Truth or loyalty?

On Labor Day my TV was tuned to a marathon "Best of The Twilight Zone," a series I first watched in the early 1960s. During the marathon, I saw five to seven minutes of five or six episodes - among them, the one where alien creatures interrupt power in a suburban village and the citizens develop the urge to destroy each other and the one where a lovely housewife shopping for gold thimbles finds herself trapped on the "ninth" floor, where mannequins are stored.

My favorite episode was the one starring a gentle female patient whose head is wrapped in bandages from what is a final, desperate attempt to use drugs and plastic surgery to make her normal. It fails, and as the doctor and nurses, seen heretofore only in shadowy body shots, remove the bandages, we hear them scream in revulsion. What we see is a beautiful blond, with perfect features, surrounded by a grotesquely ugly medical crew. What kind of world is this, asks Twilight Zone host Rod Serling, where ugliness is revered as the norm, and beauty is reviled as an aberration? "Beauty," he reminds us, "is in the eye of the beholder."

No doubt our own experiences and preferences color our sense of beauty, but the episode worked because most of the viewing audience could recognize the difference between two aesthetic extremes. On this planet, we differentiate between the beautiful and the hideous.

How about between truth and not truth? In a terrific seminar entitled "A Moral Vision for the 21st Century," Rushworth Kidder, president of the Institute for Global Ethics, in Camden, Maine, says that the ethical dilemmas that we face are not typically about choices between "the good, the moral, the right thing to do versus the evil, the ugly, the wrong thing to do." Most of us, he says, have no trouble making those choices.

The difficult choices involve right versus right. For example, we face an ethical dilemma when we are asked to choose between our understanding of truth and a sense of loyalty. Your best friend tells you he hit a car in the parking lot and didn't report it. The security officer asks you if you know who did it. Which value takes preeminence? Truth or loyalty?

In our society, because we come from widely divergent cultures and value systems, we may overestimate our differences. In the details, we may prefer brown hair to blond, green eyes to blue; but on matters of significance, we know beauty from the beast.

We share a sense of common truth and ethical intent to a greater extent than we perhaps give each other credit for. Let's learn together to question and explore our feelings when our feelings don't feel right. Even if we don't perfectly agree, we will be a stronger community if we get our antennae up so that we know when we're making a choice.