▲ | tolerance 2 hours ago | |
The author of this article is a 76-year-old single institution career academic who's feel for the world is apparently constrained to academic journals, articles written by academics and legacy media, and a communiqué from the Congressional Joint Economic Committee (which just so happens to cite the author as a reference throughout it). I say this and juxtapose it against my previous comment where I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt because the Asterisk article was so bad I couldn't get through it and the sentence above was my initial reaction to it, which to some may come across like an ad hominem attack. But I think the fact that this man has spent over half his life in the social sciences contributes to his inability to comprehend a human experience that emanates from the spirit (loneliness, social dispossession) and is not as easily expressed in data as what he thinks is more important in comparison (gun control, education reform, health reform, etc) and are more readily quantifiable. The act of questioning loneliness in relationship to other factors is interesting, I do think agree with you that his applied line of thinking is dangerous and dehumanizing. In fact, I think the kind of dehumanization that occurs when the human experience is comprehended through graphs, charts, numbers, polls and surveys, control groups, institutionalized methodologies and ontologies and obscure Greek letters in two-column PDFs has a lot to do with what the author is in doubt over. |