We know that condemnation of evils is fundamental to our fundamentalism. Ayn Rand played the A for our orchestra. There is no surprise in that.
Larger than us, ideologies tend to be this way. It was all well and good for Patrick Henry to give a speech and Alexander Hamilton to be Washington's aide de camp. After the revolution, other issues divided them. It is appropriate, if not ironic, that Hegel's theories generated the antithetical Young Hegelians who stood him on his head.
As I suggested in the "Gold Standard" topic, it may be genetic, rewarded by evolution that we perceive by contrast heed warnings. Did your mother give you a list of things you could do, or merely the things you could not. It's the Ten Commandments, not the 10,000 Approvals, though Jeremiah was more inclusive than Moses: "all is vanity..."
Maybe if we were other creatures - perhaps if we not tied to the Apron Strings of Mount Sinai - in discussions, we would only agree with each other and let disagreements die by lack of reinforcement. There would be no disagreements, only consensus.
It may be that the path to truth must be a dialectic, a "proportional, integral, and differential tuning" as is the case in servo-feedback mechanisms. In other words, if all we measure is agreements, what happens when they are lacking. Above, I said that disagreements would cease to exist from lack of reinforcement.
Discussing the post-modernists, David Kelley drew a powerful analogy to driving. Do they actually dirve as if reality were a socially-mediated construct? Of course not. Here, too, then: if you never acknowledged a disagreement (your speed versus the posted limit; your general direction version the curve in the road), you would not be very successful.
Perhaps the problem is not disagreeing, but taking all such conflicts to heart. Again,though, how else could you react your lover abandons you for a younger woman? Scorned women seldom have been known to denounce their betrayers as existentialists, though it happens, apparently.
Why is there so much infighting among Objectivists?
in Objectivism 401
A blog by Roger Bissell in General
Posted
We know that condemnation of evils is fundamental to our fundamentalism. Ayn Rand played the A for our orchestra. There is no surprise in that.
Larger than us, ideologies tend to be this way. It was all well and good for Patrick Henry to give a speech and Alexander Hamilton to be Washington's aide de camp. After the revolution, other issues divided them. It is appropriate, if not ironic, that Hegel's theories generated the antithetical Young Hegelians who stood him on his head.
As I suggested in the "Gold Standard" topic, it may be genetic, rewarded by evolution that we perceive by contrast heed warnings. Did your mother give you a list of things you could do, or merely the things you could not. It's the Ten Commandments, not the 10,000 Approvals, though Jeremiah was more inclusive than Moses: "all is vanity..."
Maybe if we were other creatures - perhaps if we not tied to the Apron Strings of Mount Sinai - in discussions, we would only agree with each other and let disagreements die by lack of reinforcement. There would be no disagreements, only consensus.
It may be that the path to truth must be a dialectic, a "proportional, integral, and differential tuning" as is the case in servo-feedback mechanisms. In other words, if all we measure is agreements, what happens when they are lacking. Above, I said that disagreements would cease to exist from lack of reinforcement.
Discussing the post-modernists, David Kelley drew a powerful analogy to driving. Do they actually dirve as if reality were a socially-mediated construct? Of course not. Here, too, then: if you never acknowledged a disagreement (your speed versus the posted limit; your general direction version the curve in the road), you would not be very successful.
Perhaps the problem is not disagreeing, but taking all such conflicts to heart. Again,though, how else could you react your lover abandons you for a younger woman? Scorned women seldom have been known to denounce their betrayers as existentialists, though it happens, apparently.