Just the Facts Ma'am, Just the Facts

I went to the Seasonal Dialogue last night. I usually really enjoy these. I’ve been going for four years. I find it a good way to think about things with people and mainly a good way to be exposed to the way other people think about things and what they value.

 

I just wasn’t in the mood last night. So much so that I considered taking myself away for a while.

 

Partly, I had carried some petty irritation in the room. Partly, I find that I was coming down with something. I was reminded about the connection between the physical reality of my body and the (possibly physical) structure of my mind.

 

So I found myself in a truculent, tetchy mood. I fidgeted in my chair more than usual. I was a little less respectful of the process and the other people than I usually am. One of the valuable things about the dialogue sessions is that I interact with people’s ideas in a different way from the way I usually do.   I’m a lawyer by training, a disputer, a debater and a mooter. The dialogue sessions help me listen to people in way that is not about persuading them or winning a victory but is about learning from them and sharing a collective thinking out loud session. This is good for me.

 

I think part of the reason why I wasn’t as engaged in the first half of the conversation was that it was about one of the most nebulous topics, the nature of Truth. I would divide the search for Truth into two elements. Firstly, there is the Truth about the physical universe, about how the parts of it are and work, and how they work together. You might describe this as a search for an accurate description of how things are. Just the Facts, ma’am, just the Facts. This is hard enough. The second element is the search for some Truth about (not sure what, something that seems important to some people). I can best describe this as a search for how we ought to be. 

 

How we ought to be I think should be grounded in the physical reality. Mostly it is. However, people tend to reason backwards from their world view  to the opinions about physical reality that they choose to accept as Facts.

 

Then I find lot of the debate about Truth is a difference of opinion on what makes people happy, with much reasoning from the imperfectly understood specific to the not at all understood generality (against a background where we struggle to understand what the Facts are). I think seeking after the Truth is likely to be a fruitless exercise. My answer the question,” Is This All There Is?” Is likely to be, “Um yes, what were you expecting?” If you insist on seeking it out, I’m more than happy to watch you, talk to you about it and hold your coat but I don’t expect to ever find myself thinking “THIS is the Truth”. If I ever did, I’m not I would know what to do with it.

 

I wonder if the time spent seeking after the Truth would be better spent finding people who tended to agree with you and spend your time with them in a homogenous community. Dull, perhaps, but peaceful.

 

So I found myself sitting on an uncomfortable seat, in an uncomfortable body, being niggled by  the fact I was irritated by my own irritation engaged in an interesting but, for me, possibly fruitless conversation.

 

Of course, the evening I’m less than averagely willing and able to engage properly is the evening that the one individual who just rubs me up the wrong way turns up. Not sure why but they do. I try not to let it bother me but it did.

 

Then we moved onto the Pope and I got cross. More later.

 

Afterwards some of us went to the Scotch Malt Whisky Society. That was nice, although the second beer was a mistake. It was nice to see f4f3. I had been looking forward to seeing him. His comic book on the iPad is very groovy.

 

Went home, spoke to MLW, had two paracetamol, went to bed.

General Napier's Cultural Relativism

On the subject of the Pope I am cross.

 

I understand more, thanks to F4F3, the Truth that the Catholic Church might (or might not) be working to; that sinners are to be loved and not punished. Perhaps you can’t judge one culture by the standards of another and perhaps cultures are self-referential.

 

However, it feels like a whitewash to me. It feels like a convenient excuse for the Church to not effectively protect people in it’s care and to avoid scandal, loss of face and monetary loss and the organisational disruption of having to sack lots of your middle management. Oh, that and the fact that before these people started touching children, they were apparently touched by God.

 

Where I get to, where I usually get to with self-referential cultures is General Charles Napier on suttee

 

“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours”

 

Anyone who has ever read any Nazi jurisprudence will know that they could justify the most brutul and flagrant abuses of humanity in a neatly self-referential system, where orders flowed from the top, from a man who had a meta-physical link with a Great Thing. Didn’t stop us hanging the bastards in 1948.