EXCERPT THREE -- "MIRROR OF THE PSYCHE"
THE FALLACY OF A PRIORI
James R. Fisher, Jr.,
Ph.D.
© November 7, 2020
When I was young, I lived in a neighborhood in which we were
all poor with the grounds of the Clinton County
Jail and the Clinton County Courthouse
separated by the dimensions of a football field with that expansive lawn our
playground. I write lovingly of this in “The
Shadow of the Courthouse: Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel” (2003).
We played baseball on the grass of the jail/courthouse grounds on a baseball diamond laid out by the Sheriff and his three deputy sheriffs, who at
their own expense had a steel backstop and screen constructed behind home plate.
They also had a basketball court built at what would be right
field with basketball goals on a regulation court that had been rolled to a smooth
surface by a highway steam roller machine.
On Halloween, the Sheriff organized a parade through downtown
in which young people across the City of Clinton
(Iowa) participated; and in the winter, the baseball field was flooded so that we
could ice skate with music piped in from the Clinton Country Sheriff’s Garage.
Neither the sheriff nor his deputies had gone to college, yet
they knew a lot about guiding the raging hormones of young people to positive activities.
At the time, Clinton, Iowa was an industrial city of 33,000 running 24/7 during
WWII.
As for crime, the best evidence that it was practically nonexistent
was a sheriff’s department with only three sworn officers. Incidentally, eighty
percent of the young people from this Courthouse neighborhood graduated from college
or university and had careers across the United States and beyond.
One of the paradoxes of being poor is that you never think in
such terms. You don’t waste your breath with jealousy or envy but make the most
of your situation. You don’t even think of your parents, who struggle to make a
living as your heroes, but just as your parents who you know will always be there
for you, whatever.
Nor do you think in such abstract terms as more being less. You just deal with what you are and have because
you don’t know anything else.
At the time, your all-consuming job is just being a pre-teenager
with no idea that you are in the arms of loving parents, loving adults, and a
loving community that is allowing you to find your own way into life without an
agenda.
Your coaches are older boys, around 16, who had grown up in
the Courthouse neighborhood and didn’t mind devoting their time and attention
to you as a budding athlete. They were
your teachers as well as your coaches as I attempt to show in my memoir as a
novel, teaching life lessons that would stick with you for life.
These older boys were our authority figures at the Courthouse,
and we looked up to them with respect. Saying
it here, in today’s culture, makes it sound as if a grandiose myth if not a self-serving
cliché. But it was true.
These deputies and these older boys kept us on the straight
and narrow because they were on it as well.
Their instruction was through example, not moralizing or quoting some
social engineer. Proof that it had gravitas
is the fact that not a single boy with whom I grew up ever got into trouble
with the law, and as I pointed out above, the majority graduated from university.
Hoffer didn’t have this kind of inculcation or experience
which makes his reflections all the more riveting. He recognized the fallacy to a priori
reasoning when it came to the verities of life.
Alas, poverty didn’t breed crime but more likely self-reliance,
engagement, happiness and purposefulness.
Hoffer writes:
A priori logic assumes
that poverty breeds crime, that necessity is the mother of invention, that permissive
upbringing will produce self-reliant adults, that authority hampers change. The
logic of events shows the opposite to be true. Rich countries have a higher crime
rate than poor countries, invention is least where the pressure of necessity is
greatest, permissive upbringing produces conformist adults lacking confidence, authority
is crucial for the realization of drastic change. A priori logic assumes that people
will be happier when they have more. The logic of events shows that we are less
dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing. A
priori logic assumes that we have less when we give part of what we have to others
whereas the logic of evens shows that we multiply by dividing – that we are happiest
when we share our happiness with others. A priori logic says that a straight line
is the shortest distance to a goal whereas in human affairs a straight line is the
shortest distance to disaster . . .
It is an aspect of the
human paradox that the attempt to transcend humanity often results in a return to
animality. Post-human often means pre-human. There must be many examples of the
passage from “post” to “pre.” I can think of two: post-Christianity often means
a return to paganism, and post-industrialism a return to pre-industrialism. There
is a circularity in human affairs – if you go far enough you return to where you
started. Is this because we are living on a circular planet? (The True
Believer, pp. 61-63).
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