7 September 2004

Perceive This ...

I knew there was a reason why I programmed my VCR to record 60 Minutes for me every week.

A recent report on the Pornography business in the States got me thinking about obscenity. Thoughts on obscenity naturally brought up memories of laughing at the outrage over the Janet Jackson nipple fiasco. That, combined with a short essay on the sorry state of the American educational system that I read on Jerry Pournelle’s web site (www.jerrypournelle.com) got me thinking about the differences between the way Americans generally tend to perceive things and the way Canadians generally tend to perceive things. So now my overactive mind has saddled me with all of these interesting thoughts, and we all know what happens then!

The 60 Minutes report was interesting for a variety of reasons. One of the things that stands out most strongly in my mind is the revelation that many Multi-National companies based within the States own subsidiaries which are directly associated with the Porn industry. Of course, as soon as 60 Minutes revealed this those companies turned around and sold those subsidiaries, but it was still an interesting fact, and that’s part of what got me thinking about perception.

There’s a certain stigma attached to the whole Adult Entertainment industry, a belief that the actions depicted in Adult Entertainment and the practice of watching them for your own personal entertainment is somehow filthy, obscene. This stigma is, for the most part, perpetuated by religious lobby groups who want us to draft an exacting and very harsh definition of exactly what constitutes obscenity. Here in North America these groups generally tend to operate out of the United States, but we have our own lobby here in Canada too. I know this because these are the same people who are fighting against the recent federal legislation that endorses the marriage of homosexual couples. I know that they’re the same people because they’re using many of the same arguments.

Religious lobbyists are rather easy to identify. They’re generally tend to be upper middle class conservative Christians who have this unshakable belief that they know what’s best for the human race because they were told so by God, and God’s word must be followed to the letter. These are people who invoke the teachings of Christ as a means of controlling the hearts, minds, and perceptions of the masses. They’re prejudiced people who hide their prejudice behind an activists mask. It’s okay for me to hate this certain type of person or certain type of thing because by fighting against that person or that thing I am doing so for the betterment of humanity. I need to do this because the human race generally has no idea what’s right or wrong and therefore need to be told what to think and what to believe.

Religious lobbyists are people who have bought into the activists dogma hook, line, and sinker. They truly believe that the human race needs to be told what to think and what to believe, and that they’ve been chosen as God’s messengers for the task. Personally, my opinion on the issue is divided. On the one hand I believe that the vast majority of the human race wants to be told what to believe because being told relieves them of the freedom of having to make their own decisions, and because they’re not making any of their own decisions then they don’t have to take responsibility for those decisions. On the other hand, I also think that the lobbyist’s dogma is a crock, a lousy excuse for an arrogant and elitist point of view that does nothing except create an environment in which censorship flourishes.

The problem with the whole thing is that this environment of censorship is exactly what they want. They want Morality Police to go over everything that’s ever going to be read and watched and give the thumbs up or the thumbs down to every word, every sentence, every image. They’re getting it, too. The Janet Jackson nipple fiasco is a perfect example. According to the lobbyists the image of an exposed nipple is so obscene and so offensive that it must never be allowed to happen again. I mean, think about the damage that a scene like that could do to a family. It’s really nothing more than smut, and do our children really need to be exposed to that kind of thing? I think not!

So who gave those people the right to decide for the masses? No one did. They simply took it and people went along with it because it freed them from the responsibility of making decisions and taking responsibility for those decisions. The equation, therefore, becomes very simple. What they find offensive, I find offensive. What they find obscene, I find obscene. As time goes on these people gain more and more power, and more and more influence, and pretty soon the whole country reverts back to the environment of the 1920's, where prohibition ran rampant.

Personally, I don’t buy into any of it. I want to make my own decisions. I want to look at all sides of an issue and make my own decision about what I should think and how I should feel based on the observational evidence I’ve gathered. Why do I want to do this? Because I, like so many others, am a thinking, reasoning, human being, and I make a conscious choice to use the abilities that I have been given. And I believe so strongly that others should do the same thing that I am driven to write these Musings and distribute them out to anyone who will listen as a means of encouraging people to think for themselves, and to debate. This is why I welcome comments, because I legitimately want to know what people think about the things that I am saying. You may not always agree with me, but I still want to know, and know why., because it’s not a debate unless we actually talk about things.

The problem with giving up your freedom to decide for yourself is that once you make that decision in one aspect of your life you soon start to find yourself making that decision in all aspects of your life. Education is a perfect example of this behavior.

Somewhere along the line someone got the bright idea to turn education into a science. When you turn something into a science you start analyzing it from all sides and begin to establish laws which cannot be violated. When you make something a science you eliminate all other forms of thinking that deviate from a pattern which states that if it’s not this then it must be this because there is nothing in between. There is no grey area in science, so therefore by applying a scientific mentality to Education you effectively eliminate all grey areas in Education.

Now, I can understand building an education curriculum which teaches instructors to teach by giving them an understanding of psychology. In fact, I encourage it. In the beginning, that’s exactly what happened. But somewhere along the line someone started establishing thresholds to define acceptable and unacceptable occurrences within the framework of an educational institution. These thresholds were applied to things like classroom size, but they were also applied to the diagnosis of learning disabilities.

