Why We Can't Have Nice Things

I'm feeling cranky today, which means it's time to get started on this one.

NBC News reported on Thursday that a school administrator in Texas told schoolteachers who worried -- "terrified" was their word -- about the state's new "guidelines" regarding controversial issues in the classroom:

"Just try to remember the concepts of [House Bill] 3979," [Gina] Peddy said in the recording, referring to a new Texas law that requires teachers to present multiple perspectives when discussing "widely debated and currently controversial" issues. "And make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust," Peddy continued, "that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives."

"How do you oppose the Holocaust?" one teacher said in response.

"Believe me," Peddy said. "That’s come up."

Oh, I believe her.  This is America, after all, and that is Texas.  There's a lot of Holocaust denialism in this country, so I'm not at all surprised to hear that some parents have objected to their kids being taught about the Holocaust.  I'm concerned that these teachers don't know it, just as so many good liberals are determinedly ignorant about a lot of things they don't want to think about.

The rest of the article is mildly entertaining, in a horrible kind of way.  The meeting where Gina Peddy said this was recorded secretly, so the reader gets to watch numerous Texas officials and politicians scrambling to do damage control, and doing it badly, because that's the American way.

Just as bad, and possibly worse, is the way liberals react to bigotry: by panicking.  For example, this "Journalist & historian. Pub musician. Dad. Husband. I also do dishes" posted on Twitter:

It’s important as a historian to help people understand why and how people in the past understood themselves and made decisions. It is important to understand antisemites and racists and genocidaires and slavers. But not to teach as opposing and equal views, as controversy.

Yeah, no.  I've seen numerous attempts to solve the problem by definition, as here.  The word "controversy" doesn't remotely mean that the views at issue are "equal," let alone equally valid, as I think David M. Perry wants us to believe.  Nor does "opposing" imply it, as Perry seems to assume.  It just means that there's a disagreement going on.  (For example, the pronunciation of "controversy," but I'm not going to go into that.)  I wonder why Perry gets that so wrong -- no, actually, I don't.

The real trouble with "opposing," I'd say, is that it implies that there are only two sides involved.  Usually there are more, and often all of them are arguably wrong.  For example, in American controversies over slavery, not all white abolitionists wanted emancipated slaves to be free and equal American citizens: there was widespread sentiment, including in high places, for relocating them to Africa. Many white liberals have found this fact unsettling and have tried to suppress it, because it made history less simple and more confusing.  To insist on telling the historical truth is not even close to saying that resettlement is an "opposing and equal" position, and one should be suspicious of anyone who tries to end a dispute by pretending otherwise.

I'm not saying that teachers should keep books denying the Holocaust in classroom libraries.  I'm saying that teachers had better be prepared to refute Holocaust denialism among their students.  The same goes for erasure of American white supremacy; of Creationism and Intelligent Design; of opposition to masking and vaccination to contain COVID-19; of antigay bigotry; of anti-Islamic bigotry; of any and all historical or scientific distortions, because sooner or later they will come up.  That has always been my answer, in speaking to classes, when students ask why elementary school kids should be taught about LGBT issues: because the kids themselves will hear about them in the media, from parents and other adults, and from other kids, so teachers should be prepared to address them. Take the current hullabaloo over Critical Race Theory: it's not really teachers who are ensuring that students will have questions about the topic, it's right-wing racist media and parents.

As the teachers told Gina Peddy, they are frightened for their jobs, and they have good reason to be.  I don't believe Peddy when she told them that she and school administrations would fight with them: some will, I suspect most will not.  That means that teachers will need allies among parents and students.  Unfortunately many liberal parents sit out school board meetings, even before Joe and Kammy took office and those parents announced their determination to take a four- (or better, eight-) year nap free of concern about politics.  It seems, for example, that when Central York district in Pennsylvania "essentially banned" anti-racist books, parents did nothing until the students mounted a protest.

What really baffles me is that there's an obvious response to right-wing initiatives demanding "differing perspectives" on controversial issues.  I'm all for differing perspectives, and liberals pretend (as right-wingers also pretend) to want them too.  If your school's curriculum teaches that slaves were mostly contented and well-cared for by their kindly masters, demand that differing perspectives be given a fair hearing.  Demand that your state-approved textbook be supplemented by the differing perspective of the 1619 Project.  If your school's curriculum teaches Intelligent Design, demand that the differing perspective of Darwinian theory be taught as well.  If your school teaches that the USA is a Christian nation, if your school teaches Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve, if your school teaches abstinence from all sexual expression until marriage, there are differing perspectives, and these laws and "Academic Bills of Rights" actually require that they be made available to students.

Of course this all means more work for parents and teachers and administrators and students.  I've acknowledged before that there isn't time to teach all the conflicts.  (Note: when liberals and progressives sneer at the idea of "teaching the conflicts," remember that they are authoritarians at heart and really don't care about freedom, including your freedom to disagree with them.)  Exploring complex issues will take time away from the standardized testing that right-wing authoritarians have imposed on our educational system, precisely and often knowingly to take time away from classroom time for actual teaching.  That means we have to get rid of those standardized tests, no small task.  

But there's a lot of bad faith in liberal objections to teaching the conflicts.  Some of it comes from simple authoritarianism, as just noted.  Some of it comes from ordinary human laziness and ignorance. Do those liberals who oppose right-wing objections to their beliefs do so because they've examined the evidence and arguments themselves?  Almost never as far as I have observed.  Often they're actively misinformed, as with avowed Darwinists who are really Spencerians or even Lamarckians, rejecting actual Darwinian theory unawares in favor of scientific racism.  And in general, like their opposite numbers, they have no idea how to debate: they can declare their beliefs and principles against their opponents, but neither side knows how you proceed after that.  (This is why I'm critical of Noam Chomsky's strictures on debate: Yes, many or most people do it badly.  The remedy is not to refuse to do it at all, but to learn to do it better.  One could say the same thing about thinking.  Chomsky's somewhat hypocritical, since he himself often debates, and not always very well.)

One of my favorite pastimes is observing people online who misread satirical posts, often from self-labeled parody or satire accounts, by taking them at face value. This is often known as being Waltered, in honor of the great account Walter(OwensGranp.  Admittedly, actual responsible media are generally beyond parody, which may make it difficult to tell if New York Times Pitchbot's "Whether it's liberals wearing masks outdoors or conservatives teaching opposing perspectives on the Holocaust, both sides have an extremism problem" is real or Memorex, but damn it's fun to watch people who can't parse sarcasm.

To be fair, sarcasm puts a lot of strain on cognition.  It takes young readers years to learn to recognize it, especially in writing where they can't hear the tone of voice that may signal it, and many adults never do. But it's a very common tactic on social media, especially Twitter, and even after it has been explained to them many times, many adults persist in taking articles from the Onion as straight news.

Is it unfair to expect adults to recognize satire and irony?  I say it's not only fair but obligatory that they learn.  I've noticed that even scientists seem to dream of a world where all problems will present themselves neatly and cleanly, so that they can be solved like the most basic arithmetic problems.  (Though they also like to congratulate themselves on seeing past Nature's sneaky attempts at deception.)  Even when there's no attempt to deceive their opponents, debaters will often deceive themselves.  Critical thinking involves learning to recognize fallacy and error, even or especially when they aren't deliberate.  (It also involves learning to recognize fallacy in your own beliefs and arguments.)

So when liberals demand that satire and sarcasm be labeled for them so they won't get confused, they're not only undermining public discourse, they're announcing that they're too dull to read for comprehension above a first-grade level.  (I single out liberals here because everyone knows that this is true of conservatives.)  Yet these same people often congratulate themselves on their power to see past the lies and escape media brainwashing, which you can't do if you expect the media (let alone other people) to tell you in advance when they're lying or joking.  And don't right-wingers delude themselves that they have seen past the media lies?  If you read Twitter, or the New York Times, in the expectation that you can take it all at face value, you're going to fall on your face regularly.

