Is it time to ditch the Golden Rule?

It was over dinner that my housemate broached the controversial subject: ‘How would you guys feel if I got an Xbox?’

‘Oh I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I’ve heard they’ve put a lot of strain on people’s marriages during Covid.’

‘Well,’ she said dryly, ‘It’s a good job we’re not married then.’ And with that, the Xbox was duly purchased.

To be fair, several weeks later the Xbox is yet to ruin our lives. In fact, it aims to enhance them, with wisdom such as this, which recently appeared on the Xbox homescreen:

‘You’re probably familiar with the Golden Rule: treat others as you would like to be treated. It means well, but it doesn’t consider that people might want to be treated differently than you. That’s why we’ve embraced the Platinum Rule: treat others as they’d like to be treated.’

This upgrade on a millennia-old piece of moral-wisdom-in-a-nutshell included a link to Xbox’s community standards (comprising some 3,000+ words) for using Xbox Live, the online platform for playing in real time with other gamers around the world. The ten-point document includes, among other things, an explanation of the difference between acceptable trash talk and unacceptable harassment, illustrated with examples. That quite so much detail is necessary implies that some people’s behaviour in the bowels of the Xbox community can become just as unsavoury as one might imagine, and then some (as it can on any online platform).

Still, the Platinum Rule made me do a double take. It rankled, and I wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t just the audacity of describing the Golden Rule as ‘meaning well’ but ultimately deficient – although that was part of it. After all, the Golden Rule was articulated by Jesus himself with his trademark artful simplicity in the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Do to others what you would have them do to you’ (Matt. 7:12). But expressions of it are also found in many other faith traditions and cultures. It is, in this sense, wisdom – a common-grace insight into navigating the thorny realities of human existence.

To be fair to Microsoft, the ‘Platinum Rule’ did not originate with them. And, if one interprets the Golden Rule to assume that everyone is exactly like you, then it’s true that it’s not going to work particularly well. Still, I think the Golden Rule is more nuanced than that. It’s a call to do to others what you would have them do to you if you were in their shoes, rather than to assume your shoes are the same. In this way, it encourages empathy. It invites you to imagine the world from someone else’s perspective and act accordingly.

Which brings me to what didn’t quite sit right about the Platinum Rule, which is that it is, perhaps, symptomatic of some more troubling trends: the atomisation of society – and of morality – and the gradual erosion of our sense of shared human nature. The Golden Rule assumes that you and I have something in common and can come to a mutual understanding. The Platinum Rule assumes that we don’t and we can’t. The Platinum Rule turns us all into islands with our own law code that other nation states must abide by, rather than a continent of humanity that is interconnected with one another.

With the Platinum Rule, the individual is arbiter of what is and isn’t acceptable – and yet, as the extensive Community Standards show, that isn’t quite enough. We need some external source to impose rules on us. And the Christian worldview explains why: we are creatures designed to be dependent upon God – the ultimate external source – to show us how to live; we’re not suited to go-it-alone morality. But, at the same time, we’re fallen – which means that’s exactly what we’ve chosen.

These are all ideas explored by Oak Hill Principal Daniel Strange in his fascinating forthcoming book, Making Faith Magnetic: Five Hidden Themes our Culture Can’t Stop Talking About and How to Connect them to Christ. This is just one of the many ways in which it’s been feeding my thoughts recently – but I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until October for the pleasure (although his Plugged current book In is equally stimulating). You’ll never play Xbox in quite the same way again.