Errol Morris' transcript of his commencement address at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
Excerpt-
Truth. It has become fashionable nowadays to speak of the subjectivity or the relativity of truth. I find such talk ridiculous at best. Let’s go back to Randall Dale Adams. He found himself within days of being executed in “Old Sparky,” the electric chair in Walls Unit, Huntsville Texas.
There is nothing post-modern about the electric chair. It takes a living human being and turns him into a piece of meat. Imagine you – you the young journalists of tomorrow – being strapped into an electric chair for a crime you didn’t commit. Would you take comfort from a witness telling you that it really doesn’t make any difference whether you are guilty or innocent?
3 comments:
Morris gives a truthful commencement address; however, that quote, I feel, could be used as fundamentalist fodder, if taken out of context. As Pete shows by quoting the second paragraph, Morris is talking about the truth of actual, definable actions. As a journalist your principle job is to try to find out what actually happened.
He is not talking about the subjectivity of ...say, moral behavior or the relativity of ...well, simultaneous events to people in relative motion. He is talking about the truth of whether a person actually did perform a murder.
Somewhere between these two ideas -- (1) that all knowledge boils down to nothing more than subjective interests and perspectives; and (2) that by reason and careful observation we can eliminate all subjectivity and distortion and know reality as it is apart from us -- lies the truth.
"Every individual choice between competing theories depends on a mixture of objective and subjective factors, or of shared and individual criteria.” Thomas Kuhn
Well said... now if only we could be certain that is the truth.
Post a Comment