Integrating best parts of all ideas may resolve debates

Editor,

I've been reading the Opinion section in the Daily Lobo since 1986, and it seems that our campus, like much of our culture, splits into three main camps.

First are the traditionalists. They stand for order, purpose, one absolute truth and one code of conduct. Second are the modernists. They stand for rationality and often for individual excellence and achievement. Third come the postmodernists. They stand for communitarian feelings of equality, relativism and pluralism.

You'd think the postmodernists, being pluralistic, could unite us. But postmodernists, including most UNM humanities professors, react as negatively when challenged as the other two camps. Postmodernists turn pluralism into an absolute. Relativism becomes the only truth. And so, postmodernism plunges easily into "whateverism."

Let's give the postmodernists their due - interpretation matters. In fact, it's intrinsic to our experience. But why can't we fully appreciate all values, including the strong moral values of the traditionalists and the rationality and achievement ethos of the modernists? Why can't we see the necessary role of the values of all three camps? Maybe then we'd weave them into something functional for each time, place and situation in our lives.

The key is to operate from a deep sense of unity with all people, with nature, with dynamic flowing experience and with the deity or formlessness that connects all three. If we really sense that unity, we automatically exercise concerned responsibility for nature and life. If we really sense that unity, we automatically exercise compassionate responsibility for family, co-workers, neighbors and people around the world.

Integrating the best of traditional, modern and postmodern, I suggest, will lead to an evolution in thought and awareness, which might resolve a whole host of debates that rage across these pages.

Mike Weber

UNM alumni