“Beware of false knowledge. It is more dangerous than ignorance.” —George Bernard Shaw
For once I have to agree with the right-wing zealots: Mankind is going to hell in a hand basket. Our opinions diverge on the reasons why. According to the ultra-religious, man has turned his back on God, and so man is doomed. I tend to believe God, most contemporary incarnations of whom man has created in his own image, has nothing to do with man’s impending downfall. Man is handling that perfectly well without God’s help.
One of the reasons I think man is on a collision course with a decidedly unpleasant destiny is statistical. You remember statistics from school, right? They were those nasty percentages we all had to calculate at various points during our education. “If Bob has four apples and Joe has six oranges, what is the probability either boy will eat a healthy lunch?” I admit that’s a nonsensical example (it’s 99.9 percent nonsense, anyway), but it makes about as much sense as some of the other statistics I’ve seen lately.
Take recent statistical revelations from Morality in Media, for example. According to a Harris Interactive study conducted in July on behalf of MIM, “almost three in four (73 percent) U.S. adults think that viewing pornographic websites and videos is morally unacceptable.” Twenty-one percent of people surveyed said viewing porn is morally acceptable; six percent either didn’t have an opinion or refused to divulge it. That certainly sounds like bad news for the adult entertainment industry, doesn’t it? However, empirical evidence (part of it regurgitated ad nauseam by MIM in as annual porn revenues) also indicates that adult entertainment generates huge amounts of money worldwide annually, with no decrease in sight. Extrapolating from the two sets of figures, does that mean fewer people are buying more porn at higher prices, or that lots of people are buying porn and they really don’t care whether they’re sinning while they view it?
Of course, as any mathematician will tell you, statistics can be used to prove or disprove anything. Sometimes the same statistics can both prove and disprove the same concept. One plausible explanation for the apparent contradiction between revenues and moral judgment could be the way in which MIM’s study was conducted or the way the resulting figures were massaged. When was the question asked? Certain days and times are more conducive to finding conservative people at the other end of the telephone line. How was the poll conducted? MIM does not specify whether the question was asked by phone or online. Were the participants selected at random or culled from a specially selected group? Perhaps most importantly, how was the question (reportedly “Do you consider it to be morally acceptable to view pornographic websites and videos?”) phrased, and were the resulting answers compiled and analyzed with “pollster bias” in mind? There’s no way to know the answers to these questions without someone on the inside divulging them (and they don’t seem to be very forthcoming in that area), but if I had to hazard a very unscientific guess, I’d say there’s a 99-percent probability MIM is not above skewing an otherwise perfectly good survey to suit its own purposes.
Why is this important and how does it relate to my opening statement? That’s a little tougher to explain, but I’ll give it a shot. Since his appearance on the planet, man has been an inveterate seeker of knowledge. Sometimes, when incontrovertible proof isn’t readily available, he’ll accept almost anything anyone tells him as fact. It makes man feel more fulfilled to have something “real” to cling to in the face of uncertainty; almost any “facts” are preferable to The Great Unknown. It’s one of mankind’s greatest flaws that he’s so thirsty for knowledge about himself and his universe that he willingly grasps at the flimsiest of straws rather than wander in the wilderness until something of true substance shows up. This, statistically, is one of the great principles of politics.
Education, which ought to be lifelong and take place in the world outside the schoolhouse walls, does not always generate wisdom. The same is true of polls and statistics vis-à-vis reflecting reality. As Albert Einstein said, “Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.” If it’s also true that “the squeaky wheel gets the grease,” then perhaps what man considers truth is nothing more than flimsy statistics that have been quoted loudly and often.
