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MattBurkeSecondEssay 9 - 02 Jun 2015 - Main.MattBurke
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| | | I watched Peterson’s posture and expression as he deduced the student’s transgression from the student’s posture and expression. “Get into a fight with a teacher?” Peterson asked. The student nodded. Then the student explained: The teacher had mistakenly accused the student of another student’s misdeeds. Insulted, the student "cursed out" the geometry teacher. | |
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< | Peterson nodded and unfurled to the student a speech. His speech is familiar to high school students and teachers—it's the one about treating an authority figure with respect even when the authority figure errs. The speech was right. The student understood it, so did I. But the student also held his justification close, the geometry teacher was wrong, the student was right, and no speech would change that. | >
> | Peterson nodded and unfurled to the student a speech. His speech is a familiar one to high school students and teachers—the one about treating an authority figure with respect even when the authority figure errs. The speech was right. The student understood it, so did I. But the student also held his justification close, the geometry teacher was wrong, the student was right, and no speech could change that. | | | After Peterson left, I asked the student what he thought of his geometry teacher, the one at whom he’d cursed. He told me. I nodded and listened, but I didn’t reply. | | | Exegesis: Wrong ideas
The realization upon which I premised the first anecdote is one I had while writing it, not while experiencing it. For this reason, the anecdote ends in silence. I wasn't then, nor am I now, sure that anything productive could be said. The second anecdote might as well have ended in silence: I recently spent some time volunteering at the high school and neither faculty nor student had heard from Jon. The notion that either anecdote could end with the saying of some productive truth is, I think, a wrong idea. | |
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< | Someday, I’d like to write a book of wrong ideas—Lamarckian transformation, Ptolemaic geocentrism, and Aquinian scholasticism. My thesis: Wrong ideas struggle to formulate a truth until the truth becomes incompatible with the idea that formulates it. The formula, though essential, is essentially incidental. The struggle to formulate produces the greater insight. But that book is a long game. I mention it here to help introduce a wrong idea about interpersonal behavior, something lying in the interstices of my two anecdotes: We desire others to accept for us that which we struggle to accept for ourselves. | >
> | Someday, I’d like to write a book of wrong idea. My thesis: Wrong ideas struggle to formulate a truth until the truth becomes incompatible with the idea that formulates it. The formula, though essential, is essentially incidental. The struggle to formulate produces the greater insight. But that book is a long game. I mention it here to help introduce a wrong idea about interpersonal behavior, something lying in the interstices of my two anecdotes: We desire others to accept for us that which we struggle to accept for ourselves. | | | | |
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< | If my wrong idea carries any weight, the "no" I said to Jon was a truth I wanted him to accept, just as was my therapist's speech to me and Peterson's to the student, as was my silence concluding the first anecdote. But each touches the wrongness of the idea—its futility. Each one had some truth, and the other could accept it or reject it for the sake of the one, but still the one struggles. | >
> | If my wrong idea carries any weight, the "no" I said to Jon was a truth I wanted him to accept, just as was my therapist's speech to me and Peterson's to the student, as was my silence concluding the first anecdote. But each touches the wrongness of the idea—its futility. Each one had some truth, and the other could accept it or reject it for the sake of the one, but still the one struggled. | | |
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