I feel like I’m cheating a little when it comes to blogging these days; I tend to blog about things other people have either said or written. But then again, isn’t trying to understand the world in large part about listening to others, first trying to understand why, within their own framework, they make sense, and second, making the small mental adjustments we need to ‘fix’ our patterns of thought that, in light of these experiences, should be changed, and third, to learn to verbalize these mental adjustments, thus making their integration a reality?

Jonathan Haidt seems to think so. His TED talk was entitled “On the Moral Mind”, but the part that struck me the hardest was near the beginning, where he tells his audience, mostly left winged, that they needed to listen to the right wing, as it’s normal for similar people to get together and discuss ideas they already mostly agree on but that it takes discussion with people whose opinions differ, sometimes widely, to really figure out what’s going on.

When one believes that:

a) there is only one Truth,
b) none of us can understand the entire Truth, but
c) all of us understand parts of the Truth,

Then this approach only makes sense. And this is why I will continue blogging about things other people have said or written, because I do not hold the entire Truth (far from it, actually), but I do want to understand more and more, and this seems to be the most promising approach to take.