An old friend, a graduate student in philosophy, used to chide me for being skeptical of religious claims, saying that she felt I was 'afraid of being fooled.'  As if that's an unreasonable fear, even if she were right about me.  It's a very common fear expressed by Christians, historically and in the present.  But that can only be part of it.  More of it is a self-critical desire not to be mistaken about the world I live in.  I'm not afraid of being mistaken, I want to learn from my mistakes, and I know that takes effort.  I can't think of many more valid and interesting pursuits for any human being, and I remain unable to understand why a philosopher of all people would consider that aim discreditable.

In any case, if you misread a satirical statement on Twitter, there will be plenty of people who will correct you, with varying degrees of empathy.  Most of them, whether they'll admit it or not, have been Waltered themselves at some point, and will be again.  And that most definitely includes me.

All this, I think, casts some light on why so many liberals are eager to suppress free discussion about disputed (I won't say "controversial") topics.  It's a desire they share with the Right, because they don't know why they believe what they do and don't know how to think about it.  The possibility that someone might disagree with them, rightly or wrongly, makes them very uncomfortable.  They don't mind making others uncomfortable, but they must never experience the discomfort of uncertainty or knowing they're wrong about anything important.  When they say that learning history should make you uncomfortable, they don't include themselves, just as when Trumpies say "Fuck your feelings," the operative word is "your."

The Whole World Is Spinning!

 

This tweet was an attempt at irony, I guess.  I saw it because a liberal historian I follow retweeted it, and that's even more disturbing.  The irony goes a lot deeper than Seth Cotlar can grasp.

The Declaration of Independence is not an anti-colonialist document.  It was written by settler-colonialists to announce that they would carry on their colonialist project without interference from the British government. Which they did, from sea to shining sea, and when they had stolen as much as they could, the United States extended its tentacles around the world.  They certainly weren't opposed to colonialism; it was their brand.  (This distortion of history has been used before, by the way.)

As for "liberation," millions of Native Americans and African slaves might beg to differ.  It's one of the ironies of the drive toward American independence that the slave-owning rebels complained that they were being enslaved by the British Crown.  Even if their analogy were valid, they had no ground for objecting to being enslaved.  If it was acceptable for them to enslave others, then it would be acceptable to enslave them.

One commenter, a teacher, quoted Pink Floyd's "The Wall": We don't need no education / We don't need no thought control... Hey teacher, leave those kids alone!  This was presumably intended to mock the right-wing opponents of anti-racist education. Again a certain cluelessness was in evidence: the Floyd's diatribe against state indoctrination of the young was aimed at teachers like the commenter.  You were supposed to agree that kids don't need "education" as schools practiced it, and sing along with the chorus. If the Right appropriates that rhetoric, so much the worse for the rhetoric.

Of course I agree that schooling-as-indoctrination is a bad thing, and that students should be taught how to think critically about any orthodoxy.  I don't really get the impression that liberals and even progressives are comfortable with that idea, however.  I've seen a lot of pushback from liberals against teaching the conflicts and critical thinking, which they strategically misunderstand just as the Right stategically misunderstands Critical Race Theory.  This indicates that they want to replace the old orthodoxy with a new one, and even if I'm sympathetic to the content of their orthodoxy, it's not education.

Being anti-slavery doesn't mean "Hey, don't enslave me, enslave those people over there"; it means that no one should be a slave.  Anti-colonialism doesn't mean "I'll take over the job of stealing a continent from the people who already live here, just stop telling me how to do it"; it means you don't take over other people's land. Apparently a good many liberals can't understand that, and that's worrisome. They're perfectly happy if teaching American history makes other people uncomfortable, but their comfort is not to be disturbed.

As the educator Deborah Meier wrote* years ago (via):

There are plenty of liberal-minded citizens who are uncomfortable with Central Park East's stress on open intellectual inquiry and would have us leave young minds free of uncertainties and openness until "later on" when they are "more prepared to face complexity."  First, some argue, "fill the vessel" with neutral information and easily remembered and uplifting stories.  But such compromises will neither satisfy the Right nor prepare our children's minds for "later."

There isn't any "neutral information" where history is concerned.  Liberals (and others) confronting the Right need to be ready for some messy debate.  I don't believe that liberals in general know what Critical Race Theory consists of, or that they'd be happy if they did know.  I just reread Derrick Bell's 1989 book And We Are Not Saved (Basic Books), an exploration of what came to be known as CRT written for a general audience, and it made me uncomfortable. The book consists of dialogues between Bell and the fictional legal scholar Geneva Crenshaw, debating legal and movement strategy against racism.  I'd forgotten how effectively white supremacist resistance had blocked the gains achieved by the Civil Rights Movement, using those same gains for the benefit of whites.  Given what we've seen in the thirty years since it was published, Bell's recommendations seem far too optimistic.

Seth Cotlar's stance in the tweet I copied here is classic Ingsoc: Colonialism Is Anti-colonialism.  Slavery Is Liberation.  He's not as far from the Right as he likes to think.

----------------------

*The Power of Their Ideas (Beacon Press, 1995, 2002), p. 81.

Circling the Wagons; or, All These People Who Aren't My Boss

I've been meaning to write about freedom of expression here for some time.  Several recent events pushed me - Trump claiming that Twitter or Facebook had censored him; my Twitter account locked for a few weeks; etc.  I'll try to return to these matters later, but today the Twitterverse is aflame over an open letter published by Harper's Magazine and signed by numerous celebrities, among them Noam Chomsky.

I probably shouldn't write about it, because I agree with those people who've declared the letter a distraction, like the Gravel Teens: "pretty incredible that amid mass joblessness and a deadly pandemic all our 'leading intellectuals' can talk about is the deadly threat of 'cancel culture'".  But one: this isn't entirely fair: many of the signatories, including Chomsky, are talking about joblessness, a deadly pandemic, climate change, war, and other important issues.  Many of us can multitask.  Two: it's clear that many of our random non-intellectuals are all too ready to be distracted by it.  Include me in that company if you wish.

Among the many issues raised by the responses I'm seeing to this rather vacuous and dishonest document is the anger, even fury, over it.  There's a lot of babble about "thought control" and "manufacturing consent" on the Internet, and whatever else you can say, this open letter doesn't do either.  The signatories are a motley bunch, with a variety of complaints and motives, but the letter represents an Establishment that is crumbling under the weight of its own incompetence, so it's lashing out at its critics.  I can point and giggle and make rude noises at them, or I can ignore them; I don't think they will make anything happen by attaching their names to this complaint.  I think that many of their left critics have been echoing their position: these people are trying to silence me!  Perhaps they are, but I don't think they will succeed.

In particular many left-identified persons are attacking Chomsky for setting himself up as some kind of shining example of the Left, or anarchism, whatever, and this old guy who doesn't know anything about the Internet is telling them what to think!!!  Before this particular kerfluffle, Chomsky was getting heat for arguing that people should vote strategically, as if anyone had to do what he said.  I've written about this before, about people who say that Chomsky treats his opponents with contempt (oh noes!), or that he demands unquestioning obedience to his authoritarian declarations (false), that you can't disagree with him (also false).  Interestingly, these claims come from individuals on the right, the center, and the left. Whatever influence Chomsky has, he can't make you do anything: you don't have to listen to him, you don't have to read him, you certainly don't have to agree with him.  Yes, if you're on the left, you'll probably encounter people who will cite him as Scripture. which is probably annoying, but that just gives you an opportunity to refute him -- if you can; rational debate is hard work.  But I don't see how it could be more annoying than encountering people who attack him inaccurately and irrationally, and I run into a lot of people like that, in person or online.

I respect Chomsky, I honor his dedication and persistence, but he's not my boss and I don't always agree with him.  If I feel strongly enough, I write a critique of him. Therefore I don't feel threatened when he says something I disagree with.  Funny that so many bold free-thinkers have such a different reaction.

Faithful and True; or, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

While I was working -- well, procrastinating -- on another, still unfinished post, I happened on this tweet:

I’m so glad you at least waited the customary 10 days after a massacre in a mosque to compare Islam to cancer.

It referred to this image:

And referred back to a previous tweet featuring Dawkins' letter to the editor of the London Times, denouncing Cambridge University's rescinding of a fellowship offered to Jordan Peterson, a well-known crank philosopher with arguably racist and sexist views.

