Brett Alan Williams's Blog, page 7

May 7, 2018: America could never become a totalitarian State… Right?

When I was a boy, our home was divided by a sibling in the US Marine Corps and another in marches against the Vietnam War. Significantly younger than both, differences were a mystery to me. But I wasn’t the only one confused. As pressures grew, my parents tried to adjust, though not always sure to what. To many it was a mystery how the Heartland could find itself centered in a firestorm ignited by National Guard murders at Kent State, our university closed by riots and burned buildings. [1] But what was clear even then, and persists to this day, was that our close nit family was a casualty of hostile ideologies that hardened with time. That core of community, where I felt a sense of family belonging with its attendant meaning for the only period in my life, never recovered.

When Ronald Reagan arrived on the scene during my high school years, I was inspired to hear a public figure with a positive message. Finally, I thought, I can stop feeling bad about Vietnam. Whatever Reagan’s policies, irrelevant to a kid, I felt pride in my country instead of disgust. This was Reagan’s talent, the opposite of Trump. Which is not to say Trump’s rhetoric is always wrong.

Stepwise since Reagan, his GOP mutated into neoconservatives powered by Vice President Cheney’s corruption, then the forgotten austerity of an obstructionist Tea Party, and finally absolutist populism with a fondness for America’s enemy and murderer, the Dictator of Russia. [2] All the while as what economists Autor, Dorn, and Hanson label The China Shock inflicted “underestimated adjustment costs and distributional consequences.” [3] Translation: mass unemployment, dislocated families, and “rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation,” as Trump rightly put it. [4] After Reagan, Republicans ceased to think creatively. [5] Intellectuals who can argue for conservative ideals from the perspective of reason have been vilified by their own Right as not visceral enough. Conservatism is in ruins, but for much bigger reasons than mere incompetence.

Each of these steps was a signal that Arnold Toynbee’s diagnosis was correct: “Civilizations disintegrate when leaders stop responding creatively, [sinking into] nationalism, militarism, and tyranny of a despotic minority… death by suicide…” [6] Because all civilizations are self-destructive. The boon and bane of our species—innovation—is what humans do. But technical and social innovations hurl civilizations apart as they struggle to hold themselves together. Society is a giant machine that humans build. It then acquires a power of its own. A kind of artificial intelligence of invisible hands that will strangle its maker. It takes creative thinkers with counter-innovations to save us from it. To adjust, when most aren’t sure to what.

This devolution of leadership has left the Right with no inspiration beyond their constant revival of evils committed by the Left as sanction for their own. Hence the refrain of Barack Obama (not in office), Hillary Clinton (she lost), and Bill Clinton (gone 18 years). The litany of largely imaginary crimes are the daily fodder of our Joseph Goebbels imitators. As Eric Hoffer showed, true believers first and foremost must deny reality or reinvent it to protect their fragile dogmas, which is all the Right has now. [7]

I’d prefer to label our newsworthy Right and Left as “fringe,” but the fringe has come to dominate America. Thank our Joseph Goebbels imitators; self-reinforcing echo chambers; internet amplification of otherwise unheard cranks; simplistic application of motivated-reason accepting only evidence that makes us feel better, and motivated-morality applying morality only to the other tribe. Add to this, structural flaws like Gerrymandering and primaries, both inciting the least reasoned / most radical to lead the way, and it’s no wonder America is rotting in absolutism laced with its many pathogens. [8]

Absolutism nurtures ignorance, because truth lowers the fever. Our propagandists have fortunes to make by boiling the blood to rally the troops. Inhaling this infected atmosphere produces a kind of delirium that’s easily steered with false promises of salvation. Among the most powerful is something I once had: belonging and its attendant meaning. As a disconnected nation of strangers, more than anything we yearn for belonging. In this Clan Age, absolutism offers an emotionally charged lure: Swear to the creed and your emptiness is filled with a simple act of free will. Choose well the new God.

All this has people asking, could America become a totalitarian State? Like the failed democracy of Athens, the failed Republic of Rome, or today’s Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Egypt, and The Philippines. As Freedom House reports, “For the 12th consecutive year freedom has declined, with 71 countries suffering… This democratic recession is global.” [9] Or as one Latin American so familiar with their many despots put it, “We’ve seen this movie before, just never in English.” [10] The legal scholar Cass Sunstein argues American authoritarianism has commenced. [11] Consider the dictatorial nature of Trump’s actions, or antics, cover up, and institutional assaults by boot lickers in Congressman like Devin Nunes, Mike Conaway, Mark Meadows, and Jim Jordan. [12] Loyalists are in place. The propaganda arm well established.

Hannah Arendt recalled her own witness to Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, when supporters of totalitarian regimes treated evidence “as non-facts…in line with the totalitarian contempt for facts and reality…” [13] This, and the rampant conspiracy theories she chronicles prepared the mental ground for action. Like Stalin’s Great Purge with millions of his own people murdered. “Post-factuality is pre-fascism,” writes Yale historian Timothy Snyder. [14] “When Mr. Trump calls journalists ‘enemies of the people,’ he’s quoting Joseph Stalin.” And trashing our Constitution his supporters pretend to love.

Absorbing the brunt of The China Shock and incompetent leadership, the Right’s anger is as understandable as the giddy thrill of Trump’s assault on political correctness. What’s not consistent is their moral conversion. The new God is not the old God.

Against Trump, one in four Christian evangelicals have been true to the moral teachings of Jesus, while 3 in 4 betray every major verse we know. [15] Trump’s supporters cheer at his pep rallies when he claims to hit back ten times harder, while Jesus counsels, “Turn the other cheek.” Trump and his sycophants blame everyone but himself for his own failings, rejecting “Pull the plank from your own eye first.” For Trump and his followers, only winning matters, no matter how shameful the means. But, “What good is it to win the world and lose your soul?” And while Trump and his propagandists share and defend his liar’s addiction, Jesus said, “Seek the truth to set you free.” [16] Such duplicity is all the more grotesque for the Right’s deception of their own Savior.

Does this make Trump’s Christian supporters, hypocrites? Not to them. For many, Trump is a “gift from God.” [17] Like Cyrus, King of Persia, who freed captured Jews from Babylon, Trump will free Christian conservatives from liberals. [18] King David was a beast too, but God used him as a tool for good. [19] (Recall, Paul condemned this notion as reprehensible. [20])

Similar excuses are given by the morally vacant Flight 93 Election, [21] and those many email viruses the Right bathes in, like the call to arms penned by Livermore, CA Mayor Dr. Marshall Kamena. [22] Except, of course, per usual, it was written by a Right-wing blogger with poor Kamena’s name attached. But never mind. It’s the ignition of emotions that matter, not truth. As Thomas Paine wrote, when a man so “prostitutes the chastity of his mind…he has prepared himself for commission of every other crime.” [23]

And yet, if a Trump supporting Christian could win a foot race and its million dollar prize for his church to feed the poor, would he cheat? Ride a horse, perhaps, drive a car? Isn’t winning for some greater good what matters? Do immoral means to moral ends pervert those ends? Is this why our Founders gave us the Constitution they did, because process is a moral matter?

So far, that Constitution has stopped Trump’s quest to cure his septic inferiority with dictatorial power. But can that document tame the passion of millions, called by their new Idol and his media lairs to destroy the Founder’s creation? Will it be that immoral fraction of once moral Christians who betrayed their God and our Constitution that lead us to tyranny if it happens? If we American’s ever so fancied ourselves to believe this Republic could never become a totalitarian State, we now see how wrong that is.

America is in the grip of hostile ideologies, hardened with time. As the Right continues its tailspin, their yearning for authoritarianism rises. [24] But eras like this are educational tools. For history, for political philosophy, human psychology, and that all-inclusive topic, the rise and fall of civilizations. Which will it be?

Until next time, Monday July 2, 2018.


[1] Student Protests of the 1970s , Library News, University Of Iowa, 5/4/2010
[2] James Kirchick, How the GOP became the party of Putin , Brookings Institute, July 27, 2017
[3] David H. Autor, David Dorn, Gordon H. Hanson, The China Shock: Learning from Labor-Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade , Annu. Rev. Econ. 2016.8:205-240
[4] The Inaugural Address , January 20, 2017
[5] One example of Reagan’s creative thinking came out of his response to MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). Instead of the assurance of destroying both sides in a nuclear exchange as a deterrent to war, why not seek to eliminate the threat through a defensive shield: his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Even still, pundits claim this was a failure. And yet, the remarkably successful anti-missile missile PAC-3 (in production and fielded for 20 years), and its follow-on THAAD are products of SDI. The PAC-3 scenario was said to be impossible because “It’s like hitting a bullet with a bullet.” Except bullets don’t travel nearly so fast, nor are they self-guided with pinpoint precision onboard radars. Reagan then leveraged SDI with Mikhail Gorbachev at Reykjavik, resulting in the successful Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 1987 at Geneva.
[6] Wikipedia: Arnold Toynebee
[7] Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, January 19, 2010
[8] JONATHAN RAUCH, How American Politics Went Insane , Atlantic Monthly, JULY/AUGUST 2016
[9] STEWART PATRICK, Global democracy retreats as authoritarianism marches forth , The Hill, 03/04/18
[10] Gideon Rose, Is Democracy Dying, Foreign Affairs, pg. 8, May/June 2018
[11] Cass Sunstein, Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America, Dey Street Books, 2018
[12] BRENT BUDOWSKY, Mueller marches on, while the House GOP covers up, The Hill, 3/13/18
[13] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Harcourt, pg. xxxii, 1985
[14] Timothy Snyder, Donald Trump and the New Dawn of Tyranny , TIME, March 3, 2017
[15] Not all Christian evangelicals support Trump. One in four do not. Some are vociferously opposed and practice the teachings they hold dear. Eric Sammons, Christians' Support For Trump Undermines Their Public Witness, The Federalist, October 12, 2016
Neil J. Young, Dear Evangelicals, A Begrudging” Vote for Trump Is Still a Vote for Trump, Religion Dispatches, October 4, 2016
Russell Mooresept, Have Evangelicals Who Support Trump Lost Their Values?, New York Times, September 17, 2015
[16] Mathew 5:39, Mathew 7:5, Mark 8:36, John 8:32,
[17] Wayne C. Anderson, Reader's view: Trump a temporary reprieve, gift from God , Duluth News Tribune, Jan 13, 2018
[18] Ed Kilgore, Bibi and the Christian Right Agree: Trump Is the New Cyrus the Great , New York Magazine, March 5, 2018
[19] DAVID FRENCH, Imagining Trump’s Evangelicals in King David’s Time , National Review, March 22, 2018
[20] Paul: Romans 3:8 , Bible Hub
[21] Publius Decius Mus, The Flight 93 Election , CRB, September 5, 2016
[22] Publius Decius Mus, Democratic Livermore Mayor Marshall Kamena on Donald Trump, Snopes, November 22, 2017
[23] Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, pg. 8, Prometheus Books, 1984 (1794)
[24] Charles Kaiser, Can it Happen Here? review: urgent studies in rise of authoritarian America , The Guardian, April 8, 2018
Thomas B. Edsall, The Contract With Authoritarianism , New York Times, April 5, 2018
Revised 2/12/19. Added the tasty description of "boot lickers" for the likes of Nunes, Jordan, Meadows, and Conaway. Individuals we should bronze for their exceptional talents.

March 5, 2018: The light, the power, the glory: kids. But can they save us?

During the close comet encounters of Hyakutake and Hale Bopp in 1996 and '97, I had the good fortune of working at Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. The word “work” I use here loosely for two reasons. There was nothing work-like about it, and the pay was $3.12/hour. [1] Hence, we on the staff labeled ourselves Griffith’s Volunteers, and we relished the mission—to teach.

Built in 1935 on funds bequeathed by Welsh-born industrialist, philanthropist, and attempted murderer (of his wife) Griffth J. Giffith (1850 – 1919), the Observatory is among the two most remarkable Los Angeles attractions including the Getty Museum. The reason Griffith attracts 1.5 million annual visitors is because it appeals to children. [2] More precisely, to child-like curiosity that resides in each of us if we give it a chance to breathe. Griffith Observatory provides the oxygen. When people discover the place you can see color return to their cheeks.

As “Telescope Demonstrator” I held the most coveted position. An endless talker, thrilled to excite others with science, I could not have found a better setting. The dark confines of a 60 foot diameter dome, punctuated by eerie red lights, and a 200-inch streak of telescope lunged at the sky through a gash in the roof. A telescope more people have peered through than any other on earth, 8 million so far.

