Standards and Discrimination.

Celebrity gossip is usually the last thing I’d ever bother to read, but my eye was caught today by a headline which suggested that Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson had fallen out. I thought it might have something to do with perception of standards, so I took a trip down to the basement and read it.

Seems it has nothing to do with standards; they haven’t even fallen out, according to young Dan. They just want to ‘meet new people, having spent ten years working together on Harry Potter.’ Oh, well.

So then I wondered whether to make a comprehensive post on the subject of standards. It didn’t take many minutes to realise what a long, subjective, tedious and ultimately pointless post it would be. Scrap that one, then. I’ll restrict myself instead to three quick jottings on how I see it.

1. If you restrict yourself to a one life, one world view of existence, there’s probably no need to have standards at all.

2. Standards are entirely a personal matter. If you do choose to have them, you probably owe yourself a responsibility to be reasonably diligent in living up to them.

3. You have no right to impose your standards on anybody else. You do, however, have the right to judge everybody else’s standards purely for the purpose of being discriminating with regard to the people with whom you choose to associate. That isn’t the same thing as saying they’re wrong, and neither does ‘discriminating’ mean the same as ‘discriminatory.’

I suppose that’s all pretty obvious really, but I had half an hour to kill before lunch.