End-Times Beliefs Unlikely to End

Archeologists working in the Guatemalan rainforest have discovered an ancient mural room evidently used by Mayan scientists, on which extensive calendrical calculations had been written.  The newly discovered instances of Mayan timekeeping are older than earlier calendars recovered from ruins of the civilization – the ones that notoriously end after the thirteenth baktun, or four hundred year cycle, and that convince some New Agey people that the world is scheduled to end seven months and nine days from now, on December 21^st, 2012.

Those expectations are ostensibly undercut by the reporting on this new discovery of what you might think of as a beta version of the super-long Mayan calendar.  When the coverage of this story proves not to change anything, though, I think it will convey a worthwhile lesson about nature of people’s beliefs.  The longer false information is reinforced, the stronger the eventual revelation needs to be to push people to the breaking point of abandoning irrational ideas.

This Mayan calendar speculation has been going on for so long that there are certainly people out there who accept its credence even though they know nothing about the context of Mayan timekeeping, or even about the Mayan civilization in general.  It’s common knowledge, or rather common bullshit, to the extent that it’s been used without explanation in recent ad campaigns.  Of course, that same fact indicates that people are immune to the reference.  By and large, they either reject it out of hand without having to argue the point anymore, or they accept it but have accepted it for so long that waiting for the end of days has become about as engaging as waiting for one’s number to be called at the DMV.

People can become absolutely committed to the craziest beliefs just by virtue of proximity and repetition.  As somebody who’s been prone to a good deal of mythological thinking and esotericism myself, I don’t rush to judge the so-called Mayan calendar prophecy as crazy or stupid, but it is pretty well divorced from anything that could be construed as objective fact.  Speculation isn’t an intellectual crime, per se, just as long as you recognize that you’re speculating and that it won’t take much additional evidence to discount your ideas altogether.

That’s what a lot of people don’t understand, and it is a serious problem for the entire belief structure and process of rationality in the minds of some people who are otherwise capable of great intelligence.  I’m certain that some such people still think that the world might end on the winter solstice, and I’m equally certain that the mere fact that their sole piece of evidence for that has been directly refuted by the same 3000 year-old dead civilization that had been the source of it in the first place.

Breaking points are by their very nature hard things to reach on one’s own, and much harder to bring about in others.  That’s what makes them either so damaging or so satisfying, depending on the outcome.  That’s also why they ought to be confined to matters of principle or behavior or ideology, and not factual information.  It is an unfortunate complication to rational dialogue when the breaking point for one’s genuine understanding is pushed back by the fact that he insists on stubbornly clinging to beliefs that were based on pure speculation in absence of the factual data that is to become available later.

In this sense, I’m looking forward to a sort of meta breaking point in social psychological trends, one that encourages people to dispense with their need for a breaking point in issues of pure fact.  Fact, theory, speculation, and opinion all need to be relegated to their own spheres.  If any significant number of people persist in conflating those categories so much that they believe that recurrent speculation is knowledge, it is that much more difficult for the public to have effective discussions about opinions that can’t be outright disproven but can – and should – be broken.

Horses, Lambs, Children, and Conflicting Ethics

In the March issue of The Atlantic, Darcy Courteau writes about the consequences that have been faced by the horse market in the years since the last slaughterhouse that produced horse meat in the United States was forced to close. I remember that story well, as I felt at the time that I was at odds with what I perceived as a widely shared instance irrationality in American culture. It seemed absurd to me that the Department of Agriculture should place a value judgment upon the production of horse meat, which differed from that applied to all other livestock.

I disagreed in no uncertain terms with that bit of interference with free enterprise. I disagreed with it on rational grounds despite being a vegetarian and a person highly concerned with animal rights. I simply don’t see how the overwhelming public support for the removal of horse meat and only horse meat from the American market could have stood up to any measure of introspection. It relies on a false distinction between one type of animal and all others.

Being a vegetarian and an animal rights advocate, I want to see that society avoids the mistreatment and slaughter of all animals, not just the ones that I like. How I feel about the creatures is irrelevant; right and wrong are never contingent upon personal attitudes. It may be contingent upon the objective nature of different things, but this doesn’t seem to apply to the situation of horses and other livestock. I don’t see how anyone could realistically argue that horses possess personalities that, for instance, cows or lamb lack, or that horses are better able to experience pain, discomfort, or fear.

