ORDINATION ADDICTION
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu,
“peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com
June 21, 2013 (summer solstice in Ohio)
When I took my required year of
research methods in graduate school, I became fascinated by how the studies I
was reading in other classes blatantly violated basic assumptions of the
statistics they used to get results.
The most glaring example in criminology is applying actuarial predictors
of recidivism for groups of people to individuals. All statistics by definition assume that the
probability of any single case falling at any particular point along a
distribution is zero; hence the fallacy of affirming the null hypothesis (that
one thing equals or is another, which as Gregory Bateson pointed out is true
only as a tautology—true by definition).
Regardless of the “fact” that someone has offended, the odds that s/he
is now an offender are 50/50: either s/he is or s/he isn’t, period. Whether s/he is an offender is ultimately a
matter of whether s/he is so named, as in “being duly convicted of a crime,” or
in “self-report studies,” whether s/he admits doing what the researcher defines
as an offense. In the language of
statistics, “offender” is a “nominal variable.”
We criminologists and our
audiences won’t settle for treating who we “are” as a nominal variable. I surmise we implicitly agree that laws and
their applications are so numerous that practically all of us have broken the
criminal law. To “treat” offenders,
criminologists and the lay public all assume that some offenses are worse than
others, and that by extrapolation, some entire people are worse offenders than
others, more “at risk.” Even self-proclaimed
“penal abolitionists” generally concede that prison is necessary for “the worst
of the worst,” for “the most violent offenders.” That leaves many “critical criminologists” in
the position of arguing whether other people—wealthy people, powerful people,
or “persons” known as “corporations”--are worse offenders than those we
incarcerate. We may settle for not being
able to set a zero to 100% scale from those whom “we know” to be perfectly law
abiding, we virtually insist that “meaningful” results be scaled ordinally,
that is, be ranked. And from there, we
slip into cardinal scales—forsaking “better” and “worse” ranking of events and
people for “best” and “worst,” without noticing the leap in logic.
In this respect, criminologists
sound like conversations I hear all the time in everyday life and news. In lawyer-speak, we tend to ask each other
leading questions about experiences we have had and people we refer to. “What is your favorite
movie/song/composer/vacation spot?” “Who
are you best of friends with?” “What is
your greatest fear?” “Are you doing your
best?” “Are we the greatest nation on
earth?” “How do we achieve
justice?” “I have some really good
students this term.” “Who is the
top-ranked [fill in the blank]?” “What
are you doing to better yourself?” “What
or who is the greatest threat to national security?” “Who have been our greatest presidents?” “Are we maximizing return on our
investment?” “Who is the world’s richest
person?” “Are you spending/using your
time efficiently and effectively?” And
ultimately, “How do I rate?” “What value do I have to the people, whose opinion
of me I depend of me on, place on whether I live or die, eat or starve, suffer
at my lack of productivity?”
Commodifying the value of our lives in cardinal or absolute terms
entails setting beginning and end points to our lives—a fruitless effort that
among other things leads to eternal debates in the face of physical ambiguity
over when life begins and ends, our ultimate fear that of dying, let alone
becoming, a nobody. Whether we surrender
or not, pressure on ourselves from birth is enormous for us to show others that
we rank high enough on some reference group’s scale that we have social
worth. And given that we never get high
and mighty enough to ensure our social status, we tend to rely heavily on
invidious comparisons of others to “ourselves” to “belong” somewhere with
like-minded people, in Erving Goffman’s terms, stigmatize others for the sake
of “status identification.”
The more I allow myself to
settle for living nominally rather than ordinally, the more I recognize not
only that every person is uniquely situated and experienced, but that no one
has a single personality, let alone is deviant or “perfectly normal” (that is, has
arrived at some statistically arbitrary midpoint where no one really
exists). Centrally, this enables me to forgive myself
for my own mistakes and missteps, most dramatically, recently, of validating my
resistance to being labeled “an alcoholic” by embracing and thus being able to
negotiate with my own conscience the possibility that I was not only a
drunkard, but had always also been one to appreciate that another part of me
was equally capable—if only I acknowledged it—of enjoying life without
drinking. I notice these days that
social scientists are recognizing this if only as a personality trait as “resiliency”
among communities that are “socially resilient”—in Darwin’s or systems analysts’
terms to accommodate uncertainty. And
so, in the criminological part of me, I have repeatedly found myself able to
gain mutual respect and trust with prisoners who are known as incorrigibly
violent or sociopathic, in one case as it turned out literally to have had my
trust requited by a “career offender” who saved my life when he saw (as I see
it in retrospect) that he had no alternative but to kill someone before he killed
me. For over forty years until he died
of cancer at 64, Fred Villaume became an enduring, close friend and companion.
For 10 years until she too died
of cancer, my friendship with Mable Linder in Bloomington led me to join her in
singing with older people in “skilled care” and “adult daycare.” Repeatedly, I met great grandmothers who had
spent their lives devoted to family well-being seldom being visited by those
they had known including family, dying sadly and in isolation. It dawned on me how precious it was to reach
a point in life with assurance that I knew in my soul that I had made a
significant difference in the life of even a single other person. More than that, once I gave myself credit for
being of such seemingly minor “accomplishments” in my life, it became easier
for me to accept that I didn’t have to prove my worth by this or that professional
recognition. Living to learn how to
respond to conflict rather than eliminating it turns out to be pretty relaxing
in its own right, to let go of defending the rightness or wrongness of what I
do, and to embrace my many mistakes rather than trying to make sure I never
make that mistake again. What a relief
that is. Love and peace--hal
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