Beyond Feelings - Vincent Ruggiero.original_ [15]
That's what happens in daily life. No two words have precisely the same shades of meaning. Therefore, the simple fact that people repeat a story in their own words rather than in exact quotation changes the story. Then, too, most people listen imperfectly. And many enjoy adding their own creative touch to a story, trying to improve on it, stamping it with their own personal style. This tendency may be conscious or unconscious. Yet the effect is the same in either case – those who hear it think they know.
THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PERFECT KNOWLEDGE
Even the most vigorous active learning and the most critical approach to passive learning, of course, will not bring us complete and perfect knowledge. One reason is that old unanswered questions continue to resist solution, questions like what causes cancer, what approach to education is best for children, and how can we prevent crime without compromising individual rights.
Another reason is that everyday situations arise for which there are no precedents. When the brain operation known as frontal lobotomy was developed to calm raging violence in people, it raised the question of the morality of a "cure" that robbed the patient of human sensibilities. When the heart transplant and the artificial heart became realities, the issue of which patients should be given priority was created, as well as the question of how donors were be obtained. When smoking was definitely determined to be a causative factor in numerous fatal diseases, we were forced to examine the wisdom of allowing cigarette commercials to mislead TV viewers and entice them into harming themselves. More recently, when smoking in public places was shown to harm the nonsmoker as well as the smoker, a debate arose concerning the rights of smokers and nonsmokers.
Still another reason why perfect knowledge is beyond our grasp is that as generation passes to generation, knowledge is often forgotten or unwisely rejected. Some ancient Greeks knew that whales have lungs instead of gills and are therefore mammals. But later the Romans thought whales were fish, and that false notion persisted in Western minds until the seventeenth century. In that century one man suggested whales are really mammals, and another later established it as fact. The West rediscovered an item of knowledge.5
In our time the ideas of "sin" and "guilt" have come to be regarded as useless and even harmful holdovers from Puritan times. The "new morality" urged people to put aside such old-fashioned notions are obstacles to happiness and fulfillment. Then Karl Menninger, one of America's leading psychiatrists, wrote a book called Whatever Became of Sin?6 in which he argues that the notion of "sin" and "guilt" are good and necessary in civilized society. He says, in other words, that our age rejected those concepts too quickly and quite unwisely.
Knowledge is often thought of as dead matter stored on dusty shelves in dull libraries. Unfortunately, the hushed atmosphere of a library can suggest a funeral chapel or a cemetery. But the appearance is deceiving. The ideas on those shelves are very much alive – and often fighting furiously with one another. Consider the following cases.
The idea that Columbus was the first person from Europe, Africa, or Asia to land on the shores of North or South America hangs on tenaciously. The opposite idea challenges this again and again. (The evidence against the Columbus theory continues to mount: the discovery of ancient Japanese pottery in Ecuador, traces of visits by seafarers form Sidon in 541 B.C., as well as by the Greeks and Hebrews in A.D. 200 and by the Vikings in A.D.