Children's books as mind control · 3:14am Nov 21st, 2014
I'm settling into my new home in Western Pennsylvania, where we have people with a diversity of preferences (both Presbyterian and Catholic, Winchester and Remington, checked flannel and solid), and people watch Fox News for a fair and balanced viewpoint. Folks don't ask me if I go to church; they ask what church I go to. So I am a little hyper-vigilant lately about cultural homogeneity. And it occurs to me that maybe what this idyllic setting needs is children's books written by Bad Horse.
Not just like that. First I accidentally wrote a children's book. (Though after I thought about it I realized it was a children's book for old people, and more specifically a children's book for me.) Then I thought, "What do I do with this? Can I sell it?"
So I browsed the web to find how one sells children's books. The first mistake most people make is getting illustrations for their book before trying to sell it. That is the mark of an amateur. Text, fortunately for writers, doesn't go out of style as quickly as illustrations do. Choosing a book's illustrations is like choosing a cover: It's marketing and fashion, not artistic sense. That's why you can always tell a self-published book by its cover. It may be a fine picture, but there's something not quite Madison Avenue about it that makes the sophisticated book-buyer shrink back from it in horror.
The second mistake is writing too many words, and fitting them onto the wrong number of pages. A book is made by combining sheaves of 4 sheets folded over, each sheaf making 16 pages. A standard children's picture book has 32 pages. 2 of these are glued to the front and back cover, and the 4 pages on inside of the covers and next to them are traditionally left empty, I expect as offerings to the tree spirits. 2 pages hold copyright, publisher info, and title. That leaves 24 pages for the story. You can add one or two more sheaves, for 32 or 40 pages of story. Your story should fit one of these numbers exactly; there are no blank pages at the end of a children's book. We adults have learned to pass over small mysteries such as blank pages without noticing them, whereas a child can be stopped and frozen in place by such enigmas, possibly all through naptime.
(The third mistake is telling the artist what to draw, but I'm totally doing that.)
I went to my little sister's house and stole an armful of picture books, to see how many pages they each had, and get a feel for how they read. The first one I read is "Die Sterntaler" (The Star Coin) by die Brueder Grimm. This is a charming story about a little girl who has nobody and nothing in the world except the clothes on her back. She goes on a journey (since she has nothing else to do and nowhere to be, really), and gives away all those clothes, one by one, to people less poor than her, because they ask for them. Finally she stands alone and naked in the snow. Then on the last page, we have:
Und wie Mathilda so dastand in der kalten Nacht, fielen unzaehlige Sterne vom Himmel, die sich sogleich in glaenzende Silbermuenzen verwandelten. Und obgleich Mathilda erst gerade ihr letztes Hemd weggegeben hatte, trug sie jetzt ein neues Kleid aus feinstem Gewebe. Glucklich sammelte Mathilda die Silbermuenzen ein und steckte sie in die Taschen ihres Kleides. Von dieser Nacht an musste Mathilde nie mehr Not leiden.
Translation:
And as Mathilda stood there in the cold night, countless stars fell from the sky, which immediately turned into gleaming silver coins. And although Mathilda had only just given away her last shirt, she now wore a new dress made from the finest fabric. Mathilda happily gathered the silver coins and put them in the pockets of her dress. From that night on, Mathilde never again suffered poverty.
Translation of the translation:
Bitch died and went to heaven. It was ballin'.
And this is from the Brueders Grimm, who are on the short short list of folktale-tellers with the balls to tell disturbing stories.
Yeah, "...and so she froze to death in the snow and went to heaven" is not exactly Disney. But this shit is still too idealistic, and BAD for kids.
First, it's lying about what happens. It would be more honest if they said "and then she died and went to heaven"; but then the kid might have objections: If God could take her up to heaven, why didn't he just give her another coat? Because she was too stupid to live and would have just given it away again? No; tell the kid something nice happened, and then, later on in life when people tell her about heaven, she might think, "Wait, that really doesn't make sense," but some part of her mind will think "It makes perfect sense; it's like that nice story Die Sterntaler!" The story tricks kids into believing in heaven.
Worse, here's the moral: "Being generous is always good, no matter what. If somebody asks you for something, give it to them. If you meet a family that has inexplicably brought their child out into a snowstorm without so much as a blanket, and they ask you for your undershirt, which is the only thing in the world you have left, because they're too selfish to give the child one of the scarves or hats or jackets they have on, don't ask questions. Give them your shirt. That is being generous, and being generous is being Good, and God will reward the good. (That's why we do good, kids: To get rewarded for it.) Doing anything less, ever, is failing."
The idea here is that if you teach kids to be really, extremely, over-the-top good, maybe sometimes they'll be just a little bit good in real life.
Only, wait, that isn't the idea. It isn't "extremely good". Telling someone who has nothing but a shirt to give it away because God wants her to is evil. Teaching kids that being good is impossibly hard, and they can never ever attain it, at least not if they want to live, is evil. Teaching that "good" means "never thinking about the consequences" is evil. That's nearly the opposite of good. The whole thing is a mindfuck worthy of Screwtape.
Old-country children's stories didn't shy away from disturbing stuff. They had horrible things happen to kids who disobeyed their parents or violated social taboos. Or, like Die Sterntaler, they explained why their simple folk-deontology was just perfect, thank you very much, and didn't need any fancy logic or thinkin', just the Hand of God every now and then.
Sometimes I play a game called "people are smart": Pretend, for a minute, that people understand what they're doing. None of these old stories are really about how to be a good person, so what are they about?
They're about how to be normal, do what you're told, and not ask questions.
A lot of contemporary children's stories and movies shy away from sad or disturbing things, at least things that aren't fixed in the course of 24 pages. Gotta protect the kids from sad thoughts, or they'll grow up twisted and write stories about ponies getting killed by asteroids.
(They may have a point. I read the Bible when I was 6. Fortunately my parents took it away because I was taking it literally.)
Yet it's okay to tell kids about the crucifixion. Or to tell them stories from the old testament about, oh, committing genocide against people with different beliefs, or sacrificing your kid on an altar to prove your devotion to God. I was at my kid sister's house for dinner a while ago, and her kids started talking about their dreams. Turns out they all dream frequently about getting martyred. Burned alive, boiled alive, shot with arrows, and more variations on that theme. It's fine to tell little kids hundreds of stories about innocent people being tortured to death if it's what you believe in.
Let's play "people are smart" again. Why would we (a) tell kids gruesome stories about what happens to kids who disobey, (b) tell them gruesome stories that are part of our religion, (c) tell them about kids freezing to death in the cold to teach them not to think about morality, and yet (d) be afraid of anything violent or sad in any other kind of story?
