Pinker, Blake and Moebius
[ by Charles Cameron — looks like I’ll have an “Author’s blog” up soon to accompany a book I’m working on, and it’ll be called “Seeing Double” — which is what this post is about ]
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Steven Pinker, I’m sorry to say, appears to be one of those…
One can imagine a world in which oracles, soothsayers, prophets, popes, visionaries, imams, or gurus have been vouchsafed with the truth which only they possess and which the rest of us would be foolish, indeed, criminal, to question. History tells us that this is not the world we live in. Selfproclaimed truthers have repeatedly been shown to be mistaken — often comically so — by history, science, and common sense.
The characters I’m interested in here are the visionaries — and my point is that truth as fact is not the only truth there is.
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Can “history, science and common sense” really detract from the “truth” of this image by Blake?
or this, by Moebius?
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Pinker is interesting — that single para of his just gave me a chance to rant — so let me return you to his whole piece.
I have other disagreements with him, no doubt, but he’s a mind to be engaged with.
