This was the kind of freshman English student I was…
In my Honors Composition class, we were asked to write a rhetorical analysis of Mark Twain’s essay, “The Lowest Animal,” which facetiously argued that humans were the lowest creature on earth. Being the wag I was, I wrote an equally facetious rhetorical analysis that claimed I had figured out how to assess creature-dom and that humans had just beaten out manatees for the crown of Greatest Creature on Earth. My categories? Food, Mood, and Peace Corps. Of course, humans were the only creature to come up with the Peace Corps, so that was their trump card. (BTW – I somehow managed to make an A- on that paper which still boggles my mind).
The takeaway? The standard matters.
Twain was judging humans by one standard. I judged them by another.
This week, we talked about Richard II and competing standards for royal legitimacy. The Bishop of Carlisle says the Bible is the final standard. God appoints rulers, not men. The people can’t simply decide they don’t want Richard around. Richard is a king, no matter what his performance is.
The Earl of Northumberland and his crew, on the other hand, believe that the law determines legitimate kings. If the king disobeys the law, he becomes illegitimate. A king’s authority depends on his performance.
For your discussion post, I asked you to assess Richard’s deposal. We didn’t explicitly talk about standards, but we should have. They matter. As a class, we probably unconsciously judged Richard by the standards of an American president: what would get Richard impeached?
If you don’t think the Bible or law or some other publically available standard can help you decide, then what were you using? Perhaps my patented Food, Mood, and Peace Corps trifecta?
And, of course, if you’re under the impression that such issues are purely theoretical, there’s any presidential election, an elaborate means of seeing what standards you and the rest of the country use to judge its leader.
The standard matters. I encourage you to think about which one you’re using.