Unit 2 Lies and TruthWhat is truth? –and the opposite question that goes with it: what makes a lie? Philosophers, teachers, and religious leaders from all cultures and periods of history have offered many answers to these questions. Among Euro-North-American writers, there is general agreement on two points. The first is that what we call a “lie” must be told intentionally – that is, if someone tells an untruth but they believe it to be true, we don’t consider them a liar. The second point is that practic ally everyone lies, and lies frequently. But there the agreement ends.One rather extreme point of view is that lying is always bad and that we should try to find ways avoid doing it. The reason is that lying hurts not only the listener, but also the liar. Each lie makes the next one easier to tell, and the liar comes not only to disrespect herself, but to mistrust others, whom she believes will lie as easily as she. In a society, where lying is common, trust becomes impossible, and without trust, cooperation can not exist. Furthermore, by lying to people, we remove their power to make important choices about how to spend money, what future career to take, what medical treatment to take.Toward the opposite extreme is the position that although some lies are evil, many others are not –in fact, they are necessary to hold our society together. We lie in harmless ways to protect other’s feelings and to better our relationship. These are not lies that try to hurt others. We laugh at the boss’s joke which we have heard before and which she doesn’t tell very well; we pretend interest in a friend’s story of something uninteresting that happened to him. If someone asks us a question that is very personal and is none of their business, we may lie in response. Sometimes we lie to protect the reputation or even the life of another person. On a larger scale, government may protect national security by lying.Each person seems to have some point at which they draw the line between an acceptable lie and a bad lie. Obviously, this point varies from individual to individual and from culture to culture.A sometimes painful part of growing up is realizing that not everyone shares your own individual definition of honesty. Your parents and your culture may teach you that liars suffer, but as you go through life, you find that often they don’t: in fact, dishonest people often seem to prosper more than honest ones. What are you to do with this realization? It may make your moral beliefs look weak and silly in comparison, and you may begin to question them. It takes a great deal of strength and courage to continue living an honest life in the face of such reality.Little white lies: This is our name for lies that we consider harmless and socially acceptable. They are usually told to protect the liar or the feelings of the listener. Most of them would be considered social lies, and they include apologies and excuses: “I tried to call you, but your line was busy.” “You’re kidding! You don’t look like you’ve gained a pound.” Some people, however, would consider it acceptable to lie to save themselves from responsibility in a business transaction: “After I got home, I noticed that it was broken, so I’m returning it and would like my money back.”Occasionally a “little white lie” may have a very profound effect on the lives of the listeners, and may even backfire. Author Stephanie Ercsson tells of the well-meaning U.S. Army sergeant who told a lie about one of his men who had been killed in action. The sergeant reported the man as“missing in action,” not killed, so that the military would continue sending money to the dead man’s family every month. What he didn’t consider was that because of his lie, the family continued to live in that narrow space between hope and loss, always watching for the mail or jumping when the telephone or the doorbell rang. They never were able to go through the normal process of sorrowing for, and then accepting, the death of their father and husband. The wife never remarried. Which was worse, the lie or the truth? Did the sergeant have the right to do what he did to them?What we really mean when we call an untruth a “little white lie” is that we think it was justifiable. Into this category fall many of the lies told within the walls of government. A person may lie to government, or a government official may lie to the public, and believe that by doing so, he becomes a hero. Clearly, however, one person’s “little white lie” is another person’s “dirty lie.” That brings us to the second category:Dirty lies: There are lies told with intent to harm the listener or a third party and to benefit the liar. Into this category fall the lies of some dishonest salespersons, mechanics, repairmen; husbands or wives who are having an affair with someone else; teenagers who lie to get out of the house in order to do things that their parents would die if they knew about it; drug addicts who beg family members for money to support their habit. Dirty lies my be told to improve one person’s reputation by destroying another’s, to hurt a colleague’s chances of promotion so that the liar will be advanced. Lies of omission: Some people believe that lying covers not only what you say, but also what you choose not to say. If you’re trying to sell a car that burns a lot of oil, but the buyer don’t ask about that particular feature, is it a lie not to tell them? In the United States, a favorite place to withhold the truth is on people’s income tax returns. The government considers this an unquestionable lie, and if caught, these people are severely punished. If omission can be lying, history books are great liars. Until recently, most