My Truth is Better than Your Truth!

My father was a local business man and politician. I remember, as a young boy, sitting in a row with elderly men in a barber shop on Main Street.  I was waiting for a hair cut, they were there for a shave. It was the morning after an election and my Dad had been running for Mayor. He did not win the election that time but the conversation among most of the men waiting for their straight-razor shave, hovered around the election results. Of course, no one present knew I was related to the candidate, for the gist of their conversation was, "Grannan was the right man for the job, unfortunately he is a Catholic."  

In her book The Juggler's Children Carolyn Abraham points out that Henry V111 got rid of the wives that did not bear him a living son. It seems anyone who stood in his way was eventually executed. Aside from his uxoricidal behaviour, we now know it was not the wives fault that they gave birth to a girl. It was Henry's fault - he donated the sperm carrying the X chromosome, not the Y chromosome required! Of course, like all men, what sperm won the race was not his main concern at the time of launch!

As an octogenarian I have learned to maintain a healthy amount of doubt most of the time. Believing one has all the answers is definitely a good way to lose friends and bore the rest of us to death. At one time in our history religion was the authority in medicine. Today, science has pushed it aside. Religion also determined what was morally right or wrong. Now we seem to have moral relativism or situation ethics! People still vote for a particular party because their parents supported that party. Why - because their father voted Liberal or Conservative. That is not really a good enough reason for them to do the same without some examination. Others think a certain race is bad for the country while they themselves are entrenched in notions and practices they have never even considered analysing. Indeed, exploring some of our fixed, long-term ideas about life, politics, religion, culure, right and wrong is a daunting exercise. The fear is that if we examine things too closely, and shelter those ideas that should have been exposed and abandoned long ago, we might end up having to change!

It has been said that everyone has the right to their own opinion. They have the right to have an opinion, but not the right to its content, unless they can successfully argue for it. As Daniel Patrick Moyniham once pointed out, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, they are not entitled to their own facts."

I remember the myth we were taught in grade school those so many, many years ago. We learned that in the Middle Ages they believed that the earth was flat.  Not an unreasonable assumption at one time! With that 'truth' in mind it was not unreasonable to assume that poor old Columbus was in danger of falling off the edge of the world if he sailed out too far.

We know that 1 + 1 = 2 or that there are no square circles, as the philosophers would say. But for the rest of it there is still a lot we don't know. So it is good to question ideas, especially those that have become deeply entrenched into our being. Who knows they might not be as correct and important as we once thought! On the other hand the process of aging teaches us to come to terms with the world the way it is and not the way we think it should be. And by the way, shaving with a straight-razor was not the preferred method by the time I grew some fuzz on my face!

And that's Dick's View of the World this Week.