Polydactylism is an anomaly in human beings and animals—i.e., extra fingers and/or toes.
Suppose you were playing True or False, and the question was “Humans have five fingers, true or false?” The common sense, customary response would be “True”—but sometimes, rarely, they don’t. So the right answer must be “False”.
Now, if the question was more nuanced, say, “Humans usually (or mostly) have five fingers, true or false?” the right answer would be “True”.
But if the players of this game all lived on an isolated little island (never mind that “isolated” and “island” are both derived from the same root word) where everybody has six fingers . . . well, you get the idea.
On a day to day basis, it’s hard to find real life “absolute” truths and/or “absolute” falsehoods.
A similar challenge involves characterizing something as either “right” or “wrong”, or as “good” or “bad”.
The problem is whether there is such a thing as an “absolute”—because an absolute means something 100%, without exception.
An absolute is a projection, based on experience. In practice, one end of a range is an absolute—e.g., from 100% True to 100% False. You can be at any point on the range, but you’re never at either end point.
None of us are ever 100% True or 100% False; 100% Right or 100% Wrong; 100% Good or 100% Bad—no creature, that is. (100% is either a theoretical abstract or we’re talking about God.)
But just because no view, opinion, or decision is absolutely (100%) true or absolutely (100%) false, it doesn’t mean that all views, opinions, and decisions are of equal value or worth.
We judge things—and even argue about things—on the basis of how close or how far away they are from the ideal (the absolute).
A popular classification or rating criterion now-a-days has to do with liking. Someone tweets something, and then we learn about how many “Likes” it got in response. (We don’t get into whether it refers to liking a lot or only liking a little.)
This is a measure of popularity at any given moment in time (presuming, of course, that everyone more or less understands the tweet, view, opinion or decision being classified in the same way.)
An idea may be very popular, but this has little to do with it being true or false—or right or wrong, or good or bad.
When you get down to it, there’s a high degree of relativity to every aspect of our lives. We may not be perfectly (100%) good, but we may be striving to be good. Our ideals are the carrot on the stick!
We often “like” the unearthing of negative facts about people. And, since none of us are perfectly (100%) good or bad, smart or dumb, prudent or imprudent, selfless or selfish, there’s always something to accuse, criticize, unearth, or discredit about each of us—about every human person, no matter who!
What’s really important is what are our absolutes, our ideals, what are our carrots on the stick in front of us.
If we try to be true, right, or good and manage to be more often than not we may be on the way to becoming “saints”—e.g. exemplary people, outstanding in many ways, models to be imitated.
On the other hand, if more often than not we’re false, wrong, bad, we also may be exemplary people, outstanding in many ways, but an entirely different kind of model!
14 March 2021