Achieving a human understanding

A quote from Marie Curie referenced by Felipe Fernàndez-Armesto in his book "A Foot in the River":

"There is nothing to be feared. It is only to be understood.

Another by Isaiah Berlin who explains why we should accept and adopt pluralism:

There is a plurality of values, which men can and do seek...And the difference it makes is that if a man pursues one of these values, I, who do not, am able to understand why he pursues it or what it would be like, in his circumstances, for me to be induced to pursue it. Hence the possibility of human understanding."

Felipe Fernàndez-Armesto goes on:

This position differs from cultural relativism. It does not say, for instance, that all cultures can be accommodated. One might exclude Nazism, say, or cannibalism. It leaves open the possibility of peaceful argument about which culture, if any, is best. It claims, in Berlin's words, 'that the multitude values are objective, part of the essence of humanity rather than arbitrary creations of men's subjective fancies'."

(All quotes are from Chapter 8, "Towards the planet of apes")

See also this old blog post that is relevant to this topic.

Additional quotes from "A foot in the river" by Felipe Fernández-Armesto

"There is no reason for God and Darwin to be rival deities--except in the minds clouded by passion"

Chapter 5, The Limits of Evolution

The effort to invoke biology to explain history has failed because it is basically ill conceived. History, to quote a collaboration between an eminent scientist and an eminent historian, is 'too generally messy' for scientific treatment. Societies do not change by transmission and inheritance, but by acquisition and acculturation. History seems unDarwinian precisely because it is a story of the survival of the unfittest. The societies we class as least evolved, least complex, least developed, with fewest parts, last longer--while elaborate civilizations become playgrounds and photo-ops for romancers amid ruins. Culture is just too different from organic life to invite the same kind of explanation. Cells are self-organizing systems that adapt to survive and resist permeation by hostile intrusions from outside. Cultures, by contrast, are built for chaos and as prone to self-destruction as to survival.

Chapter 5, The Limits of Evolution

Quotes from "A foot in the river" by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

"Maybe there no causes to know, or, at least, maybe much that happens is uncaused. Anyone who thinks that everything is explicable as the result of something else--who sees causation as the 'cement of the universe', making each event adhere closely to the next--may be the victim of an unwarranted assumption. 'Just-so' explanations may be the only true ones." (Chapter 3)

A quote from early in Chapter 3 where the author starts to develop his theory that future human events might not be predictable, a theory that goes opposite to that of Pierre-Simon Laplace but is in line (albeit for different reasons) with that of Karl Popper.

"Empathy is the heart of understanding" (Chapter 3)

 A quote that summarizes, according to the author, a principle of anthropological field work as well as of life followed by Franz Boas.