[lit-ideas] Re: Sounds right to me
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 11:40:32 +0900
On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 9:38 AM, Phil Enns <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I like John McCreery's analogy of the toolbox, except that I would not want
> to
>
claim that this toolbox is anything more than tools we have
> accumulated over time and that we share with anyone who wants to
> perform similar activities.
>
>
At the beginning of "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of
Culture," Clifford Geertz writes,
> In her book, Philosophy in a New Key, Susanne Langer remarks that certain
> ideas burst upon the intellectual landscape with a tremendous force. They
> resolve so many fundamental problems at once that they seem also to promise
> that they will resolve all fundamental problems, clarify all obscure issues.
> Everyone snaps them up as the open sesame of some new positive science, the
> conceptual center-point around which a comprehensive system of analysis can
> be built. The sudden vogue of such a grand idée, crowding out almost
> everything else for a while, is due, she says, "the the fact that all
> sensitive and active minds turn at once to exploiting it. We try it in every
> connection, for every purpose, experiment with possible stretches of its
> strict meaning, with generalizations and derivatives."
After we have become familiar with the new idea, however, after it has
> become part of our general stock of theoretical concepts, our expectations
> are brought more into balance with its actual uses, and its excessive
> popularity is ended. A few zealots persist in the old key-to-the-universe
> view of it; but less driven thinkers settle down after a while to the
> problems the idea has really generated. They try to apply it and extend it
> where it applies and where it is capable of extension; and the desist where
> it does not apply or cannot be extended. It becomes, if it was, in truth, a
> seminal idea in the first place, a permanent and enduring part of our
> intellectual armory. But it no longer has the grandiose, all-promising
> scope, the infinite versatility of apparent application, it once had. The
> second law of thermodynamics, or the principle of natural selection, or the
> notion of unconscious motivation, or the organization of the means of
> production does not explain everything, not even everything human, but it
> still explains something; and our attention shifts to isolating just what
> that something is, to disentangling ourselves from a lot of pseudoscience to
> which, in the first flush of its celebrity, it has also given rise.
If, on the one hand, the idea of ideas that settle into a modest utility
points to grounds for agreement, the examples that Geertz offers point to
possible controversies: The second law of thermodynamics? No problem.
Natural selection? Offensive to religious fundamentalists. Unconscious
motivation? Sure to raise the hackles of strict rationalists. The means of
production? Surely, Marxism is so, just out of it. (These are not my views;
I agree with Geertz, but I do anticipate problems.)
How, then, might we select the tools, a.k.a., useful ideas that might form
the core of a 21st education for people who must cope with information
overload and all sorts of different people? The order of Geertz's examples
suggests a principle; start with math and physical science, on which most
everyone can agree (these are your basic hammer and screwdriver); continue
with other things of massively, near universal utility, basic accounting for
example (that's a subject I wish I hadn't passed up out of sheer
intellectual snobbery); continue with things on which there is at least pro
forma agreement, e.g., the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights or the need for
basic sanitation or music with a near-universal distribution (the three B's,
Mozart, big band jazz, the Beatles, for instance). The key would be to start
with things on which there is the widest possible agreement, to construct a
common ground from which conversation might then proceed in all sorts of
directions.
Sheer utopianism, I know. But what's a life without a vision?
John
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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