U.S. history textbooks painted Christopher Columbus purely as a hero, the man who “discovered America,” and had nothing to say about his darker side. Moreover, most Native American and African-American contributors to science, technology, invention, literature, art, discovery, and other areas of civilization used to be omitted form children’s schoolbooks. Many people considered this a lie, and today’s history books u sually mention at least some of it, though not as much as some people might like.False promises: This category is made up of promises that the promiser knows are false, that he has no intention of keeping even as the world leave his lips. While some are fairly harmless and social, others are taken more seriously and can hurt the listener: “I’ll never do it again, I promise.” Advertisers and politicians suffer from terrible stereotypes because of the false promises of some of their number: “Lose 50 pounds in two weeks.” “Read my lips: No new taxes.” Probably everyone would agree that if we make a promise but have no intention of keeping it, we lie. But what if we really do plan to keep it, and then something happens to prevent it? Consider the journalist who promises not to indentify his resources, but then is pressured by his newspaper or by the law. How far should he go to keep his word? If he breaks his promise, is he dishonest?Lies to oneself: This is perhaps the saddest and most pathetic kind of lying. These are the lies that prevent us from making needed changes in ourselves: “I know I drank/spent/ate too much yesterday,but I can control it any time I really want to.” But there is a fine line between normal dreams and ambitions on the one hand, and deceiving ourselves on the other, and we have to be careful where we draw it. It’s common for young people to dream of rising to the top of their company, of winning a Nobel Prize, of becoming famous or rich; but is that self-deception, or simply human nature? Were they lying to themselves? More likely, they really believed that such a future was open to them, because they had seen it happen to others. We shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves, but if we have turned a blind eye to our faults, we should take an honest look in the mirror.There is no question that the terms “lying” and “honesty” have definitions that vary across culture boundaries. Members of one culture may stereotype members of another as “great liars,” “untrustworthy,” or “afraid to face the truth.” But what may lie behind these differences is that one culture values factual information even if it hurts, while another places more value on sensitivity to other people’s feelings. While the members of each culture believe that of course their values a re the right ones, they are unlikely to convince members of other cultures to change over. And that’s “the truth.”Unit 3 Generation XIt’s often said that kids today aren’t what they used to be. But is this new generation of teena gers and young adults, commonly referred to as “Generation X” or the “baby busters,” really so different from previous generations? What makes them tick? What impact will they have on us and our institutions as we move into the future?Current TrendsTwent y years ago, employers didn’t worry about finding enough good people. Just like a box of tissues, there was always another candidate that would pop right up. But the 18-year baby boom of 1946-1964, when birth rates peaked at 25.3 births per 1,000 population, was followed by the 11-year “baby bust,” when the rate fell to a low of 14.6 births per 1,000. This means the smallest pool of entry-level workers since the 1930s. “Generation X,” as they were dubbed in a 1991 novel by Canadian writer Douglas Coupland, realize the numbers are on their side. They are now mainly in their 20s, and they see themselves as very marketable in the workplace. They feel that they can be patient when choosing a job, and they can look for the best wages.This generation has watched more TV, and as a result has probably witnessed more violence and murders, than any generations in history. In addition, their gloomy view of the world has been shaped by numerous negative events, such as the Persian Gulf War, escalating crime, riots, AIDS, the nuclear threat, and pollution.They parents practiced birth control and abortion and were highly concerned about “making it” financially. About 40% of X’ers are products of divorce, and many were brought up in single-parent homes. The emotional upheaval and conflict this causes helped shape their view of the family and the world. It seems to have sent out a negative message to X’ers about their value and worth.Many young believe that their economic prospects are gloomy. They believe that they will not do as well financially as their parents or their grandparents. They know that the average income for young people, even with two or three college degrees, has declined significantly over the past generations. Many feel that their chances of finding the job and salary they want are bleak. Couple with the high divorce rate with the fact that many were latchkey children and you get a generation who may have had more time alone than any in history. They are also the first to spend considerable time in day care. At home, they were weaned on TV, high tech, video games, and computers. They became independent at a young age. Many had to grow up fast, taking on family responsibilities or part-time jobs to help out. All this has helped them become very freedom-minded, individualistic,and self-absorbed.Many resent the fact that their parents were not home to spend more time with them. An often heard sentiment is that things will be different when they