That Demmed Idiot (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} ahsu) wrote,@ 2006-10-26 21:27:00 |
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To thirty-six, then sixty-four, and then I'd have done seventy-three ...
I've been thinking quite a bit recently about things like evil and good, and about the ability of human beings to understand each other.
I haven't come to any particularly enlightening conclusions, except that humans are naturally cantankerous. I'd like to hear a biologist explain that one away as a survival trait. (Since I've heard quite a few things that are, I'm sorry, simply bad behavior explained that way.) Man is inclined to trouble, and all that.
I've also come to the conclusion that my youthful certainty that, "If we would all just sit down and talk to one another and get to know one another, there would be peace," is really, really way off. I've finally lived long enough to have had some reasonable discussion with people who have ideas that differ very widely from mine, and it wasn't a matter of misunderstanding one another. It was a matter of just plain not having the same reference points at all. In one case, I explained what a certain set of facts meant to me (it was a parenting issue) and the person I was discussing with agreed with me 100% on the facts. But their worldview meant that they interpreted those facts in a way that made their opinion one hundred and eighty degrees away from mine. Discussion didn't matter; I might as well have tried to persuade them that the world is a watermelon as change their mind about how they perceived the facts we were discussing.
I think this has a lot to do with the way the Left and Right, both political and religious, perceive each other. We simply can't imagine how the other side can possibly believe what they believe given the simple facts of the matter. Not that there isn't an awful lot of spinning going on -- I don't know how anyone in Washington, D.C. can walk a straight line from the sheer dizziness -- but even when you get right down to the bedrock of facts, there are different groups speaking, basically, entirely different languages.
There's a pretty good book on this subject, whose title completely escapes me, naturally. But I got my eyes opened by a conservative Christian friend who just, plainly, disagreed with me about how we raised our children. And we must both have been doing something right, because we both had pretty good kids ... This kind of thing makes me wonder how much of what we think is causal isn't any such thing, too.
I've been thinking quite a bit recently about things like evil and good, and about the ability of human beings to understand each other.
I haven't come to any particularly enlightening conclusions, except that humans are naturally cantankerous. I'd like to hear a biologist explain that one away as a survival trait. (Since I've heard quite a few things that are, I'm sorry, simply bad behavior explained that way.) Man is inclined to trouble, and all that.
I've also come to the conclusion that my youthful certainty that, "If we would all just sit down and talk to one another and get to know one another, there would be peace," is really, really way off. I've finally lived long enough to have had some reasonable discussion with people who have ideas that differ very widely from mine, and it wasn't a matter of misunderstanding one another. It was a matter of just plain not having the same reference points at all. In one case, I explained what a certain set of facts meant to me (it was a parenting issue) and the person I was discussing with agreed with me 100% on the facts. But their worldview meant that they interpreted those facts in a way that made their opinion one hundred and eighty degrees away from mine. Discussion didn't matter; I might as well have tried to persuade them that the world is a watermelon as change their mind about how they perceived the facts we were discussing.
I think this has a lot to do with the way the Left and Right, both political and religious, perceive each other. We simply can't imagine how the other side can possibly believe what they believe given the simple facts of the matter. Not that there isn't an awful lot of spinning going on -- I don't know how anyone in Washington, D.C. can walk a straight line from the sheer dizziness -- but even when you get right down to the bedrock of facts, there are different groups speaking, basically, entirely different languages.
There's a pretty good book on this subject, whose title completely escapes me, naturally. But I got my eyes opened by a conservative Christian friend who just, plainly, disagreed with me about how we raised our children. And we must both have been doing something right, because we both had pretty good kids ... This kind of thing makes me wonder how much of what we think is causal isn't any such thing, too.