Both Hyakutake and Hale Bopp, were back-to-back once-in-a-century events. Even the national media descended when I found myself before PBS Newshour cameras. A three minute interview and address to crowds wrapped around the roof was boiled down to a five second sound bite. I called to the people and pointed at the sky, “That comet tail you see now is sixty times longer than a full moon is wide!” Eighteen hundred miles away in Iowa, my mother saw this with sudden expectations for her son in Hollywood.

Visitors set record attendance with up to 1500 per night through the dome. More could have passed, but it was hard for people to leave that small space once they glimpsed their place in the universe. The leading enthusiasts were children. It was kids who provoked adults to remember what it was like to wonder, be amazed, and thirst for more. Be they elderly, romantically obsessed, or gangs who strived to impress their brothers, I remember not one to leave without a sense of urgency. Like they’d just that instant, quite unexpectedly, discovered where the real stars were, and they wanted a piece of it.

Throughout the night to each fresh group of minds, I'd return from answering questions, sharing enthusiasm, or the regular wrestling match with Creationists, to a reprise of my intro, “Tonight we travel back in time! We’ll do that because even at 186,000 miles per second—or one foot per nanosecond—it takes time for light to travel space. So you see me now as I was 15 or 20 nanoseconds ago. But 1500 light years that way is Orion Nebula. What you’ll see there, right now, happened about the time the Maya invented zero, Barbarians burned Rome, and Christianity became official in Constantinople. But in astronomical terms, Orion’s in your pocket. The universe is so big you can go back in time 14 billion years and not take a step. So come see the sky. It’s yours. Who else could it belong to? Now questions! I love questions.”

As adults hesitated, children raised their hands in unison like salutes to the sky. “Why is the moon round?” “How long would it take to walk to Jupiter?” “What do you put on a hotdog with mustard and onions?” This last question came from a shy four-year-old whose father responded to my laughter with, “You asked for questions. You didn’t tell him they had to be about astronomy.”

On one special occasion, a small boy raised his hand. I bent my 6’2” frame over the little fellow to say, “A question! I love questions. What’s your question?”

“I know something about astronomy,” he said. And rattled off a series of facts as though read from a book.

“Wait. Stop,” I said. “Follow me.”

I walked to the center of the dome. I pointed at him, and then the space beside me. With a quick check of his mother, he left her in line to take his station.

I turned to the crowd and said, “I have just been outdone by a five-year-old.”

“Five and one-half,” the boy said.

After the slightest pause, I responded, “Then five and one-half it is.”

“Am I going to be your helper?” he asked.

“No. You stay here. I’ll stand in line with your mom. You’re the astronomer. This is show town. This is your show. Take it away.”

I stood by his mother as he scanned a long line of people, many much larger than he. He said nothing.

I shrugged and said, “We just want to know what you know. Go.”

And he did. With perfect enunciation, but so tenderly, people in the dome fell mute to listen. The only other sound was that quiet hum of German motors still turning their telescope 60 years on.

As he told his story about galaxies that eat each other, suns that blow up so hard they fall down, and stars so heavy a little bit weighs a lot, patrons huddled about him as though sustained by heat of some cosmic campfire. All as that 200-inch tube scooped light from other worlds with no eyes to catch them. That little boy was center of the universe. [3]

After three or four minutes he was done. He walked to his mother’s side. He held her hand for his turn up stairs to the eyepiece. An elderly woman began to clap. As the audience responded, he looked about to see what they were applauding for.

I shook my head, amazed at yet another of Griffith’s many wonders. In the most hedonistic environment on this planet and beneath that ovation I whispered to myself, “It’s not what you show, it’s what you know.”

I hope the remarkable curiosity of that little boy survived these last twenty-plus years. In that time America has cheated our young people through dogmatic doctrines and negligence. Creationists have long sought to invade science education with religion because they’re unsettled by the facts of nature, and fear skeptical thinking about their beliefs. As China builds its economy on science, Americans seek to “teach the controversy” between biological evolution and biblical creation. There is no controversy. Other than in the fertile imaginations of Creationists and their Intelligent Designers, yet to understand the first fundamental rule of science enunciated 2600 years ago by Thales: only natural causes allowed. Supernatural powers, miracles, and magic bear no testable predictions, provide no reasoned models of nature, and cannot be refuted. Try building telescopes, radios, or aircraft with that.

Likewise, we now find the science of manmade global warming off limits to parents who prefer their children conform to creeds defined by liars. States across the country are in another battle of the books to sanitize them of science. In Idaho’s battle, Representative Scott Syme recently said, “I don’t care if the students come up with a conclusion that the earth is flat—as long as it’s their conclusion, not something that’s told to them.” [4] Math and science demand independent verification and proofs by the student as standard practice. Barred from man-centuries of effort completed before us until every finding is personally validated would freeze all advance. I needn’t prove Newton’s calculus or mechanics to use both in engineering with accurate results. Syme would rather children be wrong than know the truth so long as they got the wrong answer on their own. Remember, Syme is a legislator of laws. Such utter ignorance of science is not a disqualification for office in Idaho, or anywhere else, but rather a badge of honor.

But math and science aren’t the only thing we’ve neglected to teach our young people. According to the Educational Commission of the States, only 17 US states are accountable for civics education. [5] Americans graduate high school with no understanding of self-governance. Is the Constitution superior to statue law? Why are there individual rights to begin with? Why are courts and the legal process so slow? So vacuous is our grasp of self-governance that in 2017 Newsweek reported a quarter of Millennials find democracy a bad or very bad form of government; a third support authoritarianism; one in six favor military rule. [6]

Simultaneously, an embarrassing fraction of campus students have been taught so little of history, philosophy, and the examination of ideas they’re terrified of adult issues easily defeated with open debate. They yearn for intellectual sanitation of “safe spaces” where they can hide from imagined “micro-aggressions” as they shed tears for cameras and university administrators petrified of violating politically correct McCarthyism.

Kids are one of the stellar powers in this universe. They’re born curious. It takes years of training to kill that. Now that we have, will they have the tools to save America and Western civilization as it crumbles under ignorance? As Thomas Jefferson said, "A nation that believes it can be ignorant and free is a nation that never was and never can be."

Until next time, the first Monday in May.

[1] I have my last check from Rick Tuttle, the Controller of the City of Los Angeles under glass on my desk for one hour at $3.12. Void after 2 years, I’ll not be able to cash it if times get tough.
[2] Griffith Observatory, Griffith Observatory. MISSION: Griffith Observatory inspires everyone to observe, ponder, and understand the sky .
[3] It is quite literally true, that little boy was the center of the universe as is every other location. So fond of this little fellow I was that I incorporated this real life experience into my first novel.
[4] Betsy Z. Russell, Rep. Syme: Don’t care if students conclude earth is flat - as long as it’s their own conclusion , The Spokesman Review, 2/1/18
[5] Jackie Zubrzycki, New 50-State Analysis: Most States Don't Include Civics in Accountability , Newsweek, 12/13/16
[6] REBECCA BURGESS, HAVE MILLENNIALS FALLEN OUT OF LOVE WITH DEMOCRACY? , Newsweek, 9/2/16
Nudged 2/17/19. Added a paragraph break, and indulged myself with one tagline for Idaho politician Scott Syme.

January 1, 2018: Why America’s anti-science movement is a moral matter: Part II, The Left

This time we look at the assault on science from America’s political Left, concluding with consideration of equivalence between Left and Right in this crusade.

Back in March with Part I of this post we looked at several aspects of America’s assault on science from our political Right. We saw the self-contradiction of denying scientific facts while dependent on them in our daily lives. Even broadcasting denials of science over radio built by it. We looked at the coupling between science and morality through their shared requirement for reason, linking these factors with democratic government. When science is rejected, reason goes with it. Without reason, morality is crippled and capacity for self-governance dependent on moral justice cannot last—the moral matter. “Scientific values of reason,” writes Michael Shermer, “are not the products of liberal democracy, but the producers of it.” [1] Science denial is not merely about defiance of the other Party, or lying in order to regain a sense of control over experts labeled as elites. The American Right does now what Islam did in the 11th century when they found rational thought a threat to the Koran. [2] That anti-rational movement won, and Islam lost their place as cultural light of the world for the last 700 years. Sometimes, social movements, no matter how apparently inane, destroy whole civilizations.

But America’s anti-science struggle didn’t start with the Right. It began with 1950s / 60s French academics on the Left who decided after two world wars that reason was to blame, and to be abandoned. With human senses near bottom in the animal world, how and by what means could the very tool that enabled our survival possibly be jettisoned? The answer came in their creation of postmodernism and the relativism it was based on. Michel Foucault argued that rationality was a coercive regime of oppression. Jacques Derrida sought a non-philosophical philosophy. And Jacques Lacan seized a bit of scientific cachet while debasing it with his declaration of equivalence between “the erectile organ and the square root of negative one.” [3]

Hmm.

But nonsensical ideas require protection. So like any fragile belief, quasi-supernatural powers had to be established to build a space free from rational challenge. As Ferry and Renaut write in their French Philosophy of the Sixties, this was done by “accustoming readers and listeners to the belief that incomprehensibility is a sign of greatness,…that the thinker’s silence before incongruous demands for meaning was not proof of weakness but indication of endurance in the presence of the Unsayable.” [4] Humans were to be freed “from any dependence on the concept of objective truth.” [5]

Once done, as David Stone’s critique is titled, Anything Goes. [6] And it did. Foucault claimed: 1) “There are no facts, only interpretations,” 2) what matters most is not what is said or written, but what is not, and who says it, and 3) with the help of Heidegger, the idea that any truth, “is at the same time and in itself a concealment.” [7] Recalling the argument of the cube which hides three sides no matter from where it’s viewed. Analogous to the violation of physical laws and common sense in the question, “If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound?” With previous examination, we needn’t simultaneously see the cube’s other sides to know what’s there.

Of course there’s an element of truth in all three of Foucault’s attempts to relativize reason, but in the hands of absolutism, “the democratic project,” writes Ferry and Renaut, is reframed as “ideology…or metaphysical illusion.” [8] Eventually, not only were postmodernists to expunge rational thought, logic, and science, but all Western “bigotries,” including Western traditions, philosophy, religion, and history. Particular hostility was harbored for the majority, as we recall the US Constitution strives to tame its potential ills, but seen by postmodernists as an innate evil. Instead, they favored a “tyranny of the minority,” victims of a majority, real or imagined.

While this movement colonized American universities in the 60s, it seems to have become significant or dominant in sectors of the humanities by the early ‘90s when Marxism’s flaws finally doomed it as a useful ideology against the West. By 1996 Lawrence Levine could brag that Berkeley reversed white student populations from 68% in 1974 to 37% by 1994, while 75% of America was white at that time. [9] Racism as racism’s cure. As Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. elaborates in his Disuniting of America this new mindset lauds a redefinition of multiculturalism with its preservation of ethnic identity, hostile to the old idea of a melting pot. [10] Where dignity becomes a posture of opposition and self-segregation. From the beachhead of our universities these ideas spread to achieve what in part the Klan failed at after a century of intimidation. Since all movements are counter-movements we shouldn’t be surprised to find a majority of US conservatives now view college education as a national threat. [11]

To show how much venom the Left has for science and scientists, consider the award winning UCLA feminist theorist, Sandra Harding. In her popular university Women’s Studies text she writes, “The best scientific activity and thinking about science are modeled on men’s most misogynistic relations to women—rape, torture, [and] choosing mistresses.” [12] For Harding the equations of Newton and Einstein—F=ma, E=mc_squared—are gender-laden sexism. [13] Echoing Right-wing talk radio host Rush Limbaugh’s “wizards of smart,” Harding dismisses “practices of science [as]…sacred commandments.” [14] But if this were so, those cell phones, TVs, ships, satellites, and vaccines wouldn’t work as science predicts they will. One wonders if Harding has access to the fruits of science in her daily drive, work, and healthcare. Like Creationists to Harding’s right, she wants a science indifferent to the way nature really is, exchanged for a creed to make her feel better. And for Harding’s support? “Mainstream thinkers,” she writes, like “Derrida, Foucault, Lacan...” [15] In the end, Harding demands science conform to political, social, and gender-based passions (forget realities of nature) to forge a masculine-free “feminist science,” through what she calls “a painful world-shattering confrontation.” [16] It has a familiar ring.

Like Nazi Science made free of Jews. [17] Stalin’s Proletariat Science that led to Mao’s Great Leap Forward, starving 30-40 million people. And Islamic Science, where Pervez Hoodbhoy reports, papers are “accepted for the Scientific Miracles Conference…of the International Islamic University at Islamabad for their theological correctness.” [18] We won’t build working devices with that, or solve global warming, or combat next year’s flu strain, any more than we would with Harding’s feminist science. There is but one science, revealed in the book of nature. And just as we see on the Right, when science is ditched, reason and morality dependent on it, go down with it.

