-m-

On Changing Minds

by Mark DrzycimskiMay 01, 2006

Revised for clarity. I should learn how to write. -m

Anyone who reads this must think that all I do is read Doug Wilson’s blog. I assure you that this isn’t entirely true. But I’m drawn to it, because he says things that I find to be insightful, at least within my own experiences:

One of great mistakes I made was that of not recognizing that different doctrinal positions (on different subjects) are like different chemicals. And when you change one of them (and have all your Bible verses in a row) you need to be aware of the new interactions between that new position and some of your old positions that were previously just sitting there.

And, as a bonus, he has a short note on the Greek system of temperaments:

Another milestone screwup had to do with a particular theory of temperaments. A Christian writer named O’Hallesby had popularized an ancient Greek notion of temperament, in which the human race is divided up into four basic temperaments—sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic. Or to take the insights of another great writer on the human condition—Tigger, Rabbit, Eeyore, and Pooh.

He goes on to say that he found the Greek system too limiting, and the categories were too definitive, i.e. a Sanguine can never act like a Phlegmatic, etc. In this, I’m inclined to agree. I was first introduced to the Greek temperament system via Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars (good sci-fi, if a tad liberal and preachy). Robinson plots the temperaments against Greimas’ semiotic square (a better illustration here). In Robinson’s application, there was much more room for a “fuzzy” assignment of temperament. For example, not everyone is wholly sanguine—everyone has times of introversion to some degree. Or so I hope. By the end of the paragraph, Wilson seems to be supporting this view as well, though he has discarded the utilization of temperaments in favor of a… well, he doesn’t really favor any temperament system at all. Which is, I guess, his prerogative, but where are we without our shortcuts and generalizations? Mr. Global/Analytical would like to know.

Eagle-eyed readers, and people who have short term memories of over 15 minutes, will notice that I’ve completely removed the last sentence of this post in favor of this rather long-winded notification of the fact that the sentence was removed. In the aforementioned sentence, I implied that like-minded people tended to make each other “soft”. Which to an extent I still agree with, but upon further review I realized that this is not necessarily always the case, and that many times like-minded people can goad each other on. Helping each other “Further Up and Further In” as it were.

CommentCategory: Diversions