A Cautionary Tale

This morning Amazon, like the Hand of Providence, threw into my path a book by James A. Lindsay, Everybody Is Wrong About God (Pitchstone Publishing, 2015).  Everyone except for James A. Lindsay, I figured, and I was right.  According to the accompanying blurb the book is:

A call to action to address people's psychological and social motives for a belief in God, rather than debate the existence of God  With every argument for theism long since discredited, the result is that atheism has become little more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs. Thus, engaging in interminable debate with religious believers about the existence of God has become exactly the wrong way for nonbelievers to try to deal with misguided—and often dangerous—belief in a higher power. The key, author James Lindsay argues, is to stop that particular conversation. He demonstrates that whenever people say they believe in "God," they are really telling us that they have certain psychological and social needs that they do not know how to meet. Lindsay then provides more productive avenues of discussion and action. Once nonbelievers understand this simple point, and drop the very label of atheist, will they be able to change the way we all think about, talk about, and act upon the troublesome notion called "God."

I'm sympathetic with Lindsay's approach here.  I've benefited from reading the literature debating the existence of gods, but I was already an atheist when I began reading it.  I became an atheist quite young, at around the age of ten.  I was fascinated by Greek and Biblical mythology, and one day my father told me that I should know that some people don't believe in God.  "Why not?" I asked. "Well," he replied, "they don't feel any need to."  I took my time absorbing this information, and I don't know exactly when I realized that I was one of those people, but I did.  After all, I didn't have much of an idea of what God was before; he was sort of like Santa Claus, of whose existence I'd been disabused some years earlier, or the Greek gods.  Learning what it meant to be an atheist took a lot more time and thought.  I'm still learning, but debating whether gods exist doesn't interest me any more than debating whether homosexuality is okay.

The trouble with Lindsay's stance is that it cuts both ways; we atheists, when we say we don't believe in "God," are really telling theists that we have certain psychological and social needs that we don't know how to meet.  Everyone does.  Human beings aren't rational creatures at heart; we can learn to use reason, but our needs and drives are pre- or sub-rational.  Does Lindsay realize that he's echoing, almost parodying, a popular Christian missionary line here?  I don't think so.  But it's also reminiscent of Almost-New Atheist Sam Harris's conviction that people who criticize American foreign policy are "masochistic," and need to have our eyes opened to the healing light he brings, that we may have life more abundantly (and Muslims have it less).

And -- surprise, surprise -- I downloaded the Kindle sample of Everybody Is Wrong About God, and found that Harris is for Lindsay one of "the most prominent atheist writers of the beginning of this century, among them Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, the late Victor Stenger, and Jerry Coyne."  "Prominent" seems to be damning this pan-atheon with faint praise, I must admit, but Lindsay thinks that they have definitively brought theism low.  He says he will work with a "clarified position on the term atheism, one that speaks back to the meaning originally put forward" by Harris et al.  This is also odd: did they -- does Lindsay -- believe that there was no atheism before the twenty-first century?  From what I've read of their work, which I admit isn't enough, they were just following in the footsteps of much smarter writers.  David Hume, for one.  And far from what you might call post-theists, which is what Lindsay seems to be aiming for, they are very noisily anti-theist.

Lindsay also says that "we need to understand myth.  Myth doesn't just mean a misinterpretation of a phenomenon."  (Actually, it doesn't mean that at all.  I'll return to that point shortly.)

At the core of myth is a blend of misinterpretation, obscuring ignorance, and yet clear apprehension, but what is most relevant about mythology is none of these.  True, myths are built out of ignorance, often due in part to the complexity of the subject matter at their cores, and, true, myths are a kind of misinterpretation of that subject matter.  On the other hand, and importantly, also true is that myths encapsulate some degree of understanding of what they represent -- otherwise they'd be far less compelling than they are.  What is most relevant about myths, however, is exactly what makes them most compelling: myths are culturally relevant narratives that simplify complex or unclear phenomena and that speak to people at the level of their psychological needs.  Narratives of this kind, though, are exactly what religions provide for people, and it is therefore precisely this observation that illustrates why God, at the center of so many religious beliefs, is a mythological construct.

