Philip Jong

Last week, the Toronto District School Board was publicly cited for considering the establishment of a black-only school in the city. The motive was to improve public education for minorities by fostering an ethnic-sensitive learning environment with black teachers and Afro-centric curriculum. The public reaction towards this recommendation had been swift and polarized. The formal institution of racial segregation in schools had never been done in Canada. In United States, racial segregation in public schools existed until 1954 when the US Supreme Court ruled against the “separate but equal” doctrine of public education and required the desegregation of all schools across America. Today, racial divide and tension still prevail in our educational system that supposedly teaches tolerance, diversity, and multiculturalism. Regardless of the motive behind the decision, the establishment of a black-only school is simply a form of racial segregation in disguise. It will neither provide a more nurturing environment to minorities nor improve tolerance between different ethnic groups in the community. As an immigrant of Chinese descent myself, I have greatly benefited from a multicultural educational system that promotes ethnic diversity and racial tolerance. As Winston Churchill once said, “Those that fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.” Enforcing segregation is not the answer; teaching tolerance is.

Is truth simply the way we may explain most easily what we observe of the world around us? My work as a scientist demands that I continually question the perception of truth. Long ago, the Catholic Church hailed Ptolemy’s geocentric view of the universe as the truth to explain God’s creation of our world. When Copernicus proposed a simpler heliocentric model to predict the motion of planets in our solar system, his view was quickly scorned as a challenge to the biblical truth. Today, we know that the heliocentric view of the universe explains not only the motion of our planets, it also explains the motion of planetary bodies in other galaxies. Yet, it will be wrong of us to choose the heliocentric view over the geocentric view just because it provides a simpler explanation of our universe. This is because while Occam’s Razor may dictate the principle of parsimony when selecting a theory to explain our world, the same principle may not guarantee that the chosen theory indeed represents the truth. In other words, truth is not simply the way we may explain most easily of the world around us. Truth does not stand alone. It stands besides all other truths of the universe. The only way to pursue truth is to continue to challenge existing belief with other truths, rather than accepting it in isolation.

My blog is just one of the millions and millions of blogs now on the internet. If there is a topic, there is a blog on that topic. These blogs range from insightful commentaries to mundane one-liners. Because there is no policing of what is allowed in a blog, anyone who seeks to speak up can put up a blog for the world to see. The end result is a sea of mingled content, much of it worthless except to those who wrote the blogs. More tragically, these noises drown out the voices that should instead be heard aloud. When I blog, I choose to blog with a purpose—to inform, to educate, or to share. A blog should not be written solely for self-gratification. A writer must blog with a responsibility to the readers, so that its content will not add more noise to an already noisy world.

I am an avid gamer. I have played many video games that feature fantasized violence and stimulated killing of in game characters. In recent years, much media attention has been paid on linking video game violence to real life violence, especially in teenagers and young adults who are the primary consumers of video games. Reports of real life teenage and gang shootings have repeatedly cast blame on violent video games because of their potential to desensitize gamers to the murdering of human beings.
Scientific studies that attempt to establish a linkage between video game violence and real life violence have so far been inconclusive, and it is doubtful that a study can ever be done to conclusively confirm or refute this association. Even in cases where the accusers have claimed that the murders have been directly inspired by violent video games, isolated examples such as these cannot be used to establish an epidemiological association between video game violence and real life violence. A recent example is the highly publicized murder of three police officers in Alabama, US by a teenager who later confessed that he was inspired to kill after playing Grand Theft Auto from Rockstar Games. This is because it is not possible to exclude other factors that may be the true underlying causes of violent behaviors in these individuals or other factors that may confound the relationship between the two phenomena of interest.
We should be reminded that long before video games existed, classic works of literature also existed that were filled with stories of violence and murder. If we are to cast blame on video games, then we must also cast blame on these works of literature for promoting violence in our society. The fault thus lies not on whether violence should be portrayed but on whether violence is portrayed responsibly. If violence is accurately portrayed with due moral consequences, then individuals who are exposed may also absorb the moral value that keeps them from acting irresponsibly, regardless of the medium where the violence is portrayed. Blame should not be cast only on individuals who have committed the murderous act in real life; blame may also need to be cast on game publishers that choose to sell video games that portray violence in an irresponsible fashion.

Professional journalists are faced daily with the responsibility of going “on the record” in their writings. Those who are willing to speak “on the record” are often seen to be more credible than those who are willing to speak only in the shadow of anonymity. With few exceptions, this fact also differentiates good from poor journalism. Similarly, an unwritten rule of blogging is that you are forever bound to the words written in your blog. This is because once the content of your blog appears online, a copy of it will always exist somewhere else in cyberspace. Many search engines today, such as Google, cache the content of all web pages which they index. These caches then become indefinite records of what have been written by you online. Even years after the original blog is deleted, a copy of it may be retrieved online elsewhere. When I blog, I am keenly aware that my blog will also be “on the record” and that I will be ethically accountable to the words in my blog. Such is the price for establishing my voice in this online world.