The glass can sometime be always half empty By Prof Dr Sohail Ansari

(I LAUGH BUT BELATEDLY BY DR SOHAIL ANSARI part 2)

 “Everyone and all members of the human race, including the pious and the sinner, are endowed with dignity, nobility and honour, which cannot be made exclusive to any particular group or class of people”. The Quran commentator, Shihab al-Din al-Alusi ‘Dignity is not earned by meritorious conduct; it is established as an expression of God’s grace as a natural and absolute right of every human person as of the moment of birth. It is God-given, hence, no individual or state may take it away from anyone’. MOHMMAD HASHIM KAMALI’.‘Everyone has their own worth and the way it may be perceived differs, but it can't be taken away’  MICHAEL KOREN

 A responder said:

“We read our opinion of the world is formed by experiencing the world in our own way, it is not that we do not read, it is that we read different authors, and read and understand them differently’’

Human beings seem to have the same organs and cells, ability to reason just like any other person; but the question is: ‘why do people have different interpretations for a common situation? Or why do people  have quite contrasting and at times slightly different interpretation for the same piece of information.

What precisely accounts for this?

Patricia Eyamba says: ‘We are influenced by our world view and the information we have about a particular issue. Whether written or not this knowledge is kept in our subconscious and that influences our interpretations’.

Daniele Ortu says: ‘Although we may think of papers and books as objective forms of stimulation, we respond to stimulation differently based on our different histories’ or people draw upon their background and experiences as Gwendolyn says to interpret information.

 Yaron Shlomi states: ‘The interpretations are informed by associations to our previous experiences, thoughts  etc... every one has his own associations  differ from mine’.

Many people though such as ‘economists more than those in any other discipline are apt to view every issue from the standpoint of whatever "school of thought" they subscribe to’. The same can be said to religious people.

Charles Herrman sees things differently when he thinks that ‘biological factors are ever at work when presenting the same written material at which variant interpretations result. While experience and background can be assumed to play into such differences, of course, we still can ask, and should ask, to what extent biological differences at an individual level -- or shared biological differences within groups -- can account for differences’.

Stendhal (On Love) was a brilliant Frenchman who tried to explain love and infatuation in terms of what he called "crystallization", by which he meant what a theorist in behavior will describe as interactions between "projections" and "identifications".

Every psychologist knows these concepts and applies them similarly, if more broadly, than Stendhal. What most psychologists do not do, however, is place these two curious biological interlocutors in still broader biological contexts that would give far more meaning and relevance to how they really work for in ways that can also account for the very phenomenon of different interpretation.

Social constructivism is a sociological theory of knowledge according to which human development is socially situated and knowledge is constructed through interaction with others.

Paul George Munro applies a Social constructivism. to understand why people have different interpretations.

‘An (Artefactual) social constructivist perspective argues that while reality exists, it is something we can never fully grasp as we are all condition by our preconceived biases. Therefore, we all view the same piece of paper through different social lenses (although people with similar training/backgrounds might view the same piece of paper in similar ways). Knowledge creation, therefore, is a discursive process and some of the more taken-for-granted knowledge in society can be linked to hegemonic perspectives, not indisputable facts’.

Researcher like  Giuseppe Laquidara  even has given an interpretation of this phenomenon in bio-physics.

Murid James writes: The ebb and flow of tides, influenced by the moon, shows a continuous and ever changing pattern. The ebb and flow of people’s lives, influenced by their cultural scripts, also reveals patterns. The patterns reveal script and script are based on interpretation of history, not necessarily on historical events.

What all these experts say prove the responder right; however, he is not absolutely right.

Patterns differ because of scripts and scripts differ because of interpretations; however, if people always differ, there would never be the universal values.

Isaiah Berlin writes in ‘Perspectives on Human Sexuality’: "...universal values....are values that a great many human beings in the vast majority of places and situations, at almost all times, do in fact hold in common, whether consciously and explicitly or as expressed in their behavior..." 

Though spheres of human value encompass morality, aesthetic preference, human traits, human endeavour, social order and human dignity,  Charles Herrman believes:

‘It stands to reason that a criterion is needed that can serve as a common denominator for weighing or assessing different values or ideals. Dignity is offered as a possible candidate, to be presented from religio-legal and cross-cultural vantages and provides a widely-accepted groundwork for ethics and morality’.

Dignity is seen to be the common denominator for weighing or assessing different values or ideals; therefore, whenever dignity is trampled; people don’t differ in reactions: all (except the perverted ones) condemn unanimously.

“We read our opinion of the world is formed by experiencing the world in our own way, it is not that we do not read, it is that we read different authors, and read and understand them differently’’

No one would read differently (except the perverted ones) what DENEEN L. BROWN says.

DENEEN L. BROWN WRITES IN ‘THE history of racial violence:

’“Abusive plantation owner, Hampton Smith, was shot and killed,” according to the NAACP. “A week-long manhunt resulted in the killing of the husband of Mary Turner, Hayes Turner. Mary Turner denied that her husband had been involved in Smith’s killing, publicly opposed her husband’s murder, and threatened to have members of the mob arrested.

The next day, a mob came after Mary Turner. The mob tied her ankles, hung her upside down from a tree, doused her in gasoline and motor oil and set her on fire. Turner was still alive when a member of the mob split her abdomen open with a knife and her unborn child fell on the ground. The baby was stomped and crushed as it fell to the ground. Turner’s body was riddled with hundreds of bullets.”

Edgar Chambers is right to say:

Two people,a so-called "conservative" and "liberal" pair will look at the same data and give different interpretations based on their desired outcomes. To generalize, to a common example, pessimists see the "glass half empty" and optimists see the "glass half full". This is based on expected desired outcomes. The pessimist will view the half empty glass as showing that things are going downhill and something has been removed because the "desired outcome" for the pessimist is negative. The optimist will view the half full glass (the same amount as in the half empty glass) as showing that things are moving up and something is either added or still there because the "desired outcome" for the optimist is positive’.

No doubt, our expected outcomes also impact our view of the world, but one cannot give different interpretations of when he reads that ‘Turner was still alive when a member of the mob split her abdomen open with a knife and her unborn child fell on the ground’