Society

Monogamy is a Moral Trinket and Other Profoundities

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2014-05-06 Monogamy_Not_For_Me_xlarge

I realize that paying too much attention to what someone writing for The New Republic has to say about sexual morality is beyond silly, so I will try to keep this brief. The most interesting thing about Helen Croydon’s piece It’s Time to Ditch Monogamy is that it never really bothers to mount a serious argument. Not even a little bit. It approaches sexual morality with all the gravitas of discussing the latest fashion trends. In fact, less. I’ve seen more care and attention paid to articles on normcore than I have to this articles take on why monogamy is so five minutes ago. I cannot emphasize enough that I’m being earnest here. Normcore fashion is treated with more seriousness than monogamy. Literally.[ref]As in: the actual, original definition of the term.[/ref]

I’m also not going to indulge in any of the usual sky is falling rhetoric here. The sky has been falling and will continue to fall for the foreseeable future, but this article contributes nothing original or noteworthy to that ongoing process except as a prototypical example of “not with a bang, but with a whimper.” The debate over monogamy, among those who don’t see the point, is over precisely because they don’t even grasp that there’s anything intellectually serious to talk about. I mean, this is an article which includes “For these girls, Cameron Diaz is a good role-model.” as an ironically non-ironic statement.[ref]Meaning: Croydon realizes that’s a ridiculous thing to say. But she says it and she means it. We’re now looking to Hollywood stars not only as moral paragons, but also trenchant social commentators.[/ref]

I’ll make one final observation, and this simply that this death-rattle of monogamy (at least among a very particular cultural segment of the United States) is just the inevitable conclusion of Disney’s version of romance carried to the extreme.[ref]It’s worth nothing that Frozen was a daring departure from that con-job.[/ref] First we make a fetish out of that euphoric, transient phase of romantic love and then we realize that euphoric, transient phases aren’t really relevant or important to the real world. Well, that’s true. They aren’t.

But what does that have to do with love and marriage, again? Don’t ask Croydon. She hasn’t the faintest clue.

Trigger Warnings and Sanity

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2014-05-02 Trigger Warnings

If you aren’t familiar with the term, trigger warnings are disclaimers that folks put at the top of blog posts (or other written materials) which they believe may cause post-traumatic stress reactions in some readers. As The Guardian describes it:

In the early days of feminist blogging, trigger warnings were generally about sexual assault, and posted with the understanding that lots of women are sexual assault survivors, lots of women read feminist blogs, and graphic descriptions of rape might lead to panic attacks or other reactions that will really ruin someone’s day. Easy enough to give readers a little heads up – a trigger warning – so that they can decide to avoid that material if they know that discussion of rape triggers debilitating reactions.

This makes sense to me. Although I do not have traumatic experiences in my own past, and am grateful for that fact, even I have been seriously affected by particularly tragic or graphic news stories. I have also seen people have real-world reactions to topics of rape or sexual assault that have convinced me that there is a legitimate concern.[ref]See also: Rape Trauma Syndrome.[/ref] I don’t know that I”m really up-to-speed on exactly when and how to issue a trigger warning, but the general principle seems both sensible and compassionate. Recently, however, I came across a piece in my exploration of the sci-fi political controversy that had nine trigger warnings:[ref]The piece was linked by John Scalzi, which is how I found it.[/ref] “slurs, ableism, racism, sexism, transmisogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, anti-semitism, colonialism.”

I found the whole list a bit odd. I try to be empathic and compassionate, but this seemed to be pushing it. When I got to to “colonialism” there at the end I found I had passed my limit. I just can’t take that seriously. In fact, I think such absurd over-sensitivity is downright counter-productive. For starters, it seems disrespectful to those suffering with Rape Trauma Syndrome to put them in the same category as people who are sad about the history of colonialism. It turns the whole thing into a joke. And that’s not just bad for victims of rape. It’s bad for all of us because it makes people who care about these kinds of issues look totally insane. Which is why we get pieces like  Big Boy Panties from the Mad Genius Club (a group blog run by conservative sci-fi writers):

Seriously. You now need to put a warning label on a blog post or something because somewhere, somehow, someone might have a reaction to something that may or may not cause them to react in a way… that’s a lot of stinking cow excremental right there. Aside from our usual society response to any sort of speech which might deemed “racist” (oh yeah, I used air quotes when I typed that), we now have this burning need to placate individuals who forgot their big boy panties and now must be warned before reading something.

