This is just something I've been thinking about. In the UK, we had this big outpouring of grief for Princess Diana, even those that had never met her were somehow 'altered forever' by her death etc. More recently, the whole city of Liverpool was afflicted by much the same thing over the execution of the British hostage in Iraq, Ken Bigley. There was a day of mourning, random people in the street were saying how much their lives had been affected by it etc, even though in a city the size of Liverpool, the number of people who actually knew him would be very small.
Then I just read this article (
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4183495.stm) in which the president of Harvard said that women might be genetically predisposed to be slightly worse in science and maths (based on research and the fact that they generally perform worse in these areas).
A quote from a passage in the article:
Quote:
Nancy Hopkins, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was one of the academics who walked out of the conference.
She said that, had she not done so, she "would have either blacked out or thrown up".
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I mean,
come on!!
I know that if somebody told me that men were genetically predisposed to do worse at English it really wouldn't bother me, and it definitely wouldn't make me black out... Its either dramatism at its worst, or she's so ardently feminist that she really
would have become ill at his statement, in which case one would have to conclude that her feminism is unhealthy!
So, my questions to you good people are:
(a) Have the general public reached a point where they are so emotionally fragile that they clutch at a shared feeling of loss to substitute in the place of something missing in their lives?
(b) If we have reached the point where personal views are held so strongly they can make you ill (feminism in this case, but there are plenty of others), is this a 'bad thing' and is it symptomatic of a greater malaise in society? (I was thinking here of the massive increase in use of and reliance on psychologists etc for example)
Note1: I've nothing particularly against feminism - it just happened to be the example that cropped up in the article. Note2: Discussing the actual merits of what the president said or the merits of feminism in general would sortof be offtopic from the real issues I was musing, so please keep to a minimum if possible! Thanks [img]smile.gif[/img]
[ 01-18-2005, 09:29 AM: Message edited by: shamrock_uk ]