Karen Watters Cole wrote:
>
[snip]
> When the Spaniards introduced the horse to the new American continent, it
> and gunpowder provided them the transportation to overtake the natives but
> it also gifted the natives with new transportation to outrun their attackers
> and counterattack. Arguments that one detail unquestionably leads to a
> final conclusion are unavailable to us in history and the social sciences,
> even sometimes, I'm told, in mathematics. (fuzzy math).
I prefer [Marshall] McLuhan-omics, i.e., case-study depth hermeneutics,
deploying all available disciplines in an interdisciplinary way
under the guidance of phronesis [that form of
encompassing reasonableness which
even critically assesses the deployment of "rationality"].
But mathematics has real uses in the human world, e.g., in
epidemiology, and, as computers get powerful enough, finally
being able to do better than the mindless of The Invisible Hand
in allocating social resources in mass societies.
>
> Likewise, the conspiracy theories swirling around the WTC attacks are
> maddening, polarizing and may never be completely proved one way or the
> other - except that my faith in the voice of truth surviving through time is
> strong. For example, I was astounded to hear an otherwise well-educated and
> extremely intelligent young man at work tell me he wasn't sure that anyone
> actually landed on the moon,
[snip]
What evidence can *you* adduce that we landed on the moon and that
it wasn't all staged on a Hollywood movie lot? Do you have
a laser to bounce a beam off the reflector we supposedly left there?
Would you know how to use it if someone gave you one?
I wouldn't. And that reflector could have been deposited by
an unmanned probe, etc.
--
It is less important whether a person believes the earth is flat
or that they believe Jesus Christ is their Personal Savior,
than what they *do* with whatever they believe. A PhD physicist
who knows the mind is an epiphenomenon of the brain
is in my book far more primitive than Protagoras (4th century BC).
I have far more in common with a "believer" who is willing to
discuss whether G-d is a criminal or that The Devil
may be deceiving him..., than with a person
who "knows" there is no god and that "liberal democratic
capitalism" is the fully human form of life.
> At some time in the future we will know more, but now to let the negative
> unknowns overtake our positive energy to correct the conditions that
> contributed to this tragic event is as unproductive as the Israelis and
> Palestinians continuing to argue who is more to blame for their unending
> cycle of violence or my rearranging the calendar to obliterate my last
> birthday. As long as the philosophy does not reconcile with reality, real
> people on both sides will continue to suffer. Which brings us back to the
> possibility that it will be fundamentalists vs modernists, as Arthur first
> suggested, and I simply repeated.
What is a "modernist"? I continue to argue that a modernist
is one who understands that his or her project in life is to give
ever better accounting for whatever he or she believes and does, and
ever again to self-reflectively overcome whatever his or her current
position happens to be. An investment banker or a particle
physicist is not necessarily any more modern than a "savage",
and each probably disdains the other for good reasons.
As Emmanuel Levinas urges, there is something important
in judiasm: The personal accounting for oneself:
"Here I am."
And there is something important about the classical
Greeks:
the form of human community in which each
individual is an end in himself -- a peer
dialogical, as opposed to hierarchical
form of life. Neither leaders nor followers.
[snip]
When I was in prep school, it was "Beat Gilman!"
Now that I am an adult, it's "Gain market share away from ___!"
As an adolescent, I thought "school spirit" was stupid.
Now I am embarrassed for the marketing executives when I overhear
them.
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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