In reading The Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 25-37),
we might ask, Who was this man "going down from Jerusalem to Jericho,"
who was mugged and left for half dead. What was the date and time of day
of the assault, and what were the hometowns of the priest and Levite
who didn't get involved and passed by. What, we might ask — if we were
cops or criminologists — was the age and economic class of the Samaritan
who "took pity on him. […] and took care of him," that man attacked on
the road? We might indeed ask, but most of us don't, 'cause it'd be dumb
to do so. Jesus's parable is true, but not factual; there's no reason
to believe the event ever happened — it only needs to be plausible — and
there's no need to believe that it did happened. "The Good Samaritan"
story is a parable: a teaching story, a thought experiment on a matter
of ethics and theology.
Even as with The Good Samaritan, I was given as a parable in my education in the sciences the story of scientific studies in days of yore (19th c.? late 18th?) showing that 92.3% of male inmates in mental institutions reported having masturbated, often having masturbated fairly frequently (and one or two have been doing so while being interviewed, but when I went to school such a narrative touch might have been omitted). The story is plausible, given old theories of "masturbatory insanity" and given continuing attempts to find something pathological with jerking off.
Anyway, given that "87.6% of all cited statistics are made up," you can fill in any impressive-sounding stats you like here, and we retain a cautionary tale of problems with our thinking.
First off, you have scientists collecting evidence for what they know to be true, following in the steps of earlier generations of intellectuals that got masturbating sinful by twisting the story in Genesis of Onan, or continuing the error of Aristotle and looking for a goal (telos) with every behavior.
(Cats don't hunt with the goal of eating; they hunt in a beautifully-graded cascade of encoded behaviors, fairly frequently culminating in a kill and a meal; humans sometimes have sex in order to reproduce, but all Mamma Nature requires is that the sex be heterosexual vaginal copulation often enough that babies get conceived — which happens quite enough, thank you, that we humans have been fruitful and multiplied and held dominion over the Earth up the wazoo, whatever else our various "wazoos" have been up to, down to, or rooting around in.)
Second off, getting back to the jerking-off parable — second off, an early Liberal pedant might have pointed out the problem of confusing correlation with causation: Are there so many wankers in insane asylums because whacking off causes insanity, as the social conservatives say, or do people driven mad in other ways then jerk off more? A truly liberated thinker might even have suggested that masturbation was a sensible response to confinement and boredom.
The most important lesson in this parable is that there was no lesson in the statistics: in terms of whacking off, inmates of insane asylums turned out to be pretty much just a normal adult human (male) population.
Since 95% of American males over age-whatever will admit to having masturbated at some time or other — see above on making up statistics —and noting that there's much truth in the joke that most of the other 5% are quadriplegics or lying, then there is no significance to having a population of the certified insane (etc.) with similar stats.
Obviously here, which is why a factoid on stupid early research went into academic folklore, or why some teacher made up a highly plausible and true, if not necessarily factual, parable.
It's a kind of parable that needs repetition, just with different obvious examples with different audiences, because we still make similar mistakes.
E.g., in the early 1970s there was much speculation on just how badly the 1960s education reformers had screwed over American high schools that college professors were seriously trying to determine "Why Johnnie Can't Read" or write or spell or do math. My friend Dan and I had a strong feeling that high school was the institutional equivalent of one of the great dinosaurs, seen when we were growing up as slow-witted lumbering beasts, moving along at low speed but incredible inertia.
"High School," we were convinced, "doesn't change." So we went back to our old high school, and, allowing for hasty generalization, over generalization, and some exaggeration — yeah, "High School doesn't change." At least ours hadn't much: different ethnic mix, murals on the wall, rumors of better-grade weapons among the hoodlums, a new public address system — but that was pretty much it.
Far more scientifically, the great scholar Richard Ohmann wrote an essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled, "The Literacy Crisis Is a Fiction, if Not a Hoax" (25 October 1976). If there were problems with the skills of incoming college frosh — and there were and are — there have been such problems for a long time, and the in-quotation-marks "problem" in the early 1970s wasn't so much with Johnnie as with Jane.
Earlier in the 20th c., the academically best and brightest among women high school graduates were likely to go to college, but, generally, the academically best and brightest only; by the 1960s, college professors were seeing a more normal population of American high school graduates: primarily more women, to some extent more Black and Brown students. The professors often didn't like what they saw and groused, but an earlier generation of professors had groused after World War II and the G.I. bill, and the professors often out-groused and out-curmudgeoned by conservative politicians and editorialists at, say — for those G.I. bill students at the University of Illinois — The Chicago Tribune.
