all matters equally. They believed that and, as far as they could tell, their friends believed it too. The dog messed everything up. She didn't know anything about ideology or feminism. She decided which of the two was the strong authority figure in her life based on what she observed in their behaviour. She picked the man. 

It was rather awkward. Everyone could see it and, while professing not to care, the woman talked about it a lot.

The woman set about fixing the problem by competing with her husband for their dog's respect. She tried to win that respect by showing the dog that she really understood its needs and wants. That had the reverse of the desired effect. The man, who didn't want a dog in the first place, saw the dog as just another thing in his life that had to be dealt with. The dog loved both of them in that unreserved way dogs do, but she developed a deep respect for and trust in the man that she never had for the woman. That this was so was unmistakeable; the dog's behaviour was very different when the man was not around.

I put it to you that this true story can also serve as a parable about why we fail or succeed in living values and, therefore, whether we pass them along or not.

The quote in the subject heading of this post is something my mother said to me when I was in my early twenties. I was quite taken aback by it for two reasons: 1) she was very upset by it (she was crying when she said it) and 2) because it seemed to me to be patently false. If you had asked me which parent had most influenced me up until the moment my mother tearfully challenged me, I would have unhesitatingly said my mother because, as was typical of my generation, she was the one who spent the most time with me as a child. I was raised by parents who came from a  generation that took it as absolutely normal that the mother raised the children and the father, at most, was an occasional authority figure. But she was absolutely right. I had mostly rejected her values without even realizing that I had.

Oddly enough, that conversation only served to further that rejection. I'd never really thought about it before then. I loved my mother and I didn't like to think about things that made for differences between us. When I was alone, I tried very hard to come up with a list of values that I shared with her but all I could come up with were values that are nearly universal, such as, for instance, the belief that cruelty is wrong. Although my mother obviously played a huge role in my life, for which I am very grateful, her remark was right on the money: I don't share her values.

Where do my values come from then? A good portion came from my father. My Godfather, Clifford Warner, was a huge influence. My first girlfriend, Ellen Broadhead, had an influence you probably couldn't over-state. Two fathers of  later girlfriends—Art Mantell and Ian Webster—were very important in making me who I am (one of the ironies of my life is that both are far more important to me, when seen in retrospect, than their daughters are). Four professors—John Minhinnick. Andrew Lugg and Hilliard Aronovitch, who taught me philosophy, and Linda Sanborn who taught me Romantic poetry—shaped a lot of my values. Add to this some people I never met but whose works I've read obsessively over the years: John Dos Passos, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Joseph Conrad, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh and Benedict XVI.

When I look at that list, the thing that really strikes me is that most people on it had little or no interest in passing their values on to me. Ellen didn't pass on hers so much as she forced me to become responsible for myself in a way that no one else in my life had done. (She was the Joey Potter to my Pacey Witter.) Others either never knew me or didn't think about me as someone to pass anything along to. Most of them rarely, if ever, talked about their values. Benedict XVI, for example, has a lot to say about values but he is actually spectacularly reticent about his own values. He never tells you what they are. He doesn't even set out to show you what they are. You have to dig hard to find them (He is very different from the current pope in this regard.) He passes them along without meaning to. That was true of everyone on that list.

The first rule of values is, you do not talk about your values

The second rule is, you DO NOT talk about your values. The third rules of values is, they are not YOUR values for you cannot own values. (If you try to own your values, they end up owning you.) The fourth rule of values is that values are ways of doing things and NOT ways of becoming a certain kind of person. (Values aren't virtues.)

The last of those is counter-intuitive because it seems to be indisputably true that our values make us. A man's character is his destiny. That seems to open up a direct route. I think I could become the person I want to be (or the person that others would love) by adopting certain values. Someone might also think that raising their children properly is a matter of getting them to accept a set of values and, therefore, spend a lot of time discussing their values with them. As near as I can tell, that is almost universally the strategy that most "good liberal" parents now take. It was certainly a big part of my mother's approach to parenting.

A child who can repeat back value statements about tolerance, love and forgiveness has learned something. But have they learned very much? Is being able to talk this way useful? (In my early twenties, I could describe the values my mother wanted me to have perfectly and, up until she challenged me, I believed that I "had" those values. The reason she challenged me was that she had noticed that I increasingly did not live those values.)

