Hello world!
So I am sitting in my internship, and while I should be doing a million other things right now, I had an idea. This is partially inspired by a professor I had last semester of the name Joel Swerdlow (I just discovered that his wiki page is HUGE). He tried a forum for exchanging ideas about any and everything important. I can imagine his deepish voice now "I feel a provacative rhetorical question coming on..."
How about we talk big?
I would love for this blog to become a place where big ideas that move and shake the world can be presented, torn apart, discussed, and dissected.
A couple of things...
1) This blog will probably trend toward the political. That's what I do, and that's what a lot of cool people I know do as well.
2) This blog can be about ANYTHING you consider to be really, really important. Something relating to human nature (or the lack thereof), or social trends, or cultural oddities that may or may not impact anyone significantly. Seriously... anything...
3) In writing, you can register your discourse as formally as you would like, or you can be as fuckin' lude as you want. No rules. What is important is the substance of the post and the idea you are trying to express.
4) If all of this sounds really vague and ambiguous, good. I realize that I might be sacrificing specificity for inclusion, but if I had to choose, that's definitely the choice I would make.
That's all for now. I'm going to get started on a first post about whether or not people are good or bad by nature...
Luis,
ReplyDeleteI like this idea, consider me a contributor.
I'm afraid that I'm not entirely sure how to answer your first Question. One thing I must say is that a discussion of this sort about human nature shouldn't take the terms "good" and "bad" too lightly. What those terms mean in theory and how they are conveyed in human practice will surely change our answer as to the goodness or badness human nature on the whole.
It seems to me that members of humanity (broadly construed) have consistently carried out both compassionate and oppressive actions throughout history till this very day (as should be obvious in this particularly turbulent political era in which we are living.) One thing that is surely true is that human nature is provenly capable of producing both good and horrific actions. Certain human actors also seem to vary in how consistently they perform actions of a good or bad nature (leaving aside difficulties with those terms for now.) All that is to say that Human Nature is firstly a nature constituted by its variety.
I couldn't agree more Anthony. I think you can take it even further too.
ReplyDeleteAt the expense of sounded unforgivably cliche, 'good' and 'bad' mean different things to different people. That much seems readily apparent. Off the cuff, a perfect exemple seems like homosexual relationships. To the partners in question, their relationship and the love and companionship they feel is undeniably "good". To someone might be very religious or socially conservative, none of that matters and the relationship is "bad".
In that example, I think that it is very clear that different standards are being used to ascribe "good" and "bad" to the homosexual relationship. I think this is a tremendous problem that is associated with the dichotomy. Supposedly, "good" and "bad" are opposites like "hot" and "cold", yet while we have a standard for the later (namely temperature) it is (debatably) impossible to create a similar standard for "good" and "bad".
Congratulations on taking this tremendous, exciting leap, Luis. I'm looking forward to reading and perhaps even contributing to what is sure to be a provocative and challenging conversation. Onward!
ReplyDelete