There was a long tradition of complaints every time US college and university admissions had opened up to new groups, and that tradition had come on strong in the early 1970s and has recycled since.
A MORAL here: don't View With Alarm!!! and try to explain a phenomenon until you're sure it's actually happening.
The "Literacy Crisis" of the 1970s wasn't new and it wasn't a crisis and it didn't reflect radical changes in US high schools. That perceived crisis in basic academic skills reflected a chronic failure of American schools over long periods of time to educate normal students to a high academic standard. Over the last eighty years or so, US students have improved at thinking — they keep getting better at IQ tests, anyway, but our standards for mediocrity are still way too low. That's not good, but it calls for different responses than rhetorical attacks on reformers trying to deal with chronic problems.
(Critique and criticism: Hell, yes! Most new ideas in education are bad ideas, and that should be pointed out. But critique is different from jumping to the conclusion that small changes in high school education and culture in the 1960s were having huge effects by the 1970s, and then lemon-picking, so to speak, horrible examples to prove the point.)
In the mid-1990's Mike Males talked about a Scapegoat Generationand America's War on Adolescents, and allowing for exaggeration and an additional generation since then, his arguments were and remain valid. One of his most important arguments is that in most areas of social pathology, older US teens are a normal adult US population. Indeed, the kids of the 1980s and '90s were doing better than the Boomers did as kids and in some areas were doing better than the Boomers were doing as adults.
So, "What's the matter with kids today?" — significantly a song line set in the 1950s — may be asking the same sort of wrong question as asking whether masturbation causes mental illness or mental illness causes masturbation.
The bashing of kids may be the same sort of wrong-headed approach to policy as seeking to reduce US violence with stricter controls on the mentally ill: At least it’s been argued that "there is overwhelming epidemiological evidence that the vast majority of people with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts. Only about 4 percent of violence in the United States can be attributed to people with mental illness." Hence, "mental illness is […] a risk factor for violence," but a small one. "Only certain serious psychiatric illnesses are linked to an increased risk of violence."
Our problem with violence in American may well lie with normal Americans — especially Americans of the male persuasion: normal people with normal desires to strike back at people who have really pissed us off — but, for whatever reasons lack the self-control, inhibitions, and/or social constraints to keep such violent impulses in check.
"Man" is not a rational animal, Jonathan Swift wrote to Alexander Pope (29 September 1725) but only an animal capable of reason. And from the Age of Enlightenment on — with Francis Bacon and Baruch Spinoza preceding even Swift — it's been clear to serious thinkers that clear thinking is difficult. Still, we can do better, starting with determining carefully just what it is we are trying to think about.
A lot of the time we try to avoid thinking about us: i.e., we avoid recognizing that people behaving in ways we don't like are folks not all that different from us.
Even as with The Good Samaritan, I was given as a parable in my education in the sciences the story of scientific studies in days of yore (19th c.? late 18th?) showing that 92.3% of male inmates in mental institutions reported having masturbated, often having masturbated fairly frequently (and one or two have been doing so while being interviewed, but when I went to school such a narrative touch might have been omitted). The story is plausible, given old theories of "masturbatory insanity" and given continuing attempts to find something pathological with jerking off.
Anyway, given that "87.6% of all cited statistics are made up," you can fill in any impressive-sounding stats you like here, and we retain a cautionary tale of problems with our thinking.
First off, you have scientists collecting evidence for what they know to be true, following in the steps of earlier generations of intellectuals that got masturbating sinful by twisting the story in Genesis of Onan, or continuing the error of Aristotle and looking for a goal (telos) with every behavior.
(Cats don't hunt with the goal of eating; they hunt in a beautifully-graded cascade of encoded behaviors, fairly frequently culminating in a kill and a meal; humans sometimes have sex in order to reproduce, but all Mamma Nature requires is that the sex be heterosexual vaginal copulation often enough that babies get conceived — which happens quite enough, thank you, that we humans have been fruitful and multiplied and held dominion over the Earth up the wazoo, whatever else our various "wazoos" have been up to, down to, or rooting around in.)
Second off, getting back to the jerking-off parable — second off, an early Liberal pedant might have pointed out the problem of confusing correlation with causation: Are there so many wankers in insane asylums because whacking off causes insanity, as the social conservatives say, or do people driven mad in other ways then jerk off more? A truly liberated thinker might even have suggested that masturbation was a sensible response to confinement and boredom.
The most important lesson in this parable is that there was no lesson in the statistics: in terms of whacking off, inmates of insane asylums turned out to be pretty much just a normal adult human (male) population.
Since 95% of American males over age-whatever will admit to having masturbated at some time or other — see above on making up statistics —and noting that there's much truth in the joke that most of the other 5% are quadriplegics or lying, then there is no significance to having a population of the certified insane (etc.) with similar stats.