Christina Hoff Sommers documents one thread of this in The War Against Boys. [19] Sommers showed how irrational dogmas become government policies wrecking human lives when she investigated the Women’s Education Equity Act (WEEA) Publishing Center. With $70 million in tax payer funds, this almost 20 yearlong effort pushed postmodernist policy to education departments across the country. [20] Its critical need was enunciated by then director Katherine Hanson when she claimed that in the US alone: Every year nearly four million women are beaten to death; violence is the leading cause of death among women; the leading perpetrators are men at home. [21] Such were the numbers used to prod policy makers to take action against the dangerous nature of boys in school.

But instead of pathologizing boys, a bit of the scientific method and simple math could have avoided a lot of wasted money and terrorized children. Divide 4 million by 365 days in a year and that’s almost 11,000 murders per day in just one country. Based on Hanson’s claim, as of 2014 with 125.9 million women in the US, almost none of them would exist. And as reality would have it, in the year she divined these numbers, heart disease was the leading cause of female death (370,000), followed by cancer (250,000). According to the FBI, the number of female victims of homicide that year was 3,631. [22] Without question a tragic number, but short of 4 million by a multiplicative factor of over 1000.

Such anti-rationalist, anti-science doctrines in their varied forms are taught as Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies, branches of literary criticism, sociology, and revisionist history in university humanities departments across this country. Their credibility garnered from campus proximity to science and engineering where they actually test claims against reality, unprotected by pseudo-religious rules of political correctness. For postmodernist liberals, application of critical reason to their self-contradictions is defended against through accusations of insensitivity. Harding explicitly makes this point, as do campus speech-code-supporting students unprepared for exposure to adult life. Thus creating another victim with, as Bertrand Russell noted, “superior virtue of the oppressed.” One dare not challenge that, like they dare not challenge “the Lord thy God.” [23]

Hence the French root of postmodernism, and its upkeep in America as politically correct McCarthyism. This movement is largely why less than half of the American electorate voted for a well-known thief, draft-dodger, and want-to-be despot for 2016 president—as a counter-movement. They hated the Left more than they feared betrayal of their Savior's teachings. And doing so has revealed the Right’s embrace of Foucault’s ideas that helped build our modern Left. Administration advisor Kellyanne Conway’s now infamous remark that lies are “alternative facts” is a restatement of Foucault’s first point. Foucault’s second, with truth-as-concealment, feeds the Right-wing’s conspiracy fetish and propaganda machine. While both sides dismiss the other thanks to Foucault’s prioritization of who makes any truth claim.

Little did our modern Right realize how liberal (and 11th century Islamic) they are. And despite their acceptance of manmade global warming as a scientific fact, little did the Left realize how hostile they are to science, and how similar they are to the Right.

So, who’s more radically anti-science, anti-reason, and thus morally compromised, the Right, or the Left’s intellectually sounding assault on the West? It’s a close contest. Considering the current status of our Culture Wars, I wonder if the Left can see the cost of their assault on science and reason now?

Until next time. The first Monday in March, the 5th, 2018.


[1] Michael Shermer, The Moral Arc: How Science Lead Humanity to Truth Justice and Freedom, Henry Holt and Co, 2015, pg. 135
[2] Pervez Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle For Rationality, Zed, 1991
[3] Sokal & Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectual’s Abuse of Science,, Picador, 1998, pg. 27, the quote shown is a truncated summary
[4] Ferry & Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism, University of Massachusetts Press, 1990, pg. 14
[5] Sokal & Bricmont, pg. 234
[6] David Stone, Anything Goes, Origins of the Cult of Scientific Irrationalism, Macleay Press, 1998
[7] Madsen & Madsen, 1990, Science & Culture, 56, pg. 471-472, appearing in Sokal & Bricmont, pg. 234. From the Sokal’s hoax itself, making his successful attempt to be published in one of the premier sociological journals by imitating their gibberish.
[8] Ferry & Renaut, pg. xvi
[9] Lawrence Levine, Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History, Beacon, 1996, pg. xviii
[10] Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, Norton, 1992, pg. 16, 43, 80, 92, 116, 118.
[11] Chris Riotta, Majority of Republicans Say Colleges Are Bad For America (Yes, Really), Newsweek, 7/10/2017
[12] Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism, Cornell University Press, 1986, pg. 112
[13] ibid pg. 42,
[14] ibid pg. 39. And as this weren’t bad enough, “Those wedded to empiricism,” claims Harding, “will be loath to commit…that the social identity of the observer [makes a difference] in research results.” Pg. 26 Imagine observers making different numeric measurements based on their social identity.
[15] ibid pg. 27
[16] ibid pg. 39
[17] Wikipedia, Deutsche Physik
[18] Pervez Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle For Rationality, Zed, 1991, pg. 180. Italics added.
[19] Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men, Touchstone Simon & Shuster, 2000
[20] WEEA funding: http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/Biennial/125....
[21] Sommers pg. 48
[22] ibid pg. 49
[23] Exodus 20:2
Tweaked 2/17/19. Clarified identity between Left & Right in their crusade against science with separate paragraph.

November 6, 2017: Down in the dark, beneath the American psyche, some of it’s not so bad

In the September 18 issue of New York Magazine, Andrew Sullivan asks what it must be like to live in a tribal society like Syria, Iraq, or the Balkans where the smallest difference defines friend or foe. [1] But we already know, he claims, as we live in America. Where the 18th century hope was that emotion could be tamed by reason, and deep divides “bridged by a culture of compromise,” he writes. For Sullivan we have regressed to more primitive origins of our evolution. “Tribalism, it’s worth remembering,” Sullivan notes, “is not one aspect of human experience. It’s the default human experience.”

Sullivan maintains this wasn’t a problem, until recently. “Tribalism only destabilizes a democracy… when it rivals our attachment to the nation as a whole; when it turns rival tribes into enemies.” It’s also easy. “One of the great attractions of tribalism, is that you don’t actually have to think very much. All you need to know on any given subject is which side you’re on.” A condition that Animal Farm and 1984 author George Orwell characterized as a propensity for self-contradiction and indifference to reality. [2]

Today, American tribes are much more about “what we stand against,” than “what we stand for.” As a naturally superstitious species, our polarization is accentuated by a conspiracy theory mindset nurtured by the internet. As Walter Quattrociocch notes, this mindset is a kind of “quasi-religious mentality.” Where we again occupy a mental space, “a bit like the dawn of humanity, when people attributed divinity to storms.” What he characterizes as our Age of Credulity. [3] Fodder for tribes.

In an On Being podcast, The Righteous Mind author, Jonathan Haidt takes the tribal notion a step deeper into the realm of Richard Dawkin’s selfish gene. [4] But with one of two expressions, each having been essential for human survival. Elsewhere differentiated by selection of individual traits favored by Dawkins, or selection of community traits as offered by E. O. Wilson (much to Dawkins’ irritation). For Haidt, liberal or conservative is a function of one or the other of these encoded behaviors. Haidt has even revealed two of their most defining differences with simple tests of imagery. When viewing dots on a screen, his conservative subjects preferred the dots be cast in an orderly fashion. Liberals preferred a variety of distributions. Order for them, it seemed, was equivalent to confinement, hierarchy, and potential abuse of authority.

For Haidt, the more freedom and prosperity people have with markets that cater to wants, including bias-reinforcing media echo chambers, the more our two personality traits will self-segregate like some chemical distillate. “So progress,” host Krista Tippet remarked, “leads to incivility.”

Haidt’s hope for remediation is a revival of civics education on America’s long history of Left and Right with the pairings each is most concerned with: order or reform; stability or change; belonging or autonomy; freedom or equality; responsibility or rights. Having abandoned civics education, these are mysteries of the dark arts in America.

From the same classical-liberal camp of Europe’s Enlightenment we can dig beneath the psyche's surface to a time when these competing priorities became hostile thanks to divisions created by the 1789 French Revolution. Which allows for an interesting implication: that America’s culture wars are the extension of a 220 year conflict without (fortunately) a winner. Such are the implications of Yuval Levin’s Great Debate: Edmond Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left. Per Levin, “If political ideas are applications of philosophical ideas—of some understanding of what is true and good in life—then serious political debates must be rooted in different philosophical assumptions.” [5] Arguments between Burke and Paine that set our modern stage were about the priorities those assumptions warrant. Balance was and remains the hard part. Too much order is authoritarian. Too much change is destabilizing.

While Paine courses through my blood, I found Burke more convincing. Burke is not opposed to reform, but to save tradition he wants change to be gradual. A pace the community psyche can absorb over slow time so as not to threaten personal bonds. Society for Burke is about people living with others, indebted and responsible, not demanding and entitled. Society has been a centuries-long experiment to find the best way to live. (See the evolution of law commencing with Ur Nammu 2100 BC.) For Burke, we should not dispose of that learning for a return to square one based on some abstract proto-society of the individual alone in a hostile wilderness that so enamored Paine.

But if we’re to reference the earliest living state as “natural man” from which to extrapolate society, as Paine seeks to do, then based on what we now know, isn’t the first proto-society mother and child? Before Hobbes, Locke, and Paine were individuals in a struggle with nature, they were utterly dependent on mother for survival. To the infant, she must be something like God, providing not only sustenance for the body, but some form of meaning through the infant’s own value reflected from the mother. Does this fundamental arrangement lead the growing child to a sense of entitlement and rights, or debt and responsibility? With foreknowledge that individualism’s evolution would lead to the former, and a stronger view of indebtedness, our Founders might have given us a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.

While Burke is too tolerant of transgressions by those in power, Paine is anything but. And not without cause. Paine’s witness to corrupt power makes justice and equality his central concern with perpetual reform a requirement of moral societies. If government fails to be the guardian of rights, Paine’s urge is to burn it down, reboot from that time before social relations and hierarchies. As though such a clean slate could exist in reality without a multitude of leftover alliances. Paine seeks to apply the scientific method to civilization, but it can seem like a surrogate for an axe to grind. Like the scientist’s mathematical model, idealized by perfect spheres and unperturbed parabolas, in the field the scientist finds his model an approximation. A myriad of unmodeled phenomena, from the winds of change to irrational human behavior, yield a different answer. While the scientist adds those phenomena for a more precise solution, Paine seems little concerned for lessons learned that Burke would rather preserve. Both sides have valid arguments, and each goes too far. But we’re better for having both than only one or the other.

And richer still for the great debates between Plato and Aristotle over many of the same Western dichotomies. While this ancient duo roams over wider terrain and they crisscross with Burke and Paine, their disputes elucidate “what is true and good in life.” Their philosophical ideas converted to application-as-politics were the West’s first contest between pairs of opposing priorities for the same cause: the best way to live.

In Arthur Herman’s The Cave and the Light we find Plato’s Republic “…is all about raising that collective order to the highest… [making] the individual’s health and happiness dependent on the larger political community.” [6] Like Burke, “Plato’s philosophy looks constantly backward, to what we were, or what we’ve lost…” While, like Paine, Aristotle’s is “a philosophy of aspiration.” “Steadily looking forward, to what we can be, rather than what we were.” [7]

And yet, for Plato, now crossing paths with Paine, our existence is a cave of illusions to be escaped from for higher principles. Plato’s politics was a quest for “a foundation more elevated and certain than custom, public opinion, and majority rule.” [8] But for Aristotle the pragmatist, as for Burke, what’s so bad about the cave? It’s what we have, where we are, in the here and now that matters most. Let’s work with that.

For over 2000 years the West has debated what is true and good in life, and ultimately from this, speculations about the best way to live. I’m struck by the repeating theme of duality, and I wonder, is this an inflection of the old mind-body problem? And is the mother and child its first biological expression? What the body needs as material; what the mind needs as meaning.

Fundamentally different, the two require different things. Our bodies are in constant competition with the world outside, or think they are. Our genes don’t know there’s another meal in four hours, they want to gorge. Hence, America’s obesity epidemic. Our body’s concern is with the material world. But the mind has other worries. Especially once age and experience with The Great Reality is recognized for what it is. When despite our myriad of distractions it finally dawns on us that each is biodegradable. Who wants an early start in the recycle? As pastor Forest Church once said, religions are a result “Of being alive and having to die.” [9] Our mind knows this and demands a solution. Competition between the material world with existential realities, clouded by hormones, and tamed by age is bound to have different outcomes for different people over time, and thus, which tribe they swear by. While America’s current, perhaps permanent political vulgarities could convert the Pope to a nihilist, fortunately, we have the treasures of Plato, Aristotle, Burke, and Paine. Down in the dark, beneath the American psyche where foundations of substance lie, some of it’s not so bad.

