Hi On Wed, 10 Oct 2001, Rick Froman wrote: > A person who sees him/her-self as not being superior to others > does NOT go into their communities and try to convert them to his/her > belief system in an attempt to "improve" their beliefs. That kind of > behavior is so offensive it justifies Michael Sylvester's tirades > against Eurocentricism--yet it is EXACTLY what both Christian and > Islamic sects have been doing for centuries (and are STILL doing in both > cases).
The question of whether one is justified in attempting to change other people's minds would appear to hinge on more than feelings of superiority. Nor is it clear that efforts to "improve" beliefs are always offensive. Don't we as educators try to change our students' beliefs about, for example, the validity of various ways of knowing? Are we as culpable as missionaries in this action? At least in some of my classes where it comes up, I do probably communicate some disagreement with certain religious/cultural practices (e.g., female mutilation). Am I prosyletizing? And should we be trying to change how parents rear their children based on psychological literature? Isn't that just us imposing our Eurocentric theory based on our equally-Eurocentric way of knowing onto an alternative world-view that is (according to one perspective) as legitimate as our own? The issue of morals and ethics raises all the same kinds of difficult questions that academics have wrestled with on this and other groups under the guise of epistemology (e.g., post-modernism, relativistic views of knowledge, science, ...). The resolution in this domain, however, is likely to be even more difficult to achieve because there are no obvious criteria by which success can be measured. With respect to knowledge, one can determine to some extent whether people's views about the world allow for prediction, control, and the like. What are the ultimate criteria by which we evaluate alternative conceptions of morality and hence, perhaps, the legitimacy of efforts to promulgate those demonstrably-better views? Best wishes Jim ============================================================================ James M. Clark (204) 786-9757 Department of Psychology (204) 774-4134 Fax University of Winnipeg 4L05D Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 2E9 [EMAIL PROTECTED] CANADA http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~clark ============================================================================ --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