This isn't far from the view of a theistic apologist like Karen Armstrong.  The main difference is that Armstrong allows more understanding and knowledge to mythology.  But they're both wrong.  There's a lot of scholarly debate about just what myth is, and at best Lindsay is addressing only a subset of the material.  It's not even sure how much the ancients believed their myths.  Some scholars argue that at least some myths encode not ignorance, but knowledge about the world, perhaps to keep it esoteric.  But it ill becomes Lindsay to dismiss ignorance, since everyone is ignorant of more than they know, including Lindsay.  Indeed, "ignorance" and "superstition" are both religious concepts.  Especially going by the mythos of Modern Science, everyone today is an ignorant savage compared to those who will follow us in centuries to come.  He has, as far as I can tell from what I've read of the book so far, a rather backward conception of religion, as a bunch of silly stories invented to keep the rabble happy and controlled.  It appears that he hopes to fill the shoes of the elites who developed religion for that purpose in the first place.

Take the last sentence I quoted, which has the form of a logical conclusion but isn't one.  First, mythology is only part of any religion, and it's likely that ritual predates mythology.  People create narratives for their own sake, and only rationalize them afterward.  Mythology is a part of epics like the Gilgamesh cycle, the Homeric epics, and the Torah, but only part; and I wouldn't care to pontificate as to their purposes.  In Greek drama, which originated as part of religious festivals, the gods are used as part of the stories, just like the human characters, who are also mythological though not divine.  Myth is part of the backdrop of any human society.

Second, because human beings think narratively, mythic narratives aren't specific to religion.  It's a cliche that nations have their own mythologies, and the United States is no exception: Columbus, who defied superstitious belief in a flat earth to discover America; the Pilgrim Fathers, who fled persecution to build a haven for religious freedom in the New World; the Founding Fathers, who in their wisdom created a new nation devoted to freedom for all men; and so on.  (I know that these are ahistorical; that's the point.)  So does science, not just with heroic tales about the Patriarchs -- all male, naturally -- who defied superstition to bring Man the light of knowledge, of Galileo muttering "It still moves" after being forced to recant his claim that the earth moves around the sun, Thomas Huxley totally destroying Bishop Samuel Wilberforce over Evolution in 1860, of Watson and Crick cracking the DNA code by themselves, down to bold cowboy geeks inventing the computer in their garages without a penny of government money -- but with a mythology of the Scientific Method, which bears little or no resemblance to what scientists actually do.  But scientists believe in it, because it speaks to their psychological needs.  The myth of evolution as a linear ascent from lower to higher, dumber to smarter, is also popular among those with Faith in Science.  You might be able to get rid of religion, narrowly and tendentiously defined, but mythology won't be eliminated easily, if at all.

Unwittingly supporting my position, Lindsay declares a little later, "We saw the idea of racism collapse long before the culture started really catching on, a process lamentably still continuing today." This, lamentably, isn't true.  The idea of the oneness of humanity is actually much older and is found in some universalizing religions, but in the late 1800s the "idea of racism" moved from "the culture" to science, where it's comfortably entrenched to this day, along with the "idea of sexism."  Lindsay has degrees in physics and mathematics, but he doesn't know much about history.

If the price of Everybody Is Wrong About God is marked down, I might try reading the whole thing, but so far it isn't promising.  As numerous people have said, including me: the trouble isn't that people are ignorant, it's that they know so much that isn't so.

Ignorant Armies Clash

Over the weekend a young Asian-American man told me and some other white men about an experience he'd had in college -- graduate school, perhaps.  A paper he'd written was rejected by his professor because the professor considered its vocabulary too advanced or complex, so he assumed either that it was plagiarized or written by someone else.  (Compare his experience to that of the neurobiologist Ben Barres, who before transitioning to male in the 1990s was accused by an MIT professor of getting her boyfriend to solve a difficult test problem, because of course no woman could have done it.)  Luckily the young man had the courage to stand up for himself, and the professor wasn't so far gone as to refuse to let him prove his competence: which he did, and the professor changed his grade from F to A.

Now, the young man speaks English with a standard mid-American accent.  I don't know where he was born, but he was likely born in the US, or at the latest came here early enough to acquire English as fully as one would expect from a native speaker.  Maybe the professor hadn't heard him speak?  Or if he did, his preconceptions may have overlaid a Chinese accent in his mind's ear.  I don't know exactly what kind of racism drove him to this unfounded, unjustified conclusion, and it doesn't much matter, because my point is that this story gives me one more reason to cringe when someone speaks or racists or other bigots as "ignorant." 

