'86: How I Failed Ethics - The Magnetic Fields

Though majoring in Visual and Environmental Studies

And minoring in History of Sci

I had to retake Ethics from my Mennonite professor

For whom my skepticism didn’t fly

The first time I made mincemeat of the standard propositions

Establishing a so-called moral science

And I declared morality an offshoot of aesthetics

And got a failing C for my defiance

So next semester I back to Divinity School trotted

Proverbial tail not between my legs

And spent the whole course positing my own ethical system

While other college students emptied kegs

Information ethics, cyberethics — both since taken —

Said: Maximize the information flow

Toward a hypothetical end state in which the cosmos

Consists entirely of our info

And at the highest level possible, not only data

But data about data dot dot dot

Or life on top of life on top of life, et cetera

Profundity, my mother’d say — I’d not

My Mennonite professor did concede I’d done the coursework

Although my system left him quite dismayed

Depending, as it did, on neither history nor Jahweh

And gave me, finally, a passing grade