My first posts on this blog are going to start relatively personal–because I feel the need to write out (even just to understand myself)–what has influenced my perspective? Where does my bias come from?
So, I plan to lay out exactly how my background has influenced that perspective, with the intention of being able to look at it in a few months and see where the ideas have gone, if anywhere, how they have changed and if maybe if I just forgot about them.
First of all, I knew that I wanted to be involved in academia in an informal setting: It has been said so much, but school has standardized learning to the point where it is no longer effective. I was good at school–I got A’s, I did very well several Advanced Placement exams and was always in honors courses and won awards. I was in the honors program in college and took advanced level classes. I got to the point where I was so focused on that 4.0 (that I, in fact, never did achieve). I believe I got to the point where if I hadn’t learned it in class–I hadn’t learned it properly. In high school, I remember the honors classes were the ‘smart’ classes. The vanity in me liked being in the ‘smart’ classes, but it also made me feel uncomfortable because truly, on the inside I didn’t feel that smart. I’d study the facts so hard, spit them out the way my teacher wanted them, but I’d miss the stuff in between.
After my junior or so year in college, I got sick of pure academia. I knew if I were to pursue an academic discipline, I would have to choose a point of view and use it to dispute other’s point of view in every way I could. It would be like being a lawyer–tunnel vision. Sure, academics consider other points of view, but it seemed to me that they can’t be wishy washy. They can’t consider the gray area, the questions, the stuff in between, the multiple truths that might make up Truth, or it makes their stance seem week. Well–I’m very wishy washy. I always have been. I thought this was a weakness, but is it really?
As with everything, I think that in moderation wishy-washy-ness is a good thing. I think it means that you can understand that not everything is black and white. That there is an inherent interconnected-ness between what we know. So what do we do? We must understand that possibilities are out there–and we be a little bit wishy-washy to get as close as we can to the Truth.
Now having said all this, I have immense respect for academics. It’s just not for me. They further the discipline, bring in new ideas–and ultimately more new and exciting questions to explore.
So to end this first blog post, I’ll reference one of my favorite museum experiences I’ve had that was honest about the fact that they didn’t know the Truth. That there were multiple possibilities, and for the sake of the exhibition had to choose one.
Le Site Archéologique de la cathédral St. Pierre
Geneva, Switzerland
http://www.site-archeologique.ch/contenu.php?id-node=3
They have opened up the excavations underneath the Cathédral to be a mix between open storage and a museum. The site dates back to the 3rd century B.C.E.–and has been built over 7 or so times if I remember correctly. Therefore, can they really know what it looked like over 2200 years ago? Probably not, but with research they have a decent guess. One of the ‘audiovisual shows’ located dans le site shows the curators speaking about how difficult it was to put this together based on different interpretations–then they made a model of an old interpretation and displayed it to show how different it was! After viewing this, I already loved the idea of le site, but now I had a lot of respect for it. They owned up to the wishy-washy-ness in the Cathedral’s archaeological record and explained how they made the decision that they did. Merci, Genève!
Thanks for reading this if you did…hopefully my posts will improve with practice 
