Our Library is undergoing a transformation this summer. Along with the new layout, new computers, and new home for the Technology office, many old books are making way for the change (that's a bibliophile's gentle way of saying we're recycling them). As I helped to clear out part of the History section, a question occurred to me: at what point do original ideas become historical curiosities? Are there circumstances in which there can be a universal answer to this question? Are there ideas that do not go out of date? If the answer to this is discipline specific, are there exceptions? Can a mathematical theorem prove Euro-centric? Can a book entitled Our Expanding World: The Age of Exploration provide objective accounts of history, despite its titular perspective? For this week's post, identify two moments of knowledge from different AoKs and examine this train of thought in each. You needn't answer all of my questions, but you should answer some, and you may come up with questions of your own.
Ethics is an example of an AoK where overtime the standards and ideals change. Things that were once considered ethical can now be seen as outdated or even barbaric. My moment of knowledge comes from an article in IFL Science which discussed the use of black slaves for human experimentation by doctors and medical students in the Deep South. Back then it was perfectly acceptable and expected of medical students and doctors to have do this. Now, the idea of forced human experimentation no matter the race is considered barbaric and unacceptable. So in that regard ideas in ethics can become outdated.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand there are ideas in other fields such as the natural sciences which withstand the test of time with little change. In biology class our last topic was Evolution. Darwin formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection in 1859. Ever since then it has been accepted by the majority of the scientific community with a few modifications. Although it has been compounded on, the theory of evolution as proved to be timeless.
To sum up, I don't think there is any AoK that has only "timeless knowledge
or one where all the knowledge is due to become outdated one day.
http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/how-black-slaves-were-routinely-sold-specimens-ambitious-white-doctors
First off, I urge you not to fool yourself into thinking there could ever be universal truths / answers. I have spent far to many nights making lists of 'universal truths' and disproving all of them, instead of doing what a teenager should be doing (in my case, this means frantically studying my biology notes on transcription and translation and sending snapchats of chocolate chip pancakes to Katlyn), to start this habit again.
ReplyDeleteAs I was rereading this series of questions, the idea that kept coming to mind was that of relevance. This in turn brought to mind a moment from this past week that deals with both relevance and religion. I was riding on the back of a friend's motorcycle (yes my mother knows and yes she disapproves) and pretty much the entire time I was thinking a combination of "oh God, I hope I don't die" and "please God, don't let me die". As most of you, probably, know, I am not religious in the slightest (I went to church on christmas once and that's pretty much it). However, in that twenty minute drive to Conway, I was not only asking for help but believing that someone could help me. However, after I got off the death trap, I was back to my old non-religious self. Within this very short timeline, the idea of a God proved to be no longer useful and so it was discarded. The funny thing is, religion is one of the only timeless ideas of our species. I am not sure how this is possible, as it cannot be proved, but people have yet to discard religion as useless. Back in olden times, God was an explanation for thunder and drought, rain and good harvest, however, today these things have been disproved as being wrath/ miracles and proven as science. So, why haven't we, as a high evolved species, grown out of religion? What purpose does it really play today? I ask this question to myself a lot, especially as I see murder and war all in the name of one God or another. How can such a destructive idea not have been deemed outdated in today's 'modern world'?
The second moment of knowledge came as I was hiking a mountain near my house alone. I came upon a Killdeer, a very interesting species of bird, who was pretending to be injured to draw me away from her nest (they nest on the ground). Knowing this, I thought how this wasn't an extremely effective method as humans can simply shoot the bird and then find its nest. Wouldn't these birds grow to realize that some ideas/ methods are outdated? A few days later, I pondered this again as I took a friend to a huge hill close to my house. As we slipped under the electric fence, a blackbird began to squawk at and dive-bomb us. We soon realized that the bird had a nest close to where we were walking, which we would have never known about had the bird remained quiet. I asked my friend what he thought of all this, the idiocy of birds, and he replied that birds, like all other things on this earth, cannot escape predispositions and genetic wiring. We then concluded that these types of things are timeless and may one day lead to the downfall of many species. At that point, I began to think of the motorcycle ride (with this very person) and my train of thought on religion. So, I concluded as we walked / talked our way up the hill, the very downfall of humanity might just lie in our inclination and application of religion; a timeless predisposition. Overall, I have found that the only ideas that remain timeless are those that are predetermined, and thus inescapable, or at least in the case of natural sciences.
