orthogonal
Registered Senior Member
I hiked down the mountain one morning not long ago. As I came to a quiet road at the mountain base, I noticed three kids waiting for their school bus. As I walked by, I gave them a bright, “Good morning.” All three shrank back in silent terror with grimaced faces. I walked on, though feeling a bit less cheerful than before.
I don’t blame these kids for their impolite and anti-social behavior. It’s their parent's hysterical paranoia that worries me.
As silly as it may sound, my first notice of this phenomenon came with the unfortunate demise of Halloween trick-or-treating. My own generation fondly reminisces about those happy evenings when we’d cover five miles on foot with our friends, and return home with half of a pillow-slip filled with candy. Mom didn’t drive us house-to-house and walk behind us, right up to the door with an Uzi under her jacket. We didn’t put the apples we received under an X-ray machine to ferret out razor blades, and our candy didn’t go through a mass spectrometer to sort out the candy sure to be found laced with rat poison. One acquaintance drives her daughter only to houses owned by people she knows. Despite this precaution, she still destroys her daughter’s tick-or-treat candy and replaces it with her own store-bought candy! We love to remember the wonderful times we had, yet we wouldn’t dream of letting our own children have such fun. Everyone knows that unlike today, people could be trusted in the "good old days."
I came across a book in the library with the macabre title of, Wisconsin Death Trip. It’s written by Michael Lesy, and chronicles the rampant and savage crime in "the good old days." Here is a short excerpt from a review of it by John Hoh:
“Debates rage today about the state of society. Many feel that people and situations are getting worse by the day. Viewing the evening news we hear about drive-by shootings, children brandishing guns, increasing occurrences of domestic abuse. Often our nostalgic memories long for a simpler day when neighbors helped each, everyone knew everyone else in town, families and neighborhoods were at peace, and people respected each other. There were no drugs, no gangs, and no domestic squabbles.
Into this arena comes Michael Lesy's book, Wisconsin Death Trip. This book soon shatters those myths of previous generations living in peaceful, idyllic tranquility. First, let me express my wonder at those who view the past with rose colored glasses and see a better time. The average life expectancy was much shorter; a part of our past as a nation is a past filled with the bloodshed wrought by gangsters, robbers, and hoodlums prowling our city streets…”
The gruesome newspaper stories and photographs in this book reinforce my appreciation for not having to live in the “good old days.” Generally, people today are far more civilized than were their ancestors. However, our perception is quite the opposite. Too many of us believe that we live in the midst of a seething cauldron of amorality. Both the media and our uncritical acceptance of the daily deluge of crime reports are to blame for this belief. If a child is abducted in Los Angeles, we immediately know about it on the East Coast. We hear about every major crime in our nation of 270 million inhabitants. Crimes involving children are especially apt to make the national press. Humans evolved in village settings where their news of others was limited to a few hundred persons at the most. In today’s interconnected world we have instant access to the criminal activity of nearly 9 billion people. Given the efficiency of our news gathering organizations, coupled with such mind-boggling numbers of people, it's inevitable that we have such a daily outpouring of stories of murder, rape, kidnapping, etc. It's the nature of the “news” business that we hear so little of the good that humans do everyday. The press finds good people to be boring, and much prefers to write about axe-murderers.
The erroneous belief that your neighbor is more apt to be an axe-murderer is not an innocuous belief. A number of ethicists (Steven Pinker comes to mind) have explained that people tend to calibrate their moral compass to what they perceive is the average moral standard of their society. That is; most people would rather not be a saint or a sinner, they would rather simply be “normal.” A problem arises however, when people have a skewed perception of what the average moral behavior of their neighbor actually is. If we only think that men act worse than they actually act, we recalibrate our own moral standards to reflect this perceived lower standard.
Another result of this erroneous belief is that we come to fear what we should not. An analogous story comes to mind:
A few years ago, a friend told me that his company had hosted a Chinese visitor for six weeks. Despite numerous social invitations by the resident employees, the visitor preferred to remain alone inside the house provided for her on the company grounds after her working hours. Eventually the word got around that she would be returning to China having only seen as much of Vermont as could be seen while driving from the airport to the company headquarters. A more urgent request was made to the guest that she should do some sight-seeing. This time the guest explained her hesitance. All of her life she had heard stories of the terrible crime in America. She’d been terrified out of her wits that she had to make the trip to America at all. I suppose if you or I had to make a business trip to Columbia, South America, we might have an idea of how she felt about visiting Vermont. It’s ironic that she was afraid to walk on the street in the same county where I leave the door of my house unlocked, unless I’m going away on a trip.
Similarly, parents instill an irrational fear and mistrust of adults in their children. Children are far more likely to die in an automobile accident than at the hands of a murderer, yet why have the children not been taught to shrink back in fear when it's time to go by car to their soccer practice? No, we teach them that this is your house and this is your car; you are safe here. The rest of the world is a bad place, full of bad people whom you should have nothing to do with. In truth, children are much more likely to become a victim at the hands of someone they know rather than a stranger.
Instead of being taught to fear and mistrust adults, children should be taught that they are members of a complete society and owe their very lives to people they might never have met. Think of the labor of the farmer you will never meet, yet without the product of his toil you would be dead in a matter of months.
There is a minute chance that one day you might be assaulted or even murdered by a “stranger”. However, without the constant help we receive from “strangers,” each of us would surely die in a short time. In other words, there is a tiny possibility that a man might one day harm you, but an absolute certainty that millions of men work daily to help you. So which is the more reasonable, that we generally love or fear other men?