See, if trigger warnings were used exclusively for discussion of rape and sexual assault I would respond to someone like this by saying, “No, you don’t really get it. There’s a legitimate reason for this.” But I can’t really do that now, because this person will just point to “trigger warning: colonialism” and collapse in a fit of hysterical laughter. I want to stake out a moderate middle position, but it’s hard when the left and right are both doing the absolute darnedest to live down to their stereotypes: irrational sentimentality on the one hand and unflinching callousness on the other. Not that conservatives are the only ones to complain that the trigger warning thing has gone way, way too far. The article from the Guardian that I quoted at the top is actually headlined: We’ve gone too far with ‘trigger warnings’, and it has an even more impressive list of trigger warnings then the one I found, including:

misogyny, the death penalty, calories in a food item, terrorism, drunk driving, how much a person weighs, racism, gun violence, Stand Your Ground laws, drones, homophobia, PTSD, slavery, victim-blaming, abuse, swearing, child abuse, self-injury, suicide, talk of drug use, descriptions of medical procedures, corpses, skulls, skeletons, needles, discussion of “isms,” neuroatypical shaming, slurs (including “stupid” or “dumb”), kidnapping, dental trauma, discussions of sex (even consensual), death or dying, spiders, insects, snakes, vomit, pregnancy, childbirth, blood, scarification, Nazi paraphernalia, slimy things, holes and “anything that might inspire intrusive thoughts in people with OCD“.

Seriously. We’ve gone from “rape” to trigger warnings for spiders, holes, and slimy things. But it’s much worse than just over-sensitivity. Colleges are starting to either require trigger warnings or just encourage teachers to remove material from the curricula that might be triggering.

Oberlin College recommends that its faculty “remove triggering material when it does not contribute directly to the course learning goals”. When material is simply too important to take out entirely, the college recommends trigger warnings.

2014-05-02 Things Fall ApartAnd we’re not talking hardcore stuff, here. The classical work Things Fall Apart (which I read as a freshman) is listed as an example, and requires trigger warnings for: “racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide, and more.” I realize that a trigger warning is not the same thing as outright censoring, but the trend is deeply disturbing and illustrates the conservative case that even if your intentions are laudable the end result can be sinister. The trigger warning logic isn’t just about adding disclaimers to what you read, it’s about reading less. It’s about removing objectionable work (and all work can be classified as objectionable on the basis of triggering someone somewhere). It’s not about individuals opting out of particular works as a matter of conscience (as conservatives sometimes do), but about applying rigidly overprotective standards for everyone.

It is deeply and tragically ironic that important literary works by minority voices who come from cultures that have suffered under colonial imperialism are now on the verge of being suppressed by the folks who claim to be the most concerned with colonial imperialism. Shouldn’t we be encouraging more  people to read a book by Africa’s leading literary voice that includes discussions of the impact of colonialism on Africa precisely because the history is so tragic that it can be distressing?[ref]What’s next: are we going to scrub all historical references to the Holocaust and expunge it from history? Sometimes the things that are hardest to look at are the most important not to forget.[/ref] Is this what it looks like when radical ideology begins to eat its own tail?

Even The New Republic can see that this trend, especially when it comes to colleges, is both absurd and ominous: Trigger Happy: The “trigger warning” has spread from blogs to college classes. Can it be stopped? The article starts with another collegiate example:

Last week, student leaders at the University of California, Santa Barbara, passed a resolution urging officials to institute mandatory trigger warnings on class syllabi. Professors who present “content that may trigger the onset of symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” would be required to issue advance alerts and allow students to skip those classes.