Obviously here, which is why a factoid on stupid early research went into academic folklore, or why some teacher made up a highly plausible and true, if not necessarily factual, parable.
It's a kind of parable that needs repetition, just with different obvious examples with different audiences, because we still make similar mistakes.
E.g., in the early 1970s there was much speculation on just how badly the 1960s education reformers had screwed over American high schools that college professors were seriously trying to determine "Why Johnnie Can't Read" or write or spell or do math. My friend Dan and I had a strong feeling that high school was the institutional equivalent of one of the great dinosaurs, seen when we were growing up as slow-witted lumbering beasts, moving along at low speed but incredible inertia.
"High School," we were convinced, "doesn't change." So we went back to our old high school, and, allowing for hasty generalization, over generalization, and some exaggeration — yeah, "High School doesn't change." At least ours hadn't much: different ethnic mix, murals on the wall, rumors of better-grade weapons among the hoodlums, a new public address system — but that was pretty much it.
Far more scientifically, the great scholar Richard Ohmann wrote an essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled, "The Literacy Crisis Is a Fiction, if Not a Hoax" (25 October 1976). If there were problems with the skills of incoming college frosh — and there were and are — there have been such problems for a long time, and the in-quotation-marks "problem" in the early 1970s wasn't so much with Johnnie as with Jane.
Earlier in the 20th c., the academically best and brightest among women high school graduates were likely to go to college, but, generally, the academically best and brightest only; by the 1960s, college professors were seeing a more normal population of American high school graduates: primarily more women, to some extent more Black and Brown students. The professors often didn't like what they saw and groused, but an earlier generation of professors had groused after World War II and the G.I. bill, and the professors often out-groused and out-curmudgeoned by conservative politicians and editorialists at, say — for those G.I. bill students at the University of Illinois — The Chicago Tribune.
There was a long tradition of complaints every time US college and university admissions had opened up to new groups, and that tradition had come on strong in the early 1970s and has recycled since.
A MORAL here: don't View With Alarm!!! and try to explain a phenomenon until you're sure it's actually happening.
The "Literacy Crisis" of the 1970s wasn't new and it wasn't a crisis and it didn't reflect radical changes in US high schools. That perceived crisis in basic academic skills reflected a chronic failure of American schools over long periods of time to educate normal students to a high academic standard. Over the last eighty years or so, US students have improved at thinking — they keep getting better at IQ tests, anyway, but our standards for mediocrity are still way too low. That's not good, but it calls for different responses than rhetorical attacks on reformers trying to deal with chronic problems.
(Critique and criticism: Hell, yes! Most new ideas in education are bad ideas, and that should be pointed out. But critique is different from jumping to the conclusion that small changes in high school education and culture in the 1960s were having huge effects by the 1970s, and then lemon-picking, so to speak, horrible examples to prove the point.)
In the mid-1990's Mike Males talked about a Scapegoat Generationand America's War on Adolescents, and allowing for exaggeration and an additional generation since then, his arguments were and remain valid. One of his most important arguments is that in most areas of social pathology, older US teens are a normal adult US population. Indeed, the kids of the 1980s and '90s were doing better than the Boomers did as kids and in some areas were doing better than the Boomers were doing as adults.
So, "What's the matter with kids today?" — significantly a song line set in the 1950s — may be asking the same sort of wrong question as asking whether masturbation causes mental illness or mental illness causes masturbation.
The bashing of kids may be the same sort of wrong-headed approach to policy as seeking to reduce US violence with stricter controls on the mentally ill: At least it’s been argued that "there is overwhelming epidemiological evidence that the vast majority of people with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts. Only about 4 percent of violence in the United States can be attributed to people with mental illness." Hence, "mental illness is […] a risk factor for violence," but a small one. "Only certain serious psychiatric illnesses are linked to an increased risk of violence."
Our problem with violence in American may well lie with normal Americans — especially Americans of the male persuasion: normal people with normal desires to strike back at people who have really pissed us off — but, for whatever reasons lack the self-control, inhibitions, and/or social constraints to keep such violent impulses in check.
"Man" is not a rational animal, Jonathan Swift wrote to Alexander Pope (29 September 1725) but only an animal capable of reason. And from the Age of Enlightenment on — with Francis Bacon and Baruch Spinoza preceding even Swift — it's been clear to serious thinkers that clear thinking is difficult. Still, we can do better, starting with determining carefully just what it is we are trying to think about.
A lot of the time we try to avoid thinking about us: i.e., we avoid recognizing that people behaving in ways we don't like are folks not all that different from us.
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