Unless one earnestly believes that horses are intrinsically different from other animals, which belief they would have to hold in absence of real evidence, I can only assume that their impulse to suppress the slaughter of horses while allowing it for other animals is on the basis of the personal relationships people sometimes have with horses.

But that doesn’t really make a difference when we’re talking about just the concept of slaughtering them for meat. It’s not as though opponents of horse meat had personal relationships with this or that particular horse. Some people have personal relationships with particular rabbits, or snakes. It’s not unheard of for someone to keep a pig as a house pet, or to feel affection for a cow that is kept solely for dairy production. Rarely is any of this used as grounds to argue that the entirety of society ought to disallow the killing of or production of meat from any animals of a certain species.

If one recoils with horror at the very thought of horse meat, but never bats an eye when filling his shopping cart with pork and beef, he is wedging an artificial dividing line into the application of his principles. Such selective defense can only be irrational. And if one is concerned with consistency of his own beliefs or ethics, instances like that ought to lead to one of three outcomes: a change in attitude leading to universal application of the principle, even if potentially inconvenient; abandonment of that principle; or production of a satisfactory account of why the dividing line is not artificial.

If a person utterly opposes the production of horse meat but neither opposes the slaughter of all other creatures nor truly believes that the mental lives of horses are significantly and objectively different from those of all other creatures, then that person is trying to hold two contrary views at once: that killing a sentient, autonomous being that’s called a horse is wrong, and that killing a sentient, autonomous being that’s not called a horse is okay.

Cognitive dissonance is the enemy of breaking points. When you give yourself license to hold views that are in opposition to one another, you strip yourself of the crucial motivation for intellectual or moral growth. Breaking points arise of conflict, and sometimes it is a conflict between two opposing ideas that you yourself maintain. A person who is concerned with rational consistency will keep an eye out for such conflicting views, and his breaking point will entail a sudden realization that either one of his ideas is wrong, or he doesn’t actually know why each of them is right.

In the case of the ranching of horses and the slaughter of them for meat, the tension between views goes well beyond the simple difference in perception of horses and other animals. Cognitive dissonance is easy when you’re operating on pure intuition. When those intuitions are directly challenged by pragmatic concerns, it’s much more difficult to make glib pronouncements that a certain action is simply wrong. Courteau writes of the fallout from the closure of the last US horse meat producers:

“In states across the country, reported cases of equine abuse, neglect, and abandonment skyrocketed. And the kill buyers of yesteryear aggregated into rarer but still more haunting boogeymen, purchasing for the abattoirs of Canada, or, worse, Mexico, where horses at some slaughterhouses are reportedly subject to torturous conditions.”

Consequentialism makes for complex ethical calculations, and if one wishes not only to release the United States from the stigma its citizenry attaches to the slaughter of horses, but to actually reduce the suffering experienced by American horses, then such a person’s intuition that it was good to force closure of the slaughterhouses is probably in error. But that error and the larger error of deliberate cognitive dissonance are both based on the same mistake of thinking that your knee-jerk intuition is sufficient grounds for all moral judgments.

When one really starts to analyze the consequences of people’s intuitive moral pronouncements, we see that cognitive dissonance is quite easy to come by once all the nuance of principle and pragmatism is taken into account. In other words, what a person thinks is wrong often fails to align perfectly with why he thinks it is wrong. We cannot permanently avoid the moral burden of having to occasionally choose the lesser of two evils. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to occur to many people who have non-inquisitive, black-and-white views of morality.

The other night, I was watching the documentary Sweetgrass, and the depictions of some of the operations at the sheep farm brought to mind these same questions of ethical complexities. The opening scenes of the film largely focus on the beginning of lives for sheep on that farm, and I was somewhat shocked by the dismissive treatment by the ranchers of both newborn lambs and nursing mothers. But if watches with a measure of objectivity, one quickly comes to realize that given such high volume of sheep, the farmers are doing what they can to promote survival of the highest number possible.

Some years ago, I had a good friend who was a devout, even zealous Buddhist. He was exceptionally sensitive to implications of animal mistreatment, and aggressively, immediately judgmental of perceived wrongdoing. It occurred to me while watching Sweetgrass that he certainly would have found the farmers’ behavior to be unforgivable, but that any alternative behavior that would have resulted in the survival of fewer sheep would have elicited just as much disdain from him. While their rationalizations were grounded in Buddhism instead of Christianity, this friend’s social and political views were decidedly conservative, and probably didn’t differ very much from those of his Christian parents.

