It’s a fair question for this age: Where do you get your good?

It’s a fair question because it’s not so easy any more to say what good is. And if good is such a thing, is it worth chasing?

You know good is still out there because you can find videos on YouTube or Facebook of people doing amazing things that make you pause and reflect inside.

A guy climbs untethered down into a driving drainage channel river to save a mortified dog on the verge of being swept over a drop-off and downstream.

A waitress talks about the man who left a thousand dollar tip on an 8 dollar meal because he saw she was pregnant and heard she was single.

The guy who picks up a near dead hummingbird and brings it home and nurses it back to health because his dog stopped to save it.

The videos are out there, and we watch them and we have a pretty clear sense that what we’re seeing is good happening.

But sometimes, in real life, seeing good is not as clear- because defining good is not as clear.

In the age of spin and self-promotion, it is easy to confuse doing good with doing the usual thing, or doing the popular thing, or doing the visible thing. Despite our culture’s major preoccupation with appearances and opinions, can those really define what good looks like?

The swim of modern Western thought was grounded in realism in the 19th century, where Enlightenment thinking celebrated certainty, and truth was considered objective. After a world war though, modernism became the thing in the early 20th century, where truth became suspect, and criticism en vogue. And if modernism encouraged the re-examination of every aspect of existence, postmodernism, that philosophical phoenix rising at the end of the 20th century, shouted for the rejection of certainty about every aspect of existence. In reality, post-modernism declared, everything is relative, based on personal opinions and experiences.

And caught in the wash of postmodern relativism was truth, morality, and ethics.

Truth and good morphed to become whatever seemed best to an individual- or to a group- in the spotlight at the moment.

Truth and good became commodities, bought and sold by the loudest lecturer.

Or did they?

Are truth and good objectively defined- human universals after all?

Because, after all, how you define good is how you’ll do it.

And what you will ultimately want to fight for.

Whether it is really good or not.