raise their own families.The loyalty and commitment to the workplace that previous generations had is gone. Generation X’ers watched their grandparents slave away only to receive a gold watch and pension upon retirement. Thirty or more years of loyalty sometimes ended with a security guard helping them to clean out their desks and escorting them out the door. Their parents’ dedication to the company has been repaid with downsizing and layoffs.Young people feel there is no such thing as job security. They feel they don’t want to wait around and pay their dues when there is no long-term commitment from the top. They can’t believe that their boomer bosses spend 60 or more hours a week at a job that they constantly complain about. They strongly believe there is life after work.Generation X’ers take longer to make j ob choices. They look upon a job as temporary instead of as a career, partly because they want to keep their options open. They are always looking to jump ship when they can upgrade their situation. They will often leave a job at the hint of a better position.This generation seems to do things at a much later age than their parents. They graduate from college later, stay at home longer, and marry much later. Many who leave home come back again, sometimes more than once. This is due in part to the high cost of living and the fact that many have piled up huge studentloan debts. In contrast with the baby boomers, who couldn’t wait to leave home, Generation X’ers save their money so they can live better when they do leave. It may be that some just want to delay the time when they are on their own, because they spent so much time alone as children.Many of X’ers’ parents were busy in the morning getting ready for work and too tired to have any quality time with their children at night. X’er classrooms were often overcrowded. It was hard for the X’ers to get noticed, so as adults they have a need to be noticed. Often, they seek that attention in the workplace.Whether from watching TV or from being spoiled by their guilt-ridden, seldom-home parents or grandparents, X’ers have come to expect a whole lot for nothing. They have a strong propensity for instant gratification, wanting it all and wanting it fast. Their favorite TV programs are soap operas. They would like their world to be filled with the same good-looking people, dressed in the latest fashions, with lots of money and prestige, and without having to work too hard.It is not uncommon for X’ers to get out of high school and expect to be paid well despite minimal skills. Many disdain low-wage “McJobs” at fast-food chains. Young college graduates look to start at high paying positions with power and perks. They have little patience for working their way up.Yet, the X’ers feel that making money is not as important as experiencing life. To be a workaholic is to have no life. Consequently, a paradox exists between how they view life and what they think they need from it.Future TrendsThe first boomers are only 10 or 12 years away from retiring – and finally out of the way of the next generation. The X’ers will beg in to take over in politics, arts and culture, education, media, and business. This should lead to a time of better problem solving and quicker solutions, as they hate political maneuvering and want to get to solutions in a fast, no-nonsense way.X’ers don’t like the fact that their parents spent so many hours working. They promise to do better with their children, being more accessible and providing a more stable home life. Since many of them will marry later when they are more mature, the divorce rate will finally begin to dip.When X’ers control the organizations of tomorrow, they will create a shorter workweek, so people will have more time to spend with their families and leisure activities. Productivity won’t suffer, as technology will enable people to be more productive. In addition, the X’ers’ disdain for office politics and desire to solve problems faster will improve productivity. If organizations do not manage their human resources better, X’ers will leave to find or create a more humane workplace.Many Generation X’ers have a freedom-minded and individualistic nature. They like to be left alone to solve problems. They are a perfect group to become consultants, as already evidenced by so many venturing out on their own.Organizations will come to re ly on the X’ers’ entrepreneurial spirit to foster innovation. They will create systems that will allow “intrapreneurs” to create and run small businesses within a business. The organization’s financial support will allow young people to research and create new products at unparalleled rates. Outside entrepreneurs of this generation will team up with these “intrapreneurs” to create joint ventures.Generation X’ers have started to use their technology skills to create virtual businesses, and they will be the driving force behind this marketplace in the future. They have been quick to take advantage of the lower overhead and quick start-ups that the Internet provides. Being able to reach millions of people with new ideas and products instantly attracts this generation.Generation X has evolved in dramatically different ways than previous generations. What motivated past generations is far different from what motivates this new breed. But the changes will be for the better in many ways. Kids may not be what they used to be, but if we listen, there is a lot we can learn from them. The future will be a better place if we do.Unit 7 To Err Is HumanEveryone must have had at least one personal experience with a computer error by this time. Bank balances are suddenly reported to have jumped from $379 into