His moral judgments, like those of many conservatives, and indeed like those of many people of any political leaning, were severely averse to nuance. I recall discussing abortion with him on one occasion and using the word “complex” to describe the breadth and seriousness of the associated ethical questions. That evoked fiery indignation from him, and he said, “No. You can kill or you can not kill. It’s actually really simple.”

And it would be simple if that’s all it came down to, if there weren’t any genuine questions about what qualifies as killing, if there weren’t any other ways of being responsible for another creature’s suffering. What my friend believed seemed simple on the surface, but at a deeper level of analysis it becomes clear that he was keeping it simple by ignoring the hard questions.

No doubt he would have agreed that his moral concern was with decreasing the suffering of sentient beings, a utilitarian concern. That view means it is reprehensible to do anything that promotes or permits the death of, say, sheep or horses. But it must also make it reprehensible to do anything that promotes or permits the hunger or severe discomfort of the same creatures.

In the case of the sheep in Sweetgrass, keeping all of the lambs alive meant separating them from their mothers immediately upon birth, forcibly compelling ewes to nurse lambs to which they had no connection, and hastily handling the creatures as if they were inanimate objects. The alternative would have been to handle them more delicately, more compassionately, but chances are that in light of the enormous numbers of sheep that needed to be handled by just a few farmers, that would have resulted in some of the lambs being neglected, and thus starving or being killed by competing sheep.

Both alternatives may well be similarly unethical, but it’s unhelpful to simply reject whichever alternative is current simply on the basis of its perceived wrongness. The choice of one wrong action is, in cases like this, the direct consequence of the rejection of another.

It may strike some people as hideously dehumanizing to draw such a parallel, but the pragmatic circumstances surrounding the abortion debate can be elucidated by thinking of the entire human race as a correlate to a herd of livestock. As population increase, the rate of survival within that population, or at least the average utility available to each individual, naturally decreases. Mandating the birth of more young is tantamount to mandating the provision of more suffering. A person who opposes either abortion or the neglect of newborn lambs or the slaughter horses doesn’t have to accept that fact as a justification of the contrary position, but he does have to acknowledge the consequences of what he’s advocating.

In fact, I find that most people refuse to do this. They are, instead, happy to embrace cognitive dissonance, presumably because it is easier to live in a fantasy world in which right actions never have unintended consequences than it is to willfully struggle with moral dilemmas. That perception, however irrational, may help an individual to remain admirably committed to his own ethical obligations, but it also results in unfair judgments predicated upon others.

It’s not rational to demand that a creature with little access to resources must both birth its child and feed it. The acceptance of cognitive dissonance results in dissonant demands and no-win situations. That is the cognitive dissonance of, for instance, anyone who repudiates abortion without compromise, but also rejects the provision welfare. Essentially, the two views in concert pronounce that it’s wrong both to terminate a pregnancy and to have a child while poor.

Again, a rational person whose views are at odds with one another must apply the relevant principle, abandon it, or explain how they can be reconciled. In the given case, if a person claims the principle of defending the lives of innocents, he must apply that principle by providing material support to unsupported children. If that is too inconvenient, he must rethink his stance on abortion, or else explain why it’s worth defending an unborn child but not one who has truly entered the world.

It’s not easy to decide upon coherent ethical theories as to what constitutes right and wrong, but even once you have, it’s not easy to determine how to apply those theories. If you want children to have both a chance at life and at least basic comfort once they’ve begun that life, you’ll eventually have to confront a situation in which those desires stand in opposition. If want the lambs to avoid both starvation and mistreatment, you’ll be horrified, when you look closely enough, to realize that it sometimes takes one to avoid the other. You can save the horses from the abattoir, but you may thus doom them stable that does them even greater harm.

There is a certain sense in which my Buddhist friend’s pronouncement is still correct. It’s very simple: you can either kill or not kill. But the operative word there is “you.” The individual often has privileges that are absent to society at large. You can choose to carry your own unintended pregnancy to term, but if you can then feed that child without fail, you’d better thank God that you never really had to face the choice between depriving a child of life and subjecting it to exquisite hardship. And you can’t conflate either situation with the broader hypothetical in which the nation is inundated with a million additional young lives that must be supported and defended.