Until next time, Monday, January 1, 2018


[1] Andrew Sullivan, America Wasn’t Built for HumansSeptember 18, 2017, New York Magazine
[2] George Orwell
[3] Walter Quattrociocch, Inside The Echo Chamber, Scientific American, April 2017
[4] On Being
[5] Yuval Levin, Great Debate: Edmond Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left, Basic Books, 2014, pg. 43
[6] Arthur Herman The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization, Random House, 2014, pg. 62
[7] ibid pg. 52
[8] ibid pg. 28
[9] Bill Moyers, A World of Ideas, Doubleday, 1989
Revised, 2/17/19. Grammar, and mixed up references.

September 4, 2017: Has America become a nation of liars? [1]

In Kurt Anderson’s September 2017 Atlantic article, How America Lost Its Mind, he argues that 1960s Postmodernist relativism served as an assault on conservatives who did not view their religion, traditions, and values as mere subjectivity. [2] Anderson writes, “…by the 1970s [Michel Foucault] was arguing that rationality itself is a coercive ‘regime of truth’—oppression by other means.” [3] Coupled with what Anderson calls ultra-individualism this became pick-your-own-reality and free choice morality. This relativism also served as training-by-example for Right-wing “alternative facts” used to disempower what they view as liberal elites in science, academia, government, and the press. A construction of the Left which years later would invite Rush Limbaugh, global warming denial, and the Creationism of Intelligent Design from the Right. In a society where so many feel they have lost control, lies are one way to get it back.

Stuart Rachels wrote, "Moral thinking begins when we try to see things as they are… Morality is the effort to guide one's conduct by reason." [4] But relativism dismisses "things as they are" as unknowable. Originally a Left-wing perception, both sides now embrace it. Compare the Left's dismissal of moral judgments - as the communal construction of morality became a matter of individual free choice - with the New Right's dismissal of morality in their affinity for lies. Or the Left's embrace of "blank slate" all-nurture-no-nature claims that make gender purely a social construct open to choose, with the New Right's rejection of evolution and the Big Bang - both in violation of science. [5] Morality and science are now matters of political convenience. Conservatives feel they've thrown relativism back in the face of liberals. Ironically, with tools of Enlightenment reason the postmodernist Left warped reason. Soaked in technology we approach a pre-Enlightenment Middle Ages mindset through imitation of the Left by the Right. [6]

Per Rachels’ warning, crippled moral standards release restrictions on immorality. As Anderson’s article implies, this topic has become something of an American obsession. My own observations of this trend began early. Part “loss of innocence,” part witness to history, my starting point commenced with parents who were products of the Great Depression and WWII. Born later in their lives I was raised like an only child. Not privileged by middle-class standards of the time, I was also not penalized by society at large. Well cared for, never hungry, I wanted for little, in part because I didn't know there was more outside our 900 square foot home among so many others like it.

At ninety-one, my mother still recalls her embarrassment among other girls at school when each day she revealed the quarter stick of butter for lunch her mother wrapped in newspaper that morning. The sole provision all eight children in her home received after a stale slice of bread with coffee poured over it for breakfast. Yet about the same age in my own life I was convinced the reason I received what I did was because I deserved it.

One evening as a 4 year old I stood in the checkout line behind my mother at the local grocer as she and the clerk made small talk. Loitering, I spied 1-cent Tootsie Rolls displayed quite obviously for me. I casually inspected the most desirable of these identical treats and put five in my pocket. Back home I presented my gift to the family: one Tootsie for each. After the inquisition I was marched to convene with the grocer’s manager. He hovered above me. Head down, I thrust out that tiny hand I had then to expose five kidnap victims as proof of my crime. I cried and apologized before an audience of shoppers. Unsure of further consequences, I begged the punishment not be too severe. Not merely at bedtime, but before the Lord himself in his house I had work to do at church on Sunday—pray for forgiveness.

So it was I received my first lesson that I was not deserving, but lucky. Lucky my parents had the hardships they had without having them myself. As Chantel Delsol wrote, “A people are made by hardship. They are also made by its absence.” [7] Hardship provides moral perspective, a kind of conscience fetched from suffering that is anything but relative. When it comes to morality, abundance can be a curse. Such are the teachings of Buddha and Jesus.

My parent’s pointed me toward what the word morality meant. Such lessons notified me of a standard. They instilled a trust of others, high expectations of their moral stance, and mine. Except for the occasional typically-boy fistfight, I remained under this impression well into adulthood. I’m grateful for that upbringing. I consider it healthy, wholesome, and entirely naïve for the America we live in now.

One adult lesson came from a woman with no higher education. It was from her I formally recognized motivated-morality. Wrongs done by her, her friends, family, or political party were excused. Only other tribes received moral judgment. Values were a matter of utility. After she had an affair with a married man, which she held not to be adultery (she too was married), I severed ties and never saw her again. She was a Christian woman. The kind of Christian with four-square-gospel jubilation for every word of Christ, and paradoxically, the Ten Commandments. By then, I’d left the faith unable to square the Bible’s self-contradiction of love and slaughter in violation of its own morality.

My second adult tutorial came from a man I worked with, educated to the highest level with a PhD. He was not a religious man. Our field is one in which the peer review process makes mistakes public, and not infrequently, embarrassing. This man recast those public embarrassments as conquests. He’d then wait to see if I would endorse his lies to patch his ego and satisfy his required loyalty. For a time I practiced diversion. I changed the subject or complemented something else he did. I began to question my own morality in exchange for peace. The work was fascinating, surroundings like an idealized Lyceum, the minds of others in our group, exceptional. But one by one they peeled away because they knew something I didn’t: rarely are we faced with big events to reveal our moral fiber. Minor transgressions are portentous. Midway among the exodus, jolted by external events, I quit, and moved to California. Years later I heard of an international scandal that made headline news of the Houston Chronicle, centered on the man and place I left behind as it imploded.

About this time Bill Clinton was lying about his sexual escapades to a Grand Jury and inquiring about the definition of “is.” Truth revealed, followers rallied: “We all make mistakes,” “Bill and Monica are in love,” “But he’s our first feminist president.” More irony, and motivated-morality as Senator Packwood from the other party was pursued for his own infidelities. Intensified by my experience I recoiled from these people and their excusers. Immorality and its supporting lies were not confined to my small arena, but played on a national stage.

Then came Iraq. I was back in Texas, part of a research group headed by one of the most devout, moral, honest, and truly good men I’ve ever known. But nationally, lie leaders spun a willfully complicit public, yearning for retribution after the 9/11 terrorist attack. [8] Working for the world’s largest defense contractor I was staggered by how many of the most educated people on earth refused to see blatant violations of reason in our march for Saddam. I made it my duty to correct them. Furious and outspoken I felt the need to tell my supervisor I was not a security risk, and did. All this culminated in a realization that childhood lessons had been compromised. Not recognizing I had one, I divorced my Right-wing tribe and stopped lying for it. [9] Evolving fantasies, from 500 tons of invisible yellowcake uranium to WMDs never found before or after the ruse were a crash course in worldwide lying, and most Americans embraced it. Then, we gave birth to ISIS, doomed 4500 US troops, 150,000 Iraqis, $2T, and with zero connection to 9/11, Saddam Hussein—a favor for Osama bin Laden and Iran who’d been hoping to kill him for years. [10] The power of lies.

Now, fueled by political correctness, valid populist anger perverted by talk-radio propagandists, and horrid political opposition, 63 million Americans preferred a lifelong liar and thief for what historian Tom Ricks notes as, “certainly the worst president in America history.” [11] After seven months of Trump’s attacks on the Constitution his followers claim to love, the stench of Russian money laundering, Trump’s vulgarity, ignorance, incompetence, and clear mental derangement, who are his most ardent supporters? Three quarters of Christian evangelicals who cheer when Trump hits back “ten times harder;” who relish Trump’s caustic blame of others for his own failures; who endorse his lies in order to patch his fragile ego, parading their loyalty because only winning matters. [12] And yet their Savior urged to “Turn the other cheek,” [13] “Pull the plank from your own eye first,” [14] “The truth will set you free,” [15] not the lie, nor the liar, and “What good is it to win the whole world and lose your soul?” [16] Such people failed to ask if Jesus would embrace such an unrepentant beast. Another adulterer, like Bill Clinton whom these people despise for his adultery.

Before our evolution of relativism, lies, and immorality, the presidency came with expectations of moral character. [17] But Trump was never required to return what he’d stolen. [18] With his mental perversions born to excess, our own Caligula has no moral bearing. [19] Nor does his cult, applying motivated-morality only to others. And it’s these people, not Trump, who matter most. We’ve seen to what ends Trump will go to mend his bottomless complex of inferiority. When Trump is impeached or expunged by the 25th, will this minority whom Trump schools at his rallies retain any decency? If, after impeachment, to hoist his ego Trump makes a call to arms under guise of 2nd Amendment protection from tyranny, will they? History shows, zealot minorities trigger revolutions.

With these examples spanning the political spectrum, the gamut of education, gender, class, believers and non-believers, I ask the obvious question: Has America become a nation of liars?

Of course there are millions of Americans who strive to live honest and moral lives. Among the many examples of courage and compassion as I write this, my friend in Houston tries to rescue dogs belonging to a stranger, trapped by hurricane Harvey. While simultaneously from my radio Rush Limbaugh establishes the day’s false premise: humans don’t create hurricanes (ignoring exacerbation), thus any association of Harvey’s record rainfall with the “global warming hoax” is also a hoax. Conflating storm category with rainfall, Harvey “is not unprecedented,” he says. “Everything in America’s been politicized, folks.” [20]

Harvey beat the old record by 4 inches. Liars make every circumstance conform to their distorted morality.

Until next time, the first Monday in November the 6th.



[1] The Title: Such a question must demand the question, Does this apply to the claimant?
[2]Kurt Anderson, How America Lost Its Mind, The Atlantic Monthly, September, 2017
[3] Relativism might be said to begin with David Hume (1711-1776) who claimed that "reason is slave to passions." A fact that apparently did not apply to him.
[4] Stuart Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, 6th Ed. McGraw Hill, 2010
[5] Brett Williams, Why America’s anti-science is a moral matter. Part I: The Right, March 6, 2017
[6] Of course, rejection of reason is selective for both sides, depending on convenience and party creed.
[7] Chantal Delsol Icarus Fallen: The Search For Meaning In An Uncertain World, ISI Books, 2003
[8] For a fascinating tour of Iraq War immorality, see PBS FRONTINE, The Secret History of Isis. Corrupted mostly by Vice President Dick Cheney, the scandal took a large step when Cheney swapped a CIA report destined for Collin Powell's UN speech with a fabricated report more incendiary. CIA consensus was that Saddam Hussein had no connection to Al Zarkawi in Iraq whom Osama bin Laden himself disavowed. What Powel read instead was the lie that Saddam and Al-Zarkawi-as-Al-Queda were affiliated, 21 times. As Treasury Secretary and required security meeting attendant Paul O’Neil said, "Taking down Saddam was Topic A ten days after inauguration." CBS News, Bush Sought 'Way' to Invade Iraq, Jan 9, 2004. As the Al Queda connection frayed the mission became to cleanse Iraq of WMDs. But if we wanted to remove such weapons, why not pay a visit to China, Russia, India, Pakistan, or Israel? One: because they can fight back. Two: because that was not Topic A. All to compensate for the humiliation of a desert tribe’s success against the world’s superpower.
[9] As noted in a previous post, my work and its search for truth in nature was the backdrop. Iraq was in the foreground.
[10] Daniel Benjamin, Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda Are Not Allies, September, 30, 2002
[11] On Point with Tom Ashbrook, A Historical Perspective On Trump's White House, August 26, 2017
[12] Not all Christian evangelicals support Trump. One in four do not. Some are vociferously opposed and practice the teachings they hold dear. Eric Sammons, Christians' Support For Trump Undermines Their Public Witness, The Federalist, October 12, 2016
Neil J. Young, Dear Evangelicals, A “Begrudging” Vote for Trump Is Still a Vote for Trump, Religion Dispatches, October 4, 2016
Russell Mooresept, Have Evangelicals Who Support Trump Lost Their Values?, New York Times, September 17, 2015
[13] Mathew 5:39
[14] Mathew 7:5
[15] John 8:32
[16] Mark 8:36.
[17] With five Vietnam deferments, Trump claims to have been a "brave soldier" in his "personal Vietnam" for not acquiring sexually transmitted diseases. He now awards the Medal of Honor.
[18] Except, so far as we know, $25M returned to students defrauded by his fake University. For which he remarked, "I got a great deal." Either he did and thus defrauded more money than he lost, or this is it another of his automatic lies to patch his inferiority complex. See more here .
[19] Nicholas Kristof, There Once Was Great Nation With an Unstable Leader, August 26, 2017. People Magazine, Trump Boasted of Avoiding STDs While Dating: Vaginas Are 'Landmines … It Is My Personal Vietnam', October 28, 2016
[20] Rush Limbaugh , Monday August 28, 2017. Notice how Limbaugh conflates storm category 4, which the 1900 Galveston hurricane reached, as have others, in order to say there's no global warming influence on Harvey. Hurricane category is defined by wind speed, not rainfall. Harvey is the current record. Galveston is not in the top 10 Texas hurricane rainfall maximums.
Revised 2/17/19. Changed ASCII quote type, and added Mark 8:36. CanNOT believe I missed that opportunity to skewer my old tribe for their betrayal and hypocrisy. And to imagine I once thought this my best written post. Horrifying.