Because what parents are afraid of isn't violence or sadness. They're afraid of open questions. They're afraid of stories that pose questions and don't have the answers immediately at hand. [1]
The old stories were explicitly meant to teach kids how to think. Now we know it's safer just to stop children from thinking. To pen their little minds in, whether with thorny walls of Teutonic threats, or soft downy cottonballs of fluff, any time they're in danger of thinking. So that they can grow up just like their parents, whether they want to or not.
But do nice-nice children's stories even work at that?
Die Sterntaler does at least one thing that not many children's stories do: It makes kids feel sorry for the little girl. Parents today, and corporations even more so, are terrified of telling their kids sad stories like Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid". I'm no psychologist [2], but I've got a theory: Sad stories teach kids how to feel sympathy.
So what do you get when you raise kids and never let them hear any sad stories?
Selfish kids, I'd bet.
Likewise, it takes stories that are disturbing in other ways, or just weird, to make kids ask questions and think. Maybe like this odd 24-page Beatrix Potter book, "The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse," in which everybody is selfish, neurotic, deceptive, and/or larcenous, and Jackson Toad is in the habit of eating uninvited guests. It's oddly heart-warming that they more-or-less get along (the ones who weren't eaten, anyway) in the end. Or maybe this nicely-grisly one by Aldous Huxley, of all people, "The Crows of Pearblossom", in which birds conspire to kill a snake who eats their eggs, and in the end use his corpse to hang their laundry on.
I hated "The Giving Tree", but even its creepiness is a breath of fresh air in the nursery when it's shelved between "Make Way for Ducklings!" and "The Berenstain Bears Forget Their Manners". The book doesn't actually say "This is a healthy relationship." It's in-your-face with its weirdness and unanswered questions.
I don't know what age is appropriate for what kind of stories. And nice stories are nice. But when we give kids nothing but nice, inoffensive, non-problematic stories, it isn't for their sakes. It's for ours. We're unconsciously hoping to stop them from asking themselves questions, in the deluded hope that they'll grow up like us. [3]
I don't think that's what will happen. But one thing is clear: As a clever Austrian once said, he who controls the youth, controls the future.
I gotta get me a piece of that action. 
[1] I'm not talking about my sister specifically, who is pretty chill about these things.
[2] Okay, I minored in psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics. But I still claim non-expertise.
[3] Or maybe we just don't want to be around a 6-year-old with a lot of questions. It can be exhausting.
Hmm. This is very true. So how are you gonna sell that book, may I ask, if you are doing it at all? Getting odd but good books like The Giving Tree initially published is kinda hard, by lieu of being so against cultural norms.
Ooh! Let us know when the book is out so we can read it!
My understanding is that The Giving Tree is one of Shel Silverstein's milder works that's (debatably) safe for kids.
I've heard lots of people relate similar experiences with the Bible et all. I swear all the followers of it aren't crazy. Just most of us
Maybe the compromise is to write a book where an inquisitive young child is rewarding for thinking critically and asking questions of everyone except their parents, who have had a long day and don't need to be bothered a lot. I bet that book would sell like hotcakes. The title could be "Wait 'til School and Ask Your Teacher, She's Paid to Deal with You."
As far as children's books go, I'm fond of Gator Gumbo. It has a story where the alligator has gotten old and slow and all the other animals mock him for it, letting him get just close enough to get his hopes up and then outrunning him when he tries to eat them. Eventually he seems to give up and starts cooking a delicious gumbo. As he adds ingredients, various animals are drawn by the smell and ask him what he's cooking and what ingredients he's putting in it. Finally at the end, all the animals and the gator are standing around the pot, looking forward to the gumbo. Then he grabs them and dumps them all in and cooks them because they were too close to escape even an old gator and distracted.
The Moral: Don't be jerks or old people will eat you. Alternately, age and treachery trumps rash youthful athleticism.
No, it's as offerings to the destructive appetites of small children, like ablative armor. Sometimes it even works.
We need more Bad Horse story translations
The only quibble I'd point out is that, up until a certain age (I don't know offhand), a lot of what a child learns is by emulation. So, you do need stories with clear role models. This doesn't necessarily mean black-and-white-morality (see: inter-mane-six conflict episodes) but I do think that children end up learning a lot of morals and "how the world works" lessons from early lit and its character conflicts. The challenges then, include:
+ Don't be preachy. Kids are smart enough to read between the lines.
+ Cool it with the indoctrination. I'd like to say "don't", but I simply don't think that's possible in our day and age. If the household practices any religion, the kids will be indocrinated. If the household is aethist, the parents may or may not shelter the kids from such material, but they're sure not going to go out of their way to buy their 6yo a collection of various religious works to let the child form their own informed opinions.
+ Write good stories first. It's not merely that Die Sterntaler's moral is dangerous (though that doesn't help). It's an unsatisfying ending.
First off, childrens' books are not mind control. That's a bit of an exaggeration. Certainly, they CAN have a large impact on a child, but there is never any guarantee. I am sure that there are some books I read as a child and don't remember anything about. All stories impact different children differently; making general claims about such things can be fallacious.
I think you are drawing a ridiculous conclusion from the story, namely that its purpose is to "trick kids into believing in heaven". From the excerpt we were given, it's not even possible to tell what the Brothers Grimm were actually trying to say in regards to the reality of what happened. Did they normally write stories with allegorical endings like this? I'd have to know that before I judged anything about whether the story was even trying to say what you claim it does.
You also make some unreasonable claims in regards to the moral of the story. If the Brothers Grimm are really telling the story as you describe, then I'm certain it's reasonable to assume that Mathilda knew what she was doing when she gave away all her clothes, and then your idea that "good means never thinking about the consequences" makes no sense, because she WAS thinking about the consequences.
Frankly, you seem to have a presupposition that modern, 'logical' thought is incompatible with 'old-fashioned' or religious (specifically christian) ways. I respectfully disagree. I can't vouch for anyone else, but as a christian myself I know that when I have a family some day I will teach them about God as best I know how, without censoring anything. I'm afraid of tough questions, sure, just like everyone, but I've decided that I won't let myself be ruled by that fear. I will never 'trick' my children with a storybook, nor will I force them to think the way I do. The highest honor I could have as a parent would be to raise a child who could think for themselves and make good choices in life. Am I biased there? Probably. Can I speak for everyone? No. I simply wish to provide some perspective in this discussion, as there are people out there like me in christian communities who value independent thought. Perhaps more than you think, perhaps less than I think. I can't be sure.