Michael
I don’t blame these kids for their impolite and anti-social behavior. It’s their parent's hysterical paranoia that worries me.
As silly as it may sound, my first notice of this phenomenon came with the unfortunate demise of Halloween trick-or-treating. My own generation fondly reminisces about those happy evenings when we’d cover five miles on foot with our friends, and return home with half of a pillow-slip filled with candy. Mom didn’t drive us house-to-house and walk behind us, right up to the door with an Uzi under her jacket. We didn’t put the apples we received under an X-ray machine to ferret out razor blades, and our candy didn’t go through a mass spectrometer to sort out the candy sure to be found laced with rat poison. One acquaintance drives her daughter only to houses owned by people she knows. Despite this precaution, she still destroys her daughter’s tick-or-treat candy and replaces it with her own store-bought candy! We love to remember the wonderful times we had, yet we wouldn’t dream of letting our own children have such fun. Everyone knows that unlike today, people could be trusted in the "good old days."
I came across a book in the library with the macabre title of, Wisconsin Death Trip. It’s written by Michael Lesy, and chronicles the rampant and savage crime in "the good old days." Here is a short excerpt from a review of it by John Hoh:
“Debates rage today about the state of society. Many feel that people and situations are getting worse by the day. Viewing the evening news we hear about drive-by shootings, children brandishing guns, increasing occurrences of domestic abuse. Often our nostalgic memories long for a simpler day when neighbors helped each, everyone knew everyone else in town, families and neighborhoods were at peace, and people respected each other. There were no drugs, no gangs, and no domestic squabbles.
Into this arena comes Michael Lesy's book, Wisconsin Death Trip. This book soon shatters those myths of previous generations living in peaceful, idyllic tranquility. First, let me express my wonder at those who view the past with rose colored glasses and see a better time. The average life expectancy was much shorter; a part of our past as a nation is a past filled with the bloodshed wrought by gangsters, robbers, and hoodlums prowling our city streets…”
The gruesome newspaper stories and photographs in this book reinforce my appreciation for not having to live in the “good old days.” Generally, people today are far more civilized than were their ancestors. However, our perception is quite the opposite. Too many of us believe that we live in the midst of a seething cauldron of amorality. Both the media and our uncritical acceptance of the daily deluge of crime reports are to blame for this belief. If a child is abducted in Los Angeles, we immediately know about it on the East Coast. We hear about every major crime in our nation of 270 million inhabitants. Crimes involving children are especially apt to make the national press. Humans evolved in village settings where their news of others was limited to a few hundred persons at the most. In today’s interconnected world we have instant access to the criminal activity of nearly 9 billion people. Given the efficiency of our news gathering organizations, coupled with such mind-boggling numbers of people, it's inevitable that we have such a daily outpouring of stories of murder, rape, kidnapping, etc. It's the nature of the “news” business that we hear so little of the good that humans do everyday. The press finds good people to be boring, and much prefers to write about axe-murderers.
The erroneous belief that your neighbor is more apt to be an axe-murderer is not an innocuous belief. A number of ethicists (Steven Pinker comes to mind) have explained that people tend to calibrate their moral compass to what they perceive is the average moral standard of their society. That is; most people would rather not be a saint or a sinner, they would rather simply be “normal.” A problem arises however, when people have a skewed perception of what the average moral behavior of their neighbor actually is. If we only think that men act worse than they actually act, we recalibrate our own moral standards to reflect this perceived lower standard.
Another result of this erroneous belief is that we come to fear what we should not. An analogous story comes to mind:
A few years ago, a friend told me that his company had hosted a Chinese visitor for six weeks. Despite numerous social invitations by the resident employees, the visitor preferred to remain alone inside the house provided for her on the company grounds after her working hours. Eventually the word got around that she would be returning to China having only seen as much of Vermont as could be seen while driving from the airport to the company headquarters. A more urgent request was made to the guest that she should do some sight-seeing. This time the guest explained her hesitance. All of her life she had heard stories of the terrible crime in America. She’d been terrified out of her wits that she had to make the trip to America at all. I suppose if you or I had to make a business trip to Columbia, South America, we might have an idea of how she felt about visiting Vermont. It’s ironic that she was afraid to walk on the street in the same county where I leave the door of my house unlocked, unless I’m going away on a trip.
Similarly, parents instill an irrational fear and mistrust of adults in their children. Children are far more likely to die in an automobile accident than at the hands of a murderer, yet why have the children not been taught to shrink back in fear when it's time to go by car to their soccer practice? No, we teach them that this is your house and this is your car; you are safe here. The rest of the world is a bad place, full of bad people whom you should have nothing to do with. In truth, children are much more likely to become a victim at the hands of someone they know rather than a stranger.
Instead of being taught to fear and mistrust adults, children should be taught that they are members of a complete society and owe their very lives to people they might never have met. Think of the labor of the farmer you will never meet, yet without the product of his toil you would be dead in a matter of months.
There is a minute chance that one day you might be assaulted or even murdered by a “stranger”. However, without the constant help we receive from “strangers,” each of us would surely die in a short time. In other words, there is a tiny possibility that a man might one day harm you, but an absolute certainty that millions of men work daily to help you. So which is the more reasonable, that we generally love or fear other men?
Michael
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