If you raise horses and you’re uncomfortable with them being either slaughtered or abused and underfed, you can do as Ms. Courteau’s father had always done and refuse to sell them to kill buyers. But when such sales are no longer an option and the reduced demand causes the prices of horses to fall, lowering your revenue to the point where it is no longer possible to take adequate care of the horses you have, the dual ideals of defending all life and defending against all suffering are no longer sustainable.

This has been the situation of horse farming in the United States for the past four or five years. I remember it being mentioned by some as a possible consequence at the time that the last slaughterhouse dealing in horse meat was closing. But mostly I remember objecting to the irrationality of it all. I remember this very well, but somehow I missed the fact that the Congress resumed funding for these slaughterhouses in November, which may result in some reopening this year.

I won’t be happy to see domestic horses go back to slaughter. Indeed, I hope that someday in the far-distant future they all close again, but that they do so then right along with those that deal in every species of animal, and that it be on the basis of the universal application of moral principles, not on the basis of an absurd double-standard.

But despite the fancifulness of that hope, I’m not naïve about the implications. I know that many animals will suffer and die from lack of care during any possible transition away from their slaughter and consumption. But if I could be alive when that time comes, I would say that that is the unhappy consequence of doing right in a way that is more crucial to our future moral standing. It is a great tragedy of the social aspect of moral existence that we sometimes have to prioritize our values against one another. But our collective morality gains not a bit from pretending that there is no such problem.

The nuanced demands and consequences of collective ethics are discomforting, in that they may require us to accept things that don’t feel right to us. Intuition is a powerful tool in making moral judgments, but it can only lead us so far. If it guides a situation towards less obvious but more serious harms, we’ve probably made the awfully mistake of eschewing rationality in order to appease the short-sighted demands of immediate perception. Only reason, and not intuition, is capable of handling nuance and recognizing indefensible cognitive dissonances.

Rationality is a skill that must be learned for the sake of coherent, far-reaching moral behavior. It draws the dividing line between those who think they are doing the right thing and truly are, even if they appear not to be.

Courteau writes of the reversal of the double-standard regarding horse meat, “Many pet lovers are furious, but PETA actually supports the reversal, arguing that the suffering of unwanted horses increased after the demise of the kill plants.” If PETA, which is often so prone to over-the-top displays of self-righteous, black-and-white morality, can learn the value of nuance and circumstance, anyone can.

Simplistic Thinking from Educated People: Arne Duncan

Every time a representative of the government goes on the television or radio to talk about higher education, my blood boils a little at my recognition of the simple-mindedness that governs policy in that area. On last night’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart’s guest was Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. At the very end of the portion of the interview that went to air (the entire thing is available in three parts on the web), Duncan made the most indefensibly black-and-white assessment of the outcomes of education that I have yet encountered.

First, though, he pointed out that the United States is now ranked 16^th in number of college graduates, whereas a generation ago it was in first place. He further explained that our rate of graduation hasn’t fallen, but has leveled off, allowing fifteen other countries to surpass us. Now, after a good deal of research, I’ve found that different reports come to different conclusions on the exact ranking, and they base those rankings on different criteria applied to different countries, so I can’t pin down exactly which countries beat out the US on this subject, or even whether Duncan is quite correct with his statistics. But it’s certainly the case that we’re far from the top, and some countries can be pretty conclusively identified as exceeding us in provision of tertiary education.

Duncan’s point is apparently that our achievement of benchmark standards for secondary education is insufficient to prepare students for college and university. I’ll eagerly agree that that’s true, but it is unhelpfully presumptuous to assume that that’s the only important factor contributing to low levels of higher education attainment. What of the steadily climbing costs of college tuition and the dearth of public funds to compensate for the out-of-pocket expense for students and parents? Might that not hold back some perfectly capable students from actually obtaining the education that they’re intellectually, but not financially, suited for?

Among countries in the Organization for Economic and Cooperative Development, the United States is 29^th out of 34 in terms of how much funding for educational institutions comes from public funds. Not only is this situation accepted by US society, it is lauded by some elements thereof. Private institutional dominance of tertiary education, and indeed of all segments of society, increases competition and improves outcomes, they say. But with the US ranking somewhere around 16^th in educational attainment, it’s clearly not working that way. In fact, among the nations that are fairly reliably ranked well ahead of the US on this point, many are classed as those nations that conservative Americans tend to envision as socialist hellscapes.