July 3, 2017: I just can’t shake that dual nature thing

Sometimes, like today, I ask myself, “Did I do the right thing?” My cats and dogs now own me. My house and yard enslave me. Hundreds of books call me day and night from the shelves for attention. Before that thing happened, I let these matters go. While pressed by schedules, rushed by deadlines, comrades rang my home office to ask, “Does that design work, or not?”

I had excuses for an unkempt house, an unmowed lawn, and why I failed to give Scooby and Tiger their walk as they sat side by side staring at me. And just for emphasis, Cooty, the cat who managed house affairs, sat behind them, adding a pair of eyes to the plea. But I was busy being responsible. They wanted daddy to make money for food and treats, “Right, kitty, kitty?”

But then, a few years ago, that thing happened. It was a decision. Some neurons in my head activated somehow. They began to form new connections, and all sorts of biochemical things commenced that I’ve yet to read about. This lead to new networks that generated new ideas, and those ideas stimulated emotions, and those emotions told my body to start moving in the outside world.

Now, I’m not so sure those neurons are really my own, but whoever they belong to, here’s what they said, “Leave a good paying, highly respected position, where you know and enjoy what you’re doing, and go do things that pay nothing, garner no respect, where you know very little.” As a founder of artificial intelligence, Marvin Minsky, once said, “It’s so thrilling not to know how to do something.” My neurons reminded me of that. And so it was, from this strange sequence of events I left my career behind to make time for one of the most impractical endeavors to the American mind: the pursuit of art and the humanities.

What?

Why?

For one, art and science share the same transcendent experience. On those deep dives into reality when its laws become murky, one is filled with anticipation. Until those neurons link, and you’re plugged directly into nature. It’s electric. Ditto for art. For me it’s painting, writing, and studies in history with the philosophy that attends it, as well written books are obviously fine art. Each time I hit that brush stroke that works, craft a line of my own that says it all, or discover history I never knew in a book, I want to jump to the window and shout to the neighbors, “Did you see that?”

“Art,” Picasso said, “is the lie that tells the truth.” About us. That’s why myths work, great paintings, music, novels, sculpture, and high poetry that rhymes, like Pushkin. [1] Science is the avenue to Truth in nature. Art, the avenue to Truth in humans. And that’s the other reason I decided to pursue it. It’s that nature, human nature, that I decided to focus on because it’s so murky, and odd, I can’t stop staring at it, filled with anticipation, in wait of that connection that explains us.

At the heart of our oddity is this dual nature thing we pondered last time. Remember E.O. Wilson’s hypothesis, that we evolved through natural selection of individual survival traits, and group (community) survival traits. If true, selfishness and selflessness are woven together in the genes.

This dichotomy in humans is reminiscent, only by analogy, of another in physics: wave particle duality in the atomic world. [2] Wave particle duality can be demonstrated by a common college experiment. Cut open two slits in an opaque card. Let the card intercept a laser beam so dim that just one photon of light at a time passes through the slits. Beyond the card place a photodiode array that clicks each time a photon strikes. Let this go on for a while and what shows up on the array? A pattern created by interfering waves. Like the interference of waves off the bow of two boats (by analogy, two slits in the card). If their wave peaks meet in phase, they produce a “freak” wave, added together, twice as big. If they meet out of phase, they subtract to flatten the water’s surface. Yet the photodiode clicked each time a photon hit. It’s a particle. But if so, how can an individual photon interfere with itself from the other slit as though it were a wave? Doesn’t it have to pick one slit or the other to pass through? Dual nature in the quantum world—kooky. Like humans are kooky.

Through human history we see civilizations emphasize one component of human nature or the other, then battle back and forth between the two. The ancient Hebrews chose a stern and ridged spirituality that fostered belonging and survival in a harsh desert surrounded by hostile powers. At the same time, in their own rocky terrain, Greeks lavished their monuments with nude statues, worshiped the power of mathematics, and threatened their own belonging with philosophy that never stops asking if what we think is true is true. To the Hebrews, dogma was to be obeyed. For the Greeks, dogma was to be challenged. It’s the problem of Athens and Jerusalem. Violent collisions between these outlooks are a repeating theme in history. We see this dual nature today in America’s hyper-polarization: belongers vs. individualists, believers vs. skeptics, decisive-seat-of-the-pants-no-nonsense-doers vs. experts.

Michael Shermer and Chantal Delsol—whom we met last time—demonstrate this in regards to that fundamental element of Western political philosophy, individual rights. “The Rights Revolution of the past three centuries,” writes Shermer, “have focused almost entirely on the freedom of individuals, not collectives… The first principle of survival and flourishing of sentient beings is grounded in the biological fact that the discrete organism is the principal target of natural selection and social evolution [contra-Wilson], not the group... This drive to survive…and therefore freedom to pursue the fulfillment of that essence is a natural right.” [3] While for Delsol, “We suffer from the illusion that democracy’s destiny will be fulfilled if we apply its mechanisms on the widest scale possible. We cling to the illusion that this will happen if we expand its founding principles to the utmost…with no exceptions and no limitations, convinced any expansion of rights corresponds to progress.” While religious man held each moment of this life as a mold for the next, ideological man thought his work for a “radiant future symbolically inscribed his acts…in an immortal future society,” says Delsol. “Contemporary man no longer has at his disposal anything more than his own limited existence, of which his death constitutes the absolute end, not only biologically, but spiritually, socially, symbolically.” [4]

I absolutely, positively agree with…

Both.

Central to political philosophy (which is what this blog is supposed to be about) stands the question, What is the right way for humans to live so we might flourish, as Aristotle urged. Two thousand years later with the same concern for our dual nature in mind, Alexander Hamilton asked if societies are capable of “establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend…on accident and force.” [5] And still we don’t know.

So on days like today, I wonder, should I have stayed with rocket science where problems are easy? Is the study of art and the humanities really going to help answer deeper questions about humans? Maybe that was a rogue neuron.

Until next time. The first Monday of September, the 4th, 2017.



[1] Michael Polanyi, Meaning, University of Chicago Press, 1975
Rhyme, says Polanyi, is the intentional separation of words from their factual use in information exchange, converted by rhyme to a transcendent state, toward that of music and myth. While modern poetry is a short story read in staccato cadence.
[2] Despite wild claims and fortunes made by Deepak Chopra, but for devices made from quantum laws, they apply only to the quantum world.
[3] Michael Shermer Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, And Freedom, Holt and Company, 2015, pg.12-13
[4] Chantal Delsol Icarus Fallen: The Search For Meaning In An Uncertain World, ISI Books, 2003> pg. 121, 176
[5] Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist, #1, Random House Modern Library, (1787-1788), pg. 3
Tweaked for clarity, 1/27/19

May 1, 2017: Shermer vs. Delsol, Liberation or Dispossession?

Rather than continue the examination of moral implications from America’s anti-science movement, this time from the Left, I decided to first consider two books stark in their opposition. Their focus is one of two paramount issues of our age: the status of the human condition. Of course this reflects every human endeavor, including that other great issue: planetary assault causing earth’s sixth great extinction now underway thanks to human overpopulation, myself included. [1] The books are Michael Shermer’s The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom, and Chantal Delsol’s Icarus Fallen: The Search For Meaning In An Uncertain World. [2] This post serves merely as an introduction to their thought.

Though a very approximate summation, Shermer sees the world materially, practically, quantifiably, like Aristotle. Delsol sees the world spiritually, existentially, qualitatively, like Plato. While Shermer pays lip service to community, to him we’re a species of individuals. For Delsol this outlook comes with negative consequences that permeate and threaten the West. While Shermer acknowledges we have problems, we now know how to solve them with science and reason. For Delsol, the way we solved our problems killed our humanity. For Shermer, reason has come far but remains in dreadfully short supply. For Delsol, the penetration of reason is radical and incomplete only in failing to recognize its own limits. For Shermer, Western civilization is more peaceful, stable, comfortable, knowledgeable, richer with more stuff, longer, healthier lives, and we have rights coming out of our ears, no longer under the thumb of a despot. We have Enlightenment to thank for a way out of humanity’s long bondage to circumstance. While Delsol writes, “Why do people seem so dissatisfied when so many, in the West at least, have acquired everything they reasonably need to be happy?” Rather than bondage to circumstance, it is precisely ancient man’s acceptance of both his ineluctable condition (mostly this means death) and his persistent need to escape it that gave meaning through acceptance and hope. Hope not of escape from that ultimate human fate as modernity attempted and failed, but a hope to cope with this first fact of life through traditions built non-rationally, not necessarily irrationally (mostly this means religion). Modernity’s intolerance for the realities of life have made us tyrants of another sort, according to Delsol, determined to torch what gave us meaning because we’ve decided that conviction to concepts that granted significance are dangerous, like religion, patriotism, and heroism. Likewise, we have Enlightenment to thank for this mistake.

For Delsol, real life is full of contradictions, some of which are necessary as a state of existence. They cannot be made to universally vanish for utopia unless we do what we did: deny contradictions exist by relativistic means, where good and evil are merely matters of culture-bound opinion, or by creating social tyrannies of oppression like political correctness. Instead, traditional ways established over centuries of trial and error addressed these natural contradictions with countermeasures. “Religious thought,” writes Delsol, “explained the permanence of temporal imperfection and thereby legitimized the necessity of a moral code, politics, and all the other structuring antinomies [i.e., contradictions between two apparently correct solutions]…” For Delsol, religion with its promise in the face of despair, politics with its command structure, not perfect equality, and economics with winners and losers are a bit like checks and balances in Constitutional governance. Each branch can step on the other’s territory. Battles emerge over important issues as the victors ebb and flow. A messy,but organic, not analytical, leveling act that attenuates too much oscillation of naturally unstable humans.

I often challenge the blatant contradiction of those who simultaneously embrace capitalist selfishness and Christian selflessness, ut Delsol says that’s life. And for reasons modern arguments miss. For example, profit is capitalism’s reward for hard work, innovation, and service. But along the way to profit, some are inevitably left with less. On a broad scale, there will be rich and there will be poor, an apparent injustice. Isn’t there some way to fix this? One is “A kind of happy austerity,” writes Delsol, “in which desires would be limited in proportion to available goods, imagining that people would be content with a bare minimum made palatable by the attainment of equality for all.” A socialist solution—while far from the only option—that not only ignores the reality of imperfect existence but denies yearning for reward and recognition. It’s a flawed definition of human nature or an expectation that human nature will conform to a higher calling if only ideals of equality could override natural emotions. Here Delsol echoes Michael Polanyi, who asserts that only if we manage to abandon moral perfectionism can we come to accept reality. [3]

But moral imperfection is hard for Enlightenment moderns to accept. Enlightenment thought has been so successful in providing solutions for everything from spaceflight to the Founder’s Constitution, why would any stone be left unturned if justice is a fundamental human desire? Though patient, Shermer’s vision seeks to turn those stones, expanding the moral sphere as dictated by reason wherever it leads. This includes those animals whose brain structure and emotional function science has found to be little or no different from our own. [4] To Shermer, Delsol’s non-rational solution looks like a method without a plan, destined for that good old-time abuse. For him, our moral gains didn’t come from tradition, least of all religion. “Most of the moral development of the past several centuries,” Shermer writes, “has been the result of secular, not religious forces… The most important of these that emerged from the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment are science and reason… The moral universe bends not merely toward justice, but also toward truth and freedom… the product of societies moving toward more secular forms of governance…” His survey of the religious backdrop during the “witch” burnings of 60,000-100,000 women, and the disembowelment of heretics is enough to make even the Internet generation blanch. And must we be reminded of the abject immorality of a God who murders innocent first-born toddlers and children of Egypt in Exodus? Even first-born livestock. Where’s that external objective morality Delsol frees from the flimsy intrusion of reason? For Shermer, these examples show what doesn’t work. And regardless of whether or not God exists, humans are not good at practicing what they preach. There’s a better way, and Shermer says we know as fact what that is. Time to leave the Middle Ages behind, not go back to it.