Sounds OK in principle, but in practice it makes you wonder if there’s anything that won’t need a trigger warning. Over at Rutgers, a “sophomore suggested that an alert for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby say, “TW: suicide, domestic abuse and graphic violence.” Really, is there a single work of serious literature that wouldn’t require a whole slew of trigger warnings? Off hand, I can’t think of one.

This, my fellow moderates and sane people on the left and right, is why we can’t have nice things. And let it no longer be said that censorship is primarily a hobby of the right![ref]And yes: I haven’t forgotten that trigger warnings aren’t the same thing as censorship, but when it comes to meddling with syllabi and asking teachers to avoid teaching certain books we’re clearly playing both games in the same ballpark.[/ref] On the plus side, evangelical Christians who protested that Harry Potter promoted satanism will at least now have some company out there in loony town. Let this be further evidence that the real conflict is not left vs. right, but rather reasonable vs. not-reasonable.

Now, maybe this kind of insanity is just part of life on Earth. I’m sure there’s some truth to that. This is hardly the first time ever that someone has taken an otherwise good idea too far. That’s pretty much what history is all about. But in conjunction with the political infighting that is splitting the sci-fi community apart and partisanship in the US to all-time highs I have to wonder if there’s something about social media and the way it lets us democratize the spread of ideas that is turning what used to be a nuisance into a major hazard. Think about the way improving technology led ancient societies to gradually shift from rural to urban communities. A lot of good came from that, but sticking so many people in confined areas created new problems for the spread of disease. Well, on the Internet, “some dumb idea” is the effective equivalent of disease. The whole trigger warning nonsense (and it has become nonsense, even if it didn’t start out that way) is no dumber than stupid ideas of the past, but it has a chance to spread much more widely and quickly.[ref]I guess, compared to the Black Death, hyper-sensitive trigger warnings aren’t that bad.[/ref]

That’s the downside to free flow of information, folks. You all get to go and watch TED talks and get your minds expanded, but stupid fads like trigger warnings for spiders and holes get a chance to infect our brains, too. It’s all fun and games when your relatives send stupid stories that they should have checked on Snopes first, but once these infectious idiocies start sprouting up as official policies on college campuses we’re officially in trouble. As long as this is an Internet-only phenomena, it’s just one more thing to complain about. Once it hits the real world

World Bank: World Is More Equal

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The World Bank released a summary of the findings of the 2011 International Comparison Program (ICP), which analyzes PPP and real expenditures worldwide. The report describes

the interaction between the real sizes of GDP for 177 economies with the relative price levels for major aggregates and per capita expenditures based on their population sizes. The results indi­cate that only a small number of economies have the greatest shares of world GDP. However, the shares of large economies such as China and India have more than doubled relative to that of the United States. The spread of per capita actual individual consumption as a percentage of that of the United States has been greatly reduced, suggesting that the world has become more equal (pg. 89; bold mine).

The report explains that this should be “interpreted with caution” due to “changes in the ICP methodology and country coverage…” Nonetheless, this is fantastic news. Pope Francis and the rest of us should be rejoicing.

This is just one more source lending support to what Nathaniel and I argued in SquareTwo: global poverty and inequality are declining largely thanks to globalization.

What Does It Mean That Animals Play?

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

On one level, this (below) is just a cute video of a baby elk playing in a puddle. But it made me think.

I don’t think I will ever be 100% vegetarian, and I certainly have limited patience for people who seem to be more worried about saving animal lives than saving human lives, but the older I get the more I feel like there is some kind of sacred responsibility we owe to living creatures. Eating meat might not violate that trust, but mistreating animals (which is often a part of how we get more meat cheaper) certainly does.

I guess the only way I can describe it is say that while animals are not people, they are certainly not things either. A little creature that has a sense of enjoyment is a little creature that has a self in a way that, even if not human, is still important. To be honest, playing in a puddle is much more meaningful to me than traditional tests of intelligence. [ref]Also, I’m really fascinated by the fact that dolphins really do save people in danger, and sometimes other mammals too.)

