EXCERPT THREE -- "MIRROR OF THE PSYCHE"

 

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).