Certainly, there seems to be common sense support in Delsol’s argument for contradiction in humans themselves. We want love and independence, belonging and autonomy, someone of extraordinary measure to look up to, often combined with insecurity about ourselves that relishes the image of seeing those people fail. If, as E.O. Wilson claims, natural selection filtered us by gene traits expressed through individuals and by group traits expressed through community and culture, then these contradictions are built-in. [5] Hardwired to express individualism and selfishness (greed), or community and altruism of selflessness (virtue). In that case, Shermer and Delsol argue for one side or the other of our dual nature. But which way is right for the world we’re in? Or is there a solution waiting to be discovered that unifies both? Do humans have a capacity for balance?

Until next time. Monday, July 3rd, 2017.


[1] Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Picador, 2015
[2]Michael Shermer Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, And Freedom, Holt and Company, 2015. Chantal Delsol Icarus Fallen: The Search For Meaning In An Uncertain World, ISI Books, 2003
[3] Michael Polanyi, Meaning, University of Chicago Press, 1975
[4] The Cambridge Statement on Animal Consciousness, in Marc Bekoff, Animals are conscious and should be treated as such, New Scientist, September 2012.
[5] E.O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence, Liveright, 2015
Added two words, 1/27/19. I know, it's crazy.

March 6, 2017: Why America’s anti-science movement is a moral matter. Part I: The Right

For half a millennium the many varied nations of Islam were the greatest cultures on earth. Science, mathematics, architecture, and economics all thrived in Islam, while "in the West," says Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, "Charlemagne and his lords, were dabbling in the art of writing their names." [1] As European tribunals sentenced sixty thousand "witches" drowned or burned at the stake, Islam shined through Europe's Dark Ages.

But Islam’s Golden Age didn’t last. Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg notes, by the 11th century, extremists opened the door “to complete destruction of science and scientists.” [2] According to Pakistani historian and physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy some in Islam began to proclaim “a holy war against Rationalism… against the upholders of reason and advocates of philosophy and science.” [3] Cultural suicide accelerated when "renewer of the faith" Al-Ghazali (1058–1111) provided political power needed to destroy rational thinking. [4] He won.

Or did he? By 1258 Mongols sacked Baghdad. By 1492 the Iberian Peninsula surrendered. Islam silenced itself when it abandoned reason and science, such as it was in the 11th century.

But could science really be that important? Or is it related to something more?

Fast forward 500 years to Rush Limbaugh’s own holy war against science and scientists as “one of the four corners of deceit.” [5] In Limbaugh’s quest for class conflict we hear scientists belong to those “wizards of smart.” The rest of us are “the hicks, the little people.” [6] This vilification is broadcast to millions over radio waves discovered by science, on electronics built by science.

This hostile paradox is widespread and dominates powerful places. Oklahoma Republican Senator Jim Inhofe claims global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated against the American people.” [7] He’s chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee. Texas Republican Representative and science denier Lamar Smith has built his reputation on harassment of climate scientists and attorneys general with 25 subpoenas, from a committee that issued only one since its creation in 1958. [8] Smith is chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. The irony.

These are people who fly on jet aircraft, use smart phones, and light emitting diodes not candles to read by. They laud capitalism, innovation, and entrepreneurs dependent on science to create wealth. They favor a strong military, contingent on science and its technology to defend America. A nation they claim to love, most notably its Founders, all of them products of Europe’s scientific Enlightenment. The founder of electrical sciences, Ben Franklin; naturalist and inventor, Thomas Jefferson; Hamilton, Madison, and Jay with scientific analogies to proper governance in their Federalist Papers. More irony.

Or is it? Tocqueville found Americans so busy that we’re suspect of elaborate explanations. [9] We prefer quick, easily ingestible answers (sound bites). As a can-do nation from the Frontier onwards, Americans harbored an anti-intellectual posture from the beginning. Hence, America’s science deniers hoodwink a scientifically naive public without much resistance. Such habit and influence opens the door for destruction of science and scientists because reality is more complex than an audio morsel. It's also more interesting. Consider that family of atoms in the form of a molecule called carbon dioxide. This greenhouse gas is made of one carbon, two oxygen: CO2. Atmospheric CO2 rose past 400 parts per million in 2016. [10] Sounds small. Until one calculates the total volume of earth’s atmosphere to find an astounding 40 gigaton CO2 increase per year. [11] And a commensurate decrease in breathable oxygen combined with carbon that takes place when burned. [12]

But how do we know this atmospheric CO2 came from humans? Answer: the type of carbon atom found in that molecule. They’re not all the same. There’s a carbon atom with 12 particles in its nucleus, C12, and another with 14, C14. C14 is created in earth’s upper atmosphere every day when C12 gets stuck with two extra particles it didn’t want. [13] Half the C14 created today will cast out those visitors through radioactive decay in about 6000 years, its half-life. This division by half continues until after 60,000 years no C14 made today will remain. Were today’s excess carbon dioxide from natural sources it would have todays C14 signature. It doesn’t. [14] Under well understood chemistry, millions of years of carbon rich plant burials gave us coal, buried marine plankton gave us oil, and none of it has C14. Just like the dearth of C14 atoms in that carbon dioxide molecule measured from our atmosphere. And what’s more, the weight of all that annually added carbon equals the weight of annual fossil fuel inventories burned the world over. [15] A human imprint on global warming. One of hundreds. On January 18, 2017, NOAA, NASA, and UK’s Hadley Center announced from different data sets our hottest year since 1880 data gathering began. And 16 of our 17 hottest years were since 2000. [16]

If you didn’t know any of this, does that make you “a hick,” a “little person?” I didn’t know it either, until I did. Now I do. So do you. Feel like a “wizard of smart?” I don’t. But once known, plans can be made, policy, action, designs for new industries that turn engineers lose on global warming constraints as an invitation to innovate and get rich. The way China dominates solar markets while America drags its heels because science is evil and nature is a liberal. While Congress remains rooted in old technologies that fund their campaigns, China crafts the Asian Century the same way America crafted the last one—with science. In January 2017, China announced a $361 billion program to build clean energies and create 13 million new jobs. [17]

The same science used to build high-tech society is precisely the same that shows human caused global warming a fact: physics, chemistry, biology. The same science that put man on the moon, made iPhones, and pharmaceuticals. Yet many Americans think global warming science is different from other science. A fallacy facilitated by descendants of Islam’s Al-Ghazali from our own conservative Right with their “alternative facts.” As Voltaire (1694-1778) said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” [18]

As moral philosopher Stuart Rachels wrote, “Moral thinking begins when we try to see things as they are… Morality is the effort to guide one’s conduct by reason…” [19] But rejection of science is rejection of reason. Without reason, moral judgment is crippled. And this is where America’s anti-science movement links to larger issues.

The connection becomes apparent in the tight coupling between science and reason with morality and self-governance. From the reasoned basis for moral judgment comes a realization that not only must the ends be rational and moral but the means to an end must be rational and moral. Our Founders implemented a system that placed how we arrive at results on an equal, sometimes higher plain of morality than their ends, which may be merely practical, but no less critical for stable governance. This process depends on right-reason, not motivated-reason which is not reason as we saw last time. Likewise, on right-morality vs. motivated-morality which is not moral. Both require truth. Truth requires reason. But a sizable fraction of America has abandoned truth and reason, and thus the Founder’s foundation that depends on it.

The evolving corruption of this moral package was bound to have effects on the ground. Thanks to the decimation of American manufacturing and threatened by politically correct assaults on tradition, Americans abandoned their traditions to choose the liar from a field of 17 Republicans for president. [20] The Republican conservative Right has defrauded everything they once stood for, from Reagan’s capacity for compromise, to the Founder’s scientific thinking, to Jesus Christ himself. For in John, Jesus did not say “Seek the lie and it will set you free.” Nor “Seek the liar.” [21] Trump’s lies were a welcomed insult to facts and experts many Americans have come to hate. As Foreign Affairs contributor Tom Nichols puts it, “Americans have reached a point where ignorance…is seen as an actual virtue. To reject advice of experts is to assert autonomy…and insulate their increasingly fragile egos.” [22] A fascinating confluence between the excesses of individualism and consequent yearnings for a tribe. [23] And should Christians among the conservatives reject our Founders method by deciding that any means justify the ends, they’ve conveniently forgotten it was Paul who condemned “Let us do evil, so good may come.” [24] Trump’s theft of other people’s property, his decades association with the mafia, and his vulgar immoralities complete with the smell of treason were embraced because Trump appealed to emotional excess that irrational populism thrives on. [25] (Which is not to say Trump won’t succeed materially. [26]) All of this exposes moral decay for a party that once referred to itself as the Moral Majority.

But the Right is not a monolith. Even Right-wing Glen Beck labeled Trump a sociopath. [27] And Bush Administration attorney Eliot Cohen wrote in his acid bath blistering of Republicans, they are engaged in “moral self-destruction.” [28]

That Trump is a carnival barker or a hopeful dictator is less important than what this reveals about America. We’ve arrived at an historic moment when a beast is welcomed for leadership by almost half the voting public. The direction of governance that America now moves in is not what the Founders founded. As Scientific American contributor and Skeptic Editor Michael Shermer notes, they gave us a methodology, not an ideology. The opposite of what we now see as it was a method of scientific thinking. “Scientific values of reason,” writes Shermer, “are not the products of liberal democracy, but the producers of it.” [29]

With Congress already in pursuit, like 12th century Islam, Trump has commenced another witch hunt for scientists. [30] Intellectuals are first to be purged in all authoritarian regimes. A regime welcomed by America’s Right because they have betrayed Western ideals they once championed. It should be no surprise they would imperil the Republic the way Al-Ghazali did his own. The Right’s attack on science is symptomatic of moral bankruptcy, and part of a much larger depravity. If institutions and norms our science-minded Founders founded on reason, truth, and trust don’t survive, it won’t get better.

Until next time, Monday May 1, 2017.