What Brendan Eich’s Resignation Tells Us About Tolerance

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1024px-Rainbow_flag_breeze

As Nathaniel has already touched on, a few weeks ago newly-minted Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich resigned from his post amid outrage from gay activists over his contribution to Prop 8 in California six years ago. Those opposing his support for Prop 8 made clear their demands: recant or resign. Eich, presumably because he is a man of conscience, chose the latter.

Now, to be clear, Eich was not forced out under any sort of legal pressure, so anyone claiming Eich’s right to free speech was being suppressed isn’t correct. There’s no reason gay activists can’t express outrage at an opinion they find reprehensible, even to the point of boycotting the company he leads (as misguided as such a tactic may be), just as Eich can express that opinion.

But the activists have still got it wrong, and not just because the same coercive tactics used against them would be met with justifiable indignation, but because the entire premise of their anger is misplaced. Their stated or implied claims are:

  1. Eich’s contribution to the Prop 8 campaign makes him hateful, and a bigot.
  2. Intolerance of intolerance is ethical.

Those claims, by necessity, assume gay activists hold the moral high ground, and therefore can dictate what opinions are or are not acceptable to hold in our society. The problem is that gay activists do not hold any such ground. Modern society’s acceptance of homosexuality is not predicated on any sort of objective morality that flows pure and clean out of the fabric of reality, but rather the whims of the same society that just forty years ago considered homosexuality to be a clinical mental disorder.

The fact is the morality of gay activists is ascendant not because there is some universal law that compels it but because we have arbitrarily decided that’s what we want. Because it’s the popular thing to do. They refuse to acknowledge this because when viewed through that lens it puts the views of the bigots, racists and bullies on equal footing with their own. Instead of being able to arbitrate right and wrong from a position of unassailable moral authority, they’re forced to realize society is, fundamentally, only interested in its own survival, that justice and equal rights are of secondary importance–a luxury, really, and optional when the chips are down.

That’s a hard thing to realize, and even voicing such a notion runs you the risk of being labeled a bigot. And that’s part of the problem. Even asking the question “is homosexuality normal?” is enough to get you fired and treated as a pariah.

And why not? Homosexuals can’t help how they were born, so how can we justify treating them differently? Well, the reality is we treat people differently based upon how they were born all the time. I could be born with a tendency toward attraction to multiple partners, but I’m not allowed to marry more than one of them at a time. Is such a proscription morally defensible?

Maybe that’s too easy. Let’s try a harder one. What about pedophiles? We treat pedophiles differently because of how they were born.[ref]Please note that I am not equating pedophiles and homosexuals in any way other than pointing out that they both qualify as a deviation from the norm of adult heterosexuality.[/ref] In the past, our society found both pedophilia and homosexuality to be immoral, just as we continue to find pedophilia immoral today. What has changed? We must accept that either morality is a malleable, changeable aspect of our society, or that we are uncovering an immutable morality as civilization marches on.

The notion that there is some discoverable, objective morality would seem to imply that nature itself has some vested interest not only in the survival of our society, but in values like equality and human rights, and yet we have no evidence that nature is anything but utterly indifferent to our values and our society. It therefore seems overwhelmingly likely that morality is subject to change based on prevailing notions of “what’s best.” We agree as a society to limit ourselves to behaviors which are not detrimental to our current explicit or implicit goals. The sexual abuse of children runs contrary to those goals, and is thus considered to be immoral. We react with disgust and outrage at the behavior of pedophiles because we are empathetic creatures able to identify with the suffering of others and because we instinctively regard harming innocent humans as damaging to our collective survival. So while a pedophile may not be able to help how he was born, that doesn’t exempt his behavior from the harsh judgment of his fellow men, nor does it render that judgment unjustified.

Is it therefore unjustified to regard homosexuality as immoral? It certainly hasn’t always been, but now we are moving into a time in which a majority of society and the prevailing wind of reason, not to mention science, tells us that homosexual behavior has no harmful effect on its participants nor on society as a whole, and even goes so far as to state that regarding homosexual behavior as immoral is itself harmful, and therefore immoral.

