What is normal, anyway?

Case #1:

I started think about this after the recent mid-term elections in the U.S. Much has been made in recent national election cycles about what at first seem to be opposing terms: voter fraud versus voter suppression. Republicans have been trying to make it harder for people to vote (and thus presumably harder to cast a false ballot): requiring photo identification to vote, for example. Democrats have been crying foul, saying that by making it harder to vote the Republicans are suppressing the right to vote, especially among poor people for whom it may be difficult to obtain the proper ID. Voter fraud is quite rare, and when numbers are given, they are always in single digits (often only one or two people in any given district might have been proven to have voted illegally in any given election). On the other hand, something similar can be said for voter suppression. Democrats claim that hundreds of thousands of people have already been denied the right to vote by these voter ID laws, and that many more will be disenfranchised if the laws are allowed to stand. But Republicans answer that is only the case if people will not take the trouble to do what people all across the nation regularly have to do in order to drive, travel out of the country, or even use a credit or debit card or cash checks.

So political pundits are left to ponder whether it is better to allow perhaps 2-3% voter fraud in an election to allow everyone to vote or to allow perhaps 5-6% voter suppression to keep voter fraud at 0% And here is where the thinking gets fuzzy for most people. Many will think there must be an ideal 0% / 0% neutral sweet spot on a scale of suppression<>fraud where everyone can vote, but there will be no fraud. Such a scale would look like this:

Voter suppression--10%----------5%---------- 0%----------5%-----------10%--Voter fraud

But in reality there are two overlapping scales, more like this:

Voter suppression--10%----------5%---------- 0%............................................

................................................... 0%----------5%------------10%--Voter fraud

Thus to get to 0% voter suppression, we will have to put up with some fraud. And to get to 0% fraud, we will have to put up with some suppression. The %s do not matter for the moment, and are controversial in any case. The point is that there is no center. No getting to zero on one scale without a cost on the other side. A cost/benefit analysis is often a more helpful calculation.

What other cases of cost/benefit overlapping scales can you think of? Law enforcement? Government regulation? Bible translation?

Case #2:

Erving Goffman, in his book Asylums, talks about "total institutions" such as psychiatric hospitals and prisons. He points out that while one would like there to be a one-to-one correlation of the people to the institution (seriously mentally ill people are in psychiatric hospitals, healthy individuals are not; criminals are in prison, non-criminals are not), we all know this not to be the case.

Those who are committed to psychiatric hospitals are often there for what Goffman calls "contingencies," highly relevant but rarely mentioned facts like: 1. The family is wealthy and can afford such "care" for their family member. 2. The family is not willing to put up with the anti-social behavior of the disturbed individual. 3. The hospital facility is nearby to where the family lives, making it convenient to visit often. And so forth.

As to prisons, one only need consult the statistics for U.S. male African Americans 20-29: one in three is in prison, on parole or on probation. The numbers are half that for Latinos, and almost a tenth of that for Whites. Do we really think these numbers reflect the true rates of criminal behavior among these different groups? Or do minorities in the U.S. and elsewhere suffer from "contingencies" as much or more than from the behaviors for which they are officially incarcerated?

It makes one ponder anew how "normal" is related to "norm." And how many of our social norms are invisible to us, revealed only at times and in strange ways by eccentric social psychologists' musings or our own musings over cold statistics.

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And what does this have to do with Bible translation? Someone once said translation is an "agonistic" exercise, and someone else has called it "triage." Both are helpful metaphors. There is no center, no neutral, no absolute "best" in translation. There are only costs and benefits within the constraints of the translation situation. And the reasons for our translation decisions are likely to be due as much to our own "contingencies" as they are to the actual terms of the debate.