Oh that phlox

Here’s another flowerful view from our April 2nd jaunt down south. In particular, it’s from the cemetery in Stockdale. Unlike the long exposures you saw a few posts back, this time I used a shutter speed of 1/640 of a second to freeze the wildflowers that the breeze was whipping into motion.

And while we’re looking at bright magenta phlox, let me back up to our March 19th drive down to Gonzales, where I photographed some old plainsman buds (Hymenopappus sp.) with a foxy phloxy mask-like wraith behind them.

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A theme I’ve been pursuing here for a week now is that it’s common to hear politicians and activists bandy about the phrase “common sense,” which is a loaded and misleading term because some or even many things that a majority of people believe to be common sense can be shown not to be true.

One of the greatest fields of abuse is popular psychology, where many notions are passed off as “common sense” that the evidence shows aren’t true. I’d like to refer you to a wonderful book about that: 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology, by Lilienfeld, Lynn, Ruscio, and Beyerstein. Here’s an example of one myth as described on Amazon’s page about the book:

Low Self-Esteem is a Major Cause of Psychological Problems.

Many popular psychologists have long maintained that low self-esteem is a prime culprit in generating unhealthy behaviors, including violence, depression, anxiety, and alcoholism. The self-esteem movement has found its way into mainstream educational practices. Some athletic leagues award trophies to all schoolchildren to avoid making losing competitors feel inferior (Sommers & Satel, 2005). Moreover, the Internet is chock full of educational products intended to boost children’s self-esteem.

But there’s a fly in the ointment: Research shows that low self esteem isn’t strongly associated with poor mental health. In a painstakingly – and probably painful! – review, Roy Baumeister and his colleagues (2003) canvassed over 15,000 studies linking self-esteem to just about every conceivable psychological variable. They found that self-esteem is minimally related to interpersonal success, and not consistently related to alcohol or drug abuse. Perhaps most surprising of all, they found that “low self-esteem is neither necessary nor sufficient for depression” (Baumeister et al., 2003, p. 6).

Because activists and ideologues have captured the American educational system, schools here now spend inordinate amounts of time promoting self-esteem. Because a school day has a finite number of hours in it, the more time teachers devote to self-esteem, the less time they have for actual knowledge. The result is that many students are handed diplomas even when they know practically nothing about history, geography, arithmetic, government, science, and logic. But they ooze self-esteem.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman