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May. 19th, 2013 04:21 amHazlitt: "[T]he best way to instruct mankind is not by pointing out to them their mutual errors, but by teaching them to think rightly on indifferent matters, where they will listen with patience in order to be amused, and where they do not consider a definition or a syllogism as the greatest injury you can offer them."
I came to this conclusion in South Carolina, but could never have phrased it so well. It becomes less true the less South Carolinian your surroundings are, but there remains a lot to it. Get people to accept that they already adhere to pretty rigid standards of evidence in areas obviously requiring it (e.g. the justice system, interpersonal conflicts), get them to define just what those are, get them seeing some immediately contiguous areas they might also apply to, then more and more distant...
Till they see the only tracks the lay of the land will allow will require some reconstruction in their own town. Even some demolishings of beloved but, in the long or broad views they've been talked into taking, on balance harmful structures. Board them elsewhere, show them where they might go. So that as they near home, see home now not just with home-eyes but as a cluster of potential obstacles to these new things they find they can't not value, certain changes no longer seem like violence from without but necessary negotiations of priorities within an expanded set of concerns. Within a wider home.
It's often costly. I did try to keep in mind that it really can feel like (hence be) a sort of injury, when it works, which you tend to not ever see when it does. Here too Hazlitt's wording is characteristically exact: "not the greatest injury."
Probably Borges was distantly echoing him when he talked about how people are more hospitable with their imaginations than their sense of what's what. "Indifferent matters" you find yourself able to care about enough to discuss and imagined matters sufficiently veridical to have opinions about sound like they might blend some. Which may explain why keeping matters indifferent is practically an ethical principle of its own in fiction, though one that often looks like it's excluding ethics itself.
Got reminded of Hazlitt by some of Louis C.K.'s comedy we were watching earlier. Mean as it seems, to a fascinating extent he's teaching not liberal values but the forms of reasoning that lead to them, while appearing like (and maybe often even thinking) he isn't. All might fall to pieces if he seemed like he thought he was, in fact - if the matters didn't stay unmistakably indifferent. Hazlitt hid the extent of his radicalism and hated Shelley for not doing the same. But both have their place: Benito Cereno was a much more effective anti-slavery argument for keeping itself so fascinatingly isolated from all the Garrison-type ones. For not looking like an argument at all, in fact.
Because it is indifferent, impartial. One party is not and has never been a party. Which is why it's usually so bad at functioning as one - but that's another topic.
I came to this conclusion in South Carolina, but could never have phrased it so well. It becomes less true the less South Carolinian your surroundings are, but there remains a lot to it. Get people to accept that they already adhere to pretty rigid standards of evidence in areas obviously requiring it (e.g. the justice system, interpersonal conflicts), get them to define just what those are, get them seeing some immediately contiguous areas they might also apply to, then more and more distant...
Till they see the only tracks the lay of the land will allow will require some reconstruction in their own town. Even some demolishings of beloved but, in the long or broad views they've been talked into taking, on balance harmful structures. Board them elsewhere, show them where they might go. So that as they near home, see home now not just with home-eyes but as a cluster of potential obstacles to these new things they find they can't not value, certain changes no longer seem like violence from without but necessary negotiations of priorities within an expanded set of concerns. Within a wider home.
It's often costly. I did try to keep in mind that it really can feel like (hence be) a sort of injury, when it works, which you tend to not ever see when it does. Here too Hazlitt's wording is characteristically exact: "not the greatest injury."
Probably Borges was distantly echoing him when he talked about how people are more hospitable with their imaginations than their sense of what's what. "Indifferent matters" you find yourself able to care about enough to discuss and imagined matters sufficiently veridical to have opinions about sound like they might blend some. Which may explain why keeping matters indifferent is practically an ethical principle of its own in fiction, though one that often looks like it's excluding ethics itself.
Got reminded of Hazlitt by some of Louis C.K.'s comedy we were watching earlier. Mean as it seems, to a fascinating extent he's teaching not liberal values but the forms of reasoning that lead to them, while appearing like (and maybe often even thinking) he isn't. All might fall to pieces if he seemed like he thought he was, in fact - if the matters didn't stay unmistakably indifferent. Hazlitt hid the extent of his radicalism and hated Shelley for not doing the same. But both have their place: Benito Cereno was a much more effective anti-slavery argument for keeping itself so fascinatingly isolated from all the Garrison-type ones. For not looking like an argument at all, in fact.
Because it is indifferent, impartial. One party is not and has never been a party. Which is why it's usually so bad at functioning as one - but that's another topic.
