Perhaps most importantly, this failure and the confused response to it by those in charge is a reminder that the glory of the West does not lie in economic ideologies or utilitarian inevitabilities or linear process. What is admirable about Western civilizations is the minority school of humanism. Humanism is always the minority school. Socrates not Plato. Erasmus not Descartes. Periodically this more difficult way of living breaks through to the front line and re-energizes us with purpose, enough to carry us through the next ideological era with whatever destructive forces it will unleash.
Monday, February 15, 2016
Humanism is always the minority school.
From Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West by John Ralston Saul.
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In the pursuit of communication and clarity, we start with definitions of words. We then move on to Reporting. From there we migrate to Analogies. If those don't work we move on to Metaphors.
ReplyDeleteIf we are from the same culture and experiential background, it is easy to operate mostly or solely at the analogies and metaphors when the real clarification work needs to occur at the definitions level.