Let’s examine these claims in turn:

1) Homosexual behavior is not harmful to its participants.

I can’t think of any reason this might not be true. In a non-religious context, I can’t see any harm done to two consenting adults doing whatever they want together.

2) Homosexual behavior is not harmful to society.

This is a bit more complicated. Certainly birth rates would decrease (roughly) proportionately to the rate of homosexuality in a given society. Taken to an extreme, there would be a real risk of societal catastrophe if, say, we all woke up one day attracted to our own sex and not the opposite.[ref]Obviously this is extremely unlikely, but it makes me wonder, would such a society deem homosexuality immoral in a bid for survival, despite it going against instinct?[/ref] Are we then prepared to say that homosexuality is only conditionally not harmful to society? Because that would necessarily mean that homosexuality is conditionally harmful to society. What does that tell us about the morality of gay activists? What then do we make of the outrage against those backwards bigots who still consider homosexual behavior to be sinful?

3) Claiming that homosexual behavior is immoral is itself immoral.

At the risk of repeating myself, this again is a way of saying that the morality of one group takes precedence over another. This is certainly true, but not for the reasons that gay activists think. That is, not because any ascendant morality is inherently better for society. “Tolerance” is not a panacea, as evidenced by the fact that we still do not permit plural marriage and we still put pedophiles in prison when they act on their inborn tendencies. The morality of gay activists happens to be largely identical to those they oppose with a few notable exceptions. That doesn’t make it “better,” which leads to the implicit claim:

4) Intolerance of intolerance is ethical.

This is, simply, wrong, for all the reasons I’ve just mentioned. Intolerance of intolerance is a way of punishing others for rejecting your morality, which, as we’ve clearly established, is fundamentally arbitrary. If you are upset with someone for opposing what you believe to be “right,” then say so, explain yourself, and back your claims. Do not attempt to marginalize your opponents by pretending that blanket censure, shouting down, censoring or oppression of dissenting opinions is an appropriate response to disagreement.

I am deeply disappointed by the behavior of the gay activists who spoke out against Brendan Eich. They are engaging in the very behavior they should be actively fighting. Instead of being driven by the equality, love and fairness that has allowed them to accomplish their goals in the first place, they viciously attack anyone who might not feel the way they do without recognizing in themselves that same hatefulness and spite they fight so hard against in their opponents. I would expect a supposedly “enlightened” society to do better.

The Scientific-Mystical Objectivity of Pavel Florensky

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Pavel Florensky and Sergei Bulgakov.
Pavel Florensky and Sergei Bulgakov.

Nathaniel’s recent post on Newton and Parsons raises some very good points about science and the very things that it supposedly opposes, such as magic and the occult. As far as I understand things (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong), a fundamental belief for both scientists and esotericists is that the world follows certain patterns, and is governed by forces and laws that can be discovered, harnessed, and sometimes even manipulated, be it for good or for bad. It really shouldn’t be terribly surprising that an interest in one can include an interest in the other, yet the current, popular scientific narrative wouldn’t touch the esoteric with a ten-foot pole.

Pavel Florensky (1882-1937) is another of those immensely influential scientists that hardly anyone knows. He was also a mystic, Russian Orthodox priest, theologian, Symbolist, art critic, and martyr. Florensky’s book, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, written as a sort of a vast dialogue with Christ on the topics of “Divine Truth, Beauty, and Goodness” as “revealed and manifested in Creation,” is filled throughout with dozens of mathematical formulas! If that weren’t odd enough, the math itself is explained in theological terms.[ref]“[Consubstantiality] expressed not only a Christological dogma but also a spiritual evaluation of the rational laws of thought.” Rationality- the teachings of Aristotle- lost.[/ref] This refusal to see the natural sciences as divorced from divine, spiritual matters allowed Florensky to make important contributions to both. He was led to radical developments in set theory by his interest in the mystical doctrine of Name-Worshipping, and during the early years of the Soviet Union he wrote scientific textbooks, helped electrify the country, and invented a non-coagulating machine oil while still serving as a priest.

