The following is excerpted from the Deseret News. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
Dear students,
The confusion and cacophony of conflicting opinions that you see around you today has had a deep effect on all of you. It’s natural that it would. Americans disagree dramatically on an amazingly broad range of questions, including many of the most important ones.
Is climate change an urgent threat to national security, or a noble lie concocted by activists? Is socialism the path to prosperity for all, or to poverty for all but the ruling class? Is the U.S. the least racist country on Earth, or a country founded to preserve slavery? On issue after issue, where half the country feels strongly in one way, the other half passionately affirms the opposite. We disagree on the questions where we most badly and urgently need the truth.
Given what you see, it can be hard to take seriously the idea that there could be such a thing as “objective truth,” even on some of the questions where we most want to say that there is. If there is a definite, right way to understand the world, how can so many people be completely wrong, and why do our debates seem to go nowhere?
One of the central aims of education is to be able to see beyond the blindness of the cultural moment. And our culture at this moment is seriously blind. Given how deeply and broadly we disagree, there’s no question that at least half of us are seriously wrong about a significant number of deeply important issues. However, if you think the disagreement you see around you is proof that there is no objective truth, you are giving people too much credit.
To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
