We live in an age of love and peace where there is room for everything. Or do we? Consider this conversation I was recently privy to:
Guglielmo: Do you know this song?
Roy(as Pierre sniggered): No. Who’s the artiste?
R: Oh yes, but I have not heard this one. I have heard her Wrecking Ball, which is quite cool I think.
(Guglielmo just about managed to keep a straight face, but Pierre was incredulous.)
P: You are kidding right?
R: No, I get that many people think of her as being crazy, but the song is still nice and I think she sang it rather well!
P: You my friend, have spoken the unspeakable.
All this was a bit startling for me, because I too like Cyrus’ Wrecking Ball. But then, that conversation could very have been about Michael Jackson until a few years ago, before overnight he was socially acceptable again. Later in the evening, Pierre confessed to me that he was actually a Justin Bieber fan but would never admit to it in public!
I wonder if we really live in times of love and peace. People often talk about how inclusive society is these days by citing gay rights coming to fruition in western society. Yet, much of our pop culture is fuelled by intolerance and ridicule – what the Germans call schadenfreude. Human evolution sometimes appears to me to be a near zero-sum-game, where we let go of older prejudices, only to adopt new ones with a halo of righteousness.
"Since man has no automatic knowledge, he can have no automatic values; since he has no innate ideas, he can have no innate value judgments.
ReplyDeleteMan is born with an emotional mechanism, just as he is born with a cognitive mechanism; but, at birth, both are “tabula rasa.” [“blank slate”] It is man’s cognitive faculty, his mind, that determines the content of both. Man’s emotional mechanism is like an electronic computer, which his mind has to program—and the programming consists of the values his mind chooses.
But since the work of man’s mind is not automatic, his values, like all his premises, are the product either of his thinking or of his evasions: man chooses his values by a conscious process of thought—or accepts them by default, by subconscious associations, on faith, on someone’s authority, by some form of social osmosis or blind imitation." -Ayn Rand
Is it easy to avoid value judgements? What do you think? - A
A choice to abstain from making value judgments may also be based on a value judgment on value judgments. So to some extent i think they are inevitable. However, i do not think it takes too great an effort to respect others' value judgments even if they may not be the same as one's own.
DeleteI like the answer... guess there is hope for love and peace, after all. - A
ReplyDelete