does it matter
knowing you are right or wrong.
as you wave your rights happily in proving a point -
another is labelled wrong.
does it matter?
does it make you feel better that while another shows you limitations
and a boundary -
all you see is a right or wrong.
***
a senseless argument this morning is making me wonder why i even bother arguing sometimes. is it so important to be right all the time. or is it perhaps more important to try and understand that an argument is merely a showcase of two entities displaying a threshold... a limitation, a boundary, a viewpoint... neccessary internal markers of what makes an individual an indivdual. such a paradox... a case for why individuals need to be together/coexist in order to remain individuals.
***
chapter one of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis comes to mind... I leave an exercpt here.
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CHAPTER ONE - The Law of Human Nature
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"Every one has heard people quarreling. Sometimes it sounds funny and
sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we
can learn something from listening to the kind of things they say. They
say things like this: 'How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?' -
'That's my seat, I was there first' - 'Leave him alone, he isn't doing you
any harm' - 'Why should you shove in first?' - 'Give me a bit of your
orange, I gave you a bit of mine' - 'Come on, you promised.' People say
things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and
children as well as grown-ups.
Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes
them is not merely saying that the other man's behaviour does not happen to
please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he
expects the other man to know about. and the other man very seldom
replies: 'To hell with your standard.' Nearly always he tries to make out
that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or
that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some
special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat
first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was
given the bit of orange, or, that something has turned up which lets him
off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties
had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or
morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed.
And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals,
but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarreling
means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would
be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of
agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense
in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some
agreement about the rules of football....
