[lit-ideas] Re: The Rise & Fall of Somalia's Islamic Courts: An Online History (The Fourth Rail)
- From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 06 Jan 2007 15:24:53 -0500
I took the occasion of Eric's confrontation to voice my
own criticism of the
Moral-Equivalence position.
Moral Equivalence is similar to Chomsky's "linguistic
universals": people want to believe they are valid even when
the evidence grows that they are not.
It's hard to blame people for hoping against hope that
"linguistic universals" or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or the
Gaia hypothesis or Hindemith's "universal tonality" are
true. We want them to be true because there would be more
hope for a breakthrough into harmony and unity, a universal
organizing principle, a final feel-good enlightenment.
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