My first moment of knowledge occurred while I was watching an anime about a princess who is exiled from the kingdom after her father is overthrown and killed in a coup carried out by her scheming/shady-looking love interest (the drama is real). Her goal is to become stronger, build an army, and fight her way back to the throne. Due to my slight, two-week-long obsession with this anime, I was thinking about it a lot. There was one point when I was thinking about the plot and how the idea of fighting for power, land, or one's rights is a common theme throughout history. There is a well-known saying that history always repeats itself (seriously, stop invading Russia in the winter), but to what extent is that true? The world has been changing, technology is becoming more prominent, science is progressing, and the human lifestyle has been changing, so how can history still repeat itself? I think that history repeats because there are basic ideas that do not go out of date. Of course, many of these ideas evolve as humans change and learn from their failures. However, the basis of those ideas does not change. For example, the idea that humans tend to live in a community/or society headed by a leader or ruling party. This is hardly a novel idea and it is how humans have lived for a long time. From pharaohs to kings to emperors to presidents to prime ministers, humans (not always willingly) acknowledge a leader or leading party to run their society because humans have realized that building this type of community is more efficient than everyone fending for themselves. Yet of my list of rulers, pharaohs and emperors can be considered historical curiosities while presidents and prime ministers cannot since many countries have them today. This is because as humans change and their ideas evolve, specific ideas (the pharaoh or the emperor) become outdated but the basis behind these ideas does not. The specifics for every case in history are different, but one can find that many of the motivations, ideas, and trains of thought are the same and don’t become outdated.
ReplyDeleteMy second moment of knowledge occurred while I was reading one of my summer reading books, Son of Hamas (which is an awesome book btw). It is an autobiography written by a boy who grew up with his father being a Hamas leader, was sent to and tortured at Israeli prisons, and eventually became a double agent working for the Israelis. Because of the nature of the book, I was extremely aware of and greatly focused on the biases presented in the book. When I first saw the title, I thought that the book would be extremely biased towards the Palestinians and Hamas, and it was at first. However, as I went further through the story, there was a huge shift where the writer was questioning the morality of Hamas and the Arab religion. The authors ended up working for the Israelis, which I found completed unexpected given the title of the novel and the author’s childhood surroundings/upbringing. The title fit the story well, but the content was surprising to me. This made me think about the arts in general and how a title, whether it is for a book, a painting, a sculpture, or a musical piece, can often be misleading. For example, there is a song that I like called The Quiet Place, by In Flames, but it can be described as anything but quiet given that the genre is melodic death metal. So does a title always present the content of the work? To what extent can it accurately present the work? To what extent is it supposed to present the work and when can it be considered a bad title? Almost every piece of work in the arts portrays the biases, opinions, and ideas of the artist, but these ideas and opinions can be unexpected even though the title suggests one thing. I also think that though a source may have an obvious bias, it can still provide objective facts and accounts despite the bias and these objective accounts can be extracted if one recognizes the bias.
