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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (13621)	5/17/2001 1:01:01 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

I agree that even someone who is wrongheaded in many respects may make positive contributions by raising the right issues or embedding suggestive but underdeveloped ideas in his work. I was thinking less of those who are wrongheaded than those who were simply wrong, and you can certainly be one without being the other. Imagine a group of people living in a dark cave, refusing to walk outside because members of the priestly sect threatened them with hideous punishments. Finally one person gets up, walks out, looks around in the bright sunlight for a few minutes, and goes back in to tell the others that there's a whole world out there, and it's not so bad. Do we praise that person for being brave enough to walk out of the cave? Or do we criticize because the impressions that person brought back of the outside world were discovered, on later exploration, to have been wildly inaccurate. All that I object to is making originality the touchstone of the value of an idea when truth is more important....... An idea cannot have value simply because it is original. It also has to be a good idea. But I'm not comfortable with truth as a touchstone either. Who among us is qualified to decide which ideas are "true" and which are not? I prefer the marketplace of ideas, where ideas are judged not on "truth", but on value determined by comparison with other ideas and by the results of their consequences when they are applied to action.