I don't think it's accurate to say that Dawkins "compare[d] Islam to cancer."  He was attempting, with his customary tin ear, to draw an analogy.  True, the analogy depended on Islam being bad, but it's not exactly news that Dawkins is hostile to Islam.  Presumably, and I'll return to this, he is equally hostile to all other religions.  The point he was trying to make was something along the lines of "Hate the sin, love the sinner," which is no more convincing from him than it is from Christians.

Let me attempt to disentangle some of the threads of Stupid in Dawkins's tweet. First, bigotry does not necessarily refer to hostility to persons as opposed to their belief systems.  One can be bigoted toward belief systems too, for example by assuming that they are uniform and unchanging, and that all adherents share exactly the same implementations of their system of choice.  I reject Islam, as I reject all belief systems which claim the authority of a god to support their teachings and practices.  But I also recognize that its teachings are internally inconsistent, subject to many (including sectarian) interpretations, and that its adherents vary widely in their observances.  For simplicity's sake, consider the hijab, one of the practices that particularly exercises Dawkins: not all Muslim women wear it, and those who do vary widely in how much they feel God wants them to cover up.  I don't know Dawkins's opinion on this particular issue, but as I've said before, I object to secularist societies which ban the hijab as strongly as I object to societies which require it.  (Should I condemn secularism as a cancer because of its history of intolerance and oppression of, inter alia, women and homosexuals?  By Dawkins's logic, I should.)  A better analogy, though not useful for Dawkins's purposes, might be to "cellular growths" rather than cancer: some are benign, others malignant, some constitute more of a threat to the host than others.

Second, religion is not an "affliction."  Even if it were, we don't blame people with illnesses for their condition.  It is something that happens to them.  The whole point of the medical model is that the patient is a patient, not an agent, with respect to his or her disease.  We don't jail cancer patients, nor do we bomb hospitals to drive the cancer out of them.  Religion is a lifestyle choice, and it's appropriate to criticize morally the choices believers make, though not before we've examined our own.

Sometimes we bomb hospitals for the sheer hell of it, though.  I don't know the basis for Dawkins's claim that Muslims are the principal sufferers from Islam, but Christians and Jews have been doing their best to win that competition for centuries.  As Jimmy Durante used to say, "Everybody wants to get in on the act."  Perhaps Dawkins would acknowledge that Christians are the principal sufferers from Christianity, Jews the principal sufferers from Judaism, Hindus the principal sufferers from Hinduism, and so on, but such acknowledgement wouldn't play as well in a political context that demonizes Islam and Muslims while ignoring the religious component of Christian and Jewish and Hindu offenses.  Indeed, condemning the crimes of a Jewish state is a very serious thoughtcrime in Christian and secularist societies.

Third, and related: the first thing that occurred to me when I read Dawkins's remark about "homosexuals" was "Tell that to Alan Turing!"  Turing, you may recall, was forced by the State to take hormone "therapy" for the crime against Nature of having sex with other males.  Until the early twenty-first century, secularist science in the US was tolerant of secular attempts to "cure" homosexuals, decades after homosexuality was removed from the index of mental disorders and it was widely known that sexual orientation cannot be changed.  It's not clear to me why scientists changed their views on the status of male homosexuality; it doesn't seem to have been because of evidence, because whether a condition is an illness or not is not something that can be settled by evidence. And the whole edifice of psychiatry is of very dubious validity in general.  It reminds me of the way Bob Jones University, which insisted for decades on the Biblical doctrine of racial separation, suddenly awoke one day to discover that there was no such doctrine and they couldn't remember what it was supposed to be.

On women, the record of the "hard sciences" is comparable to that of "religion."  Not only were women regarded by (male, of course) scientists as a lesser breed than men, almost a separate species, but their health issues were largely dismissed.  I've pointed out before that militantly anti-religious scientists are terrible on issues like rape, which they seem incapable of understanding.  But male scientists, not only those of a certain age, still resist with great fierceness allowing women into the labs.  True, this guy is Not All Male Scientists, but he doesn't stand alone, and it's significant that a highly respected newspaper gave him a platform.  And as someone else pointed out, this scientist's claim that "it's not as if they ... build walls to keep women out," is false.  But maybe I should just conclude that scientists are the principal sufferers from science?  If that were so, I might have more sympathy for Dawkins, but it's not so.  Two words: eugenic sterilization.

Perhaps the worst error in Dawkins's analogy between religion and disease is that it's based on the assumption that religion is an external entity, like a radioactive virus, an "affliction" from which human beings "suffer."  Religion is, as an atheist like Dawkins ought to know, a human invention.  If a religion upholds male supremacy, even if all religions uphold male supremacy, a rational thinker should ask why they do so -- especially since Science also does so.  The conviction of female inferiority and the consequent belief that they should live under male tutelage (aka patriarchy) is plastic -- societies, including Muslims ones, vary widely and within themselves on how far women are disadvantaged -- but it's remarkably tenacious.  If it's a precept of many religions, including Science, it must be because male human beings put it there.  This presumption generalizes.

Recently I acquired a copy of a book I've wanted for a long time, a photographic essay about the Naked Festivals in Japan.  It includes some quasi-ethnographic articles about the history and rationale of these festivals, which prompted me to wonder why people decided that the gods wanted young men to strip to loincloths (or less, sometimes) and mass together for a giant game of Keep Away involving various sacred objects.  The visual appeal of such a rite is obvious to a pervert like me, but to the gods...?  At around the same time I saw some discussion of Roman Catholic High Mass.  We know more about the history of this rite rendering service to Yahweh and his Only Begotten Son, but again, people simply invented it in all its complex spectacle or music, costume, scent, and so on.  If one is an atheist, one can hardly claim that it is an expressive of, or compliant, with God's will.  It should be obvious to an atheist (though surprisingly often it's not) that none of the many religious rites or doctrines are the will of any god.  They are the will of the people who perform them.  In many cases, as with the Naked Festival, they are not imposed from above, let alone from outside, but are welcomed by the participants and observers, who not only enjoy the sight of massed naked men in the streets but are deeply moved and edified by it.  Blaming any human practice or belief on "religion" is an act of extreme intellectual and often moral laziness.

One more point, which actually was my starting point for this post.  Someone else commented on this thread:

Dawkins converts more atheists to agnostics than he turns away from faith altogether. Arrogant, dickish, islamophobic. Who would want to co-sign that unless you were one or more of those to begin with?

This annoyed me. I replied:

Any atheist who changes their opinion on atheism because Dawkins is an asshole is a sheep. Certainly can't claim to be an independent thinker. I'm an atheist on the merits, not because of who else is an atheist. If that's your approach, I wouldn't want to co-sign with you either.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don't think that the truth or falsehood of a claim about the world has anything to do with the personality of the person who makes the claim.  His or her personality may be relevant if he or she tries to make it so, but that can be a distraction, and certainly is here.  I've criticized philosophers before who complained that the New Atheists come across as unpleasant.  (Don't forget that Dawkins himself notoriously whined about the "inexplicable hostility of Mary Midgley's assault" in her review of The Selfish Gene.  "I deplore bad manners as much as anyone...", he complained dishonestly, and also claimed falsely that Midgley hadn't read the the book before she reviewed it.  But all of this only influenced my opinion of Richard Dawkins, not of atheism.

And why, now that I think about it, would Dawkins's obnoxiousness make people abandon atheism for agnosticism?  Is there any actual evidence for the claim anyway?  Someone, I think, doesn't know what these terms mean.  But there's a lot of that going around.

But What About the Whataboutism, Huh?

Here's my position at the moment.  (If you don't like it, I have others.)

I take it for granted that Russia (the whole country, every dang one of 'em!) meddled in the 2016 US elections.  Probably all states meddle in other states' affairs, and the US is no exception.  It's like spying: every country does it.  When they catch another country's spies, they expel or punish them, which is fair enough; it's the pretense of violated innocence that I find insufferable.

