"In social science, a cause sought is usually a muddle found. In life as we experience it, a crisis resolved is causality established. If a pill cures a headache, we do not ask too often if the headache might have gone away by itself."
This is from an excellent article about the American penal system by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker of Jan. 30. What struck me, though, was nothing about prisons or theories of punishment, but the general relevance of the kind of thinking Gopnik does in this passage. What struck me is that an article about a great divide (one among many, as we hear so often these days) in American culture and society, is actually in itself representative of the thing that constitutes perhaps the greatest divide of all: the ability and/or inclination to engage in the sort of subtle parsing and problematizing (sorry to use such an egregious English major word) that Gopnik deploys above. In my experience, neither class, nor race, nor gender, nor religion, nor age, nor even education level attained is as divisive as the willingness (or not) to perceive and, even more, to engage complexity.
There are entire tomes, it would seem, that could be written about this. Entire tomes, no?
Read the article here: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik
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