Kesher Talk

The unspoken assumption of anyone who asserts that they speak "the Truth" is this: you who do not think as I do, do so because you do not know the "the Truth" (i.e. the facts). If I tell you "the Truth" either you will be compelled to agree with me by their startling and unanswerable truthlikeness, or you are blinkered by a priori ideological constructs that prevent you from seeing the world as it really is. But there is a logical mistake in this assumption. Facts do not determine how we decide on an issue - values do. We can see the same things, yet make different decisions based on what we see. When I look at what is going on in the West Bank right now I see more or less the same thing as is seen by a critic of Israeli policy, yet my judgement on it is not their judgement. And lest anyone think I am making an apology for relativism: I am not - even value-judgements can be wrong or misplaced, because they come with consequences attached, and if those consequences are incompatible with one's values (or what one claims to be one's values) then one's value-judgements are faulty. Most Palestinians, I suspect, believe in liberty and self-determination (for themselves, at least), yet they allow and approve of actions by their countrymen and women that run contrary to these beliefs. Arafat speaks with a forked tongue.

If it's "truth" you're after, try this: since 1948, Israel has been engaged in a continuous war of survival - sometimes that war hots up, as it has now, sometimes it is cold, consisting of nothing more than verbal attacks and slurs in the Arab and European press. But because, as my oldest chum Dr Ashton pointed out (in a previous post), we think too much in pictures (and numbers too), we do not see what is happening. When we indulge in morality-by-numbers and morality-by-colour-pictorial we are in danger of losing our way completely. This is where we are today. (Daddy Warblogs)

posted by Howard @ 4/15/2002 12:40:22 PM