Though I will certainly agree with your last point, in that kids are more mature than we give them credit for, and starving them of challenging, thought-provoking material is sure to create unhealthy habits in kids.
Hopefully this didn't come out too angry-sounding. I know you're upset with the homogeneity you mentioned in your post, and I might have let a little of that attitude color my response. I'm not angry or upset, like I said I am just trying to add some perspective here.
I thought the moral was that you can't be unselfish in a selfish world. Others will take everything you offer with no regard to what it costs you and your only reward will be in death. Selflessness =/= Generosity.
I still don't get how the story of Abraham and Isaac is supposed to be positive in any reasonable sense of the term. As best I can tell, the two possible morals are:
God demanded Abraham sacrifice his son to demonstrate his obedience, but then sent an angel to stay Abraham's hand. This somehow shows that God merciful.
or
Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son to the mysterious voice in his head. This somehow demonstrates an admirable sense of faith.
Beats me, man. Give me the New Testament any day.
2607924 Or maybe a book for parents about taking time to answer their kids questions, and helping them develop critical thinking skills.
I think Bad Horse is just the right guy for the job.
2607946
The Grimm Bros. didn't create any stories. They collected stories from "the folk". They had to settle on a single version & write it down, but they were more like editors than authors.
It isn't really "true" to say its purpose is to "trick kids into believing in heaven". Authors often don't know what the "purpose" of a book is when they write it. I'm speaking loosely. But I think that's more-or-less what's happening, intentional or not.
Nothing I say about Christianity is a presupposition, though I haven't given my reasons here. There have been many attempts to reconcile logical thought with Christianity, but this story is not in those traditions. It is in the straight-up Jesus tradition: "Sell what you have, and give to the poor." I think that radical Christianity of Jesus, which approximately nobody in the world lives up to, was not supposed to be logical, or even sustainable, and was against counting the cost or making decisions based on their consequences.
When I said Die Sterntaler was against considering the consequences, I was being sloppy. I meant that it was against weighing the costs and benefits of actions in an objective fashion. But that's not really right, because the little girl gets rewarded in the end with a new fancy dress and lots of money; so you are supposed to weigh the costs and benefits, I guess. I don't know how to summarize it now, at midnight, but IMHO it's still all kinds of screwed up.
2607979
It's supposed to be a prefigurement of God the Father's sacrifice of his Son.
2607985
You mean peaceful ascetic socialism isn't all the rage?
I feel very fortunate for having been born in a family of Soviet scientists and engineers.
Sounds like more parents need to be giving and/or reading Harold and the Purple Crayon to their kids.
The other problem is that young kids, their brains don't actually work all that well yet. I can't remember exactly where I heard this, so it's somewhat heresy, but I read an account from a parent that their kids (young-ish? Elementary school approx I believe) acted out and were basically jerks after watching the Babs Seed episode of pony. Which reminded them that they had read an article explaining that kids that young don't actually have a well defined sense of cause and effect yet. So the moral at the end of the story (don't be a bully) was just 30 seconds of behavior compared to the entire episode of Babs being a jerk and having fun with it.
And yes, kids books are mind control. So are most stories to some extent. So is most education. The tricky part is that it's all kind of blind because we don't actually have a precise understanding of the brain. Oh, and on a completely different subject, not all self-published books have bad covers. Most of the successful ones have pretty good covers these days. Lots of published books have pretty cruddy covers too.
I fully agree we need more Bad Horse translated fairy tales.
2607985
I suppose that makes two of us who are tired and not necessarily in our right minds.
Regardless, I don't have much to say in response to your post. You made some good points and explained them well. I think that stories tricking kids into believing certain things do exist, and are used by parents who are lazy/afraid/etc. In a children's book, it's hard to say what the kid who reads it will take away from it. I'm still shaky on how we got the conclusion, but it's not a huge deal I suppose. In regards to the comments on Christianity, it's just an attitude that I felt pervaded a lot of what you said. I doubt you hate Christianity or anything of the sort, but from the way you worded some of your sentences I got the impression you have a negative opinion overall in regards to it. There's nothing wrong with that, nor am I trying to imply anything by this statement, it was simply the observation that I was making (and, secretly, I always wish that I could be a good enough example to give people positive experiences to balance out the negatives). Perhaps I am just overly sensitive due to the overwhelmingly atheistic, homogenous nature of the internet.
Either way, you do have a point about Die Sterntaler; being generous because you expect something in return isn't something good to teach a child.
Thing is, kids are growing up and committing less crime over time, so apparently whatever impact these are having, it is fairly minimal.
Honestly I'm pretty sure kids have always grown up with messed up stuff.
I remember liking some of the Dr. Seuss stuff - The Lorax and that story about people getting stars or not having stars, which I think was about racism, or fashion, or something (though maybe the abstraction was intentional, because no one could really tell what it was about, but it was generally a good thing because discriminating on the basis of outward appearance was bad).
Of course, I was always a precocious youngster, so I remember reading like, actual books from a young age.
Also, the Giving Tree struck me as incredibly messed up even as a child.
2607924
I hear there's a big market for this kind of "children's book".
I have a book called All My Friends Are Dead which is a parody of a children's book, bunch of simple illustrations and rhymes about how all of the characters' friends are dead (or are various other things).
2608041
Could be here?
2608041
A fair point, and important.
2608043
I was a serious born-again evangelical fundamentalist Christian for many years. Most of the things that went wrong in my life went wrong because I was trying to be a good Christian. I am very partial to the cultures of Christian nations, and I'm not convinced that telling everybody the truth about life would be a good thing, so Christianity might still be useful, at least in some places. I have a kind of respect for hardcore Jesus-Christianity and get a little angry whenever people blame Jesus for things Paul said. But I don't think it's reasonable nowadays to believe that Christianity is true, and yet I have little respect for people who are Christians and don't believe, or act like, it's true.
2607936 I once saw a T-shirt in our gaming store: Age and Treachery will always overcome Youth and Skill.
2607985 The purpose of these stories *is* to warp... I mean mould young minds, and has been since the first caveperson (being non-hetrogentive here) sat around the fire (a carbon-neutral fire of pre-industrialized nature, therefore not contributing to Global Climate Change) and told his/her/their offspring (or adopted from other tribes, being as not to disparage such relations) stories about how Thog went to spear a fish and got eaten by a croc because he was too dumb to recognize that the log floating in the water had eyes. They are lessons put into story form, because just *telling* the little crumb-crunchers about critical life lessons that could save their skins has almost no effect on their brain cells.
As examples:
The Ant and the Grasshopper: Work or you'll starve to death.
