Jan,

Reading your post, I have the feeling that you are asking me to accept all 
stories as equally valid.

Some stories are simply false.

The world is filled with neo-Nazis who claim there was no Holocaust. (Some 
of them are even winning elections in Germany!) This story certainly has a 
tradition and a habit. I’m not going to learn to live with it, though. The 
Jews, gypsies, gays, and retarded people who went up in smoke at Auschwitz 
and the other camps did not simply self-combust.

Moving forward in time, you can also look at a few cases where people tell 
different stories for different reasons.

George W Bush and Dick Cheney are certainly telling stories about the war in 
Iraq. Their story is that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction 
that forced America into a preemptive war for self-defense. UN inspector 
Hans Blix told a different story. He said that he found no evidence of such 
weapons.

The difference between these stories was more than cultural. One story was 
true. One story was false. But Bush had “an agreement with the listeners 
that implies an effort on their part to hear and understand the story.” 
Bush’s listeners included the American military forces.

Perhaps I’m wrong about this, but epistemological relativism and universal 
tolerance sets up some mighty difficult problems for people who live in a 
world where other people have more powerful armies.

Taking an aphorism out of context gives the misleading idea that Einstein 
thought that everything has many descriptions and that each of these 
descriptions is right. Einstein did not believe this. He had clear ideas 
about many issues, in many cases, he believed that these ideas described a 
real and physical universe. He believed that some descriptions were right 
and others wrong.

Either Bush’s weapons of mass destruction existed or they didn’t. For those 
with a kid brother or little sister coming home in a box, the story of those 
weapons adds up to more than “learning to LIVE WITH many narratives all of 
which have their own symmetry and aesthetic.”

From Budapest, where people still worry about Nazis.

Cindy Jackson





Perhaps its any port in a storm so to
speak. Dualism is an anachronistic concept which has at its base either/or, 
in a world which is one globe with
people
who are
whether they like it or not, connected through the commonality of their 
physical makeup (demonstrated in their ability to procreate with each other 
regardless of differences of
any kind other than gender and even this distinction is under question) and 
connected through the reality
of the effects of what has been termed Chaos theory; so reconciling diverse 
processes and
understandings by finding a hierarchy or even reconciling two methods by 
synthesising reason and experience and calling it knowledge production still
disenfranchises other knowledge. Humans are great storytellers - everywhere. 
Every storyteller in
every culture sets up an agreement with the listeners that implies an effort 
on their part to hear and
understand the story. Whatever the methods to create knowledge, including 
tradition, habit, religion,
experimentation, play, guess, and of course the intellect and experience, 
and more, looking for the
WAY to KNOWLEDGE becomes far less important (in my opinion) than learning to 
LIVE WITH
many narratives all of which have their own symmetry and aesthetic.

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