georgia6 www,nikitafirct.com_.ua_Florensky grew up in the Caucasus. He claimed that his childhood there lent him “an objective, noncentripetal perception of the world, a kind of inverse perspective” which allowed for a “penetration into the depth of things.” The Caucasus is a wild and mysterious region with snow-capped mountains, deep ravines, and roaring rivers. It exerted a tremendous influence on Russian writers, and although I had read extensively on it, nothing prepared me for my first glimpse of it. Pictures can never convey just how remarkable it is. I then understood instinctively Tolstoy’s laconic cry, “the mountains, the mountains,” and I confess to being a little awestruck even today.[ref]Some of my favorite books on this topic are Leo Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat, Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Times, and Lesley Blanch’s The Sabres of Paradise: Conquest and Vengeance in the Caucasus. These give an idea of the pull that the Caucasus can have on the imagination.[/ref] I share this because there really is a feeling there of a “native, solitary, mysterious and infinite Eternity, from which everything flows and to which everything returns,” as Florensky described it. Paradoxically, it was this other-wordly feeling that Florensky claimed enabled one to see the world as it really is. “The child has absolutely precise metaphysical formulas for everything other-worldly, and the sharper his sense of Edenic life, the more defined is his knowledge of these formulas.” It is hard to imagine someone like Wallace Stegner concurring with Florensky’s definition of objectivity, yet as Nathaniel noted, the scientific narrative has increasingly tended to absorb and adapt religious ones, resulting in something not far removed from Florensky’s objectivity.[ref]See the multiple examples in Carl Youngblood’s recent MTA paper.[/ref]

Florensky’s religious convictions eventually led to his imprisonment in a labor camp, where he was murdered in 1937.

 

Character Gaps & Social Mobility

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James Heckman
James Heckman

The Character and Opportunity Project at the Brookings Institution has a wonderful series on character traits and their relation to social mobility. So far there are five in the series. Whether more are to come will have to be seen. I think this is an important project, which features the work of Nobel economist James Heckman. As researcher Richard Reeves says in one of the posts, “If character and opportunity are inescapably intertwined, we need to open a new front in the war for opportunity, one that treats the inaptly labeled “soft” skills as vital ingredients in the creation of a more equal, more mobile, and more prosperous society.”

Protecting the Reputation of Science from Scientists

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2014-05-01 Jack Parsons
Jack Parsons, near the future site of the JPL, is on the far right.

Here’s one of the more ironic passages I’ve read in my life:

Sir Isaac Newton’s accomplishments border on the uncanny, as does his image in the world of science. As the historian Mordechai Feingold has written, “With time, the historical Newton receded into the background, overshadowed by the very legacy he helped create. Newton thus metamorphosed into science personified.” So what is that legacy? What were those accomplishments? Here, familiarize yourself with Newton’s greatest contributions.

Here’s the irony of this quote (which comes from the PBS show NOVA): Feingold was talking about the way Isaac Newton as a human being has been lost to history because his image has been co-opted as a poster child for science. Getting back to the real Isaac Newton would entail rescuing his humanity. Such as, perhaps, his devout and sometimes odd religious views. He was, by the standards of his day, a heretic. He is, by the standards of our day, an occultist.

There is no grand conspiracy to hide the truth, and it’s out there if you take a look, but there’s a definite reluctance on the part of modern intellectuals to embarrass one of the titans of the tradition. Newton has become in a real way a kind of sacred cow. He represents, as NOVA put, science itself.[ref]It’s instructive to contrast the way that Newton’s legacy is treated with laboratory care with the revisionist callousness to the legacy of the Founding Fathers. Nobody wants to blemish Newton, but taking down Jefferson or Franklin or others is the intellectuals version of big-game hunting.[/ref] So it would be really rather awkward for everyone if folks were made aware of the extent to which he wrote about his very literal interpretation of the Biblical text. This is part of how science preserves its reputation today: by controlling the narrative.