What effect, if any, Russian meddling had on the outcome of the election is another question, which most commentators, professional and amateur alike, seem not to recognize; they evidently assume that if not for Russian interference, Clinton would have beaten Trump. On that question I'm agnostic.  Given the myriad of factors that affect electoral results, I don't think it's possible to isolate just one -- if you're really interested in understanding why Clinton lost and Trump won, that is, or in preventing such interference in the future.  I don't believe that most of those who are presently obsessed with Russia and Putin are interested.  As Seth Ackerman wrote recently at Jacobin:

Despite ubiquitous demands to “take the threat seriously,” none of these voices has plausibly explained what the US ought to do about it. Democratic senator Chuck Schumer demanded that Trump “cancel his meeting with Vladimir Putin until Russia takes demonstrable and transparent steps to prove that they won’t interfere in future elections.” And how exactly would that work? ...

It seems clear that the current Beltway panic isn’t really a reflection of the magnitude of the perceived threat from Moscow. It reflects panic that someone like Trump could win an election in the United States. If Russia’s actions did, in fact, shape the outcome — and I doubt they did — it was by changing a tiny, marginal number of votes in what would have been a close election anyway. Russian meddling is not the reason Trump was a viable presidential candidate.

Ackerman also wrote:

Think of it as “the expressive function of the Russia freakout.” Just as there is what Cass Sunstein called “the expressive function of law” — “the function of law in ‘making statements’ as opposed to controlling behavior” — there’s a purpose served by the constant keening over Putin. It conveys liberals’ sense of bewilderment and disorientation at a country they no longer recognize — a feeling not so different from that which motivated the Right’s manifold freakouts in the Obama era.

On both sides there’s a sense of loss about a bygone America that no longer exists: for the Right, the white, middle-class utopia of the Eisenhower years. For liberals, the upright decency of the Jed Bartlet administration. The problem with these fantasies is neither of them ever existed.

So it's easy enough to see why the most popular riposte to criticism of the Russia Freakout is an accusation of "whataboutism."  I've been seeing it used more lately -- which does not mean that it's absolutely more common, of course, only that I am seeing it more.  It's bipartisan, too: my Never-Trump Right Wing Acquaintance uses it just as Democratic loyalists do.  Of course, he's engaged in whatboutism himself many times, just as they have; indeed, many accusations of whataboutism are accompanied by more whataboutism.  Whataboutism is only bad when the wrong people use it. 

The first time I remember encountering whataboutism online was in the late 1980s, when a College Republican, defending the Reagan/Bush support for death squads in Central America asked me Whatabout the Sandinistas' human rights violations in Nicaragua?  (Which were, though real, much less severe than those in El Salvador or Guatemala.)  I don't think I missed a beat; I replied that the US should cut off all military aid to the Sandinistas.  I was being snotty, of course, because the US wasn't giving military aid to the Sandinistas: we were waging a vicious proxy war against Nicaragua, killing and wounding thousands of civilians.  I don't recall that my interlocutor had an answer to that; the home office hadn't provided one.

Whataboutism is much older than that, for reasons I'll get to presently.  It was a common response to US propaganda against the Soviet Union, both by the USSR and by apologists in the West. But the US propaganda was itself whataboutist: sure, things aren't perfect in the US or in our client states, but whatabout the terrible conditions behind the Iron Curtain?  (It's related to the popular parental response to kids who won't eat their spinach: Whatabout the starving children in India who'd love to have that spinach?)

But once you start to pay attention, you'll find whataboutism everywhere.  When American racists threw tantrums because the Kenyan Usurper was putting his big dirty feet on the sacred Oval Office Desk (a gift to America from Queen Victoria!), the usual and entirely proper rebuttal was to point out that his predecessors had done the same thing, and more.  When I pointed this out in a whataboutism thread on Twitter, one person indignantly replied that those rebuttals were just stating facts, they weren't meant to insult and mock the people they were rebutting (as the case we were debating allegedly did).  It must take quite a bit of determined effort to miss the scorn and mockery in the article I'd linked, but a partisan will make that effort.

Another classic example of whataboutism I've been citing comes from Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1967 "Beyond Vietnam" speech (emphasis added):

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action. But they asked, and rightly so, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

When someone accuses me (usually accurately) of whataboutism, I reply demurely that if whataboutism was good enough for Dr. King, it's good enough for me.

As this example indicates, whataboutism is really a basic component of critical thinking.  That emerges in Walter Kaufmann's formula for his canon, quoted here:

Confronted with a proposition, view, belief, hypothesis, conviction -- one's own or another person's -- those with high standards of honesty apply the canon, which commands us to ask seven questions: (1) What does this mean? (2) What speaks for it and (3) against it?  (4) What alternatives are available?  (5) What speaks for and (6) against each?  And (7) what alternatives are most plausible in the light of these considerations?

Now it may be objected that doing all this is rather difficult.  But has it ever been a condition of virtue that it required no great exertion?  On the contrary.

Patricia Miller-Roberts' discussion of demagoguery and debate is also helpful, if only to show that Kaufmann's formulation of critical thinking isn't unique to him.

Another entertaining example of whataboutism went viral recently when a young Anglo-Asian journalist yelled "I'm a communist, you idiot!" at Piers Morgan on a British talk show.  Morgan had been hectoring her about the protests greeting Donald Trump's visit to the UK, asking why there hadn't been any protests when Barack Obama came to call.  Now, in fact, there were protests during Obama's visits to the UK; it's hard to tell under the cross-yelling, but I think Ash Sarkar tried to say so.  Morgan finally referred to Obama as Sarkar's "hero," which prompted her now-famous reply.

Morgan did have a point, one that Obama's critics on the left made repeatedly during his time in office: people who objected to George W. Bush's policies and actions suddenly tolerated or celebrated them when they became Obama's policies.  Antiwar activism diminished during Obama's presidency, for example.  But not all activism disappeared: protests against Obama's immigration policies were big and troublesome enough to push him to try to disarm or appease his critics.  It doesn't matter what Morgan's intentions were, he raised a valid question, and Sarkar tried to answer it.

Whataboutism criers claim that whataboutism is intended to stop debate.  It can be, but so is the accusation of whataboutism.  (More whataboutism -- whatever shall we do, wherever shall we go?)  One reply to this objection would be that whataboutism can also be intended to start debate.  The trouble seems to be, as I've noticed before, that most people have no idea how debate works, what to do once their opponent make a first rebuttal.  They know their talking point, which they got from a meme on Facebook, but it stops there.  They've seen that this or that liberal hero/ine EVISCERATED or DESTROYED the Rethugs with a single well-chosen word, and they think they can do it too.  But those Rethug targets, far from being destroyed or eviscerated, are still in good health and at large.

The proper use of whataboutism is to find out how consistent someone's position is.  If they are outraged by Obama's feet on his desk, did they object to (or even notice) Bush's feet on the desk?  If Bush's surveillance of American citizens was outrageous, did it stop being outrageous when Obama did it?  Remember, though: a responsible critical thinker will ask him or herself such questions before an opponent raises them: not to win debating points, but to test whether he or she has a sound position.  As Nietzsche said, "A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions!!!"

When I point out the US' record of interfering in other countries' elections, I'm not trying to stop debate: I want to start it.  I have some relevant and important questions for the Russiagaters.  For example, should other countries respond to US interference as they want the US to respond to Russian interference?  One difficulty is that it's not at all clear, as Seth Ackerman and Lyle Jeremy Rubin pointed out, how they want the US to respond.  As with liberals' vaunted concern over Syrian atrocities, they are upset and want everybody to know they're upset, but they don't know and don't much care what should be done.  Concrete suggestions, on the rare occasions when they were offered, consisted mainly of a US war against Syria.  As Ackerman pointed out, there's similar vagueness about what we should do about Russia.  There's a lot of posturing and xenophobic grandstanding, but little substance. Some measures for better cybersecurity have been enacted, but they are mostly not being implemented; Ackerman linked to a Politico story which reported that although millions of dollars had been appropriated to help states improve voting security, little of that money has been used.  But, I suppose, it's whataboutism to bring that up.