Several Northern European countries are variously placed in lead positions on the list, including Iceland, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands. What’s more, an Economic Policy Institute study of the affordability and accessibility of higher education in various countries concludes that “Finland and the Netherlands should be models for the international community” when it comes to both of these factors.

The correlation between cost and completion rates is not overwhelming, but it is sufficient that it needs to be explored as a factor, rather than being discounted among the ongoing repetition of the claim that if kids are smarter, they’ll always do better. There are other factors, and to deny that is to accept such unforgivably single-minded approaches to solving our problems as will only worsen some aspects of the situation. It’s not just that we’re failing at educating our children, though certainly we are doing that. It’s also that we’re failing to provide our children with suitable opportunities, access, and incentives.

Duncan seems to be under the mistaken impression that the problem underlying our trend of slipping behind the rest of the post-industrial world is just that students are failing at an alarming rate. But it’s not just dropouts that account for the low completion rate; the US ranks behind most of the OECD countries in terms of actual enrollment in higher education. And that fact is specifically ascribed in part to rising costs. That should be fairly obvious, especially to a Harvard-trained economist like Arne Duncan. As opportunity costs rise, the rational motivation for people to invest in something goes down.

The response to this would probably – nay, certainly – be that the opportunity costs of not attending college are unquantifiably higher than the material costs of attending. To that I would offer the simple challenge: prove it. The claim is repeated in the media constantly, always asserted, always assumed, but never adequately proven. And it would be one thing if the assertion was just that, on average, people with higher education backgrounds tend to do better than those without them. But that’s not what representatives of the administration say. Instead, they spread the hideously uncritical idea that if you get a college degree you are guaranteed success, and if you don’t get one you are guaranteed failure.

Do you think I’m mischaracterizing their claims? Arne Duncan said it on the Daily Show: “We have a million young people dropping out of school every year. A million. There are no jobs. None. They are guaranteed poverty and social failure.”

Guaranteed, he says. That there are any guarantees in life is an odious and socially detrimental lie. Virtually nobody would argue that people aren’t better off overall if they’re educated. For my part, I think that education is the most important thing that a person can pursue in life, though I am careful to emphasize that there are different ways of pursuing education, some far less expensive than others, and that education can serve a variety of ends, from vocational training to living a richer, fuller life of poverty. But the universal economic benefit of higher education is a baseless assertion so long as there are other explanations for a portion of the correlation between education and earnings, and other alternatives as to how hiring and job training might take place.

Now, Arne Duncan wasn’t very specific when he said “a million students dropping out.” If he was referring to students who drop out of high school, sure, they have their work seriously cut out for them if they want to be materially or socially successful. However, I’d still consider it irresponsibly closed-minded to say that both poverty and social failure are absolute guarantees for every child who has dropped out of high school in recent years.

Even working at a fast food restaurant can eventually allow a person to make a living wage, as long as he or she doesn’t rush to have children or otherwise climb into a hole that can’t be escaped through years of earnest work and eagerly sought promotions. What’s more, I’ve known people who’ve dropped out of high school and then obtained GEDs earlier than when they would have theoretically graduated. Hell, my ex-girlfriend never finished high school, and she leapt easily from job to job, quitting without notice and being hired for positions with higher pay, more responsibilities, and better titles, all at a time when I, with my fancy NYU degree, couldn’t so much as secure an interview for anything more than an eight dollar per hour retail job. Some people are just lucky; some just aren’t.

Regardless, I don’t think Duncan was referring to high school dropouts. The only statistics that I could find on short notice were from the 2004-05 school year, at which time 540,382 students dropped out of school between grades nine and twelve. Unless that number has doubled in seven years, I think Duncan was referring to any student who has dropped out at any level, primary, secondary, or tertiary. If so, some of the Americans who have been guaranteed poverty and social failure according to Arne Duncan include billionaires Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, Ralph Lauren, Dean Kamen, and Mark Zuckerberg, as well as a pretty extensive list of other highly successful individuals in a variety of fields.