My first moment of knowledge came to me while I was sitting awake at 3 AM, watching "Star Wars: A New Hope". One of the film's main characters, Luke Skywalker, comments about 20 minutes into the movie that the planet he lives on, Tatooine, is boring and nothing ever happens. As I was watching him complain about his life as a moisture farmer, it occurred to me that the planet Tatooine is one of the most significant planets in the history of the Star Wars franchise. I began to wonder why Luke Skywalker had no appreciation for galactic history. The immediate answer to this is, of course, that the events which took place on Tatooine between 4000 and 500 years before "Star Wars: A New Hope" were not immediately relevant to Luke. To synthesize this line of thought into a question not quite so related to a specific franchise. The relevant question is this: at what point do significant events or ideas become uninteresting to those not specifically studying them? The answer I give to this question is that they become uninteresting when they are no longer directly relevant to day- to- day life. This is related to one of the original questions posed in the blog post: at what point do original ideas become historical curiosities? The answer is, interestingly, the same, in terms of the study of history as an area of knowledge. Original ideas become historical curiosities when the can no longer be immediately applied to day-to-day life. Does this necessitate that all historical curiosities are boring? I would posit that this answer really only applies to the most superficial aspects of day-to-day life. When one studies the connections between things, the historical facts are clearly still relevant. For instance, although the Revolutionary War is not particularly applicable to my day to day life as an IB student, the entire reason I study in America and not Great Britain is the Revolutionary War. The significance of things continues, and hence the information cannot entirely go out of date because it remains relevant in some way or another.
ReplyDeleteMy second moment of knowledge struck me while I procrastinated researching my Extended Essay. Being the person that I am, I naturally picked an intellectually stimulating and exciting topic to pay attention to instead...no, that's a lie, I played with the cat. The cat and I do not speak a shared language, but she can communicate her needs to me by way of meowing, purring, hissing, or smashing her head into my arm. While I was playing with her, the cat decided she was hungry and began meowing loudly at me until I fed her. This form of communication is similar to what babies use to indicate need before they can speak coherently. When a baby is crying, or my cat is yelling at me, they are indicating something is wrong. This base form of communication- and my ability to understand it - shows the inherent connection between life forms. The moment of knowledge I identified was that creatures can "speak" to one another without knowing the same language.
This led me to a popular problem in ethics. In this problem, a train is headed towards five people tied to the track. Their mouths are duct taped, but they are making desperate noises. You are standing on a bridge above this track. You can stop the train by pushing something heavy onto the track; luckily, there is an extremely fat man standing next to you. Do you push him? For me this ethics problem is connected to my understanding of my cat by the fact that in both situations, communication outside of the phonemes of language took place to communicate a basic survival need. In the case of my cat loudly meowing at me, she is signalling a need for food or water. In the case of the people tied to the track, their muffled screaming indicates a need for help. These basic noises are universal and, in my mind, are a method of communicating knowledge that is universal and everlasting. Certainly, my cat's need for food might go away, but she will need food again; this need is a form of knowledge which is never outdated.
Hi everyone! I'm going to have to split my blog post into two comments because apparently, no more than 4,096 characters can be accepted per comment.
ReplyDeletepart 1:
AoK 1: science
My first moment of knowledge comes from my most recent visit to the orthopedist's office. We were discussing methods to quickly heal and prevent ankle sprains, and my doctor informed me that ice actually does not help injuries heal faster, but that physical therapists' still encourage it as a method to aid healing. I began to wonder how such a disparity could exist between medical specialists; shouldn't new research and advancing studies be universally reflected in all aspects of the medical field? How could physical therapists go about justifying the validity of the idea if its evidence contradicted more recent studies? In my mind, this question connects to the question, "are there ideas that do not go out of date?" In this instance, the answer is ambiguous. Clearly, research in the orthopedic field indicates that the use of ice is irrelevant and so orthopedist's have stopped using it , but in the study of physical therapy ice is used as a viable option so it is not outdated. Since the idea is still accepted by one part of society and is broadly circulated as being a helpful tool, the idea cannot be fully considered outdated. But then again, if an idea is outdated, does it necessarily follow that the idea is no longer accepted? In scientific fields of study, we often expand our knowledge by disproving old theories rather than setting out to invent and prove new ones; this method effectively renders old ideas obsolete. The ideas that have not yet gone out of date often remain the way they are solely because further research has not been conducted or we do not have sufficient technology to investigate further possibilities. The nature of ideas are that they progress and evolve when further explored, so they are constantly being revised and it is impossible that at some point in time a given idea will not be outdated. However, the underlying principles and essential questions we ask in order to inform those ideas never go out of date. For example, orthopedists and PTs alike will never stop wondering, " how can we heal injuries as quickly as possible?" These questions will continue to provide the foundation for improved ideas.