The Frog and the Scorpion: Evil people who talk nice to you will stab you in the back no matter how much they promise
The Little Red Hen: If you work for something and get it, there will always be others who did not work and still want it. Tell them to go (censored) themselves.
Hansel and Gretel: Nice little old ladies aren't always really nice. If something looks too good to be true, it is.
2608076 A fair point. I don't mean to condemn children's stories. But I think there is something wrong and possibly dishonest with our taboo against exposing kids under the age of 13 to open questions in fiction.
There's some age below which I'm cool with just simple reassuring stories. Maybe age 6. It's hard to pin down whether there's a problem, because there seems (based on my minimal investigation) to be a strange gap in kid lit: Lots of stuff for ages 2-6; lots of books for 11+; seemingly not much written for kids in-between that. I mean, there aren't many picture-books with complex ideas, and there aren't many books with very simple vocabularies.
2607979
If I remember correctly from when I was in school, I think it's actually both. The story of Abraham, much like Job, came from a period when absolute faith and obedience to one's deity (And, if I may be somewhat cynical, to one's church and the church leaders.) was considered one of the highest virtues one could have.
2608015
I really doubt that, as Abraham's story predates the New Testament by a rather significant period of time, and does not really mirror Jesus death very much regardless.
Regarding your new home: Why America seems to marry intense Christianity and affection for firearms is utterly beyond me. What caliber would the Prince of Peace prefer?
Also, I've read this book Bad Horse wrote. It is remarkable. My heart grew three sizes that day.
...the doctors say this is causing catastrophic arrhythmia. I have weeks to live. Send help.
But no, seriously. It is a wonderful wonderful thing.
2608049
Crime is going down, but I really must wonder if it is because we are nicer than ever. A certain willful lack of empathy seems to be the order of the day with a great many people.
It is possible to induce people to act non-criminally without encouraging empathy. Indeed, our esteemed host's blog is about one such morality that's entirely focused on virtue-as-stamp-collecting (collect ten more charity points to unlock the Greater Martyr skill tree!).
2608083
Huh. I read an absolute ton of books in that very time range. A lot of them wouldn't be familiar to anyone who doesn't belong to my native culture but I remember reading...um... Watership Down? I read that at around nineish, or something like that. A lot of Mark Twain, obviously. Jules Verne. I remember really liking The Mysterious Island.
2607979
I was never able to parse that story as anything but "Absolute obedience to God's will is an absolute good, in turn." God can't be merciful in that story because it was all his idea in the first place.
All these problems would go away if we would just stop teaching children how to read.
2608089
I think it is odd that you would use a time-based argument against someone who believes in prophecy, God's omniscience, and the divine inspiration of Scripture.
Typological interpretation of Scripture is explicitly embraced in the New Testament (such as in, perhaps most famously, Christ being paralleled with Adam) and was routine among the early Christians. The understanding of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac as being a divine foreshadowing of the sacrifice of Christ is a commonplace in Christian biblical theology. I do not know of any other interpretation that a Christian ought to find preferable.
2608015
2607979
Not really, it's just another Jobe story where willingness to put up with the actions and demands of God, no matter how unreasonable they seem, is rewarded, because that's pretty much what a large chunk of the Old Testament was about before Jesus showed up. It's not meant to presage anything any more than the first time the word "Satan" shows up it's supposed to represent the later stories about the Devil (the first time the word is used in the Old Testament, it's a heavenly emissary that stops an army from catching some Jews by appearing as an old man with a donkey and blocking the narrow road, said army being the bad guys of the story, which isn't at all the same as a fallen angel scheming to damn mankind). Different stories were written at different times, to fill different needs. If they happen to fill later needs too, that's great, but Jesus doesn't need to be presaged by Abraham, anymore than Abraham needs to be followed by Jesus to make sense to the people it was told to at the time it came into being.
It's too easy to descend into Apophenia when analyzing things and Christianity has had a long time to over-think the Bible, divinely inspired words or not. A lot of doctrines revolve around theories not really supported by the main text.
2608158
Look, if there's no God, then of course it isn't meant to presage anything, because then it's just a story written by ordinary people and ordinary people can't see into the future.
If the basic Christian ideas are right, though, then there's no prima facie reason to think that the Bible wouldn't contain stories which are a sort of divine foreshadowing of events to come. It's certainly within God's power to cause such things to happen, and moreover, the New Testament explicitly embraces these kinds of interpretations of the Old Testament. So for a Christian, I think that the best interpretation of the story of Abraham and Isaac is the one that sees it as pointing to Christ. Even if you aren't a Christian, I think you should be able to see why this would make sense to a Christian.
The reason I am harping on this point is that it is usually Christian Sunday-school teachers (rather than, say, agnostic Bible scholars or literary critics) who are mainly responsible for introducing and explaining this story to children. In a pragmatic sense, they "determine" what the story means. So if somebody is wondering why anyone would regard this violent story as being at all wholesome or suitable for children's ears, they could do worse than to ask the Christians who hold it in such high regard how they understand it.
2608173
I don't know, I think the best thing to do with it would be to kind of shove it under the table, with the pro-slavery stuff or the bit where shellfish are labelled abominations in the eyes of God, just so you don't have to try and make a square-ish peg fill a round-ish hole.
It's not like there aren't actual prophecies of a Messiah you can draw on, instead.
2608180
Seems to me like that would be dishonest. "I believe this Scripture is the Word of God, but some of this stuff I just kind of ignore because it's obviously wrong." Better, in my view, to toss the book altogether and have done with it.
2608184
No, no, obviously out-dated. Pre-Christ stuff is explicitly superceded by post-Christ, that's why you don't have to still avoid shellfish.... at least theoretically, I don't recall Christ ever specifying either way on that particular issue.
EDIT: That's the humorous example, there's a lot of very fundamental things to every modern Christian church that rely on this principle. You won't find anyone alive of any Christian denomination who isn't choosing to abandon some of the Old Testament stuff.
2608185
Ah. I guess I was misunderstanding you.
Look, about the bigger point, I agree that certain Christian interpretations of the Old Testament are not "supported by the main text". It's certainly true that you have to already believe that Jesus is the Son of God in order to, for example, see Isaac as a foreshadowing of Jesus. You can't get that from a straight-up exegesis of the text of Genesis.
My point, though, is that it isn't illegitimate to base interpretative conclusions such as these on a combination of exegesis and one's pre-existing Christian beliefs. One's religious beliefs are either true or false, but if they are true then surely it is legitimate to apply them consistently. Therefore those who are already convinced Christians, if they want to be intellectually rigorous and consistent, and if their beliefs include the divine inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture, cannot help but interpret the Old Testament in the light of the New Testament. And as the New Testament explicitly embraces typological interpretation, modern biblical scholars can hardly dismiss it without very good and strong reasons for doing so.