This repetition of a shockingly simplistic set of talking points about higher education has got to stop. Is learning good? Chirst, yes! That part is perfectly simple. But it’s not a purely economic good, and to whatever extent it does improve your income potential, that’s not the only factor. There is something to be said for the influence of social connections, environment, work ethic, opportunity, investment capital, employer bias, and plain old luck. Amidst all of that, what I want to see happen is that kids start going to school not because they want to make money, but because they want to learn. Is it really too much to ask that we encourage education on those grounds, rather than trying to deceive every young person into pursuing something that he’s not interested in and at which he’s no good?

The Simplest Explanation is Often the Tesh One

During a recent, lengthy conversation with my brother Brian, he brought up the John Tesh radio show so that we could badmouth the host’s daily contributions to the lives of his listeners. I don’t think all that badly of John Tesh, but the sentiment that my brother and I seem to share is that he takes a rather unquestioning attitude towards the information that he cites on his program, and tends to dispense, as if it is gospel, advice that needs to be context-dependent at best. Then again, sometimes it’s probably just wrong altogether.

Yesterday, I just happened to hear a bit of the John Tesh broadcast, and really got my dander up over his latest explanation of some academic study. To his credit, I’m sure that a lot of the fault lies with the researchers who are putting out this material in the first place, but again, it is Tesh’s unquestioning attitude in broadcasting the stuff that turns irresponsible reasoning from an academic footnote into a corruption of popular knowledge.

In this case, Tesh thought himself to be informing his audience that cultural and artistic activities improve people’s health. According to surveys of study participants in Norway, he says, those who reported going to museums on a regular basis or either participating in or watching things like ballet tended to be significantly healthier overall than people who didn’t take part in those activities.

And then, setting aside any possible questions as to the meaning of the data, Tesh asks what he apparently thinks is the only natural question: how does this work? He promptly answers his own question, apparently restating the opinions of the original researchers. Not knowing where to find the original reporting, I can’t say with certainty that that’s the case, but coverage of the story in the UK Daily Telegraph back in May made the same statements about a unidirectional, causal relationship between cultural activity and physical outcome, so that suggests that such statements are repetition of the claims of the researchers. Whatever their original language, Tesh puts it simply and stupidly: cultural activities engage us mentally, and that helps us to be able to deal with stress and keeps us healthier.

It is absolutely shocking to me that professional academics and paid researchers still sometimes use the most obvious kind of faulty reasoning and confuse correlation with causality. Observing that healthy people go to museums absolutely does not mean that going to museums makes people healthy. In fact, assuming that that’s the case strikes me as amazingly unimaginative and intellectually lazy. I recognize that one needs a hypothesis in order to make scientific progress, but in general I’d say that good advice for researchers would be unless you have a damn good scientific explanation for how two phenomena are linked, don’t guess. As near as I can tell, everyone who’s communicating the story of this culture-health connection, from the Nordic researchers to the staff of the Telegraph to John Tesh, is taking it for granted in exactly the same way. Do none of them consider that there might be other factors at play?

It’s not difficult to identify alternative explanations. Of course, any of them would need additional data in order to have sufficient support, just as the claim that cultural activities cause good health needs additional data as to exactly what the mechanism of that cause is. Without access to a university research staff or other such resources, I can only guess, but I’d be quite willing to bet that if you did a study of people’s social class as compared with their cultural engagement, you’d find that wealthier people participated in more activities.

Take the three data sets together, and you’ve got a picture of more affluent people who are healthier than poor people and go to museums more often. I don’t know what John Tesh or the Daily Telegraph would say, but I have a fairly clear sense of which of those is the more significant variable in determining the other two. And yet I still wouldn’t say that being rich makes you healthier, because that’s a stupid thing to say. What I would say is that being wealthy gives you greater access to a wide range of food options, and allows you to pay for health-enhancing luxuries like gym memberships and spa vacations, while still having enough left over to go to the opera. So being wealthy makes it easier to make both healthier and more culturally refined lifestyle choices. But unless someone gives me a thoroughly refined scientific explanation of newly discovered physical mechanisms, I’m fairly certain that the only things that have a direct impact on health are the things that interact with your body’s functioning, such as what you eat and how often you exercise.

Since the British newspapers covered this study, Britain’s National Health Service took it up and posted a thorough, reasonable discussion of it on their website, including the prominent image caption at the top of the page, “It’s hard to tell if culture affects health, or vice versa.” It also adds tremendously to my sense of frustration at this sort of study by pointing out that surveys of participants wasn’t only used to determine their level of cultural participation; the surveys were actually the gauges of participant health. Their actual health, as determined by medical indicators, remains completely unknown.