AoK 2: history
ReplyDeleteMy next moment of knowledge comes from listening to NPR. I heard an episode of Fresh Air about historian Tim Weiner's new book entitled One Man Against the World: the Tragedy of Richard Nixon, which was written after the government declassified many important documents and tapes from the Nixon administration. The book attempts to provide answers to many of the public's long-burning questions: why did Nixon wiretap important officials? Why did he choose to escalate the Vietnam war, despite opposition from the public and his cabinet members? What were the watergate burglars searching for? These questions exemplify what is at the heart of the question, "at what point do original ideas become historical curiosities?" I believe people are still so interested in Nixon because his presidency was surrounded in scandal, and over 40 years after his impeachment secrets are finally being revealed that allow us gain further insight into his policies and character. Nixon's "original ideas" (for example, his decision to invade Cambodia) became historical curiosities the moment that someone began to analyze them and their significance within a global context. I think that is universally the case with most of history, and journalism as well; the first piece of published literature that questions or provides critical commentary on an idea is when we can put a timestamp on the moment that something has become a "historical curiosity". Nixon's case is interesting because so much of his history was limited until the US government made it readily available to its citizens, thus much of the public's interest was forced to remain in a category of "speculative curiosity." We began to accept speculation as the truth, so what is revealed in Weiner's book is surprising and shocking to readers who have already established an image of Nixon. This begs the question, how are we forced to consider our perceptions when we attempt to rewrite history?
"At what point do original ideas become historical curiosities?"
ReplyDeleteis a question that really catches my eye. I have thought of questions
similar to this one such as, when does history become history? When
applying this to area's of knowledge I think it is a case by case
basis, but there is a common theme within each of them. I think
that original ideas become historical curiosities when they become
outdated. For the example in the arts ideas/subjects become historical curiosities when they become
out of fashion. For visual and preforming art history, stories of
edgy and new artists are often heard of, while there is also talk
of artists who are studied within the context of their time alive
who were edgy in the past but now are looked upon as old fashioned.
This theme is very strong to me in visual arts such as painting and
sculpture. For every Antony Micallef (a very cool contemporary artist)
there is the historical study of an Andy Warhol.
This theme of original ideas becoming historical curiosities can also
be put in an area(s) of knowledge thought to be completely opposite to the
arts, Human sciences and Natural sciences. When scientists make
their first discoveries it is thought of as very original. But as time
goes on, their original ideas become historical curiosities, due to
their discoveries being disproved or their discoveries becoming common
knowledge. When their discoveries get disproved, or become common
knowledge, then the public seeks out historical context as to how or
why a scientist had that first original thought, now disproved or
well known.
The second question stated that caught my eye was "Are there any ideas
that do not go out of date?" This question caught my eye because I had
trouble thinking of whether or not ideas can or cannot go out of date.
I think the reason why it is hard is because to me it is hard to think
of ways to replace a well known idea if your life experience has raised
you to think of an idea a certain way. The first two things that came into
my head when reading this question were the ideas that "The sky is blue"
and that "It is impossible to think of a new color". These two ideas seem
like ideas that will never go out of date because they are unchangeable
by science. But science can be disproved, and when this question is applied
to other areas of knowledge such as Ethics or Religious Knowledge Systems, it
seems a lot easier to think of ideas that were previously thought to be true, and
thought of to always be relevant that are now out of date.
