I haven't had much time to devote to posting for the past few days, because of my involvement with bringing three mentoring services into our community. I have been functioning as a community organizer (not the Alinsky / Obama rabble rouser type) in bringing attention to mentoring for recent parolees, currently incarcerated, and children of the incarcerated, and to implementing these services in our community. No one else was doing it, so I have to.
The intent is to work one-on-one with those whose decision processes are suboptimal to the point that their decisions were damaging to themselves, their families and their community. Those who are released from incarceration tend to return to their previous environment and network of friends who also make defective decisions, and wind up making the same bad decisions again, with the same bad results. The recidivism rate for these individuals is 60% to 80%, and is the primary cause for the prison crowding we now have. One-on-one mentoring has been shown to produce better citizens and reduce recidivism; it is a win-win for the individual and the community.
These three mentoring groups already exist in the larger city not too far away. My intent is to import and extend these groups into our community and its county jail, as well for parolees from the Department of Corrections who are re-entering the community. Representatives from each of these three groups will be here this Sunday for a public meeting to kick off the effort and hopefully gain some citizen support.
It's been a lot of work getting the word out, especially with a reluctant local newspaper which is currently entirely focused on persecuting mayor and chief of police, another story for another day perhaps.
For now, though, posting will be sparse until I get this either going or buried.
3 comments:
I thought this was good enough to reproduce in full. James Cutsinger's interesting commentary on relativism:
An image may be helpful. What we are dealing with basically are crabs in a barrel. The experienced chef is confident that he has nothing to fear in leaving the barrel uncovered as he goes about preparing to cook the creatures. For as soon as one of them gets close to the rim, the others are sure to pull him back. And so it seems with our critics. Let anyone try to get past the rim of history and contingency- let anyone even take seriously the possibiity that some men have succeeded- and they are sure to cry foul. Certain of the cognitive police would pull us down sooner. The world is a construction of language! All theory is ideology! Others would allow us to crawl a bit higher.
All ideas follow from impressions of sense! Concepts without percepts are empty! But, either way, what these particular crabs do not seem to realize is that in their efforts to bring everybody else back down into the domain of the relative, they are themselves obliged to create leverage by "reaching over the edge".
In order meaningfully to claim that all men are inevitably conditioned by their situation in history, the critics must for a split second at least have escaped their own law of gravity. Either they have ceased to be men altogether or as men they have ceased to be subject to the conditions in question. If the first were true, if these apparent men were gods, then their dictum, we might suppose, could be salvaged.
I suspect, however, that they will confess they are not. If, on the other hand, the second and only other possibility obtains, then the rule collapses, the possibility of revelation is vindicated, and Socrates and company are free once again to teach the truth.
This is what I had in mind when I accused critics of tradition of not using their intellects and for not thinking consistently. As I explained, even if they suppose all tradition to be the tradition of men, they are compelled to make an exception in their own favor. Even if there were no revelation before, and therefore no contact with something higher than the rim of the barrel, there must now be in their case. And this, of course, is the illogic I speak of. For if no one could know more than the relative, no one would be left to proclaim this was so.
Make no mistake. There is clearly nothing new in these comments. We are told about tricks of language, performative contradictions, the subtleties of self-reference, and incompleteness theorems, while distinctions within distinctions are drawn between various degrees of relativism, as if a man could be "sort of" dead or a woman "rather" pregnant.
I used to try putting up arguments against these dodges, but I have come to believe that the real problem is not lack of proof or clarity, but a lack of attention. The only other, even less charitable, hypothesis is sheer perversity. It seems instead there are minds, otherwise fairly supple and clever, which can nevertheless not sustain a thought long enough to ponder its implications. I do not know why, but some apparently intelligent people simply cannot look at their looking so as to see what conclusions must be drawn from their seeing. Try as one may by the grip of sound logic to pin their gaze and to keep their heads from twisting and turning, they are still going to blink.- from An Open Letter On Tradition
An interesting phrase turner, that Cutsinger. Thanks, Chris.
Stan,
And this is why RSS feeds are so darn useful :)
Best of luck to you, it sounds like a project that could impact lives for the better.
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