the millions, appeals for charitable contributions are mailed over and over to people with crazy-sounding names at your address, department stores send the wrong bills, utility companies write that th ey’re turning everything off, that soft of thing. If you manage to get in touch with someone and complain, you then get instantaneously typed guilty letters from the same computer, saying, “Our computer was in error, and an adjustment is being made to your account.”These are supposed to be the sheerest, blindest accidents. Mistakes are not believed to be part of the normal behavior of a good machine. If things go wrong, it must be a personal, human error, the result of fingering, tampering, a button getting stuck, someone hitting the wrong key. The computer, at its normal best, is infallible.I wonder whether this can be true. After all, the whole point of computers is that they represent an extension of the human brain, vastly improved upon but nonetheless human, superhuman maybe.A good computer can think clearly and quickly enough to beat you at chess, and some of them have even been programmed to write obscured verse. They can do anything we can do, and more besides. It is not known whether a computer has its own consciousness, and it would be hard to find about this. When you walk into one of those great halls now built for the huge machines, and stand listening, it is easy to imagine that the faint, distant noises are the sound of thinking, and the turning of the spools gives them the look of wild creatures rolling their eyes in the effort to concentrate, choking with information. But real thinking, and dreaming, are other matters.On the other hand, the evidences of something like unconscious, equivalent to ours, are all around, in every mail. As extensions of the human brain, they have been constructed with the same property of error, spontaneous, uncontrolled, and rich in possibilities.Mistakes are the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and wrong choices have to be made as frequently as the right ones. We get along in life this way. We are built to make mistakes.A good laboratory, like a good bank or a corporation or government, has to run like a computer. Almost everything is done flawlessly, by the book, and all the numbers add up to the predicted sums. The days go by. And then, if it is a lucky day, and a lucky laboratory, somebody makes a mistake: the wrong buffer, something in one of the blanks, a decimal misplaced in reading counts, the warm room off by a degree and a half, a mouse out of his box, or just a misreading of the day’s protocol. Whatever, then the results come in, something is obviously screwed up, and then the action can begin.The misreading is not the important error; it opens the way. The next step is the crucial one. If the investigator can bring himself to say, “But even so, look at that!” then the new finding, whatever it is, is ready for snatching. What is needed, for progress to be made, is the move based on the error.Whenever new kinds of thinking are about to be accomplished, or new varieties of music, there has to be an argument beforehand. With two sides debating in the same mind, haranguing, there is an amiable understanding that one is right and the other wrong. Sooner or later the thing is settled, but there can be no action at all if there are not the two sides, and the argument. The hope is in the faculty of wrongness, the tendency toward error. The capacity to leap across mountains of information to land lightly on the wrong side represents the highest of human endowments.It may be that this is a uniquely human gift, perhaps even stipulated in our genetic instructions. Other creatures do not seem to have DNA sequences for making mistakes as a routine part of daily living, certainly not for programmed error as a guide for action.We are at our human finest, dancing with our minds, when there are more choices than two. Sometimes there are ten, even twenty different ways to go, all but one bound to be wrong, and the richness of selection in such situations can lift us onto totally new ground. This process is called exploration and is based on human fallibility. If we had only a single center in our brains, capable of responding only when a correct decision was to be made, instead of the jumble of different, credulous, easily conned clusters of neurons that provide for being flung off into blind alleys, up trees, down dead ends, out into blue sky, along wrong turnings, around bends, we could only stay the way we are today, stuck fast.The lower animals do not have this splendid freedom. They are limited, most of them, to absolute infallibility. Cats, for all their good side, never make mistakes. I have never seen a maladroit, clumsy, or blundering cat. Dogs are sometimes fallible, occasionally able to make charming minor mistakes, but they get this way by trying to mimic their masters. Fish are flawless in everything they do. Individual cells in a tissue are mindless machines, perfect in their performance, as absolutely inhuman as bees.We should have this in mind as we become dependent on more complex computers for the arrangement of our affairs. Give the computers their head, I say; let them go their way. If we can learn to do this, turning our heads to one side and wincing while the work proceeds, the possibilities for the future of mankind, and computerkind, are limitless. You average good computer can make calculations in an instant which would take a lifetime of slide rules for any of us. Think of what we could gain from the near infinity of precise, machine-made miscomputation which is now so easily within in our grasp. We could begin the solving of some