Here's a question that might appear on a psychological test:

"I think it is important to be a tolerant and forgiving person." 

1. strongly agree 
2. somewhat agree 
3. neither agree nor disagree 
4. somewhat disagree 
5. strongly disagree

I put it to you that the most important words in that statement are "to be". I'd further put it that once you recognize that "to be" are the most important words, "neither agree nor disagree" is the only rational choice. Anything else is narcissism.

All of the people who strongly influenced my values were like the man in the dog story I started with. They didn't have passing along their values as a goal. It mattered to me, and mattered a lot, that I agreed with their values but they never asked me to. They didn't tell me or try to show me what their values were. They just lived them. The amount of time I spent with them mattered relatively little. I didn't need to be with them at all for the impact of their values could be felt at second hand (most of what I learned from the fathers of my girlfriends came that way). What mattered was that those values were embodied in their behaviour in ways that led me to respect and trust them.

The unbearable lightness of Maya Angelou's readers

Caveat: This is a post about Angelou's fans and the shallow way we read literature in our time not about Angelou herself. The woman herself said many things that are quite profound, see this, for instance. Further, many "quotes" circulated on the Internet were never said by the person they're attributed to; we can only hope that is the case for the examples I've cited below.

Some time ago, a friend of mine discovered that I was a fan of Matsuo Basho. He, very thoughtfully, got a copy of Narrow Road to a Far Province and began to read it so that he might discuss it with me. But this kind intention went awry for he read it only until he found what he thought was an antiwar statement and then used it to argue about the first Gulf War. As it turned out, he missed the context and the statement he thought antiwar was nothing of the sort. He lost interest in Basho after that and we've never discussed it since.

I mention this because, as my friend Paul pointed out to me many years ago, we now read literature not as literature but as a way to validate our opinions. And the problems don't stop there. The deeper problem is that what gets selected is so often driven by a shallow narcissism that seeks to make a shallow and empty culture look profound. It's not our beliefs that we seek to validate but ourselves.

Here are some quotes that Maya Angelou's fans on the Internet thought worth highlighting:

Try to be the rainbow in someone else's cloud: I think Hallmark would be ashamed to use that. 

If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude: This is your Grade 11 English teacher in a particularly self-righteous mood. 

We may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated: And people laugh at Yogi Berra. 

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time: Would it be too cruel to point out that this doesn't quite make sense? It's like saying, "The cat shovelled the teapot into calculus." It's a grammatically correct sentence that means nothing.

You are the sum total of everything you've ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot—it's all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive: A truism followed by a non sequitur. 

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you: There are tens of thousands of things that are greater agony, starting with stubbing your toe and building up to being tortured to death. 

Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope: Contrast and compare: " Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away." 

Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet: You'd forgive a mother for bragging about her precocious twelve-year-old child having said this provided she didn't ever bring it up again.

Anyone who writes can tell you that cranking out trite platitudes is an unavoidable hazard of the trade. If you were to spend a long time studying Homer, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare and Austen, you might find an equal list of awful quotes. The problem here is not Maya Angelou; the problem is the readers who've selected this crap. The problem is us and the way we have taken a great culture that was handed on to us and reduced it to almost nothing in the space of two generations.

Added: I've spent a little more time looking into this and I'm sorry to report that Angelou did say or write most of the lines quoted above or something very much like them. That said, there are some real gems to be found. Here are a few examples:

“Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.”

“I don't trust people who don't love themselves and tell me, 'I love you.' ... There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.”

“A woman's heart should be so hidden in God that a man has to seek Him just to find her.”

“If I am not good to myself, how can I expect anyone else to be good to me?”

“Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.”

There are probably more.

Transgression

... we’ve come a long way since the days when Marilyn Manson and Andres Serrano (the artist behind Piss Christ) could make careers out of transgression for transgression’s sake. Breaking taboos for shock value is relativism; breaking taboos as a means rather than an end is not, which gives Lady Gaga and Seth MacFarlane an alibi. 

