She didn’t exactly do the West proud. A Canadian English teacher working in South Korea apparently has a very odd conception of “age appropriate”: She showed a BBC documentary entitled “What does human flesh taste like?” — to a class of children as young as six. Now she faces child-abuse charges and is forbidden from leaving the country.
As the South China Morning Post reports, “Footage from surveillance cameras in the classroom shows shocked children burying their heads in their arms to shield themselves from the images in the BBC Earth Lab programme, which was uploaded to YouTube in 2016.”
Shocked children who saw the footage “are being treated for post-traumatic stress, say South Korea police,” the paper also informs.
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“In the footage, which is almost four minutes long, the host of the show allows a medical professional to take a sample of flesh from his thigh for analysis and has the sample cooked,” the Post further relates. “The host, Greg Foot, then smells the sample, saying its aroma is ‘a lot richer than pork or chicken” and that ‘it’s like beef and ale stew or something’.”
“However, noting that eating human flesh is illegal, he stops short of tasting it. Instead he gets a scientist to analyse the sample’s aroma, concluding that it is closest to a mixture of beef and lamb. He then cooks and eats a burger made up of a mixture the analysis suggests is close to his own flesh,” the Post continues.
‘”I think that’s going to be the closest I am ever going to get to tasting human. I tell you what, it’s pretty good’, he says.”
“Following the incident, parents of the children filed police complaints,” the International Business Times adds. “During interrogation, the teacher had told police that she had searched for the video after a child asked her what human flesh tastes like. Her lawyer insisted that her intentions were not to shock the children.”
Perhaps not, but here’s a pro tip: You don’t have to answer a little child’s every question in stark, sordid detail. If a nigh-to-the-knee tyke asks where babies come from, you don’t show him porn. If he’s curious about death, you don’t play a snuff film.
In the case in question here, saying “I wouldn’t know; we don’t eat human flesh because doing so is wrong” would suffice — and send the proper message.
Some will assume the teacher, who is unnamed, is pushing some kind of agenda. While possible, it’s always wise noting Hanlon’s razor, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
Yes, there are agenda-driven individuals in education, even malicious ones. Yet what likely explains this teacher’s child abuse is expressed in another, apocryphal saying: “Moral issues are always complex matters — for people who have no principles.”
Most people want to do good, while also tacitly claiming to not know what good is. The latter is no exaggeration, as research (and experience) has shown that most Americans don’t believe in Truth (absolute by definition) and are most likely to make what should be moral decisions based on feelings. Hence the common question, “How do you feel about ______?” as opposed to “What do you think about ______?”
The modern mind’s unmooring from objective moral reality is the main cause of the social decay besetting us. Sure, there are malevolent Machiavellians in every movement’s vanguard, but the primary reason millions of average-citizen enablers advance today’s destructive agendas — the Sexual Devolution, multiculturalism, immigrationism, etc. — is moral relativism (willingly adopted because it justifies personal sin).
Much as how you wouldn’t have a yardstick for distinguishing qualitatively between healthful foods and junk foods upon embracing “dietary relativism,” you won’t well distinguish between rectitude and moral junk food upon embracing moral relativism.
Speaking of diet and morality, cannibalism has been getting consideration of late. Just consider the video below of a women making a scene at a 2019 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) event and screaming “We need to eat the babies!” (to save the planet).
Okay, it turned out that the “protester” above was a troll planted by the Lyndon LaRouche PAC. But perhaps the observers who took the display at face value can be forgiven because, well, it was “art” imitating life. Consider, for example, how last year a Swedish behavioral scientist named Magnus Söderlund advocated eating human flesh to preserve the environment.
Then there was left-wing CNN reporter Reza Aslan, who showcased a cannibalistic sect in India in 2017 and ate cooked human brain tissue.
Some may say that, unlike Swede Söderlund, the Canadian teacher didn’t advocate cannibalism but was (we assume) non-judgmental about it. But missed here is that the decision to treat something non-judgmentally is itself a judgment.
Moreover, that judgment doesn’t constitute being objective when at issue is an objective wrong, as the neutral treatment sends the message that the evil is actually a neutral thing — in other words, a matter of taste. The lesson is that everything involves moral messages, implicitly if not explicitly.
(This perhaps should be remembered when dispensing prophylactics to schoolchildren or needles to drug addicts. It’s the mentality stating, “We’re not saying you should eat your brother, kids, though there are two sides to every issue. But if you do, be sure to cook him to an internal temperature of at least 165°F.”)
We’d not only fail to advance, but would regress, if we insisted upon rejecting the past’s mathematical and scientific discoveries and initiating arguments about whether 2+2=4, f=mass × acceleration, or bacteria can cause disease. Likewise, we’ll regress morally (and are doing so) if we insist on “relitigating” established moral principles, whether relating to sex, life, or something else. Will we next argue about whether slavery really is wrong?
We shouldn’t be surprised if that eventually happens if we’re going to treat morality as myth.
Photo: imtmphoto/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
