[MUD-Dev] "a nicer species" (from today's Chronicle) (fwd)

[J C Lawrence]

------- Forwarded Message
Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2004 11:26:22 -0400
From: rick livingston <Livingston.28 at osu.edu>
Subject: "a nicer species" (from today's Chronicle)
To: NARRATIVE at ctrvax.Vanderbilt.Edu

MAGAZINES & JOURNALS

A glance at the summer issue of "Seed":
The moral clout of storytelling

Storytelling has helped make human beings "a nicer species," says Steven
Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, in a
conversation with Rebecca Goldstein, a visiting professor of philosophy
at Connecticut's Trinity College and the author of several works of
fiction, including "The Mind-Body Problem." They discuss a variety of
topics related to how science and art are grappling with "substantive
questions."

Human behavior has changed in the past millennium, Mr. Pinker
says. "Much of the world has seen an end to slavery, to genocide for
convenience, to torture as a routine form of criminal punishment, to
capital punishment for property crimes, to human sacrifice, to rape as
the spoils of war, to the ownership of women," he writes. "We are
getting less cruel, and the question is how."

Exposure to a wider range of stories has helped people empathize with
groups that they might otherwise have considered "subhuman," he
suggests. "Fiction can be a kind of moral technology."

Ms. Goldstein agrees that storytelling serves a moral purpose.  "To be
in the throes of a story, to have one's emotions provoked by another's
story is not quite ethics, but it's kind of the shadowlife of ethics,"
she writes. "Storytelling is something that can awaken attentiveness,
engagement, and empathy to a life that isn't one's own. And to be
attentive, engaged, empathetic: that is moral."

The article, "The Seed Salon: Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein," is
not online. Information about the magazine is available at
http://www.seedmagazine.com
- --
____________

Rick Livingston
Associate Director
Institute for Collaborative Research
    and Public Humanities
Ohio State University
Tel: 614-247-6763 (ICRPH)
Fax: 614-292-6707
------- End of Forwarded Message


--
J C Lawrence
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.

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