Roger Gordon’s Blog

Here's another gem from TGIF, the weekly meeting for thinkers in Johannesburg.

 "Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. ... The gross national product does not [measure] the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.
It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."

 Spoken by Robert Kennedy in the US in 1968, shortly before his untimely death. True in SA in 2009. Choose wisely what you measure - it determines what you get.

 To learn more about TGIF, visit http://www.tgif.org.za

Marking the 40th anniversary of our first ever moon landing are a good amount of coverage, "live" online recreations of the event, and opportunities to vote on whether it really happened (at time of writing, 4 out of the top ten Google results for "moon landing" are about this question, and News24's poll has 31% of respondents picking the hoax option).
 
Some might argue that this remarkable achievement has not been paralleled in other (perhaps more important) areas. This is frequently expressed in the common phrase "We can put a man on the moon, but..." followed by some indignation, e.g. "...we can't find a cure for starvation", "...we continue to wage war on earth", or "...we still can't figure out what happened to the other sock".
 
Theories postulating that humankind's technical progress has far outpaced its moral progress certainly deserve our attention. If they're right, we need to catch up in our thinking about how we handle a wide range of advances from biomedics to the internet to complex financial constructs to energy consumption. To say this does not lessen the ingenuity of our technical progress in any way. But it does heighten our awareness of our accompanying human responsibility.
 
TGIF offers discussion on human advancement this Friday morning (24 July). Starts 06:15am for 06:30am, ends 7:30am. Three venues, all welcome, no entrance fee. For more details, visit www.tgif.org.za

When I was in Johannesburg, I used to occasionally attend a weekly morning meeting called TGIF (Thank God It's Friday) which would explore issues of interest to in an open minded and engaging way. While many attendees are Christian, all viewpoints are welcomed and I'd encourage anyone to in along, whatever your religious & philosophical persuations may be.
Here's the teaser for this week's meetings, which I thought was interesting enough to post here...
For details on the meetings, visit http:www.tgif.org.za or send email to the address below.
 
-original message-
Subject: TGIF. Your word against mine?
From: "TGIF"
 
One day a neighbour knocked on the town mayor's door and asked: "Will you lend me your donkey?"
"My good friend," the mayor replied, "I'd love to lend you my donkey. But I'm afraid he's away today."
Just then the donkey gave a bray loud enough to wake the dead.
"This is my lucky day," said the neighbour. "It seems your donkey is here after all."
"How dare you!" protested the mayor, puffing up with shocked indignation. "Are you going to believe my donkey and doubt me, a man of distinction and status?" [1]
 
Notice the two views of truth illustrated in this story - if we leave the donkey's view aside for a moment. In the neighbour's view, truth is a correspondence with reality. In contrast, the mayor's approach is a little more "creative" or relativistic - truth is what I declare it to be.
 
In that paradigm, all we are left with in our search for truth is one word against another, which inevitably erodes into a power-play in which the strongest person or group decides what truth is. In the story, notice also how the person who is relativistic about the truth manages to be quite absolutistic about his status.
 
[1] Arab folktale, told by William J. Bennett in "The Moral Compass"