2607979
It is things like that that make many Christians today selectively reject the vast majority of the Old Testament as merely an historical text rather than as relevant to contemporary Christain life.
The Old Testamant god is a lot more about rules and doctrine and obedience and blind faith. It makes sense considering the times in which the tribes lived. It's really no different from a different version of Sharia Law when taken literally and has no real place in any progressive society.
After Jesus came along his followers were supposed to put all that behind them. I guess they couldn't let go of the fear. Fear is so much better at controlling people than love.
2608188
Partly because it's not a fitting parallel. Thus, one is forced to preach that God is all-knowing, all-powerful, wrote exactly what is said in the Bible (which survived every translation intact) and still not actually very good at foreshadowing, if one chooses to go with that interpretation.
I think you're selling short the extent to which this is the motivation behind conformity-promoting themes in children's literature, or even other aspects of children's lives; but I also think you're underestimating to what extent such pragmatic child-raising decisions affect later development, so it's kind of a wash.
2608073
This is so incredibly cynical. I've heard this from a lot of irreligious folks, but I'm not sure that it is really fair; the Chinese and Japanese get by, after all. The Japanese don't even have a repressive government!
I think it is a bit too harsh on people.
Jesus as a person seemed like a pretty decent fellow on the whole. Religious, to be sure, but generally a nice guy.
2608083
I'm not so sure about that; challenging kids to think about the world seems like it should have a positive rather than a negative impact on them. Zoobooks and stuff like that tells kids about the world, and you can teach kids about how science works and such, and how you can test things and find things out for yourself via experimentation. I mean, people naturally do very basic forms of experimentation even as children, trying out new things to see what happens (poking things with sticks and generally being curious about them), so I don't think that little kids can't accept things with open questions. I think it is just that people don't tend to write stuff for little kids with open questions in them.
Ironically, stuff about science may do a better job of that because it encourages kids to try something themselves to see what happens, and then figure out/understand why.
Instilling the idea in kids that you can try it out yourself or look it up somewhere else is, I think, teaching them an important life pattern.
As for stuff between 6-11 - I recall there being a large volume of children's books aimed at kids that age which you could order at school, back when I was in elementary school. Stuff like Redwall, Goosebumps books, the young reader Dinotopia stuff, a lot of books of random trivia and suchlike (I loved those), even stuff like The Hobbit towards the upper end of that age range. A lot of folks I know read The Hobbit during elementary school, and some also read LOTR - that's when I read it, though I was, as noted previously, a bit precocious.
Which reminds me of a joke:
2608133
They don't. A lot of people forget this, but the US is actually an insanely secular country in many respects - a lot of places in Europe have governmentally-established churches. We were founded by a bunch of people with very strong deistic, libertarian leanings who were, generally speaking, of the opinion that if you wanted something done, you'd do it yourself. Some of them were religious - some of them intensely so - but they weren't under the delusion that being pious would accomplish anything temporally, by and large.
As such, the whole "Americans are rugged frontiersmen" and "Americans are pious belivers" never really made much sense, but they kind of went together because a bunch of Americans were religious and adopted the rugged frontiersman mythology and thus blended the two together. It makes absolutely no sense from a religious sense (at least not Christian mythology), but it makes sense culturally.
There's an insane branch of Christian mythology in the United States known as prosperity theology who believe that by praying to God and being pious, God will give them money. These people are, ostensibly, Christians, but somehow seem to have missed the whole "Christ was an ascetic mysthic who denounced material wealth" thing.
But I mean, who cares about that Jesus chump anyway? I hear he doesn't even show up for half the book.
Some years ago a bunch of Christians went to pray on Wall Street for increased economic prosperity, too, right in front of Merrill-Lynch. They have a statue of their symbol outside of their building on the street.
wonkette.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/bullprayer2.jpg
Some have noted the lack of smiting as the strongest evidence yet that God does not exist.
Is this not similar to the problem of knowledge, in that if we believe we know something, our knowledge allows us to make predictions, and our predictions are accurate, we think we have justified true knowledge, but we might just be lucky?
It seems kind of similar. If people are behaving as though they are compassionate human beings, is it really necessary for them to genuinely feel empathy if the net outcome is the same? How can we even differentiate between false, non-empathetic altruism and true altruism? If someone spends ten years treating sick Africans, if they do it out of the goodness of their heart or because they think it will win them points with God, the Africans still get treated, after all.
But honestly I'm not sure if people really can fake this sort of thing. I think it is culturally ingrained to some extent; there is vast opportunity for mischief, so if people were not "really" good, shouldn't they be evil more often? Though one could, I suppose, argue that people are less good than they seem to be, as they are more evil when people aren't looking (though not terribly evil, generally speaking).
It seems unlikely to me that we aren't actually better people today than we were in the past when most people are disgusted by the idea of segregation or genocide, or that we aren't more empathetic when countries have increasingly reached out to help other random countries for no reason other than the goodness of their own heart.
2608185
(All following language should be viewed through a healthy understanding of the history of the set of documents that is the Bible; it's just much easier to say "Jesus said" than "as best as we can tell according to second- or third-hand accounts translated across hundreds of years by people with agendas and at least unconscious if not conscious translator bias" over and over again.)
Jesus, iconoclast that he was, says in Matthew 15:11 (as a continued exploration of one of his major repeating themes: "Hebrews, why you gots to get so hung up on the wrong kindsa stuff") that he takes a dim view of being overly concerned about defilement through the diet. This has given Christians from Paul on down the safety hatch of not being required to follow any number of Old Testament restrictions.
(Interestingly, Peter seemed to be in favor of requiring new Christians to adhere to basic Jewish tenets such as circumcision, whereas Paul was all like "Yo, whatevs, just confess and believe and you're all good"; since Peter is the "rock" on which the church is built, and per Jesus's explicit words, "whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven," this would seem to render Paul's subsequent barging in on the scene and telling people what they can and cannot do suspect? At any rate, it seems clear that without Paul's overwhelmingly zealous approach to evangelism, Christianity as we know it would not exist, so make of that what you will.)
Invariably, people will look back at the Old Testament and find differences in the adjectives used to describe various forbidden acts and say "see, these violations (which correspond to my own dislikes and prejudices) are described with different adjectives, which means that they're the really bad ones and we should still totally not do them." I am... not entirely convinced? A few minutes Internet research suggests that the distinction here is between "shiqquwts" and "to'eba" and that the line between them is not as clear-cut as such individuals would like you to think. I would welcome input from the better-educated on this matter (though I suspect Bad Horse's followsphere does not attract the type of reader who would be able to offer the proper perspective).