[1] Steven Weinberg To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science, Harper Perennial, 2016, pg. 105.
[2] Weinberg., pg. 120.
[3] Pervez Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle For Rationality, Zed, 1991, pg. 120.
[4] Hoodbhoy, pg. 126.
[5] Rush Limbaugh, "The Four Corners of Deceit are government, academia, science, and the media," in The Four Corners of Deceit: Prominent Liberal Social Psychologist Made It All Up, Apr 29, 2013.
Heather Horn, Is the Right Wing Anti-Science?, The Atlantic, 9.10.2010.
[6] Rush Limbaugh, Wizards of Smart, Limbaugh Letter, January 1994.
[7] Brad Johnson, Inhofe: God Says Global Warming Is A Hoax, ThinkProgress, March 9, 2012.
Wikipedia, Jim Inhofe.
[8] Lisa Rein, House science chairman gets heat in Texas race for being a global warming skeptic, Washington Post, November 7, 2016.
Phil Plait, Scientists Stand Up To Congressional Attacks
, SLATE, June 2, 2016.
[9] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy In America, Mentor, 1984 (1840)
[10] Brian Kahn, The World Passes 400 PPM Threshold. Permanently, Climate Central, September 27, 2016.
[11] Note dates on data as measured CO2 increases over time. See links from this article for the deeper science: Phil Plait, Did I Say 30 Billion Tons of CO2 a Year? I Meant 40.,SLATE, AUG. 20 2014.
[12] O2 decrease with carbon combustion is given in this article which also addresses other proxies including ocean and plant absorptions with some basic accounting. What is causing the increase in atmospheric CO2?, Skeptical Science.
[13] Marshall Brain, How Carbon-14 Dating Works, How Stuff Works.
[14] Solomon et. al., PDF: Are the Increases in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Other Greenhouse Gases During the Industrial Era Caused by Human Activities?, IPCC, 2007: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Richard Hilderman, Fossil Fuel and Atmospheric Levels of Carbon Dioxide, Mother Earth News, 1/9/2011.
Prentice et. al., Climate Change 2001: Working Group I: The Scientific Basis, IPCC, 2001.
Note the accounting for volcanic and Mid-Ocean ridge CO2, quite natural and also without current C14 signatures. John Cook, Do volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans?, Skeptical Science, July 6, 2015.
[15] John Cook. See Figure 1 for graphical representation. The human fingerprint in global warming, Skeptical Science, July 2015.
Above references Carbon Information Analysis Center, breakdown by annual output worldwide and by nation. CIACA, Note to get CO2 weight from weight of carbon burned multiply by 3.667 for carbon’s combination with O2.
[16] Chris Mooney, U.S. scientists officially declare 2016 the hottest year on record. That makes three in a row., Washington Post, January 18, 2017.
Hottest Years: Instrumental temperature record, Wikipedia.
[17] Reuters, China to plow $361 billion into renewable fuel by 2020, GLOBAL ENERGY NEWS, Thu Jan 5, 2017.
[18] Voltaire , Miracles and Idolatry, Penguin, 2005 (1765).
[19] Stuart Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, 6th Ed. McGraw Hill, 2010, pg.
[20] Donald Trump, Donald Trump's file, POLITIFACT.
FRONTLINE, President Trump , PBS, January 3, 2017.
Donald Trump, Transcript: Donald Trump’s Taped Comments About Women, New York Times, OCT. 8, 2016.
[21] John 8:32.
[22] Tom Nichols, How America Lost Faith in Expertise: And Why That's a Giant Problem , Foreign Affairs, March/April 2017.
[23] We might wonder if a psychological feedback mechanism is at work between individualism and dogmas. Evolution of individualism has rendered American’s ever more isolated, stripped of belonging, and hence of meaning. This hinges on an assumption that meaning comes from without, from the value we have to others reflected back at us in face-to-face relations of true communities which no longer exist. Individual purpose, on the other hand, comes from within – we make it up: work, tasks, acquisitions, displays. Purpose and meaning are not necessarily mutually exclusive, one can lead to the other. But with greater isolation, dogma gives us a sense of recovered belonging through a tribal affiliation. In modern America this does not lead to true communities, but to abstract affiliations, usually through the internet, occasionally a temporary interaction between strangers at a protest. So dogma fails to provide community, rigidifies our views, and increases individualistic isolation. Two books related to this matter are Louis Dumont’s Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective, University of Chicago Press, 1992 (1986), and Eric Hoffer’s True Believer: On the Nature of Mass Movements, Harper Perennial, 1966.
[24] Romans 3:8.
[25] Michael Rothfeld and Alexandra Berzon, Donald Trump and the Mob, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 1, 2016.
David Cay Johnston, Just What Were Donald Trump's Ties to the Mob?, POLITICO, May 22, 2016.
David Corn, A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump, Mother Jones, Oct. 31, 2016.
[26] Should we suspend moral appraisal as we await Trump’s material performance? After all, reckless abandon common to populism earns early, costs late as it did Hugo Chavez. Presumably another favorite of Trump, not through imitation alone, but by his stated admiration for despotic murders Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-un, and Vladimir Putin, who has found no greater alley against the West. Such ethics make the Right no different from the Left they assail for claiming moral relativity as protection from conservative judgment. Despite his national budget surplus, Bill Clinton remains an exhibit for moral degeneracy according to the very conservatives ignoring Trump’s adultery. Motivated-morality judges only the other Party, and gives our own a pass. For Trump’s fondness for dictators see, MEGHAN KENEALLY, 5 Controversial Dictators and Leaders Donald Trump Has Praised , ABC News, Jul 6, 2016.
[27] Tré Goins-Phillips, Glenn Beck explains why he thinks Donald Trump is a ‘sociopath’ , The BLAZE, Oct 24, 2016.
[28] Eliot Cohen, A Clarifying Moment in American History , The Atlantic, Jan 29, 2017.
[29] Michael Shermer, The Moral Arc: How Science Alex Humanity to Truth Justice and Freedom, Henry Holt and Co, 2015, pg. 135.
[30] Steven Mufson and Juliet Eilperin, Trump transition team for Energy Department seeks names of employees involved in climate meetings , Washington Post, December 9, 2016.
Then Transition pulls back., Jan 24, 2017.
Reuters, Trump administration seeks to muzzle U.S. agency employees , Washington Post, ???, 2016.
Alex Kirby, Trump seeks to gag US scientists , Climate News Network, January 26, 2017.

January 2, 2017: Revenge politics: America’s Culture Wars just get hotter

America’s November 8, 2016 presidential election was not a tectonic shift, it was a supernova. From years of wide-ranging observations, wondering where this would end, this essay descends from political philosophy to politics. One thing is clear, both Right and Left find right-reason an obstacle. We live in an age of emotion now, the Clan Age.

Last time we considered systemic flaws in America’s political system. A system incrementally revamped toward direct democracy in opposition to what our Founders created: stable governance of, by, and for naturally unstable humans. Reason will always be in combat with passion because humans are first and foremost emotional creatures, not intellects. Yet we can check emotions with institutional barriers to block us when emotion takes over as we know it will. The Founders invented a system to save us from ourselves.

They knew the difference between right-reason and motivated-reason. Right-reason accepts evidence for reality, regardless of how it makes us feel. It accepts evidence conditionally, as new discoveries can modify understanding, or even upend it. This does not necessarily make what we know incorrect, but incomplete. Newton’s laws were incomplete without Einstein. And yet we use Newton to build devices that work, more today than ever, because his laws apply to our everyday world. On the other hand, motivated-reason in such abundance today, accepts only that evidence supporting what we already believe, rejecting evidence that makes us uneasy. Devices engineered to this standard wouldn’t function. But just such a design now dominates America. Welcome to America’s revenge politics, a reflection of our Culture Wars.

Democratic forms of governance around the world are threatened for the same reasons. The Economist, headlined What’s gone wrong with democracy, blames lost jobs to China, and economic upheaval of the 2007 crash. Since the Great Recession democracies have inched backward as the number of free people declines. [1]

Foreign Affairs journal multiplies our suspects with the rise of authoritarian populism. Populism further stimulated by incompetent leadership, mass multiethnic migrations (too many humans on earth), and destabilizing effects of Internet fake-news. [2] As Fareed Zakaria has it, “All [populist] versions [Left & Right] share a suspicion and hostility toward elites, mainstream politics, and established institutions.” [3] Populism does not want that rational barrier to emotional excess. In the everlasting contest of political philosophies the world is watching. And the last time democracy fell in Athens, it lay dead worldwide for 2000 years.

Populism is the political face of our Culture Wars, with many of its battles over territory that doesn’t exist: Republican President George Bush tried to fabricate an emergency in his waning term to seize dictatorial power, Democratic President Obama established elaborate programs to steal our guns and ammo. Our echo chambers and social media make the old Chinese saying current, “One dog barks at a shadow, and a hundred dogs respond to make it a fact.”

Such thinking cannot survive right-reason, but it thrives on motivated-reason. With its central principle of revenge, populism appeals to our emotions, not our intellect. This is of particular interest to me, not only by its collective impact on the West, but because of the battle I fight with it daily. I come from what we Americans call the blue collar working class. We tend to be emotional about things we don’t understand. Employing a great deal of what I label the 2/98 Rule: 2% knowledge 98% bluster, common in taverns. In argument our pitch elevates in uptalk, the finger wags, and we display what biologists designate the threat face, a snarl that mammals use to intimidate opponents. This behavior was on persistent display during our election, and served to communicate tribal affiliation. It’s also a cover for self-doubt, a diversion as we try to bluff our way to certainty. Deep down it’s a plea, to ourselves. Impossibly complex society makes us feel helpless. We're desperate to convince ourselves that we’re in control when we know we’re not. We are the targets of populism.

I committed to change through higher education, though upbringing is never distant, and much I’d not want to lose. I also got lucky with a career in science and engineering where abstract learning meets practical application. These disciplines require challenge, test, checks and rechecks of every detail, all day every day in search of Truth. Nature passes judgment. Get it wrong and what you build will fail. That career gave me the ability to confront every belief, especially my own, inside or outside the workplace. Eventually, I realized I had to divorce my tribe, because so long as I identified with it I couldn’t stop lying for it. There are other ways to hone critical thinking, but I suggest none better than science. Unfortunately, America ranks near bottom in science education in the industrialized world, and poorly among all nations. [4] This makes us easy marks for emotionally satisfying answers.

Where do these answers come from? First, on the popular, not intellectual, Right: America’s talk radio host, Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh has competition from the Left in MSNBC television, but Limbaugh is the best propagandist we have. Entertaining, endearing (when he talks about his cat), he sounds like a regular guy. His weave of revision, truth, and lie in a single paragraph is a thing of beauty. Punctuated with his signature, “Don’t doubt me.” Republican ex-presidents, ex-vice presidents, presidential candidates, and Speaker of the House have all called into Limbaugh’s show. Certain not to face scrutiny, they curry his blessing and influence in what Limbaugh calls “Realville.”

Realville is a place where good economic news was no thanks to ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act), and Limbaugh’s nemesis, Obama, because ARRA money would not be spent for years. Same week, bad economic news. Realville’s response? How could this be, now that we spent all that ARRA money? Frequently, we Americans care very little for truth, but we care very much about winning.

Limbaugh has a dogma to nurture. He knows paper defenses burn easy. Following our election, he provided the best characterization for populist motivated-reason I’ve ever heard him say: “The default reaction to any media story that has anything incredulously stupid, dumb or negative about Trump is to not believe it, folks… The default position has to be—if we’re going to be intellectually honest with ourselves—is rejection.” [5]

Yes, in this explicit self-contradiction, Limbaugh uttered the words, “intellectually,” and “honest.” He told listeners they dare not fact check negative stories they hear, a kind of blasphemy. And while this is listener prep for what’s coming, there’s more to it. As Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer, “Mass movements… interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and realities of the world… [The true believer] cannot be frightened by danger nor baffled by contradictions because he denies their existence.” [6]

Limbaugh’s job is to boil the blood, rally troops, define the creed. It’s the National Conservative Crusade against the National Liberal Crusade. Any waver from purist absolutism wins the label of liberal from the High Priest. Per Hoffer, “All [mass movements] irrespective of doctrine… demand blind faith and singlehearted allegiance.”

Populism is a mass movement, but it’s not a policy. It’s a tool for demagogues to manipulate those who can be. Energized by, “Whites ages 25 to 54 lost about 6.5 million jobs more than they gained [since the recession].” [7] Which explains some of the Right’s enthusiasm for internet conspiracy, hoax, email viruses, and fake-news otherwise known as lies [8]; Christian hypocrisy according to some Christians [9]; embrace of Russia’s hack of the American people, not necessarily their machines, with a Mid-Eastern perspective of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” making Reagan’s GOP read like GOPP, the Great Old Putin Party [10]; and of great significance we’ll examine next time, a 12th-century-Islam-like science denial that’s about more than adolescent defiance of authority. All this from what used to see itself as the “family values” Party.

Influence from the Left begins with some science-free sectors on campus. UCLA’s Sandra Harding claims that Western technocracy is “modeled on men’s most misogynistic relations to women—rape, torture, [and] choosing mistresses” [11]; university postmodernists asserted in 1950s France the persistent notion that the truth is, there is no truth [12], an assault on Western reason and tradition, now embraced by the Right [13]; and wailing students offended by micro-aggressions, soon to be nano, pico, and femto-aggressions serve as fodder for Limbaugh. [14] Where’s the space between these and superstition?

On his last official tour through Europe, President Obama urged nations to resist “crude nationalism that drowns out dissenting views.” Excellent. So too our political correctness. Racist, sexist, and homophobe are cast about with generosity to ostracize and muzzle.

Post-election, PBS Newshour’s Judy Woodruff said to a guest, “I hear you saying we’ve missed a whole chunk of the county in our effort to be diverse.” Steve Deace responded, lack of diversity was ideological, not ethnic. He added, “Those of us who think that we shouldn’t have men in bathrooms next to our young daughters are called bigots, when we used to just call them parents.” [15] Now, Bernie Sanders and others are at last voicing concerns over identity politics. In America’s constant fear of the tyranny of majority, Democrats fell victim to a tyranny of minority. Modern identity under the flag of diversity looks a lot like tribal segregation with a posture of opposition, not inclusivity. As liberal Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. lamented, our once vaunted melting pot that strived to confer an American character is dead. [16]

Neal Gabler’s assessment asked, “Who knew that tens of millions of white men felt so emasculated by women and challenged by minorities… in seething resentment…” [17] Enunciating utter blindness to liberal bias in popular culture, all the way down to television commercials. Consider the Boost ad as obese white men clothed only in bras, panties, and high heels stumble about to fuel Danica Patrick’s Formula One race car. The white man seated on a bus blundering to make breakfast on a hot plate as a black woman stands over him, looks down, shakes her head, and enjoys her Kellogg’s breakfast bar. Or those three white and one black man, frantic for food from their Honda hatchback, who smash chips in their face, pour beer in their eyes, as a white women records their primate behavior from a forest blind. Imagine gender and/or race swapped. Not about history, the boardroom boys club, or comic book heroes to the contrary, but what the common man who feels discarded by this society receives from it at every intermission. He just voted. Pop culture or politics, it’s the message not the messaging.