So here’s another, more recent example: Jack Parsons. Never heard of him? That’s kind of the point. And yet he was a founding father of rocket science in general and of the famous Jet Propulsion Laboratory in particular (it was jokingly referred to as the Jack Parsons Laboratory for a while). So what happened to Parsons? Well, he had some really weird occult beliefs, for one thing, and a penchant for orgies for another. In his own lifetime this led to his fall from grace (because the US government didn’t like sexual occultists in the 1950s any more than they liked communists) and since then his legacy has been borrowed.

Not because there’s a secret Star Chamber out there controlling our history books, but for the much more prosaic but even more effective reason that nobody really wants to embarrass the modern narrative of bold, rational, scientific progress. And so it is, from Galileo to Newton to Parson, that what we think we know about the history of science and the actual history of science diverge radically.

Rags to Riches to Rags

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Mark Rank, professor of social welfare at Washington University, has an excellent piece in The New York Times on income inequality and mobility that further supports the video above:

But is it the case that the top 1 percent of the income distribution are the same people year in and year out? Or, for that matter, what about the top 5, 10 and 20 percent? To what extent do everyday Americans experience these levels of affluence, at least some of the time? …It turns out that 12 percent of the population will find themselves in the top 1 percent of the income distribution for at least one year. What’s more, 39 percent of Americans will spend a year in the top 5 percent of the income distribution, 56 percent will find themselves in the top 10 percent, and a whopping 73 percent will spend a year in the top 20 percent of the income distribution.

This demonstrates that

most American households go through a wide range of economic experiences, both positive and negative…Ultimately, this information casts serious doubt on the notion of a rigid class structure in the United States based upon income…Rather than talking about the 1 percent and the 99 percent as if they were forever fixed, it would make much more sense to talk about the fact that Americans are likely to be exposed to both prosperity and poverty during their lives, and to shape our policies accordingly. As such, we have much more in common with one another than we dare to realize.

Check it out.

Deafness: Disability or Culture?

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2014-04-30 Cochlear Implant

This is a very, very long article about deafness, but it’s a very interesting one for people who are not familiar at all with deaf culture. I’m hardly an expert myself, but I took 2 years of ASL in high school, and part of our coursework was learning about deaf culture. What we learned surprised me. The two things that stick out the most are first, the fact that so much deaf humor is based on making fun of hearing people (like you and me). We’re the butt of most of the jokes, and we’re usually depicted as stupid and greedy. Given that I didn’t even realize there was such a thing as deaf culture before taking the class[ref]As a simpler option than other foreign language requirements to graduate high school, no less[/ref], I can see where that resentment and disdain comes from.

The second is that the deaf community[ref]Most folks believe that there is no such thing as “blind culture” because blind people communicate in the same language as seeing people do.[/ref] do not see the inability to hear as a defect. It’s the ticket to entry into their unique culture. For this reason, there are many who view attempts to cure deafness as literally attempts to exterminate their culture and community. Specifically: cochlear implants. These are little electronic devices that bypass the tiny hairs in our ears that help us hear (which are missing, for people that can benefit from CIs) and instead translate vibration directly to electrical signals to your nerves. It’s hearing, sort of. The quality is substantially lower than what people with full hearing can experience, although it is enough to understand speech and advancements are starting to make even listening to music possible.

There are two major problems, however. The first is that children can be diagnosed and given a CI at a very young age, and that once they learn to speak and hear with their CIs, the chance of them ever learning to sign or joining the deaf community are minimal. The second is that many deaf children are born to hearing parents who, overwhelmingly, opt for CIs. As a result, as some in the deaf community see it, they are essentially being robbed of new entrants to the deaf community by a hearing population that doesn’t even really know that they exist.

It’s not hard to imagine a future where virtually all forms of deafness can be cured. Would that be akin to the complete extinction of an entire culture? These are some of the questions raised by this article, which I definitely recommend.

And, the next time someone shares one of those touching YouTube videos of a baby or grown person hearing a loved one’s voice for the first time, just think that the very video that brings tears of joy to a hearing person can bring sadness and loss to a deaf person.