Good Sense

It's been difficult getting any serious sustained reading done lately, but I've been making fitful progress through a variety of tomes, tending, for the last few days, to focus mainly on Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature. I'm now at the three quarters mark and have enjoyed getting there. Interesting insights abound, though the sheer ambition of the book in terms of its historical sweep leaves a fair few hostages to fortune in terms of contentious points being made.

Most of all I find myself appreciating Pinker's deep fund of basic good sense - which finds plenty of outlets in his trademark humour. Just two examples will have to do for now. The first relates to his analysis of the motivations for rape and the current received 'wisdom' that rape is essentially an expression of power with no direct sexual content. As he points out this now leads to counsellors at universities - in the States, at least, but I suspect elsewhere - refusing to give female students the elementary advice that I hope their parents are drilling into them: like don't get drunk wearing provocative clothing and end up in compromising situations with young men.. It seems that this is construed as blaming the victims and so no one wants to say it anymore.

The second relates to the abduction of children in the US, and came as news to me. It seems that the incidence of child abduction is wildly exaggerated in the media and in cold, hard terms the chances of a child being abducted are remarkably low and getting lower. The ever-sensible prof argues that children are now ridiculously over-protected from perceived threats and simply don't need, for example, to be driven to school every day on the grounds that taking public transport poses a risk.

This reminded me of the days when the eleven-year-old version of myself took three buses to get to school, travelling half-way across south Manchester. Taking the 127, the 210 and the 53 counted amongst the most fun I ever had. Thank goodness no one took it into their heads to protect me.