It's All Fun Until Someone Loses an Election

Happily, there's another newly-published book that does what Brooke Gladstone failed to do in The Trouble with Reality: Patricia Roberts-Miller's Demagoguery and Democracy (The Experiment, 2017). Roberts-Miller is Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of a couple other books that I'd like to read.  Though she's an academic, you mostly wouldn't guess that from the way she writes; she uses little jargon and defines clearly what she does use.  And though she's surely a liberal, probably a liberal Democrat, she's not interested in pandering to her side.  Though she recognizes and deplores the current state of political discourse in the US, she also recognizes that instead of providing an alternative to it, most media and public figures have gone along with what the cool kids are doing:

It’s a commonplace that we live in an era of demagogues, and it’s a commonplace that demagogues are successful because they mislead dupes and “sheeple”with what is obviously pandering, dishonesty, and irrational rhetoric. Demagogues sucker them. We’re all agreed on that point. We just disagree with them, since those benighted fools think we’re suckered by demagogues! Of course we aren’t. That accusation just shows what mindless Flavor Aid drinkers they are. Our leaders are honest (even if sometimes mistaken), well intentioned, and authentic. Theirs are lying, malevolent, and manipulative. And we are in a terrible situation now because our political scene is dominated by their demagogues. 

The underlying narrative is that our political culture has been damaged because a demagogue has arisen and is leading people astray. If we accept this narrative (one that doesn’t actually hold up to scrutiny), then we try to solve the problem of demagoguery in ways that worsen it: We call for purifying our public sphere of their demagogues, often in very demagogic ways. That narrative misleads us because it reverses cause and effect. We don’t have demagoguery in our culture because a demagogue came to power; when demagoguery becomes the normal way of participating in public discourse, then it’s just a question of time until a demagogue arises. So, this book is not about a demagogue but demagoguery—how it works, how to describe and identify it, how good people can find themselves relying on demagoguery, and what we can do about it [1].

For Roberts-Miller, "Demagoguery is about identity.  It says that complicated policy issues can be reduced to a binary of us (good) versus them (bad).  It says that good people recognize there is a bad situation, and bad people don't; therefore, to determine what policy agenda is the best, it says we should think entirely in terms of who is like us and who isn't" (7-8).  One can dispute Roberts-Miller's definition of demagoguery, which she admits is "not the conventional view" (7); but as she shows, the conventional view is part of the problem.  She mentions the first-century essayist Plutarch, who "insisted on an absolute distinction between demagogues and statesmen": demagogues are greedy hustlers just trying to make money off the gullibility of the masses by appealing to their emotions.  Since it focuses on the (alleged) character of the demagogue, rather than the truth or rationality (or lack thereof) of his claims, this approach is itself demagogic.

That Donald Trump's style is demagogic is obvious to his Democratic enemies; that their response ("orange," "tiny hands," "narcissist," "hateful," "in the pay of Putin") is also demagogic is, unsurprisingly, not.  The tricky part is that by adopting a demagogic stance, Brooke Gladstone's The Trouble with Reality will appeal to a good many more people than Roberts-Miller's book will.

Of course, there's nothing new here.  It fits with Noam Chomsky's discussion of the importance of concision in corporate-media news coverage, for instance, and with any number of accounts to critical thinking.  It's easy to see too that many invocations of freedom, rationality, critical thinking, and the like are framed demagogically: We are rational, reality-based; They are credulous, superstitious; We support science and evidence; They are Flat-earther Creationists, "climate deniers."  Why even bother to try to have a serious, rational discussion with such idiots?  And very quickly, since anyone who disagrees with one's construction of truth and reason is obviously an idiot, no serious, rational discussion is necessary at all.

Here's part of Roberts-Miller's suggestions for what to do against demagoguery:

There are, loosely, four kinds of things we can do, and no one needs to do all of them, and none of us needs to do any of them all the time. First, we can try to reduce the profitability of demagoguery by consuming less of it ourselves, and shaming media outlets that rely heavily on it. Second, we can choose not to argue with family or friends who are repeating demagogic talking points, and simply give witness to the benefits of pluralism and diversity. Or, third, if it seems interesting and worthwhile, we can argue with family or friends who are repeating demagogic talking points. Fourth, we can also support and argue for democratic deliberation. 

Historically, cultures insist on non-demagogic political processes after a devastating war (consider the rise of arguments for religious tolerance after the English Civil Wars or the marginalization of racialist “science” after World War II). It would be nice if we could find a different solution [94].

Unfortunately, the rise of Trump to the Presidency apparently wasn't devastating enough; many Democrats, including most of the party leadership, have chosen instead to embrace and escalate demagoguery to a deranged level.

Roberts-Miller then proceeds to give a brief course in critical thinking, and concludes:

Notice that I’m not saying you will thereby persuade them they are wrong. After all, they might not be. You might be wrong. You might both be wrong. You might both be somewhat right. You’re trying to persuade them to engage in deliberation, and that means you have to be willing to engage in it, too [123].

But I've already quoted too much from this short book, which has only about 130 pages of text.  It's full of good analysis and information, though, and if what I quote here looks good to you, you should read it.

The Unreality-based Community

I recently read The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time (Workman, 2017), by Brooke Gladstone, the co-host of an NPR program called On the Media.  The portentous title fooled me, to my discredit, but once I read a few pages of this short book I realized it was symptomatic of the present state of American political discourse.  Also of every past state of American political discourse.  Gladstone drops a lot of impressive names (Thomas Szasz in the book's epigraph, Philip K. Dick, Arthur Schopenhauer, Walter Lippmann, Hannah Arendt, and -- course -- George Orwell) and indulges in professionally overwrought rhetoric ("moral panic" in the title; Dick was "America's most determined architect and annihilator of reality", [3]) that she seems not to understand very well.  (She uses the term "moral panic" exactly once, near the end of the book, without context or evident meaning.)  So, for example, she quotes a 1978 speech by Dick:

"... because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups ..."

And, he might have added, by science-fiction writers turned gurus. "Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured"?  When didn't we live in such a society?  Besides, "spurious realities" is at best an oxymoron: if it's spurious, then it's not reality.  This is a hustler playing a shell game.

"Very sophisticated people are using very sophisticated electric mechanisms.  I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power.  They have a lot of it.  And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind.  I ought to know. ... It is my job to create universes. ... And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later.

"... And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human.  Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly -- as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides.  Fake realities will create fake humans. ... It's just a very large version of Disneyland [3-4]."

Dick claimed that his novels and stories "asked the question 'What is reality?'" All he could come up with was "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."  But, Gladstone says, "he knew we urgently needed a better answer", though I don't see what's wrong with that one.  Dick confused the issue by equivocating between the "reality" that "doesn't go away" and the "spurious realities" that he and other "very sophisticated people" invented; but since human beings only have direct access to the inventions, we do have a problem.

Gladstone then declares:

What Dick saw forty years ago many of us see now, at least of those whose reality embodies liberal values [4].

Later in her book, Gladstone gestures at conspiracy theories, citing research which found that "conservatives [were] more likely than liberals to believe conspiracy theories, especially apocalyptic ones" (31).  It says something that she begins her book by declaring allegiance to an apocalyptic conspiracy theory.

She then unreels a breezy survey of the failings of the media, as if she weren't part of the media herself, and starts explaining how The Demagogue Trump did his wicked work.

Which explains why so many of the rest of us [that is, Not-Trump-Supporters] are still reeling.  We also knew the system was rigged.  But once the bad behavior was exposed, the guilty were supposed to pay the consequences, at least in the court of public opinion.  That Trump's misconduct actually would help vault him to the White House was inconceivable [40; link added by me]

And no, she doesn't seem to recognize the irony in her use of that word.  I admit when she invokes the fantasy that "the guilty were supposed to pay the consequences," it's as a "stereotype" that "those whose reality embodies liberal values" clung to in the face of disconfirming evidence, though I don't think she wants to recognize that American political, business and media elites almost never do pay the consequences.  And then she says that Trump's "system clearly was unmoored to facts" (44)..

Even as an anti-Trump jeremiad, The Trouble with Reality is a failure.  Gladstone skims over the weighty history and political theory she discusses, getting them wrong most of the time.  She misses the import of much of it, for example:

"Oddly enough, the only person likely to be an ideal victim of complete manipulation is the President of the United States," said Arendt.

"Because of the immensity of his job, he must surround himself with advisers ... who exercise their power chiefly by filtering the information that reaches the President and by interpreting the outside world for him" [61].