Basically, despite some inconsistency here and there, Jesus's main thang seems to be "Look, the important thing is love and public welfare, not these rules you keep throwing at me." Admirable enough, and it seems on the surface like something we all can get behind, but that said--bringing this back around to the main point of the blog entry--he's also on record as explicitly promoting the excessive self-sacrifice on full display in "The Star Coin," which the OP describes as "evil." So... yeah. It's probably fallacy to think that there's some one true moral view we can all agree on.
Or maybe, possibly, the Marchen were the produce of harried, exhausted, desperate adults who simply wanted the little dears to "shut the fuck up and go to sleep."
A century later they just used opium-drops.
2608133
I'm out-of-sync about ages. And so are you, if you're trying to place Mark Twain, Watership Down, and Jules Verne in the 7-10 range. There seems to be a gap between "Benjamin Bunny lost his button" picture-books, and actual books. A gap where I might expect to find short books with simple words and lots of pictures.
2608314
You are quite correct in asking whether there is a big difference between those who are 'really' good and those who are merely 'pretending.' However this is not entirely my point. To say someone is 'good' is not a particularly useful designation (deontologists and consequentialists would say it is a predictor of future behavior, only a virtue ethicist would talk about it as an actual attribute). Let me phrase it like this: Most people want to be good. However, being good is hard. The method currently in vogue is the collection of virtue points: being good is about certain attributes you have, and you can increase those attributes by conspicuously exercising certain virtues. And this works quite well! People are acting well, admirably, even. And the heuristic nature of virtue thinking produces remarkably consistent results in crisis situations.
Note that this isn't a question morality, necessarily. It's more a question of capability. As I said above being good is hard and this simplistic model produces inconsistent and problematic results in all sorts of edge cases. Certain tremendous injustices are tolerated by the highly virtuous because they don't factor well into the lens they use to evaluate the morality of actions.
So, yes, people are appalled by genocide, as they should be, but I worry how they would respond if genocide came to them disguised. A slow motion genocide, where you degrade the infrastructure and security of an area, say, to such an extent that the civilian population within starts dying off is a lot more acceptable, even though the end result is much the same.
So. Summa summarum: The question isn't if people are 'really' good as opposed to 'I-can't-believe-it's-not-good' good substitute. The question is how good at being good they are, given their view of moral-vs.-immoral.
2608394
If I may offer a... softer interpretation of our esteemed host? What makes Star Coin uncomfortable for me is that the protagonist is a child. An old ascetic, perhaps, going through a similar journey of radical kenosis, leaving nothing of themself in the end, and suborning every need to needs of others, no matter how trifling... yes. I can see such a story in a different light. A complex take on the extent of the moral life and a portrait of an almost otherworldly conception of ethics.
But I have a hard time a child is capable of such. Not quite like that. Thus, not quite being able to believe she knew the nature and ultimate result of her actions, I am stuck in seeing her as a victim of broken morality which--given that I, like most people, see harm coming to children as particularly heinous--lends credence to the 'evil' interpretation. The heavenly award seems crassly manipulative rather than a natural extension of an arc of a character's mystical transformation.
If you wrote a story about a child sacrificing very clearly so that others may live with full knowledge of what that means... that would be different.
So. To sum up. This isn't a story of self-sacrifice, so much as it is a story of ascetic apotheosis which fits a child poorly. So poorly, that it may be seen as evil.
2608408 When my Mom was a little girl in Poland, the cook would tuck her in bed and tell her, "There's a horrible beast under your bed waiting to eat you, so stay in bed."
2608462
Well, that's when I read them. Picture books were more when I was... two? Three at most. I remember reading books with nothing but words in them when I was... four or five I think. That's when I got my library card.
2608466
Yeah, pretty much matches my families' stories about the old country.
And people wonder why we aren't all agog to visit Europe...
(Yes, I know it's very different now, but still.)
DO YOU NOT REALIZE THAT YOU'VE JUST EXPLAINED EVERYTHING?
For a slightly older demographic, try getting them hooked on Harry Potter with the first couple of books and then slipping them a copy of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
2607985
Sorry, just going to slip my head in on this:
There's bits in the New Testament about "counting the cost". Not sure where exactly, I'd have to go looking for them, but they're in there. (Which is not to claim that the whole philosophy is not self-contradictory.)
2608041
2608064
I was thinking of this bookplayer blog. Which turns out to be not quite right, but the comment thread talks about the same thing.
Walter Wangerin called.
Of course, the difference between our Hypothermic Little Space Princess and the Rag Man is simple: the Rag Man sacrificed of himself to help those who were less fortunate. More importantly, he wasn't approached: he volunteered it freely. He also made certain the recipient genuinely needed what he was offering. If the Space Princess was determined to help the rich and wealthy, that's great... but she should have offered them non-materialistic things. Y'know, like love and virtue. And stuff. Because wealthy people are always, without exception whatsoever, spiritually impoverished! Yup. Camel through the eye of a needle, and all that.
Den Lille Pige med Svovlstikkerne called.
Again, big difference: the Little Matchstick Girl dies in the end, but she doesn't go to heaven. She just keels over in the snow. Disney, as usual, changed the downer ending in their animated short. It's disgustingly saccharine.
The L.M.G.'s problem is that she has matches to sell, but burns them up to lift her spirits in the face of deadly cold and hunger. Once the matches are gone, the fleeting morale boost wears off and she starves to death. The moral? Don't be a wasteful dreamer, or you will die of hypothermia. Depressing and cruel, yes. But it seems like awfully practical advice.
You know what? I don't have a problem with teaching kids about god. Them's important. But tricking is cheating, cheating is lying, and lying is wrong. And kids are VERY quick to pick up on this sort of ruse... you remember the story of the boy who cried wolf? That story teaches kids to become better liars. Seriously. That's the effect it has.
If the author used this metaphore as a shameless way of programming kids, then I am horrified. If they used it as a plot device because "Heh, good enough, and it's just for kids anyways," I am very disappointed. I don't like it when people underestimate children.
Generosity is always good. But there's a difference between what people need and what they want. "Oh please, kind sir! Can you spare a little heroin? Just a little? It's been three whole days and I've got the shakes!"
How to Train your Dragon 2 is one of my favorite movies ever. It is aimed at kids, and yet one of the characters suffers severe, permenant loss. A mighty sad loss, and one that inevitably awaits us all. But you know what he does? He grows up. He steps up to the challenge.