of our hardest problems. How, for instance, should we go about organizing ourselves for social living on a planetary scale, now that we have become, as a plain fact of life, a single community? We can assume, as a working hypothesis, that all the right ways of doing this are unworkable. What we need, then, for moving ahead, is a set of wrong alternatives much longer and more interesting than the short list of mistaken courses that any of us can think up right now. We need, in fact, an infinite list, and when it is printed out we need the computer to turn on itself and select, at random, the next way to go. If it is a big enough mistake, we could find ourselves on a new level, stunned, out in the clear, ready to move again.Unit 8 Throwing Away the KeyLock up a criminal and society will be spared whatever other crimes he might have committed if he were still on the street. That much is true.Lock up two criminals, keep them in prison twice as long, and crime should decrease that much more? Not necessarily.The logic behind what criminologists call incapacitation –the restraint on prisoners’ ability to commit crime – is irresistible. It has helped to fuel the “get tough” response to crime in the United States that has resulted, over the past two decades, in a major shift toward mandatory minimum sentences, increased use of the death penalty, the introduction of “three strikes” laws, and even, in a few places, the reinstitution of chain gangs.Unfortunately, most criminologists argue, the logic is flawed. Researchers agree that prison sentences avert some crimes. The question is the degree to which they do: At what point does prison lose its effectiveness in fighting crime? Answers to the question vary widely.At one extreme, heating up the argument considerably is John J. Dilulio, Jr., a political scientist at Princeton University and the Brookings Institution. In the past three years, he has emerged as one of the most outspoken proponents of tougher prison terms for serious offenders – and as a favorite of politicians who want to look serious about crime.“Yes, we’ve tripled the prison population,” he says. “Yes, we’ve doubled spending. That doesn’t tell me th at we shouldn’t do more.”Most criminal-justice scholars –to say the very least about what they think of Mr. Dilulio’s work –disagree.“It’s distressingly easy to fill prisons,” says Franklin E.Zimring, a law professor at the University of California a t Berkeley, “but not with the kind of exceptionally threatening offenders you want.”A Massive Natural ExperimentThe United States is in the midst of a massive natural experiment in imprisonment’s effect on crime – the results of which, so far, are inconclusive.Responding to a steep increase in the crime rate in the 1960s, political leaders fell back on tougher sanctions. Since the mid-1970s, every state has passed some kind of mandatory-minimum sentencing law. In the past two decades, the rate of imprisonment has tripled, to about 350 prisonersfor every 100,000 people from about 110. Today about 1.5 million men and women are behind bars.Over the same period, the rate of crime has remained fairly stable. According to data from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, which surveys households to determine the number of people victimized by crime, the number of victims of all types of crime is down somewhat, to slightly less than 35 million in 1992 from slightly more than that in 1973. The other major source of national crime data, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s complication of offenses that are reported to the police, shows an increase in total criminal offenses, although the rates of certain kinds of crime have held steady. Since the mid-1970s, for example, the yearly murder rate has stayed between 8 and 10 per 100,000 people.Criminal-justice experts and policy makers see in those sets of statistics what they want to see. Some say the fact that crime rates have held steady (or gone down, depending on the source) must be due at least in part to the increase in imprisonment. In a 1991 article in Science, for example, Patrick A. Langan, a senior statistician for the Bureau of Justice Statistics, calculated that there were 66,000 fewer rapes in 1989 than in 1973, 323,000 fewer robberies, 380,000 fewer assaults, and 3.3 million fewer burglaries.“If only one-half or even one-fourth of the reductions were the result of rising incarceration rates,” he wrote, “that would still leave prisons responsible for sizable reductions in crime.”Yet crime has certainly not decreased in proportion to the rise in imprisonment. Experts say the law of diminishing returns is at work here: As judges send more and more people to jail, a greater proportion of prisoners will inevitably be less-frequent offenders. What’s more, most criminologists agree that the steep rise in incarceration rates has been fueled largely by low-level drug offenders. Giving them more and longer sentences has done little to stop the drug trade, scholars say, since there always seem to be others out on the street to take their place.The fact that scholars treat the data on rates of crime and incarceration a little like tea leaves is at least partly because of the difficulty of analyzing the interplay of crime and punishment. Not many researchers have been drawn to the task.“When you look at the relationship between crime rates and prison populations, it’s hard to tell what’s causing what,” says Daniel Nagin, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon who is writing a review of research into the effects of imprisonment on crime. “Given the scale of this thing, it’s an underresearched question.”‘A Very Interesting Puzzle’。