Gladstone applies this to Trump, which is fair, though I wonder if (say) President Obama spent as much time actually watching Fox News, CNN, and other media as Trump seems to.  It also appears that he watches them as most people do, inattentively, only perking up when a buzzword gets his attention, and he doesn't bother to make sure that what he thinks he heard was what was said.  It's not as if he was any better-informed before he went into politics.  He also, as we've seen repeatedly, bullies and fires his advisors when they don't tell him what he wants to hear.  But the point is that Arendt was not talking about Trump; she was talking about all US Presidents.  The quotation appears to come from a 1978 interview with Arendt published in the New York Review of Books, so she most likely had Richard Nixon chiefly in mind.  Barack Obama also entered a bubble when he moved into the White House.  Remember when he jumped to the conclusion that the Supreme Court had overturned the Affordable Care Act, because CNN (and other media) mistakenly said so?

All of Gladstone's polemic is directed at Trump and his reality-challenged base, but her book is clearly written for a liberal-Democrat, NPR and PBS-supporting readership.  Few of them need to be told that Trump is a very bad man, the worst, a big-league demagogue who will destroy democracy if he isn't stopped, who became President because his conspiracy-theory-loving base were (willingly, don't let them off the hook) fooled by his propaganda.  Gladstone's intended readers are in no danger of being fooled by him.  But she betrays no awareness that her discussion of American politics also applies to the Democratic leadership; even when she cites a nineteenth-century critic of the press like James Fenimore Cooper, she does so because of his "eerie prescience" (39), not because his complaints show that the abuses he identified go back to (or even before) the beginning of the Republic.  In short, Gladstone is preaching to the choir, flattering and stroking their fears and prejudices, while believing that she's taking a courageous stand for Truth, Justice, and the American way.

Imagine -- well, you probably don't have to imagine -- that some Fox News personality wrote a book about the peril demagoguery poses to America, citing the same authorities Gladstone does, warning his or her readers not to be fooled by Barack Obama's or Hillary Clinton's manipulations, propaganda, and doggone-it undermining of reality.  Some, even most of their criticisms of the Adversary might well be justified, though that's purely optional.  But like Gladstone, they would never think of turning their analytical gaze on their own side.

Zombie Liberalism

Last night I watched the 2016 Korean film Train To Busan, newly out on video.  I'm not a fan of horror movies, let alone zombie movies, but I've seen my share of each type, and this one made an impression on me.  Though it wasn't intended to be, it worked as an allegory of Trump's America.  (But don't worry, it's primarily a fast-moving action film; I'm just imposing my post-modernist, deconstructionist mindset on it.)

So someone I know liked a post on Facebook, and it showed up in my feed.  The writer is a woman of color; her post in full:

I'm so sick of de no slut shaming Melania shit Michelle Obama had to have degrees many of them let's face it if she were a model or an escort or a hooker or sex worker or gold digger or whatever it would never have happened nada nothing no Obama Black Presidency-zilcho. Anyway I saw Hidden Figures tonight and I'm feeling empowered ????

Bigots are always "so sick of" being told not to bigot.  If you have any exposure to right-wing opinions, you've seen the same complaint from them many times.  If this is an example of the "empowerment" that comes from seeing Hidden Figures, then Cthulhu help us.  (I haven't yet seen Hidden Figures, but I read the book, and it's excellent.)  And it's far from the only example I've seen in the past week from liberals justifying behavior they attacked, rightly, when Republicans indulged in it.  But now they invoke Republicans as role models, and they're imitating them very well.  I can hardly tell the difference; only the names of the guilty have been changed.

Someone else responded to my criticism on this point:

You can criticize my guy all day because regardless of your opinion about how the country is run, the results can be quantified. The same can't be said about asking when an 11 year old is going to get her first abortion. If that make me a hypocrite, well, Hi, Hypocrite, party of 1.

That was exactly what I'd said.  You can, and should, criticize and attack Trump on his policies and behavior -- it's not as if he hasn't given potential critics plenty of fodder for criticism -- without slut-shaming, fat-shaming, being racist, being misogynist, etc.  It's not really that difficult.  Plenty of people have done so, from ordinary citizens to published writers.  That many liberals and self-styled progressives prefer to fall back on these old reliables says a lot about how deep their principles go.

Now, I don't know this latter person, so she may be an exception, but in general I have not found that liberals are okay with criticism of their guy on his policies -- very much the opposite.  This may be partly because they're as ignorant of their guy's policies as any Tea Party Republican.  The best that can be said is that they are really comfortable with abusive personal attacks on their guy and his family, because they know how to react to those: Oh, how can you say such awful things? You're a terrible person, etc., followed by abusive personal attacks in kind.  Like their right-wing opponents, they're on comfortable ground here because it requires no knowledge, no ability to construct an argument, just ragegasms.  Confronted with principled criticism of their guy from the left, they are helpless, assume the critic is a Republican, and fall back on what they know best, namely personal attacks.  As I said of the right after Obama's election, personal attacks are the best they have to offer.

Ironically, this stuff is proliferating just a few days after Martin Luther King Jr. Day.  Many of the same people who piously celebrated King's legacy are now pissing on it. (Well, they have a good role model for that in President Obama, after all.)  It's perfectly legitimate to reject King's legacy, of course, to repudiate his methods and style; but paying lip service to him while behaving in exactly opposite ways is not.  (I can imagine people replying that King lived in a different era, and faced different obstacles and dangers.  That's true: the America he lived in was even more dangerous for people of color than the one we live in now.  Yet King took the high road, instead of wallowing in pigshit with the White Citizens' Councils.)

The word "unprecedented" turns up a lot in liberal discourse about Trump.  I'm not so sure of that myself, but what I want to point out is that the same word was common coin in Bush and Obama's War on Terror: We face an unprecedented enemy, so we cannot be bound by outdated scruples and limits on our conduct of this war.  This trope was used to justify torture and other crimes against humanity, though of course the US was never really constrained by those supposed scruples and limits before anyway.  It seems to me that invoking "unprecedented" with regard to Trump has a similar function: to excuse and justify unethical, irrational, dishonest speech and behavior by his liberal opponents.  I would have thought, when I was younger and more naive, that if you face an unprecedented threat, the proper and natural response would be to think carefully and rationally rather than to panic and resort to abusive, destructive methods from the past.  Now I know better.

I was impressed by the international women's marches that took place around the world this weekend, but I wonder what will come of them.  So does Ian Welsh, who wrote today:

Trump doesn’t need to be popular with everyone. It doesn’t matter that the women’s march produced more people than his inauguration, despite his squealing about it: it is irrelevant because those people couldn’t produce enough people in the right states to with the election AND, as with previous great protests, nothing appears to have been built on top of the protests. It’s nice they all showed up, but they aren’t being asked (and organized) to do things that matter in the future, for all the talk of “the resistance”. If you wanted power, you’d want to be able to get one-fifth that crowd to show up when needed to oppose specific bills and actions by Congress, for example.

Mass demonstrations are useful for producing a feeling of community, that one is not alone, and they can be used to build organization.  But they're also old-fashioned, reflexive responses -- basically, they are religious revivals -- and if Trump is an unprecedented threat, shouldn't people be coming up with unprecedented tactics and strategies to fight him?  I've become skeptical of the actual usefulness of such demonstrations since I saw how ineffective the South Korean candlelight vigils were in stopping the corrupt neoliberal regime of then-President Lee Myung-bak several years ago.  And that was in a society with plenty of organizations at all levels, where the mass protests really represented groups that could worked after the protests were over.  Vigils on the same breathtaking scale have taken place to call for the removal of current President Park Geun-hye, whose corruption and lawbreaking have been even more egregious than Lee's.  It remains to be seen if the prosecutors will be able to follow through.

For example, how's the abolition of the Electoral College coming along?  A few weeks ago liberal Democrats were up in arms about it, but I haven't heard much lately.  The last I saw on Facebook was a political cartoon of the Founders deciding to set up the EC in order to prevent a "fucking moron" from becoming President; the person who shared it thought it was very clever, though they apparently overlooked the small detail that by their standards, the Electoral College had just put a "fucking moron" in the White House.  I don't blame people for having short attention spans, or for lacking the stamina for hard, day-to-day political work; that's me to a T.  But the posturing and strutting, the waving around of words like "Revolution" and "Resistance" by people who think that wearing pink "pussy hats" for a day in Washington DC is a revolutionary act, doesn't make me feel hopeful.

Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Brain

One benefit, if that's the right word, of using social media is that they bring me into fairly direct interaction with people who are ignorant, misinformed, and don't think very well.  Over the years I've been rather spoiled by reading the work of people who work hard to inform themselves, do their best to think critically, and do a pretty good job of it, at least within the pages of their published writing.  I've also exposed myself to media from a variety of positions, so while I'd hardly claim to be the most informed person on the planet, I'm better informed than most people I talk to.

So it's not surprising that when I've had a discussion with people who not only haven't read much or thought much or ranged beyond the corporate media for news, but who have actively sought to shut out of their awareness anything but Fox News or Breitbart.com or WorldNewsDaily (or Occupy Democrats or Daily Kos), I've been baffled.  I've been asking myself just how much thinking it's fair to demand from people.  As much as I demand of myself, I suppose, but that seems to set the bar much higher than I realized for a long time.

I remind myself that I've arranged my life so as to leave plenty of room for reading and thinking and learning.  People who chose to raise families, who've had demanding jobs that took time away even from spending time with their families, have a legitimate excuse for not pasturing their souls.  Still, I don't think I (or anyone else) is obligated to respect or take seriously the opinions of people who haven't bothered to inform themselves or consider alternatives.

It's a popular notion that people aren't equally gifted intellectually, and I try to bear that in mind.  The doctrine "All men are created equal" is dismissed lightly, mostly it seems by people who assume themselves to be in the superior ranks; again, they don't seem to have reached that conclusion by examining evidence, they just take it for granted.  Yet I find that if I dismiss such people's misinformed, irrational opinions, they indignantly appeal to egalitarianism: Everybody's entitled to their opinion!  My opinion is as good as yours! You're just a smart-aleck know-it-all, you think you're better than everybody else!  It's not really elitism. however, to say that some opinions are worth less than others, and indeed many aren't worth a damn.  (This is where I part company with someone like Noam Chomsky when he says "It is not possible to respond to opinions," especially when he then proceeds to discuss how you can respond to opinions.  Yes, debating opinions is messy and difficult, but so is debating arguments, which Chomsky thinks is possible.)  I think it's significant that people who insist that every opinion is as good or another don't extend that dogma to other people's opinions (mine, for example). 

Politics and religion are probably the most vexed areas for this.  I've come to realize that partisans, whether of Obama or Clinton or Trump, don't care about reasons or factual accuracy where their heroes are concerned.  It's probably not a complete waste of time to show why Donald Trump is a liar, a racist, or a corrupt thug, but it won't have much effect on his supporters, who mostly like his lies, racism, and corruption.  The same is true of Hillary Clinton's supporters.  (And of Obama, but he's old news now.)  On one hand they prefer to be uninformed about her record, but when it gets right down to it they mostly agree with her destructive, warmongering foreign policy history, her corporatist economic policy, and her support for structural racism in the drug war and the private prison system.  Dishonesty and irrationality go with electoral politics like a horse and carriage.  Besides, half of the population is below average, so we must have a meritocracy: our elites have never led us wrong before.

There are other takes on the problem, and all this is preamble to one of them.  Someone I know shared this meme on Facebook yesterday.

He remarked, "... sorry about my many deeply bigoted friends. i suppose they're doing the best they can to get by in a deeply crazy time and place."

I commented, "I can love my neighbor while disapproving strongly of her religion or other beliefs. I disapprove of all religions. This meme reeks of 'Some of my best friends are,' which is one of the Seven Warning Signals of Bigotry."

He responded, "on disapproving of religions. i hate their hierarchies... not their believers (the sin, not the sinner, as one tires of hearing). the believers generally seem to be honestly trying to tell me something about their lives with what they think will be the most effective tools-at-hand. when all they have to say is some stuff i've known about since grade-school, it can... it does... become tiresome very quickly. but, with some good faith on both sides, sometimes i can get something out of such a discussion (namely, a chance to tell them something about my life; nothing in social life with one's clothes on can match the feeling of being listened to with attention)."

I replied:

"Hierarchies" are only part of religion, and they are not limited to religion anyway. My objection to religions is that they are false, hierarchies or no. And I didn't say anything about "hate," which is a meaningless buzzword and a sign of bad faith.

"the believers generally seem to be honestly trying to tell me something about their lives with what they think will be the most effective tools-at-hand." Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but once it becomes clear that they are not interested in discussing in good faith, I tune them out. There's nothing wrong with that; life is short. Bad faith and dishonesty are part of human nature, but I'm not obligated to pretend that they're anything but spinach, and I say the hell with it.

The same is true of science cultists and conspiracy theory mongers. They too are trying to tell me something about their lives with what they think will be the most effective tools-at-hand, but I'm not obligated to pretend that they're either right or honest. We're not children anymore, and there's no obligation to pretend that the crayon scrawl that's supposed to be a superhero looks like anything but random lines. For a five year old, of course; for a thirty-year-old and up, no.

I hadn't really thought about the condescension in his remarks about his "deeply bigoted friends," but it's definitely there.  For whatever reasons, he sees them with a patronizing contempt.  I added that he should extend the same indulgence to the shadowy overlords who control our thoughts with their media machine (my allusion to "conspiracy theory mongers" was directed at him).  Of course the same accusation might be directed at my analogy to children's drawings, but I don't think it's just.  It's my friend who was infantilizing his "deeply bigoted friends."  I -- we all -- expect adults to do better than random crayon scrawls.  There's certainly no reason I can see to pretend that their misinformed, wildly irrational opinions are as good as anyone else's.

One point that I consider revealing is his bit about "their hierarchies... not their believers (the sin, not the sinner, as one tires of hearing)".  The believers are beside the point for me: it's their beliefs.  In practice it's not so easy to distinguish between them, since people are apt to identify themselves with their beliefs, and contrary to "generally seem to be honestly trying to tell me something about their lives with what they think will be the most effective tools-at-hand," many believers revel in their bad faith.  I'm not talking only about your schlub in the street, but about educated and sophisticated thinkers.

I can see that my acquaintances, both far-right wing and center-right plus not a few of the lefties, have no idea how to proceed when someone disagrees with them.  From both positions I've been attacked for criticizing what they post.  For them to post something racist, inflammatory, or generally dishonest is exercising their sacred First Amendment rights; for me to disagree with them is to violate their freedom.  I've also been accused semi-teasingly (presumably a "microaggression"), usually by liberals, of "stirring the pot," of just saying what I say to "stir things up."  This is flagrantly patronizing, and I've slapped those people down without compunction.

Are my acquaintances, most of whom are in their fifties at least, too old and set in their ways to learn to think critically?  I don't know how to answer that question.  I don't believe one is ever too old to learn; age is not an excuse.  Be that as it may, I'm old and set in my ways too.  But at least aged bigots, having apparently led sheltered lives, need to be confronted with opposition when they blurt out their bigotry.  Their families may have to let their poisonous views pass, but I don't have to.

I've long suspected that many people love social media because they can jeer at people they think they hate from a safe distance; that their targets might talk back is unthinkable to them.  (Has anyone else noticed how many people will respond to material about a celebrity by stating their love and devotion to the celebrity directly in comments, though the material wasn't posted by the celebrity or her spokespeople?  It's like yelling at your TV in the belief that Dumpf or Hitlery will hear you.)  When one of their targets does talk back, they're flummoxed.  Like most people, they have no idea how to proceed from the point of disagreement.  Come to think of it, since they're not interested in questioning their loyalties and beliefs anyway, I guess there is no way to proceed.  And where would they have learned to think critically in the first place?  The Right has always treated the teaching of critical thinking in school as a threat to civilization, along with the Jews and gay marriage.

The question of 'media brainwashing' is important too.  The media would like to think they can affect opinion, even to manufacture and control it, but this is false advertising much of the time.  Sometimes they pander to opinions already held (jingoism, religion, partisanship, racism) and can intensify them somewhat, but rarely for long; giving them credit for the opinions seems like giving them credit for the rising of the sun because they printed the time of sunrise in advance.  It's a less persuasive claim now of all times, when Trump and Sanders have confounded our wise rulers in politics and the media.  Despite a relentless flood of apocalyptic propaganda, it appears that English voters mostly favor leaving the European Economic Community.  And so on.  Nothing inspires panic in an elite like the realization that the proles are disobeying orders, and they often do, for better and worse.  I often ask those who talk about media brainwashing how they managed to resist it; I've yet to get an answer.