Ever vengeful, our sides are now divided more by Culture War than income. After 8-years, 15% of Obama judge appointments remain unfilled by the now standard practice of Republican governance: obstruction. Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley, denied even to hold hearings on Obama’s final Supreme Court appointment of moderate, Judge Merrick Garland. [18] “These elections are just too contentious. The people should decide our next Justice.” But they already had, in as much as our Founders wanted by distancing the Court from passions of the people, who elected Obama. Given we swap parties every eight years, do Republicans imagine Democrats will forget their blatant abuse of this Republic they claim so much to love? The way Republicans didn’t forget Judge Robert Bork? Tit-for-tat is not governance for long.

So what have systemic flaws and this social miasma produced? The most untrustworthy candidates to simultaneously compete for office. In our hyper-individualist society creating creatures like these, has America finally lost its capacity to produce virtuous leaders? What does this say about us in that cycle of civilization’s rise and fall, or do we even care? Can Americans divorce their tribe to remove that “fact-proof screen”? We are losing the system that saved us from ourselves.

Until next time. Monday March 6, 2017.



[1] What’s gone wrong with democracy, The Economist, March 1-7, 2014
[2] Foreign Affairs, The Power of Populism, November/December, 2016
[3] Emphasis added. Fareed Zakaria, Populism on the March: Why the West In in Trouble, Foreign Affairs, November/December, 2016
[4] Pew Research Center , February 2015
[5] Rush Limbaugh November 15, 2016
[6] Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, Harper Perennial, 1966
[7] Eduardo Porter, We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here’s What We Learned , All Things Considered, NPR, November 23, 2016. Note also the man who read an Internet story that led him to drive from North Carolina with his loaded rifle to Washington DC (300 miles). He did this based on fake news that children kidnapped by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s pedophile syndicate were housed at a Pizza parlor, where the man fired one round into the floor to emphasize demands. In Washington Pizzeria Attack, Fake News Brought Real Guns , Cecilia Kang, Adam Goldman, New York Times, December 5, 2016. Shortly after this: “The son of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Donald Trump’s pick for national security adviser, embraced a baseless conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton…” Incoming national security adviser's son spreads fake news about D.C. pizza shop , POLITICO, 12/4/2016
[9] Eric Sammons, Christians’ Support For Trump Undermines Their Public Witness , The Federalist, October 12, 2016
Neil J. Young, Dear Evangelicals, A “Begrudging” Vote for Trump Is Still a Vote for Trump , Religion Dispatches, October 4, 2016
Russell Mooresept, Have Evangelicals Who Support Trump Lost Their Values? , New York Times, September 17, 2015
[10] AP, FBI chief backs CIA’s conclusion Russia interfered with election , December 16, 2016
[11] Sandra Harding, The Science Question In Feminism, Cornell University Press, 1986
[12] Ferry & Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties, University of Massachusetts Press, 1985
[13] Erik Wemple, CNN commentator Scottie Nell Hughes: Facts no longer exist , Washington Post, December 1, 2016
[14] Lukianoff and Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind , The Atlantic, September 2015
[15] How the mainstream media missed Trump’s momentum , PBS Newshour, November 9, 2016
[16] Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. The Disuniting of America, Norton, 1992
[17] Neal Gabler, Farewell, America: No matter how the rest of the world looked at us on Nov. 7, they will now look at us differently , Moyers & Company, November 10, 2016
[18] Malvika Menon, The Republicans’ Rash Rejection of Merrick Garland , Harvard Political Review, April 24, 2016
Revised for the joy of nit-picking word choice. 1/17/19

November 7, 2016: Is PCD an acronym for Programmed Civilization Death?

For some reason, I’ve always been interested in origins and endings, how something got started, why it stopped. Some years ago, I came across a magnificent book by UCLA's chair of Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology, William R. Clark: Sex and the Origins of Death. [1] As a kid, I asked why people die. The answer, “Because they get old,” didn’t suffice. My parents seemed old, still alive, and doing well. But Clark’s book provided an answer that knocked me off my feet. “Death is not an obligatory attribute of life,” writes Clark, and did not appear with the advent of living creatures. As he explains, cellular aging, which results in death, may not have occurred for more than a billion years after life’s first entry on earth. Programmed cell death, PCD, displayed through wrinkles and forgetfulness, seems to have arisen about the time cells experimented with sex. As nature would have it, we die because of the many mechanisms built into us to ensure we do. Death does not just happen; it is worked toward with safeguards to assure our cells don’t backslide into immortality as cancer cells do. Once our DNA realizes our reproductive years are over, the code executes, and one by one, our cells receive their command to commit suicide. All the while, as the cell decapitates itself, innocent organelles roam about its cytoplasm, performing their tasks, unaware of doom.

So, I began to wonder, by analogy, are humans in a society like cells in the body of civilization? Does each of us possess an inner program that commands contribution to a kind of social disorder once a psychological threshold is crossed? Do societies fail, not by chance or circumstance, but because decline is intended, without knowing it? Like William Clark said of our aging bodies, death is worked toward without wanting to. All the while, as we go about our busy lives, unaware of doom and the part we play in a different kind of PCD: Programmed Civilization Death.

There seems a similar kind of unintended intent to America’s current trajectory, but only if we pause from our busy lives of work to contemplate our status. Otherwise, whatever’s going on might seem like just another of the many oscillations we’ve experienced: 1968, civil rights riots, Vietnam, campus burnings. And maybe it is. Roman philosophers repeatedly claimed the end of Rome was near. Eventually, they were right. They engaged in that expansive topic of the rise and fall of civilization, which belongs to those origins and endings that fascinate me.

So, where is America in that rotation? There have been a great many advances in our time. Who can argue with the extension of what can be done through technology? Seated in the comfort of my library with two dogs on their couch and two cats on my desk, I poke keys destined for a worldwide distribution platform, pretty much for free. Starting with the creation of East African tools 2.5 million years ago, Australopithecus garhi showed that innovation is something humans naturally do (assuming they’re on our lineage) and do well. Science and art are the crowns of our innovative achievements, with Newton and Einstein, Michelangelo, and Frederic Church as idols in their field. But given all societies eventually fail, that we’ve not been able to hit on a recipe that survives in perpetuity, and that humans are so unstable and self-destructive, the same cannot be said of societies that house these achievers—we don’t do civilization very well. Why is that?

There are several hypotheses, not mutually exclusive. Spengler’s ominous work, The Decline and Fall of the West, likens the life of civilization to that of a person. [2] Born with curiosity, enthusiasm, and growing strength, new societies forge ahead, refining themselves to become higher cultures with little concern for consequences. Cultures mature, lose strength, and begin to have regrets about their climb, a first step toward disintegration. Spirit that once animated society in the beginning can no longer be recalled as it becomes elderly and dies. Spengler’s hypothesis is the trajectory of aging.

President John Adams’ great-grandson, Brooks Adams, wrote a remarkable book titled The Law of Civilization and Decay; in it he reinforces the notion that all great ideas are killed by excess. [3] Adams’ volume led Theodore Roosevelt to a 15-page review in which he wrote, “Few more powerful and more melancholy books have been written.” [4] For Adams, a civilization’s cycle begins in a superstitious, spiritual phase dominated by fear. There’s also a strong artistic element as an outlet for spiritual impulse. This life of anxiety is tamed by incremental innovations that lead to economic advances with greater control over nature, people, and organizations. Eventually, life becomes confined to work in service to that organization with laws and massive economic demands dominated by competition and greed. Complexities of society sap humans of their humanity, and art dies as a nonessential. People become desperate for salvation. Descent begins with growing fear and a deep sense they have lost control as the inevitable revolution rolls over them. Adams’ hypothesis is a cycle of yearning, consumption, and evisceration.

Will and Ariel Durant emphasize the incompatibility of intellect and soul. [5] “As education spreads, theologies lose credence,” they write. “The moral code loses aura and force as its human origin is revealed and as divine surveillance and sanctions are removed… An age of weary skepticism and epicureanism followed the triumph of rationalism over mythology in the last century before Christianity and follows a similar victory today. An unmoored generation surrenders itself to luxury, corruption, and the restless disorder of family and morals in all but a remnant clinging desperately to old restraints and ways.” Durant’s hypothesis is a nosedive in belief.

If we in America could discover where we are and why, might we prescribe correctives? Comparison is complicated because ancient history suffers a paucity of information, while modern history provides too much. As we say in engineering, what is signal and what is noise?

There’s a great deal of noise in America today. But from the hundreds of clattering factors, what better example of dysfunction than the state of our political system? A political system where not so long ago, conservative President Ronald Reagan and liberal Speaker of the House Tipp O’Neill’s legislative acts were hard-fought works of compromise when compromise was not yet seen as treason. “The core idea of the Constitution was to restrain ambition and excess by forcing competing powers and factions to bargain and compromise,” writes Jonathan Rauch. During Reagan’s tenure, he held a dinner to raise $1 million for Boston College and its O’Neill Library. And one day, Reagan found Tip O’Neill at his bedside, praying for Reagan’s recovery after an assassination attempt. Politics is adversarial by nature, but adversarial did not mean bellicose. In those days, opposing party members dined at each other’s homes with their families. As one politician whose name now escapes me said, “It’s really hard to hate your opposition when you know his wife and kids.” Today, dinner with a political opponent is a violation of talk radio orthodoxy. In those days, the results of presidential elections were accepted by the loser, and no one dared speak on national television of a civil war if their candidate lost. Such vulgarity reveals abject ignorance of our own history when the last one we had mauled 750,000 men into their graves.

How could so much unravel so quickly if we didn’t mean to unravel it? Turns out, we did. Jonathan Rauch lays out the process. [6] He notes our political machine’s decline in capacity for self-organization by removal of intermediate systems of informal interaction. “For decades, well-meaning political reformers attacked intermediaries as corrupt, undemocratic, unnecessary, or all of the above,” writes Rauch. “Americans have been busy demonizing and disempowering political professionals and parties… The middlemen could be undemocratic, high-handed, devious, and secretive. But they had one great virtue: They brought order from chaos.”

As an example of unintended consequences from intended actions, the primaries were not always an election process with direct input from the people. Candidates were once decided by legislative conventions, caucus, and insider haggling. Our current system of primary elections is decided by a tiny fraction of the electorate most passionate, ideological, and consequently less reasonable for whom cranks running for office have the highest appeal. Our Founders tried to distance people from the process by implementing a representative republic to defang those passions, not a more direct democracy that exacerbates it. As Rauch puts it, “Political reform of the last 40 years [favors] amateurs and outsiders over professionals and insiders; by privileging populism over mediation and mutual restraint… All these reforms promote an individualistic, atomized model of politics.”

Open dialogues behind closed-door sessions with anonymous votes where only final tallies are announced are now rare. We prefer transparency, sunlight as disinfectant, and gridlock because no one dare speak their mind when records show they said something to infuriate their most radical fringe. This fringe is of the deepest concern in Congress, thanks to an incumbent’s gerrymandered district—something the UK, Canada, and New Zealand made illegal. Gerrymandering and primaries exacerbate the problem because same-party competition produces a more radical challenger pandering to fanatics, not to the country, not even to their own state, driving incumbents further left or right. A single square district would force politicians toward the center as it would include a variety of voter viewpoints. Even King Solomon “divided his kingdom into twelve districts which deliberately crossed tribal boundaries… to lessen clannish separation of the tribes.” [7] That gerrymandering is a bad idea has been known for a while.

So, I come back to the question of why civilizations fail. There is cause, and there is noise. But if failure of self-governance in a Republic isn't a signal, what is? Could there be some fundamental source common to the causes noted above and woven into the psyche of humans that commands us to do our part in terminating civilization?

Until next time, the first Monday in January 2017, the 2nd.



[1] Williams R. Clark, Sex and the Origins of Death, Oxford University Press, 1996
[2] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Oxford University Press, 1991
(originally 1926)
[3] Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay, Macmillan, 1916 (1st Ed. 1895)
[4] Theodore Roosevelt, Review: The Law of Civilization and Decay, The Forum, January 1897
[5] Will & Ariel Durrant, The Lessons of History, Simon & Shuster, 1968
[6] Jonathan Rauch, How American Politics Went Insane, The Atlantic, September 2016
A PBS Newshour interview is
here.
The Atlantic article is here.
[7] Will & Ariel Durant, The Story of History: Our Oriental Heritage, Simon & Shuster, 1963