my orientation to the world, A human Strategy, Matt Berry, aphorism 196
196
I spin the globe on my desk. North is up and south is down. To what extent my orientation to the world has been set by the ethnocentricity of Europe I cannot begin to imagine. Had America been discovered from the ports of Australia I would perhaps have to read the globe while standing on my head to see what I now see. But a responsible assumption serves me well. The need to appropriate an orientation outweighs the obligation to justify that orientation. One must begin somewhere, but do we see that our beginning is necessarily smug? ... that the beginning is a privilege granting too much license? ... that before our personal science begins we have already made the choice: we either affirm reality by our opposing it — as one confronts an opponent and thereby grows stronger as a reality — or we oppose reality with a frantic desire to fly from it and thereby ...