Talking about Nature

     Speaking of nature, I'm still sick :-(.  Anyway it's not the worst thing in the world.  It's forcing me to get up earlier and eat/drink better so I can improve my health.  It's kinda funny how I don't do this as much when I'm not sick but should probably consider it.  I don't know how it is where you live, but here the weather is quite hectic right now.  We go through 2 day periods of a certain temperature then the next 2 days it's either 20 degrees colder or warmer.  I don't think that's helping me, I wish spring/summer was here already.  That's enough rambling from me for now, onto the quote:

     A bit of a precursor might be needed here, so here it goes.  In the paragraph preceding this one the author mentions some of Aristotle's assumptions such as the idea that women had fewer teeth than men, or that a baby would be healthier if it were conceived when the wind was blowing north.

"We must not be too hasty in mocking Aristotle's prejudices.  We have enough of our own, as for example, the equation we moderns make of truth and quantification.  In this prejudice, we come astonishingly close to the mystical beliefs of Pythagoras and his followers who attempted to submit all of life to the sovereignty of numbers.  Many of our psychologists, sociologists, economists and other latter-day cabalists will have numbers to tell them the truth or they will have nothing.  Can you imagine, for example, a modern economist articulating truths about our standard of living by reciting a poem?  Or by telling what happened to him during a late-night walk through East St. Louis?  Or by offering a series of proverbs and parables, beginning with the saying about a rich man, a camel, and the eye of a needle?  The first would be regarded as irrelevant, the second merely anecdotal, the last childish.  Yet these forms of language are certainly capable of expressing truths about economic relationships, as well as any other relationships, and indeed have been employed by various peoples.  But to the modern mind, resonating with different media-metaphors, the truth in economics is believed to be best discovered and expressed in numbers.  Perhaps it is.  I will not argue the point.  I mean only to call attention to the fact that there is a certain measure of arbitrariness in the forms that truth-telling may take.  We must remember that Galileo merely said that the language of nature is written in mathematics.  He did not say everything is.  And even the truth about nature need not be expressed in mathematics.  For most of human history, the language of nature has been the language of myth and ritual.  These forms, one might add, had the virtues of leaving nature unthreatened and of encouraging the belief that human beings are part of it.  It hardly befits a people who stand ready to blow up the planet to praise themselves too vigorously for having found the true way to talk about nature."
~ Neil Postman

   Yes, another long-winded quote.  I guess this simply breaks down to, do we as people know how to talk about nature?  And what forms of language are capable of expressing truths about certain aspects of life?  Are those forms of language changing because of the media we indulge ourselves in? 

Currently listening to: "Killing me softly with his song" by Roberta Flack

-J