Communities of Truth
While listening to AKMA’s seminar at BloggerCon, it occurred to me that blogging communities can perhaps be differentiated by their metaphysics around truth. AKMA naturally has gathered ’round himself a set of people who may disagree about spiritual issues but who tacitly accept that faith does not give you an unequivocal spot on G-d’s own ladder so that you may peer down upon all the benighted souls who disagree with you. Rather, the people in AKMA’s informal cluster tend to believe (I think) that the nature of truth is itself a topic on the table. Another knot around some other set of bloggers may assume that there is one and only one truth, and that it looks exactly the same for all. That cluster will also have its range of topics, but the nature of the knot is different because of the difference in their philosophies of truth.
(One of the best things Akma crystallized for me is his saying that he tries to keep his students from understanding things too simply. I’m afraid that in the above paragraph I have made the simple complicated…but in an unfortunate perversion of Akma’s sense.)
Categories: Uncategorized dw
David – your choice of the very suggestive metaphor of the knot provokes a question about the extent to which clusters that form “knots” are able to sustain an open dialogue with other clusters formed around different knots. If a knot is the opposite of something loosely joined, then it seems legitimate to ask to what extent communities of like-minded individuals owe their existence to an intricate tightening that precludes openness to the constitutive truths of other groups. Might some of the energy that goes into knot formation work against the possibility of loosely joining other groups, even, say, in dialogue?
Hmm, I wasn’t thinking of a knot in a rope but of a knot of people physically clustered around some public event – I wonder if that particular metaphorical use arose around the gibbet – but what the hey, your question is poifect anyway.
Obviously I don’t have an answer. We need common ground to talk – common language, common assumptions. We even need some common interests, although conversations can generate common interests (and commonality of interests). Yet, we also need divergence. It’s exactly the same problem that all learning faces: we can only understand the new because we know so much of the old.
My blog entry was trying to suggest that one of the distinguishing marks of a webby circle (avoiding “knot”!) is the extent to which it is aware of this very issue.
(Tom, great to hear from you! It’s been too long since we’ve e-talked.)
Mmm…
“It is more complicated than that.”
Yep. I think I have heard AKMA say that once or twice. Truth is revealed. Yet it is seldom understood…at least not in its fullness…or some such Christian hooha. I love Christian hooha, mind you.
One thing about comments in blogs is, in internet access challenged environs, e.g., in rural Mexico where I now happen to be, and where everything seems to impede being online too much, by the time the opportunity to actually comment offers itself, the invincible arrow of blogtime has moved on.
However, David, I will “knot” let a knot of people be disentangled from a knot of the more usual sort. A metaphor is no less operative just because we weren’t thinking it. More soon!