GRE写作 issue 165

"In any given field, the leading voices come from people who are motivated not by conviction but by the desire to present opinions and ideas that differ from those held by the majority."     

I agree with the statement insofar as our leading voices tend to come from people whose  ideas depart from the status quo. However, I do not agree that what motivates these  iconoclasts is a mere desire to be different; in my view they are driven primarily by their personal convictions. Supporting examples abound in all areas of human endeavor-- including politics, the arts, and the physical sciences.

   When it comes to political power, I would admit that a deep-seated psychological need to be noticed or to be different sometimes lies at the heart of a person's drive to political power and fame. For instance, some astute presidential historians have described Clinton as a man motivated more by a desire to be great than to accomplish great things. And many psychologists attribute Napoleon's and Mussolini's insatiable lust for power to a so-called "short-man complex"--a need to be noticed and admired in spite of one's small physical stature.

Nevertheless, for every leading political voice driven to new ideas by a desire to be noticed or to be different, one can cite many other political leaders clearly driven instead by the courage of their convictions. Iconoclasts Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, for example, secured prominent places in history by challenging the status quo through civil disobedience. Yet no reasonable person could doubt that it was the conviction of their ideas that drove these two leaders to their respective places.

  Turning to the arts, mavericks such as Dali, Picasso and Warhol, who departed from established rules of composition, ultimately emerge as the leading artists. And our most influential popular musicians are the ones who are flagrantly "different." Consider, for example, jazz pioneers Thelonius Monk and Miles Davis, who broke all the harmonic rules, or folk musician-poet Bob Dylan, who established a new standard for lyricism. Were all these leading voices driven simply by a desire to be different? Perhaps; but my intuition is that creative urges are born not of ego but rather of some intensely personal commitment to an aesthetic ideal.

  As for the physical sciences, innovation and progress can only result from challenging conventional theories--that is, the status quo. Newton and Einstein, for example, both refused to blindly accept what were perceived at their time as certain rules of physics. As a result, both men redefined those rules. Yet it would be patently absurd to assert that these two scientists were driven by a mere desire to conjure up "different" theories than those of their contemporaries or predecessors. Surely it was a conviction that their theories were better that drove these geniuses to their places in history.

   To sum up, when one examines history's leading voices it does appear that they typically bring to the world something radically different than the status quo. Yet in most cases this sort of iconoclasm is a byproduct of personal conviction, not iconoclasm for its own sake.