Thinkling

As long as we refuse to accept phenomena like these as mere accidental occurrences of the natural world on the par with typhoons or fluctuations of stock markets, we seek explanations. That is, we attempt to make sense of such incidents by incorporating them into one or another of the conventionally accepted frameworks of social, moral, political, psychological causes and effects. We need to understand in some way and it is probably part of an instinct to keep our world together. And in situations like these every single one of us turns into an amateur philosopher and social theorist, often so smoothly as to remain unaware of the shift. The text of the Guardian article of mid-May reporting the affair goes on as follows:

The inquiry began last September when parents asked the school why their daughters were suddenly wearing new dresses and spending money they had not been given by relatives. The girls admitted selling their virginity and revealed Mr Deng's mobile phone number.
China's moral compass has been spinning wildly since the start of the government's economic opening policy in 1978. Communist ideology has been replaced by a worship of money, while the movement of 100 million migrant workers to the cities has transformed traditional family relations. At the same time, the influx of global culture, particularly through the internet, has encouraged people to experiment more in their personal lives.

Without a blink of the eye, without the least hesitation, the focus of the perspective changes from the micro-scale of a local event concerning several scores of provincial locals on a September day, to the macro-scale of hundreds of millions inhabitants of a whole continent enwrapped in supposed historical, social and demographic transformations spanning some thirty years. Given the immenseness of the jump in scale, it is remarkable that the language can carry it at all.

Now, admittedly, it is a feature of good journalism to provide a wider framework for the isolated incidents of merely topical news. And within the scope of a newspaper article it may well be impossible to resort to anything other than such sweeping generalisations. The point rather is that this can be done with such ease that a reader probably does not even pause over the borderline between the two worlds. The whole of the above quote will appear to most eyes as a continuous statement of empirical fact: arrest of the malefactor; sale of virginity by a score of school girls; wild spinning of China's moral compass; worship of money; movement of millions; transformation of traditional family. Unless trained or particularly attentive, a reader probably will not notice where the text carried him so self-evidently across the border between fact and theory.