That's from an essay published 4 years ago. The larger point of the essay was that the era of relativism was over. Leaving that issue aside for a moment, I'd like to focus on the more immediate issue of transgression. I think there's a false dichotomy in the argument  Helen Rittelmeyer gives us here. I don't think that anyone, anywhere ever transgressed for transgression's sake.

A few years ago, a friend of mine something that looked very much like transgression for transgression's sake. One day, when his inlaws were visiting, his mother-in-law, asked what music was playing. Upon being told by her daughter it was Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances, she remarked that she thought it was beautiful. At just that moment, my friend got up, abruptly stopped the music and replaced it with Jimi Hendrix and, with that move, ruined everyone's day, including his own.

Did he have a reason for doing this? I don't think he could have given you one if you'd asked him. Both CDs—the Respighi and the Hendrix—were his and I know that he liked the Respighi more than the Hendrix. He didn't dislike his mother-in-law. Not yet. A few years more of such shenanigans and his wife left him and he now feels bitter feelings towards everyone.

The person he didn't like was himself.  He hated himself for what he'd become. He hadn't meant to be. He'd just wanted to live with this woman. He agreed to marriage because that was what she wanted. And then he agreed to lots of other things—a car, a house, children. He'd accustomed himself to the car and the house and he loved his children and, if it had been up to him alone, he'd still be married today. But he hated what he'd become.

He'd wanted to be something else. Somewhere along the line, he'd lost control of that. He still isn't the guy he wanted to be. The divorce didn't give him the freedom to become what he'd wanted to be. It was probably too late. For all he knew, it may never have been possible—the whole thing may have been a crazy dream.

When a man walks into a room, he brings his whole life with him. He has a million reasons for being anywhere. Just ask him. If you listen, he'll tell you how he got there. How he forgot where he was going. And then he woke up. If you listen he'll tell you about the time he thought he was an angel and dreamt of being perfect. and then he'll smile with wisdom, content that he realized the world isn't perfect. We're flawed because we want so much more.

That's Don Draper in an episode of Mad Men called "The Summer Man". But it could be any man or woman because my friend's story is really everyone's story and thus the brilliance of Don Draper. My friend, however, was not content; he did not smile with wisdom. Instead, he transgressed. He did something stupid that he knew was stupid. And it produced results he did not like.

I suspect that, in the unlikely case we were willing to be honest with ourselves, we'd all admit that we sometimes do what my friend did. Most of us have the good sense not to do it in front of people who will be offended. We go along with being the person we didn't want to become with the people who rely on us to keep being that person. But we make jokes or express opinions when they're not around that we know would hurt their feelings if they only knew. We "act out" our transgression in ways that are safe. We may even do it by proxy, watching Mad Men and joining others in criticizing Don Draper while secretly wishing we had the nerve to do what he does sometimes.

Relativism has nothing to do with it. When you're angry, your anger is as real as the clothes you wear, as real as the car you drive and as real as the ground you walk on. Alright you say, but the standards governing what you do about that anger are objective. Are they really? What objective standard says that Greg is justified in leaving his girlfriend for cheating on him? Tyler forgave his girlfriend for the same thing and they're still happy together ten years later!

You emotions are real. You really have them and you really have to deal with them. A big part of what you do about them will depend on whether you feel they are justified. Greg may decide that the one thing that his girlfriend has done is so big that it alone justifies dumping her.  Tyler didn't look so much at the particular instance that spurred his anger as they will look at the bigger picture and he saw a single, out-of-character failure. Which is more justified?

But, either way, it's not about relativism. It's really about emotivism. That's the view that moral views express emotional attitudes. You may think that amounts to relativism and you'd be in good company. Most philosophy professors would agree with you. And that would matter except that very little moral thinking takes place in philosophy classes. Most moral argument takes place in the real world and the person who bases their moral decisions on what they are feeling is basing it on something very real. They would even say, they base them on something authentic. They're almost certainly wrong about this but the Marianne Dashwoods of the world don't know this. They go on day after day resenting that they cannot say or do what they feel is right. Sometimes this resentment spills out in acts of transgression that can appear pointless to an outsider but they always have a point.

Helen Rittelmeyer's mistake was to think that because some (most?) transgression is more about what it's against than what it is for, that the transgression was an end in itself. It isn't. Even stupid transgression that couldn't cause anything but pointless destruction is undertaken for a reason.