From my point of view, there cannot be a universal answer to the question about historical curiosities, but it can be answered from different aspects. My first moment of knowledge is when I was reading a short passage telling about the system of biological classification discovered by eighteenth-century botanist Carolus Linnacus. The author was talking about the fact that although Linnaeus himself admitted that classification is only a biological tool, a lot of people from the past hundred years had unfortunately concerned themselves exclusively with classification and began doing analysis on it. This passage made me thinking about how a lot of historical biologists was affected or even completely driven by one individual discovery, and disregard other impressive factors surrounding the field of that single finding. Thus, back to the original question, as one original idea stands out, people would consider its significant effects and work more on them, even in a radical way.
ReplyDeleteI think that there are no absolute ideas that never go out of date. My answer to this question comes from the real life situation when I was hearing a historical stories from a friend. He was telling me about Adam Smith and his economic theory, which approved that if the individual member of a group just strive to earn their own interests, the whole group will benefit. However, this well-known idea was challenged by John Nash’s new theory, that sometimes individual’s ambitions are conflicting, which means that in the pursuit of group’s interests, each individual should do what but for himself and the group. He owned Noble Prize in Economics in 1994, demonstrating his success in challenging the previous authority. Thus, the idea by Smith was turned out of date by a completely new discovery that was approved by more people most recently.
I don't believe that ideas can be applicable anytime and anywhere due to the constantly shifting nature of our world and our ways of knowing and classifying information. As we established in class, there is essentially no such thing as completely objective knowledge at least within our own spheres of thought and therefore, all knowledge is subject to the different trends and changing processes of humanity.
ReplyDeleteMy first real life situation is drawn from the natural sciences. In the 19th century, a traditional breakfast for the average upper-middle class American family would have probably consisted of potatoes, biscuits, some kind of porridge, eggs, and a considerable amount of meat. However, the invention of the first breakfast cereal (Granula) was actually spurred on by the new "discovery" that protein was as bad for you as we consider things like saturated fats to be nowadays. Due to this breakthrough, the cereal industry began to encourage the newer, low-protein breakfast cereals. The debate about protein went on for years, with one of the central issues being the question of whether or not one should eat egg yolks (my grandfather remembered going back and forth between eating eggs and cutting them out of his diet while the debate went on). Obviously, this scientific theory has now been revised as we all know that protein is a key nutrient which our bodies need. However, the science behind this is still a little fuzzy today - the paleo diet proclaims that eating almost exclusively animal proteins offers many health benefits like disease prevention, while raw-food-veganism promoters claim the exact same thing about an all-vegetable diet. In light of this, I don't see how you could say that any scientific idea such as this one could be set in stone. We can look back now and point out the flaws in the scientists' experiments and logic, perhaps due to primitive equipment, but if this pattern holds true, we could be looking back at ourselves and the ways in which we think about food in 100 years and making the same remarks.
My second real life situation is from ethics. Corporal punishment and humiliation used to be used universally as a totally accepted, unquestioned form of discipline for schoolchildren. A misspelled word could earn you a sharp rap on the hand with a ruler while more serious offenses could result in a dunces' cap and the obligation to stand in some sort of uncomfortable position for any length of time. This method of discipline has only (relatively) recently become an issue in the USA - to this day, 19 states still legally allow corporal punishment in schools. This is an example of a more current and gray moral issue - most people I've come in contact with agree with me that corporal punishment is not at all an effective method of helping children learn, but evidently there are still those who believe it to be helpful. When I was thinking about my second example, I googled corporal punishment laws in the USA because I was under the impression that it was a thing of my grandparents' generation which had long become obsolete in this country, but found that it was actually still something which was acceptable in some places. Clearly, this example demonstrates that an idea or method of doing something can be seen as totally in the past and old-fashioned by some while others still embrace it.