In the end, shadowy overlords or no shadowy overlords (I don't think they're shadowy at all, if you bother to pay attention, but it's comforting to think of yourself as one of the few who can see what the Sheeple can't), we are responsible for what we take from the media, the pronouncements of our politicians.  No one can know everything, of course, but it's possible to apply the basics of critical thinking (summaries by Deborah Meier and Walter Kaufmann quoted in this post) and start asking sensible, relevant questions.  Then it's necessary to recognize that one might be wrong, and to pay attention to differing views until you've evaluated them.  (Whining that someone is making a career out of picking on your beliefs, that they're just a smart-aleck trying to stir things up, is not an acceptable substitute.  I don't believe I've ever done that myself, at least not since the age of six; when someone corrects me, I check the correction, and admit my error if I have made one.  Most of my friends do not.)  What to do from there is another problem, harder to answer, but the same critical tools can help.

But Enough About You

The advice columnist Miss Manners made a curious and, I think, revealing misstep in answering a question on Sunday.  The questioner asked what to say on "learning that a friend has stage 4 cancer," if not "You will be in my prayers."  What if you're dealing with a selfish, unfeeling cancer patient who is "not of the same religious beliefs or is an atheist"?

Miss Manners suggested a good alternative -- "I am terribly sorry.  I'll be hoping for the best.  I hope you know how much I care for you" -- but framed it oddly.

There is the religious angle that you raise, though Miss Manners would think that a nonreligious person could appreciate a religious person's seeking the solace in which he or she believes.

I've read this and its context several times to try to be sure I understand it.  So, when a religious person's friend is terminally ill and the religious person promises to pray, it is for his or her own solace, not for the solace or benefit of the sick person?  I wouldn't be surprised, but I thought that there was usually at least a pretense that the prayer is offered on behalf of the other, not for oneself.  You learn something new every day!

Another of my Facebook friends and I have been disputing something related.  She's about my age, we went to the same high school, she's nominally liberal politically, she hates Trump and likes Hillary.  She likes to post feel-good memes, and last Saturday night she posted one that said "Do good and good will come to you."

We've had some exchanges about karma and related doctrines before.  I commented that I disagree. There are no payoffs, there is no karma. If you do good hoping to receive good in return, you'll soon be embittered. If you don't expect it, you'll often be pleasantly surprised. (And this leaves aside the very difficult question of what "good" is.)

My friend initially replied, "Oh, there IS karma, but you shouldnt liken karma with a fairy godmother.....it doesnt work that way, but there are times when there is such karma with others that its a delight to know about."  This was odd, because the whole point of the meme she'd posted is that karma (or whatever) is like a fairy godmother: do good, and you'll receive good.

We went back and forth a bit on whether "there IS karma," and a mutual FB friend admonished us that no one knows with 100% certainty what happens to us after death.  First, we weren't talking about what happens after death: the meme promises reward in this life.  Second, and more important, we do know with close to 100% certainty that bad things happen to good people and vice versa, because we can see it in the world around us.  That's what's known in philosophy as the Problem of Evil.  People have been grappling with it for thousands of years. To promise blandly "Do good and good will come to you" is to lie.  Even my friend recognizes this on some level, since she tried to backtrack a bit with the "fairy godmother" move.  But she continued to insist that karma is real, and that it works.  Maybe I should press her more to explain how karma works, if it's not a "fairy godmother," but I don't think she could articulate it; her idea of reasoned discussion is to report what a distinguished psychic told her.  Maybe I should press her on it anyway.  

After all, the Buddha is reported to have told a professional soldier who consulted him "that if the latter were to die on the battlefield he could expect to be 'reborn in a hell or as an animal' for his transgressions" (Brian Victoria, Zen War Stories, Routledge, 2003).  The Buddha took the safe path by threatening post-mortem punishment; Jesus of Nazareth, less cautiously, warned that "All who take the sword will perish by the sword" (Matthew 26:52), which is as transparently false as "Do good and good will come to you."  Many professional soldiers have died in bed, and many if not most people who've been killed in war were non-combatants.  But both of these teachers presented karmic justice as a "fairy godmother," if a highly punitive one.

That good people do sometimes flourish and bad ones sometimes suffer isn't evidence for the meme's truth.  The distribution of good and bad fortune could just as easily be random.  I think it probably is, once you look beyond face-to-face personal relations, and even in that very restricted realm, there are no guarantees.  What this means is that pointing to "karma" or "You reap what you sow" (to which I'll return presently) or similar doctrines is not a fact about the world, but a person's interpretation and judgment about the world.  This is of course true of everything we say about the world, but I'm stressing it here because my friend, like so many people who share her attitude, loves to invoke karma when she's feeling Schadenfreude because someone she dislikes has taken a pratfall.

A few months ago while I was among a small group of people waiting for a bus, a young woman began talking to no one in particular about a former boss who'd treated her badly (I don't remember the details). After she left that job she saw in the newspaper that her former boss had been physically attacked for being Muslim. "I guess it was her karma," said the young woman complacently.  No one said anything.  I considered suggesting that working for that woman was her karma, but I chickened out.

Since then I've begun commenting when people on Facebook invoke karma in connection with other people's misfortunes.  None of them have done a good job of justifying their highly selective use of the concept; as with Christian belief in Hell, they don't seem to like to think about the possibility that bad karma might catch up with them, or with people they like, and they consider it very bad form to remind them of it.  Like Hell, karma is for other people, bad people, for Donald Trump -- not for good, nice people like them.

But if "there IS karma," it is no respecter of persons.  But as I've said before, it would be highly offensive to apply it to the drowned Syrian toddler who washed up on a Turkish beach last year.  Or to the victims of the massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, the morning after my friend posted her meme.  Which wouldn't mean that bad karma wasn't involved, only that people are often unwilling to follow their own logic to its unpleasant conclusion.  And there's nothing unusual about that.  I think that people talk about karma or "You reap what you sow" (and Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick did just that when he quoted Galatians 6:7 on his Twitter account on Sunday morning after the massacre) or other similar proverbial bullshit, less because they mean it than as a warding-off of the evil eye, to try to distract karma from their own doorsteps.  It's often women who sniff "What was she doing out alone at that hour anyway?" when a woman is raped, for example.  (The Stanford rape victim must have had bad karma too.  But then so did her rapist, whose apologists whine that his life is ruined by the notoriety he received and the judicial slap he was given on his lily-white wrist.)  My mother used to harumph, "Where are their parents?" when juvenile delinquency was reported on the evening news; if my brothers and I misbehaved, though, it wasn't her fault, she'd done her best with us, etc.

Magical thinking is something we fall back on in situations we can't control or make sense of, as Bronislaw Malinoswki found of Trobriand Islanders who had rigorous, practical, rational lore for sailing in the relatively safe inner lagoons, and magic for sailing on the more dangerous open sea.  But I think we must challenge magical thinking when it takes inhumane forms like belief in karma and "You reap what you sow."  I don't think that the Problem of Evil, insoluble though it is, is too complex for most people to understand.  Sometimes I feel a bit guilty for expecting my less-intellectual friends to inform themselves and learn to think about these matters.  Critical thinking is not just for academic elites; I once disputed with a nice liberal fellow who said that ordinary people don't need to learn to think critically.  Excuse me, I replied, but ordinary people are expected to vote, which requires critical thinking if it's to be done responsibly; just shopping at the supermarket, let alone for a car or a house, involves considering and weighing alternatives.  Ordinary citizens cultivate thinking skills in dealing with spectator sports; as Noam Chomsky has observed, they are often very well-informed and won't defer to the authority of coaches and team owners.  This is permitted because such knowledge and skill has no real social consequences, while thinking about politics and morality might lead to restiveness and rebellion against the legitimate rulers of society.  I don't know how well most people can learn to think critically, but I don't trust the elites who prefer that the proles leave the thinking to them.  After all, the elites have shown consistently that they aren't smart or rational either.