In the NHS’s conclusion, it reiterates that the direction of causality is difficult to determine, and adds:

For example, just as participating in cultural activities might cause people to report better physical and mental health, it is just as plausible that people who feel healthier were more likely to engage in cultural activities.

No kidding. All a person should have to do to come up with this alternative explanation for the data is to think for just one minute about their own experience. Surely even John Tesh has felt down in the dumps at one or two points in his life. I’d be surprised if he reported that he was especially well-traveled among his local cultural institutions during those periods.

For that matter, the curve for this study would be absolutely shattered by interviewing just a few people who are genuinely sick. The researchers did adjust for things like chronic disease, but presumably not for recent, persistent disease. If, say, you’ve gotten the flu in each season of this year and have been laid up in bed for weeks at a time, of course you’re not going to the symphony. But if the poll was worded with sufficient vagueness, anyone who was reviewing the data blind would just see that participant x reported being in somewhat poor health and was highly unlikely to go to the cinema, theater, or gallery. Such a researcher might easily conclude that participant x’s cultural disinterest was contributing negatively to his health, if that researcher didn’t think very hard about the different ways to interpret what he was reading.

The study also analyzed reports of satisfaction with life, anxiety, and depression, and found that particular activities, depending on the gender of the participant, were correlated to differing levels of each. I take it that the essential conclusion from this part of the research is “Doing stuff makes you feel better.” You don’t say! And yet here also, to claim a unidirectional relationship is to draw an illogical, indefensible, and irresponsible conclusion, because feeling better makes you do stuff, too.

It’s the irresponsibility of this kind of reporting that really drives me crazy and prompts me to write 1,500 word rants on the topic. And that is also why I focus my umbrage on John Tesh, because it’s his sort of highly digested, exceptionally simplistic, and frequently repeated iterations of this kind of terrible academic research that are especially poisonous. One-dimensional interpretations of correlation between behaviors and conditions send a clear message of blame to people experiencing the less favorable conditions.

I imagine John Tesh rhetorically asking his audience “worried about your health?” and then cheerfully explaining to them that “if you think the problem is that you don’t have insurance or you can’t afford anything but empty calories at the grocery store, you’re wrong! It turns out that you, listener, just fucked up by not attending enough literature readings.”

Sadly, I’m sure that John Tesh genuinely feels as though he’s helping out his audience by telling them about the little aspects of their day-to-day lives that can contribute to their lasting health. But the thing is that for those of them who really have to struggle with these issues, he’s just making it worse. Considering that that Nordic research group included anxiety as a factor in its calculations, you’d think that someone would have given some thought to the likely future effect of believing that your health is tied to the number of lectures you attend this year. If people of distinctly low socioeconomic class listen to Tesh on this one and come to believe that frequent participation in cultural activities is key to their physical and mental health, the actual effect may turn out to be the opposite of what Tesh intends. I say that based on experience; I know what severe anxiety can come of trying to be culturally engaged while knowing all along that you cannot actually afford it.

If this possible ill effect was the consequence of just some one-off comment from John Tesh, I could give him a pass, but from what I’ve heard of his show, this is part and parcel of his daily broadcast. The list of recent topics on his website at this moment includes “Loneliness is bad for your health,” and “Volunteering boosts your health.” Bullshit claims, both. There is almost no conceivable way that in either of those cases the two factors being linked aren’t just simultaneous effects of other causes. Yet somehow Tesh doesn’t know that. Tragically, the researchers who produced the original claims may not. And certainly, much of Tesh’s listenership doesn’t realize that, and will take the voice on the radio at its word.

And what will come of these claims? Well, sure, certain frequent volunteers will feel more confident that their next check-up is going to go just fine. But also, some people who don’t have the time to volunteer because they’re working three jobs and still can’t afford health insurance will have found a new source of stress, anxiety, and depression, while some of those who have the best health care money can buy will attribute its effects to that Thanksgiving they spent working at the soup kitchen downtown. And at the same time, John Tesh is telling his sick and lonely listeners that if they’re worried about their health they’d better make sure they aren’t lonely, and if they’re worried about their loneliness, they damn well should be because it’s going to keep them in poor health. That information is rather less than helpful unless you’re neither lonely nor afflicted.

But the simpler the explanations of everyone’s problems, the better it is for everyone who doesn’t suffer them.