I was shocked. Shocked, sir. To see this in a kid's movie. It was beautiful and amazing and we need more of this.
(a) Obviously, most children's tales are cautionary. They're supposed toscare you into looking both ways before you cross the street. Most of the time, there's a good reason for this. An anvilicious good reason.
(b) Religion is meant to educate people. See (a) above. The two real concerns here are whether the underlying message is bad and whether the storytelling method fails to convey it properly. In this case, it feels more like the method than the message.
(d, out of order, because reasons) What bothers me the most is how violence seems to be rated somewhere below sexuality on the "bad for you" rating used by most mass media.
(c) Let's... okay. Hm. As I said, The Little Matchstick Girl has a similar theme, but is more on target. Death and suffering aren't the "problem" here: Red Riding Hood is eaten by a wolf, Hansel and Gretel are roasted by a witch, the Little Mermaid is turned into bubbles if I recall, and Daphne was transformed into a laurel tree by Zeus to prevent her from being raped by Apollo (How dare you almost get raped, you naughty woman? Maybe being turned into an organism from a completely different classification will teach you some manners).
The real problem is that the underlying message is way off key. Obviously, stories for children need to be simplified... which requires even GREATER care and skill from the storyteller, lest the message be taken the wrong way. But that requires an author that can THINK of those plot holes and work around them reasonably.
Let's take a more obvious example. You know what happens if you cross the street without looking? You get HIT BY A GODDAMNED CAR. There's blood and bones everywhere. But of course, a child will question this story: maybe there was this one time when they crossed the street without looking... and absolutely nothing bad happened. Does that invalidate the underlying lesson? Is jaywalking okay if I don't get caught? Does this also apply to stealing and bullying?
This leads back to your main point: Children ask questions. It is the way of things. This is a good thing. A child has one purpose in life, and that is to learn. They are exceptionally skilled at this, to the point where they often embarrass adults in terms of learning and adaptability. Removing a child's ability to question puts them at a terrible disability later in life.
Is this story in particular a brainwashing propaganda tool? I doubt it. I suspect it's a well meaning but hamfisted tale that relies on some pretty serious fallacies to get its point across. Either way, the damage to the child's open mindedness is already done. All of a sudden, I really, really, REALLY want to know what sort of children's books they have in North Korea. I wonder how many uncomfortable similarities there might be...
When I was very young, I remember finding a storybook in the library about a single mom with a very small boy (They don't explicitly say "single mom." A father never appears in the story, and that's that). The mom has two voices: one soft and caring, and the other loud and angry. Whenever the boy does something bad (and something bad always happens, no matter how hard he tries), she uses her LOUD voice. One day he forgets to bring his tricycle in from the yard and breaks down sobbing. And then a strange thing happens... the mom starts crying too. Even as a child myself, I knew something was very wrong with this story. Grownups don't cry. What the hell's going on here? The boy works up a happy ending by hugging her mom and telling her everything will be okay. She apologizes for yelling at him needlessly, and promises to be kinder and more understanding in the future.
It took me the longest time to realize it, but this was a story aimed at parents who are verbally abusive and/or unfair, and wish to make amends with their child. Sometimes grownups make mistakes too. That's a scary thing to have to admit to a child.
Maybe you're aiming too low with your worries. Maybe you need to make children's books that are aimed at adults. What's good for the goose, and all that.
2608314 2608133
One of the most compelling explanations I've seen of the last few decades' plummeting crime rates is the removal of lead from gasoline.
2608394
Good thing that's entirely unrelated to the argument we were having then, which was entirely over whether or not a given interpretation of a text (and one only tangentially related to morality) could be stated as fact or not and whether it was worth trying to teach people that interpretation-- if trying to make somethings fit later things was simply apophenia or not.
2609316
Yeah, that last sentence wasn't me participating in the "argument," as such (is this an argument?) and merely me dipping into a rambly organic discussing-stuff session. Apologies if it came across as railroading the topic.
2609235
There's a lot of arguments. Unfortunately, rational wiki has a tendency to convey very questionable information, or at times, outright lie.
This is one of those cases, as the case for lead is nowhere near as persuasive as they claim. EDIT: Claimed.
First off, what caused the rise in crime rates to begin with? Urbanization is a major cause, but is semi-problematic in that urbanization in 1960 was 69.9%, in 1970 73.6%, in 1980 73.7%, and in 1990 78.0% (it 80.7% as of 2010). While it is true more people moved into the largest cities (and large cities inherently have higher crime rates - at least historically, though there are exceptions these days), we can see that even within cities of a given size, violent crime rates rose dramatically between 1956 and 1976, and in cities of 250,000 or more people, they skyrocketed from under 300 to over 1,100 violent crimes per 100,000 people, while people in cities of 100k-250k had their violent crime rate triple as well:
planetizen.com/files/img/image001.png
So, while more people were moving into urban areas, we still were seeing an increase in crime rate in communities independent of size. Something was changing, and people were committing more crimes on a per-capita basis even independent of urbanization.
What caused this? No one really knows. But it probably wasn't lead.
The biggest problem is that people had extremely high blood-lead levels by modern standards in the 1960s from what little data I can find on the matter, and that if you track blood-lead levels by age, people born in the 1940s might have even higher blood-lead levels. If blood-lead levels were truly responsible, we should have expected the rate to rise with the rise of leaded gasoline and lead paint, and then decline after they were phased out. Instead, we saw an increase from the 1960s to the early 1990s, then a decline. This doesn't track very well with overall environmental exposure:
baltimoreleadtesting.com/paint/leadconsump.gif
Leaded paint is the biggest problem here; it is in the home and people were definitely exposed to it, and people have found a correlation between its use and blood-lead levels, but we didn't see a huge crime spike in the US in the 1940s from all the kids being exposed to large amounts of the stuff in the 1920s, despite the fact that a lot of these people were probably traumatized by WWII to some extent.
A second, rather large flaw with the lead idea is China; the Chinese were exposed and continue to be exposed to vastly more lead than Americans are, but do not appear to suffer from extremely high crime rates as a result.
Another major flaw with the lead hypothesis is the fact that IQ actually went up over the 20th century by a fair amount; if the IQ-depressing effects of lead were to blame for crime, then we should have experienced a steady decline in violent crime over the course of the 20th century courtesy of the Flynn Effect, suppressed slightly by the effects of lead and more extremely by urbanization. This is not the case; instead, we saw a spike in crime between the 1960s and the early 1990s, with a subsequent sharp decline, with the violent crime rate sort of stabilizing in recent years at about half of its peak value. While lead causes other neurological problems as well, I thought I'd point it out as the article you linked to mentioned it.