I believe that all ways of knowing play a strict role in determining whether or not an idea can become outdated. Also, all the ways of knowing employ different roles considering their separate methods for understanding new knowledge. Memory for example, is subject to various changes as it can be manipulated or tweaked overtime. Reason as a way of knowing is also subject to much change considering the world we live in is constantly changing. This can be seen through the area of knowledge of ethics, where standards and morals alter depending on the circumstances. Emotion and language are two ways of knowing that take up the same role, in my opinion, of providing mediums to understanding knowledge that is not outdated. Referring to Rose’s post, there are forms of communication and need that are universally understood and therefore eternal.
ReplyDeleteMy first moment of knowledge is related to the area of knowledge, the arts. While reading Paul Taylor’s novel, Facts and Fancies, I thought a lot about what makes a dance meaningful especially when reading the chapter on why the choreographer makes dances. As I read through this chapter, I realized that dances are masterpieces and, whether intended or not, are interpreted in many different ways. A wide set of interpretation is due to the vast disparity in thinking among individuals. However, the idea that struck me regarding the interpretation of dance and all forms of art essentially, is how one piece of work is subject to extremely different interpretation. Despite the intended meaning of the dance, painting, or whatever it is, a different interpretation is likely. It is not the specific interpretations of the work that make it timeless or universal but that it is interpreted in many different fashions. This idea aids in explaining why art is often referred to as timeless and universal. Art appeals to a wide set of individuals and this idea should never fade, even though the art itself may change in style and interpretation.
My second moment of knowledge relates to ethics and comes from the other night when I was with my family. I forget what caused my step-mom to say the word queer, but after she heard something she thought was weird, her saying queer was the immediate reaction. Following this, my sister looked to her in surprise because she had said this word. I was also taken off guard because nowadays in today’s society, the word queer has a much stronger, negative connotation. It’s interesting because my step-mom didn’t think or realize that using this word would provoke a confused reaction from us girls. She explained to us that queer means or used to mean odd or strange and didn’t have such a negative connotation as it does today. Today the word queer still means odd or strange when you look it up in the dictionary, but conversationally it can take on more negative connotations. It is associated with words like gay and fag, when used as insults. My sister and I had clearly associated queer with these words considering we grew up in a different generation than my step-mom. Times have clearly changed since my step-mom was a teenager and using the word queer to mean weird. It is obvious that right and wrong conduct is judged much differently in today’s society than it was along time ago. This means that in ethics, there are ideas that do become outdated with the ongoing changes occurring in society.
In my opinion, there could be historical curiosities in the Arts when the works are made but with individuals have different perspective and criticism on them, also include the original artistes. The arts works have no right or wrong answer but different emotional evocations. The are based on each person’s aesthetic preference so no one have very exact answer/opinion to one particular work. Curiosities are made for the “correct answer” to the works. Also, these ideas can never be out of data. Once they came out from one’s mind with reasons, they existed and could not disappear from history, even no one else hears it. One moment of knowledge is when I was in MassMoca. A series of artwork are the drawings of superheroes, but in the background there are realistic drawings of landscapes on huge canvas hanging. There is also a paper-made hand sticking out perpendicularly from the huge painting with a hole in the middle of it. This is a very interesting work because no one really understand it, but we kept trying to get the “correct” interpretation by discovering every little details in it. However, there is no correct answer, it is the process when the viewers were thinking. Maybe amount these comments and interpretation the artist him/herself did not even realize. Therefore, every individual’s interpretation of any art work can be history and they can never be out dated. Art can never be outdate, because they can either be the one point of history record or a individual’s aesthetic.
ReplyDeleteAnother AoK that CAN be outdated easily is indigenous knowledge system. The moment knowledge is when I was in Beijing and I was so surprised by the blue sky with many white clouds. This has never happened in past 3 years in big cities like Beijing. The reasons for it is the closing downing of many factories that produce large amount of air pollution. The indigenous system has changed a lot when people realized that the protecting the environment was more important than anything else, even industrial. Therefore, the policy that did not control the production of pollution is outdated. They are replaced with rules to close down certain factories, reduce private cars by numbers, decrease public transportation fee…….Therefore, in the indigenous knowledge system is changed within the development of the country and current events. It can be easily be outdated because the society is changing everyday and it has to be changed based on the changing in order to sustain the order of society.
