Howard Gardner on Richard Heffner’s Open Mind

[HEFFNER:] Of course, I realized as I read this quite compelling attack on determinism – with its insistence that “Human agency matters enormously” – that today I must first ask my friend whether his new book isn’t in a most fundamental sense a sort of would-be antidote to the despair he and his colleagues in Harvard’s famous “GoodWork Project” must have felt in their discoveries about what really motivates so many of today’s professional workers. Fair … or not, Howard?

GARDNER: It is true that for 15 years my colleagues and I have been studying what we call “GoodWork” and it’s a study of what happens to professions when they’re under huge pressure from market forces. Whether it’s law, journalism, philanthropy, even the clergy … when accountability and profit and loss and degree of visibility become the dominating motivations for professions … then the kind of thing which I respect … namely professions that try to be disinterested, that try to do the right thing even if it may not be the most profitable thing … the, the professions are really in extremis.

And both my discussion of truth and my discussion of goodness really address this issue in the 21st century. Beauty is a separate question.

HEFFNER: I wondered about that, I wondered whether … seriously … whether this book was … as I say, an antidote to those awful, awful feelings you must have gotten from the responses to your Harvard inquiry.

GARDNER: Well, let’s be specific. Truth is being attacked in two ways. On the one hand there is the post modern critique which says, “Who decides what’s true?” It’s just a question of power … you know, who ever controls the microphone, whoever controls the press … they determine what’s truth.

On the other hand, there are the new digital media … the Internet, the web … things like Wikipedia … where anything can be put forth, whether or not has truth … “truthiness” or complete falsity.

And this makes the establishment of truth very, very difficult.