The latest edition of The Edge newsletter is rather remarkable. Each year they have posed a question to leading thinkers, this year 164 of them, (historians, scientists, artists , teachers, and more), and then posted the essays both long and short on their website. Previous questions included: What are you optimistic about (2007), What is your dangerous idea (2006);,and What do you believe is true even if you cannot prove it (2005). Among the contributors this year are: Daniel Kahneman, Daniel Dennett, Kevin Kelly, and Terence Sejnowski.
And the current question is What have you changed your mind about and why. Responses range from things like classicist James O’Donnell writing about why he stopped cheering for the Romans, neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux on how he revised his notion of how memory works, or media analyst Douglas Rushkoff reversing his initial position on the potential of the Internet changing consciousness.
Each entry is worth a day or two of reflection but the first that really caught my attention was archaeologist Timothy Taylor’s one called Relativism. Once in the camp of thinking that you could not judge without taking into the mindset of the ancient culture, he now feels, after studying Andean infant sacrifice, that we are justified in discriminating morally about past practices. His last paragraph reads:
We need relativism as an aid to understanding past cultural logic, but it does not free us from a duty to discriminate morally and to understand that there are regularities in the negatives of human behaviour as well as in its positives. In this case, it seeks to ignore what Victor Nell has described as ‘the historical and cross-cultural stability of the uses of cruelty for punishment, amusement, and social control.’ By denying the basis for a consistent underlying algebra of positive and negative, yet consistently claiming the necessary rightness of the internal cultural conduct of ‘the Other’, relativism steps away from logic into coherence.
All the years have been good but this question is particularly interesting to me. To change one’s mind, especially after investing years of inquiry, is a remarkable thing. It is momentous for any of us to actually turn on an issue once we’ve formed our initial position. I remember a comedian, I believe it was Rick Mercer, talking about how brave it was for a politician to change their mind to reflect the facts or changing conditions when the most likely effect would be people saying they were wishy washy.
That does sound really interesting. Did you happen to look at the 40th anniversary edition of Rolling Stones? They had interviews of icons in politics, movies, music and though not as specific as this, there was some really interesting stuff in it.
Comment by amuirin — January 5, 2008 @ 12:37 pm