To start off, I want to take a minute to define these questions as I interpret them. For the big one, "at what point do original ideas become historical curiosities?”, I understand this to be asking “how long does it take for one idea to be so widely spread that it can be discussed years later as a question that is only relevant when looking at the past, and not at the present?”. That being said, the following are my AoK’s and moments of knowledge:
ReplyDeleteAOK 1: For my first AOK I chose history, which is of course a rather obvious one for this particular discussion. The moment of knowledge comes from a conversation I was having with my dad the other day about Communism vs. Socialism vs. Capitalism. We talked about how the U.S. has always been a Capitalist country, and how we have seen that Socialism/Communism “doesn’t work” (I put that in quotes because those are my dad’s words, not mine. Obviously, the Cold War was not incredibly long ago, but it is just far enough in the past that we can study it in history, and discuss the U.S.’s attempts to keep the Communist countries away and keep our country free of Communism. Now, when we talked about the Capitalism vs. Socialism in the U.S. debate (as we often do), we tried to rationalize why so many Americans believe that Socialism is the way to go, when it’s been proved that it “doesn’t work”. So, to the question “are there ideas that do not go out of date?”, I would say that in the minds of the Americans who believe Socialism/Capitalism is the way to go, they believe that the knowledge of how those systems have failed in the past is no longer relevant. So, to answer the question from that perspective, the idea that Socialism and Communism are bad HAS gone out of date. Of course, that won’t be the same if you ask a Capitalist, which leads me to believe that it’s truly all about perspective. Therefore, I would say that there is NOT a universal answer to the question.
AOK 2: My second AOK is ethics. I decided to show my parents my favorite anime (Death Note) a few days ago, and the quick explanation of this show is that the main character, Light Yagami, finds a notebook that will allow you to kill any person by writing their name in it, and he uses it to eliminate all the world's criminals. When I asked my mom what she thought of the show, instead of talking about the plot or the characters, she wanted to discuss the moral side of it. As we talked, we agreed on one thing: No human should have the right to pass judgement on someone to the extent of taking their life. (This includes capital punishment as well). The official death penalty is legal in Japan (where the story takes place), so it’s not so outrageous to imagine a character living there sees nothing wrong with executing criminals. However, in the United States (and in Connecticut in particular), it seems unthinkable. Once again, this comes down to perspective. On one hand, it is important to consider the setting. However, as it pertains to our questions here, the time is also important. The death penalty is obviously an extremely old tactic, used for when no amount of prison time is a good enough punishment, as well as to frighten other people from committing crimes (which is Light Yagami’s goal with the Death Note). In America, the idea that the death penalty is acceptable is very old, but in more than half the states, that idea has been discarded, and can only be looked at as a horror from the past. In Japan however, the idea is still very much alive and very relevant. This once again proves that there is not a UNIVERSAL answer… at most there could be a nationwide answer. But, even then there will be people who agree and disagree, so perhaps it’s not fair to say even that.
To sum this up: Ideas are personal, and even when shared by a multitude of people, they are not universal, even within those people. No one human thinks in the exact same way as another, and that’s what makes ideas so special. IF an idea can go out of date, it can only be to individuals, not society or the world as a whole.
