"News that's not known, or not known enough."
Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion.
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"News that's not known, or not known enough." Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion. |
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When all writing is for children by Herb Ruhs, MD Friday, July 4, 2008 PERMANENT LINK Re New and old nightmares You say, "Geez, Dr. Herb, you should write children's stories. Just kidding." Everything written for publication is a children's story, by me or by anyone else. Not kidding. The study of moral and intellectual development routinely disclose that, no matter what system or scale is used (my favorite is still that tattered old one by Kohlberg), only a small fraction of the reading public is functioning at adult levels. What passes for intellectual maturity is actually pseudomaturity. Paradoxically, the more educated the readership the lower the level of maturity that can be assumed by an author. In a natural setting, where human evolution has optimized our fitness (implying groupings of less than 200 individuals) there is a highly complex interaction between stages of development, status and reproductive success. Presumably, in those situations, which may still exist somewhere on earth in isolated tribes, there are an optimum number of fully adult individuals, and an array of interactions between individuals along the spectrum of maturity, that form a sustainable mutual support network that optimizes the fitness of the group as a whole. The purpose of "civilization," including the technology of writing, is to disrupt these naturally evolved patterns of relationship and exploit them for the purposes of concentrating power in centralized structures. In the natural state of affairs the most influential individuals are those whose views are held to be most valid, and these individuals also hold the highest status. Status in these natural settings is largely related to age, experience, and intelligence (both emotional and intellectual intelligence). In the last stages of "civilization," which we are apparently living through now, all the natural relationships are turned upside down as the culminating result of constant manipulation and perceptual coercion. Status devolves to those with the greatest sponsorship by centers of power that maintain that power by virtue of an ability to coerce compliance. Advancing your personal status in these situations, including one's status as an author, becomes a function of your ability to communicate with a population that is functioning at very low levels of moral and intellectual development for the purpose of inducing compliance with the aims of the sponsoring hierarchical structure, be it employers in mass media, publishers of mass market entertainment or even technical and scientific publishers. Consequently, in general, writing becomes progressively more emotionally appealing as it progressively makes less and less sense. "Successful" writing becomes a process of simplification to connect with childlike minds on the basis of emotional appeal and avoids complexity and irony. This process is most evident in "scholarly" writing directed not at the general public, but at "expert" audiences, the members of which, analogous to court eunuchs, have demonstrated their loyalty to centers of power and negotiated their way up through the academic hierarchy by virtue of posing no threat to established points of view. "Adult literature" has become an oxymoron unless one is referring to the xxx kind. Herb Ruhs, MD
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