Dyslexia is a perfect example. True neurological Dyslexia is a cross-wiring of the brain which causes the victim to be unable to distinguish the differences between the letters p and q, and the letters b and d. As a result of this confusion the victims of this condition tend to mix these letters up, and because they do so they start to have difficulties reading. However, somewhere along the line the definition of Dyslexia has been stretched to include everyone who has trouble reading, regardless of the cause. If you have trouble reading then you must be Dyslexic, and therefore there is nothing that I can do for you. This is a crock for several reasons. First of all, true neurological Dyslexia can be overcome with practice and training. Secondly, just because you have trouble reading doesn’t mean that you’re Dyslexic. You could be suffering from a sight impairment, or you could be the victim of another kind of learning disability that just hasn’t been diagnosed yet. Or, you could simple not give a tinkers cuss and have no desire to learn at all. The use of Dyslexia as a catchall diagnosis for people who have trouble reading is simply another excuse for educators to free themselves of the responsibility of having to think for themselves.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is another example, one which is applied to any child who displays a short attention span or an abundance of energy above some undefined threshold amount. The diagnosis is largely left up to the teacher’s discretion. If the teacher things that the child is overactive then obviously the child has ADHD. If the child has a short attention span, then he obviously suffers from ADHD. The possibility that there could be other contributing factors to these conditions is largely ignored because a perfectly acceptable answer to the riddle has already been given, and the looseness of the definition of these conditions allow educators to apply them without actually thinking about what they’re doing or why. Again, it’s just another excuse for educators to free themselves from the responsibility of having to make intelligent, informed decisions.

Now, before people start going after me for taking a run at teachers, allow me to take a moment and say that I do not believe that all teachers subscribe to these attractive fallacies. I myself have encountered a number of skilled, professional teachers who legitimately care about the welfare of their students and who will go to great lengths to ensure that each and every child they contact will have every possible opportunity to learn in their classroom. The difference between these teachers and the chair warmers is that the true teacher cares about the student, whereas the chair warmer is only interested in hanging onto his job.

That having been said, I believe that turning education into a science is a mistake that has done society more harm than good. I need only listen to a modern day high school student or graduate speak to have that proven to me time and again. The vast majority of students are sub-literate at best, illiterate at worst, and have no concept of proper speech or acceptable social conventions such as manners. Even worse, they have absolutely no interest in correcting the error of their ways. Why should they, when society has determined that it’s perfectly socially acceptable to have them exactly as they are? How do they know that this has happened? Because Pop Culture tells them that it has. Just look at the influence that modern day Rap or Hip-Hop has on today’s youth and you will see what I mean. The English Language as we were taught to speak it is dead. Long live Ebonics. Word.

And here’s another perception based disorder, one that people don’t even try to understand because of the stigma attached to mental illness: depression.

Depression in an insidious little disease that will make you think things and say things and do things that you normally wouldn’t do. Once people identify this little abnormality in you they automatically think that you’re some kind of nut bar and want nothing to do with you because you’re different and people are afraid of differences. They choose to not even try to understand because it frees them of the responsibility of caring.

Humanity in general is afraid of making decisions for itself because they’re afraid of accepting responsibility for those decisions. As a cop out we allow others to take the responsibility away from us so that we don’t have to exercise it, or we use What We Know Of The World to create the perception that something is Very Wrong without even bothering to understand what that thing is. When we do that one of two things happens: we either, in our ignorance, attach an incorrect explanation to the event in question or we simply decide that we want nothing to do with it and go on about our merry ways. We perceive that because a thing is different and differences are bad then we are powerless to change it, and why would we want to? What possible benefit could we derive from the responsibility of getting involved when it’s easier just to walk away and ignore what’s going on?

There’s an old saying that money is the root of all evil. I don’t think that’s the case. While I will admit that I don’t think that perception is the root of all evil, I will say that I believe perception is the root cause of a great many evil things in this world. I will also say that this is so because we as a race are not using the ability properly. It was given to us to make us question, to ignite our curiosity and drive us to reach out and seek answers. The problem is that somewhere along the line we percieved that we didn’t have to do that for ourselves anymore, that is was simply easier and more profitable to allow others to do that kind of thinking for us and then just take their conclusions at face value. But when you do that you start applying those conclusions in places where they don’t belong because you’re stretching definitions to cover things that they were never intended to cover.

We perceive, through the Religious Lobby, that sex is vile and disgusting and that God intended us to live like monks and never even consider the coupling of two people. But why do we have genitalia if we’re not supposed to use it? We perceive, through the Boards of Education, that Dyslexia is defined as a difficulty reading, so therefore any student who has trouble with reading must, by definition, be Dyslexic. And because they’re Dyslexic it’s going to be a lot tougher to teach them to read, so I’m just not going to bother because I don’t want to do the extra work when I know perfectly well that any difficulty reading can be overcome if you’re willing to spend the time doing it. We perceive, through the Boards of Education again, that if one child has a shorter attention span relative to another child, or if one child is more energetic relative to another child, then that child suffers from ADHD when this is probably not the case and finding out the real root cause of the behavior exhibited would just take too much time and energy that could be spent not teaching students to read. We perceive, through society, that Depression and the other Mental Illnesses can only be caught by the Great Unwashed, those stupid silly people who are incapable of dealing with their own problems and therefore are inferior to the rest of us when the truth of the matter is drastically different.

Now, I will admit that the more I think about this the more sarcastic I seem to be getting, but to some extent I think that’s warranted given that the subject matter seems predestined to generate massive amounts of pure bullshit. Or, maybe my One And Only Remaining Synapse is misfiring and thus renders me incapable of responding to this any other way. Either way I find that I am tending more and more towards ranting, and that wasn’t the purpose of this essay. However, I still think that the rant is useful, and I also believe that sometimes unintended consequences are a good thing.

There is value in debate. And there is value in people like me encouraging debate. But none of that matters unless we become willing to re-take our freedom to think for ourselves and accept the responsibility for making our own decisions. I’m willing to take the first steps. Are you?