Beside the hole

For those of you who have been suffering through these "hole" posts (not post holes ... please note the difference), you have to be asking yourself about this time, just where is all of this leading. All I can say is that that is a another excellent question. Nevertheless, I'm going to try and answer it, and to do so, I'm going to make use of two very popular words ... at least popular these days ... for the simple reason that they will be used in a sense much closer to their original intent than is thought of today.

What have we got? Fundamentally, our beliefs drive our opinions, regardless of the facts; what is more, the facts, in and of themselves, are of little value, they just are. On the one hand, then, we have those who believe in the stability of their beliefs, that their beliefs are the right beliefs, that the reason anything functions as well as it does is because of how they believe. We'll call these folks "conservatives"; that is, those who think that things should pretty much stay the way they are. On the other hand, we have those who believe that just because a lot of folks believe something doesn't necessarily make it right; there could be different things to believe at different times or in different places. We'll call these people "relativists". (Gotcha, didn't I? Admit it, you thought I was going to write something very different.)

What's wrong with this picture? What should be wrong with it, you may be asking. It looks just fine to me. Well, if we stop and reflect for just a moment, why should there be only two positions to take on this: conservatism and relativism? Why isn't there another, if not other, way(s) of looking at all of this? Well, there is. And it's what we're going to call, for lack of a better word, realism. Yes, it's just that simple to redefine somebody else's words. We should never forget that language is just that: language, a way of expressing our understanding of reality. And, in deference to the master, George Carlin, I might add we can't say things in our own words, just in those words that everyone else uses as well.

So, there we have it: conservatives, relativists, and realists. How do we know who's right? Can we know what's right? How do we decide what's right? Those are the pressing questions for the moment. The short answer is: we don't.