AOK #1
ReplyDeleteMy first moment of knowledge occurred while I was reading a chapter in Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane. Within this chapter, a Doctor Cawley explains to the main character that the mental health field is currently at war between the ‘old school’ and ‘new school.’ The ‘old school’ believes in psychosurgery to control psychiatric patients such as shock therapy and lobotomies whereas the ‘new school’ believes in psychopharmacology- using lithium specifically. As a 21st century reader I found it surprising at first that the idea of psychopharmacology was considered a new and original idea but I then remembered that the novel was set in the 1950s. Categorizing my moment of knowledge under the area of science, I considered psychosurgery to be an idea that was out of date considering the time period difference between the novel’s setting and my own time. However, after thinking more about the topic, I hesitated to believe that, for shock therapy is still used in extreme cases, and in different areas of the world psychosurgery is used more often and is considered more socially acceptable. In this situation, I believe, psychosurgery is an idea that will not go out of date until it is forgotten completely. Even if that form of treatment is no longer used, it is still an idea, and as long as it is an idea that is discussed, it is still relevant, and therefore not out of date. However, if all psychosurgery were to cease to be practiced and after a large amount of time the idea was forgotten, then the idea would be out of date. This leads me to wonder though, if an idea is forgotten, what does that mean of its existence? Is it considered extinct when it has reached that point?
AOK #2
ReplyDeleteMy second moment of knowledge was when my Grandmother talked to me about the conversation she had with her third cousin that she had not seen in a long time. Gram related to me that in her discussion, her and her cousin chatted about our family’s genealogy and my great grandfather’s brother in specific (who I know nothing about). Gram said that the family story of my great grandfather’s brother was that he died of tuberculosis when he was five years old. However, my grandmother’s third cousin, who had researched the lusty family genealogy told her that the family story was inaccurate. My great grandfather’s brother actually died from falling out of a window of a mill. Although the original ‘true’ story of how my great grandfather’s brother died was accepted throughout the family, this new piece of information had changed my Gram’s thoughts on the story. I wonder, however, what if both the family story and the so-called ‘genealogy’ fact are wrong? What makes the fact more reliable than the story? And how do we define the difference between something that is ‘just a story’ or a ‘fact’? Although the event of my grandfather’s brother’s death is something that has been considered debunked, it will still be considered a historical curiosity for members of my family who have not researched the genealogy or don’t have the resources to do so. Being brought up hearing facts about a certain event, only to hear that those facts are wrong, (knowing my family) members of my family will refuse to believe the new facts because of how long they have believed the old facts for, or they will be unable to believe either and will consider the event a mystery. However, I think that the other situation could happen just as easily that a member of my family could hear the updated and more researched fact of my grandfather’s brother’s death and devalue the story they had heard for so many years, because they consider the story out of date. I think that the response to this situation differs because there is no universal answer to when an idea goes out of date, and some family members of mine would consider the story they heard to be out of date or not.
I spent last week at a leadership seminar in Washington D.C. and I have to say that my first moment of knowledge was from that time. On one of the last days we were there we were all in a leadership session and the facilitator told us to all find the people who had had a significant impact on us that week and thank them. I was really surprised at how many people came up to me and said thank you, even people to whom I had not said more than 20 words to. I guess this would fall under the AoK of Natural sciences, because I think I'm dealing with human psychology here. It also makes me wonder, to what extent can you be affected by a person you have known for only a week? Also, to what degree can a history be created in that same short period of time?
ReplyDeleteMy second moment of knowledge is derived from the third question, "Are there ideas that do not go out of date?". The moment occurred while I was sitting in the gate on Friday to catch my flight back home and two boys who had been at the program with me walked up. They were flying to Baltimore while I was flying to Boston but their gate was not far from mine. One, Ryan, was in my team in the program so I knew him welll enough, but I had never spoken to the other, Stephen. We ended up talking about our driver's licenses, comparing the different regulations between mine and theirs, and it made me wonder how many times other teenagers had done just that and how many were doing it at that moment. Stephen ended up sending me a friend request on Facebook and I accepted it, but what made him do so? Our discussion about driver's licenses? I think that there must have been something different, like how books will always say that you know when you've met someone you enjoy talkking to from the moment you meet. I think that is a very classic idea and I think it is one that has been at play for eons and that will still intermingel in our world for eons to come.