Moreover, the Flynn Effect actually stopped around the time that crime rates started plummeting, which is even more problematic from the point of view of the lead hypothesis, and indeed from the IQ-crime hypothesis in general - while it is true that people with lower IQ appear to be more likely to commit crimes, historically people had lower IQ and yet the crime rate in the 1960s was considerably lower than the modern-day rate despite them having lower IQ.
It is, thusly, somewhat hard to blame lead, because while it is true that blood-lead levels have fallen since the phase-out of leaded gasoline and lead paint, the blood-lead levels prior to that point are not well-attested and were likely as high or even higher, which should have created an earlier peak in criminality. Moreover, if you look at the UK violent crime rate:
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Violent-crime-rates-UK-1981-to-2007.png
The spike seems too abrupt to have been caused by lead.
This is not to say that it was not caused by lead at all, but that blood-lead levels is probably not the primary cause. The fact that people with more lead in their blood are more likely to commit crimes and be poor is problematic because causality probably flows the opposite direction - poor people are more likely to have more lead in their blood (due to living in more polluted areas) and commit crimes.
Other possible links include abortion and birth control, which has some advantages and disadvantages; birth control became widely available in the 1960s and 1970s, along with greater access to abortion and other family planning, which may have caused a decline in unwanted children, especially amongst the poor. This has the advantage of being internationally true, and while the details varied from country to country, it was broadly true that it was easier to avoid having babies you didn't want. Unfortunately, while this is a somewhat plausible argument on the face of it, obviously birth control was pretty limited before that point but the violent crime rate in the 1960s was much lower than it was in the 1990s; if loads of unwanted babies were the cause, then why weren't crime rates higher before that point in time? Obviously urbanization plays some role in it, but it can't explain everything.
Another explanation is increased material wealth. While people often claim that people were better off in the 1970s than they are today, this is mostly based on questionable assumptions; as I've noted previously, the way that you have to calculate inflation is basically by taking a "set" of goods, and then taking that same "set" of goods at a later date and comparing prices. The problem is not only that "sets" of goods have improved in quality over time, making it harder to compare them, but also that nowadays we have computers which, 20 years ago, would have cost tens of millions of dollars; by the standards of the 1960s, a computer with a connection to the internet is probably worth billions.
Are we all billionares? No. But it is hard to compare our wealth to that of the days of yore for this reason; if a computer is a better form of entertainment, say, than television, radio, books, ect. combined, then we have a problem when we're trying to compare. It might be that computers and video game consoles allow people to be happier with less physical space, as they are still doing something actively with their brains, counteracting the effects of urbanization and more dense living conditions. This substitution effect is another hypothesis for the falling crime rates, and is fairly reasonable, given that it would apply to all countries more or less simultaneously.
The poorest people today are less poor than they were back in the day. This is a more persusasive argument, but it runs into a rather large problem:
If poor people were poorer in the 1960s, why weren't they committing more crimes?
Moreover, more recent studies have questioned whether poverty is the true cause of crime; they've found that poor people who live around more affluent neighbors more closely mirror their neighbors' rates of criminality, and that well-off people who live in poor areas are more likely to commit crimes. This suggests that the true cause of crime isn't poverty itself, but the culture of some poor areas - hell is other people, as they say. This would explain the low crime rates of urban communities, and why crime rates don't track directly with poverty rates - Plano, Texas's 6.4% of the population which lives in poverty is unable to aggregate, and thus mirrors the crime rates of their neighbors, whereas Detroit's 38% poverty rate, rather than resulting in a 5x higher crime rate, instead results in crime rates 10-100x greater.
Another point in favor of the cultural hypothesis is that crime rates have continued to decline somewhat during the Great Recession, despite an increase in poverty. Whatever is causing the decline in crime rates from the early 1990s does not appear to have reversed itself, though it is possible that there is something of a time lag.
Another theory is that our "throw criminals in jail for long periods of time" strategy has been paying off, and that the reason that crime rates have fallen since the early 1990s is that the imprisonment rate exceeded the new criminal rate, allowing for the jailing of lawbreakers, and that our lower crime rates are because of our higher prison population and prisoners being removed from the population. This is a possibly contributing factor, but doesn't explain why some other countries saw a rise and fall in crime rates over roughly the same time-span. Also, we're seeing a decline in our incarceration rate in the present day while crime rates continue to fall:
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/U.S._incarceration_rates_1925_onwards.png
Though some might argue that this is because of the reduced reproductive success of criminals in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when we started to throw huge numbers of people in jail and keep them there.
My personal bet is that it is a cultural issue; crime seems to be most heavily dependent upon culture, and culture changes over time. This would explain why some regions have such vastly different crime rates from others, and why Japan, which is incredibly densely populated, has one of the lowest crime rates in the world despite being less affluent than the United States. If you look at crime rates by city in the US, you see an order of magnitude difference between the most crime ridden and least crime-ridden cities, and Plano, Texas, has a homicide rate a full two orders of magnitude below Detroit and New Orleans.
I would actually be interested in graphing this data (violent crime/homicide rate vs poverty rate) but bizzarely there does not appear to be a chart of all cities with 250k+ population by poverty rate - or at least if there is, Google has failed me. There is state by state data, which shows some positive correlation between poverty and homicide rate and violent crime rate, but the R-squared values are not great - 0.27 and 0.15 respectively (looking at the residuals on the violent crime one, though, the "true" trendline has a slightly lower R-squared value and a steeper slope). This is significantly worse than the correlation between the homicide and the percentage of the population which is black, which has a R-squared coefficient of 0.57 for homicide (which isn't surprising; blacks commit roughly 50% of homicides in the US), though blacks vs violent crime rate only has an R-squared of 0.19 (though if you assume it is logarithmic, which it probably is judging by the residuals, the R-squared jumps to 0.31, which is close to the 38% of violent crime committed by blacks).
Incidentally, while there is a positive correlation between % black and the poverty rate, it isn't nearly as strong as some might expect it to be - R-squared of only 0.19.
Anyway, the TL; DR; is that no one really knows what caused the massive increase in crime between the 1960s and early 1990s, nor why crime has fallen by over 50% in the time since; the fact that we don't really know the cause of the increase probably makes any speculation on the cause of the decrease somewhat suspect.
EDIT: Seeing as I edited the rational wiki article because I spent way too much time writing this post for no good reason, I edited this post and removed some random garbage which was a response to stuff on the Rational Wiki article which is no longer there.
2609346
Either a very low key argument or a discussion. Alternately, a debate.
2609613