New Statesman – Stretch of the imagination

Shared by JohnH

HatTip to Dave Lull

Every aphorism here is about a Procrustean bed of sorts – we humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp, commoditised ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies and pre-packaged narratives, which, on occasion, has explosive con­sequences. Further, we seem unaware of this backward fitting – much as if tailors who take great pride in delivering the perfectly fit­ting suit did so by surgically altering the limbs of their customers. For instance, few realise that we are changing the brains of schoolchildren through medication in order to make them adjust to the curriculum, rather than the reverse.

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