Our moral duty to seek Truth
Thought for the day
Those of us who came of age in the sixties in the USA grew up in an environment of epistemological-political-ideological-religious consensus. Even though there were disagreements within that consensus, serious enough to cause arguments, we all took as given that truth transcended such differences. We could not imagine a world in which any responsible person would be speaking “my truth,” based on “lived experiences.”
The first challenge to the consensus was the civil rights movement, with Dr. King its leader. This challenge was not epistemological in character, because it accepted the basic premises of the American republic. It was a question of erroneous laws and customs with respect to race that needed to be rectified. And the nation came to consensus on this point in a period of approximately fifteen years (1954-1969), with new laws and norms.
It was the Vietnam War that provoked a collapse of the epistemological consensus. The war raised the question of the poss…