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Nov. 21st, 2007 09:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_elyanOne of those walks to work this morning where the brain suddenly starts constructing fast, if flawed, arguments:
I was walking into work through the backstreets of Cambridge, part of which crosses my path with that of parents taking their children to primary school. Just as I was passing the Alex, I came across a stream of same … and at the moment I did, my headphones were uttering the words “Pumped full of smack, and with more to inject.
It suddenly struck me that, if various people had their way, such an activity, if detected, would have a police car following me by the time I got across the Elizabeth Way bridge, and Questions Being Asked. Because such things shouldn’t happen around children, obviously.
I think that the prevalent opinion in most public pronouncements on children (which could be summed up as “Daily Mail”, if I thought I could get away with a stereotype), is based on a false syllogism, and a much more dangerous extension of same. To wit:
I would not listen to a song with the lyric “Pumped full of smack and with more to inject”
I do not mean harm to children
Therefore people who do not mean harm to children do not listen to songs with the lyric “Pumped full of smack and with more to inject”.
And from there:
People who do listen to such a song do mean harm to children.
This ignores two overlapping groups of people – first “people who do not intend harm to children, who are not me”, and secondly” people who listen to songs with lyrics as above, who do not intend harm to children”.
The first of these omissions is down to simple arrogance on the part of the framers of the argument, but the second is more difficult. I, and everyone I know, are perfectly capable of listening to the line “Pumped full of smack and with more to inject”, without being pumped full of smack, or having any desire to be so. Similarly, I don’t play violent computer games, or watch violent movies, because I don’t like them, not because I either am deliberately pacifist (although on balance I am), or because I am sacred that if I watched them, I would go out and do something similar. The book I just started this morning starts with a torture scene, but I haven’t tortured anyone since reading it, or wanted to, even if the train was full of howling teenagers.
This difference is made possible by the intervention of conscious thought between the sensory inputs (which see, say, someone being tortured), and the agents of external action (which torture someone else). The intervener is, of course, the brain, which makes moral, operational and self-interest calculation, many of which are very complex.
Most of these decisions, and the data on which they are based, have to be learnt – as many have pointed out, altruism, justice and restraint are not concepts which exist in unfettered nature, except insofar as they serve the interests of the tribe, but purely through the hard-coding of the individual instinct (don’t kill the children just because they can’t kill anything – they will be able to later, then we’ll all have more to eat).
Where this latter thought is leading toward is the question of education. The learning of the abilities above, and more generally the techniques of critical thinking, and applying gained experience and acquired knowledge to the facts as seen, are one of the two main purposes of education. The other is to gain skills useful to the furtherance of the society as a whole – Stephen Fry, as Professor Trefusis, identifies these two needs as “education” and “training”, which is as good a division as any.
Now the problem governments face is that training is clearly in line with their interests (and is a valid reason for why we expect taxpayers to foot an enormous State schools however much we might pretend things are otherwise), but education isn’t necessarily, because an alert and questioning populace is likely to be harder to govern than a docile and unthinking one. Plus it’s harder to sell to the taxpayer.
But in the end, the teaching of the ability to think independently, and to make value judgements, is what prevents society sliding into anarchy, not the ability to do tasks which are helpful to society as a whole. As soon as we accept the ability (as opposed, broadly, to the right) of human beings to do things which are not in the interests of the tribe – and that ability has clearly existed since prehistory – then we accept that we need to teach the ability to tell the worthwhile from the pointless, the true from the false (even when one is disguised as the other), and (more controversially), the good from the bad, or even from the evil.
Flowing from that knowledge is the ability to listen to songs containing the word “smack” without wanting to inject yourself with the substance. And, just as importantly, the ability to discern that just because you don’t listen to such things doesn’t mean that people who do are automatically dangerous – not least because there is a greater chance that they will have the facilities not to be.
Next week – “does listening to “Twist” by Goldfrapp while on the train next to a young lady make me a bad person?”
I was walking into work through the backstreets of Cambridge, part of which crosses my path with that of parents taking their children to primary school. Just as I was passing the Alex, I came across a stream of same … and at the moment I did, my headphones were uttering the words “Pumped full of smack, and with more to inject.
It suddenly struck me that, if various people had their way, such an activity, if detected, would have a police car following me by the time I got across the Elizabeth Way bridge, and Questions Being Asked. Because such things shouldn’t happen around children, obviously.
I think that the prevalent opinion in most public pronouncements on children (which could be summed up as “Daily Mail”, if I thought I could get away with a stereotype), is based on a false syllogism, and a much more dangerous extension of same. To wit:
I would not listen to a song with the lyric “Pumped full of smack and with more to inject”
I do not mean harm to children
Therefore people who do not mean harm to children do not listen to songs with the lyric “Pumped full of smack and with more to inject”.
And from there:
People who do listen to such a song do mean harm to children.
This ignores two overlapping groups of people – first “people who do not intend harm to children, who are not me”, and secondly” people who listen to songs with lyrics as above, who do not intend harm to children”.
The first of these omissions is down to simple arrogance on the part of the framers of the argument, but the second is more difficult. I, and everyone I know, are perfectly capable of listening to the line “Pumped full of smack and with more to inject”, without being pumped full of smack, or having any desire to be so. Similarly, I don’t play violent computer games, or watch violent movies, because I don’t like them, not because I either am deliberately pacifist (although on balance I am), or because I am sacred that if I watched them, I would go out and do something similar. The book I just started this morning starts with a torture scene, but I haven’t tortured anyone since reading it, or wanted to, even if the train was full of howling teenagers.
This difference is made possible by the intervention of conscious thought between the sensory inputs (which see, say, someone being tortured), and the agents of external action (which torture someone else). The intervener is, of course, the brain, which makes moral, operational and self-interest calculation, many of which are very complex.
Most of these decisions, and the data on which they are based, have to be learnt – as many have pointed out, altruism, justice and restraint are not concepts which exist in unfettered nature, except insofar as they serve the interests of the tribe, but purely through the hard-coding of the individual instinct (don’t kill the children just because they can’t kill anything – they will be able to later, then we’ll all have more to eat).
Where this latter thought is leading toward is the question of education. The learning of the abilities above, and more generally the techniques of critical thinking, and applying gained experience and acquired knowledge to the facts as seen, are one of the two main purposes of education. The other is to gain skills useful to the furtherance of the society as a whole – Stephen Fry, as Professor Trefusis, identifies these two needs as “education” and “training”, which is as good a division as any.
Now the problem governments face is that training is clearly in line with their interests (and is a valid reason for why we expect taxpayers to foot an enormous State schools however much we might pretend things are otherwise), but education isn’t necessarily, because an alert and questioning populace is likely to be harder to govern than a docile and unthinking one. Plus it’s harder to sell to the taxpayer.
But in the end, the teaching of the ability to think independently, and to make value judgements, is what prevents society sliding into anarchy, not the ability to do tasks which are helpful to society as a whole. As soon as we accept the ability (as opposed, broadly, to the right) of human beings to do things which are not in the interests of the tribe – and that ability has clearly existed since prehistory – then we accept that we need to teach the ability to tell the worthwhile from the pointless, the true from the false (even when one is disguised as the other), and (more controversially), the good from the bad, or even from the evil.
Flowing from that knowledge is the ability to listen to songs containing the word “smack” without wanting to inject yourself with the substance. And, just as importantly, the ability to discern that just because you don’t listen to such things doesn’t mean that people who do are automatically dangerous – not least because there is a greater chance that they will have the facilities not to be.
Next week – “does listening to “Twist” by Goldfrapp while on the train next to a young lady make me a bad person?”