Highly intelligent (for some sense of the word) and educated (for some sense of that one) people can harbor the most squalid prejudices and biases.  "Minority" people eager for status need to recognize, I think, that a doctorate isn't quite the crown of glory they take it for.  If you really mean that unschooled people can be, hell, are smarter than these pointy-headed professors with their diplomas and fancy words, then don't regard those diplomas and titles as signs of superiority.

It also occurred to me that this must have happened in this century.  The professor must have lived through the Civil Rights movement and other movements against entrenched attitudes; he could hardly claim to be too old to be aware of these matters, though as an academic who evidently was ready to harbor racist stereotypes, he no doubt chose not to learn from them.  Perhaps he was one of those academics who fumed against the culture wars of the 1990s, feeling embattled and persecuted for his attachment to traditional values.  Sometimes I think we need a little more cancel culture, not less.

My Grandfather Didn't Flee the Potato Famine for America to See This Country Overrun by Refugees

John Scalzi's got another post up about the refugee question, this one titled "Frightened, Ignorant and Cowardly Is No Way to Go Through Life, Son."  (I don't know about that: it seems to work for a lot of people.)  One commenter especially amused me, by saying that "Refugees are less likely, statistically, to commit mass murder than white people are." I love the assumption embedded there, that refugees aren't white; it's similar to the popular assumption, now being challenged, that terrorists aren't white.  (Or that "Hispanics" or Mexicans aren't white.)  It's not even clear that Syrians aren't "white," but then such words mean what we choose them to mean.

Along the same lines, a meme I saw today features Ron Paul saying "Here is the solution to the refugee problem: stop meddling in the the affairs of other countries."  Once again Paul shows his great knowledge, wisdom, and compassion.  Leave aside that the issue right now is what to do with the refugees we and others have already created.  Refugees can be generated simply by oppressive government action within a country. An obvious example: Nazi Germany created many refugees. The US created internal refugees by its treatment of Indians and people of African descent. So yes, not interfering in other countries' affairs is a good idea, though it's not always easy to determine what is interference and what is wise interaction. But it won't solve "the refugee problem."

But back to Scalzi.  He wrote that, "as many have noted, there is irony in the freakout about Syrian refugees coming into a season which celebrates a notable middle eastern family who famously were refugees at one point in their history, according to some tales."  This trope has been popular among liberals on social media lately, but it has problems.

Scalzi presumably was referring to Joseph and Mary, who indeed could be viewed as refugees at one point in their lives.  That would be when King Herod, alerted by the Three Wise Men that his replacement had been born in Bethlehem, ordered the killing of all male children two years old and younger in Bethlehem and its vicinity (Matthew 2:16).  An angel warned Joseph and Mary of the coming trouble, and they decamped to Egypt, where they remained until Herod died.  One might ask why Yahweh couldn't have somehow prevented the Slaughter of the Innocents altogether, perhaps by giving Herod an embolism; killing turbulent kings is certainly in his repertoire.  The answer is that the killing was Yahweh's plan and will, in order to fulfill a prophecy of Jeremiah's (Matthew 2:17-18).  Otherwise prophecy would not be fulfilled, which would undermine God's credibility.  When Herod died, an angel let Joseph know it was safe for the Holy Family to go back home.

On this analogy, we should suppose that ISIS is an instrument of the Lord, carrying out his murky and mysterious intentions.  Who knows?  If Babylon was doing his work by conquering Jerusalem, destroying Solomon's temple, and carrying the children of Israel into exile, then perhaps ISIS is doing the same.

But as the meme I posted above shows, the Flight into Egypt isn't what these folks have in mind.  When I've seen Joseph and Mary referred to as refugees (or, sometimes, "homeless"), it has always been in connection with the Nativity as told by the gospel of Luke, which depicts Mary depositing the baby Jesus in a manger, "because there was no room for them in the inn" (Luke 2:16).  Luke, who doesn't seem to know about the Slaughter of the Innocents or the Flight into Egypt, isn't depicting Joseph and Mary as refugees.  According to him, they were in Bethlehem because Caesar Augustus had ordered a census of the Empire, which required that "all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.  And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David) ..." (2:3-4).  So he wasn't in Bethlehem to seek refuge from state violence, nor was he homeless; he had a home in Nazareth.

It seems odd that Joseph had no relatives to stay with in Bethlehem, but according to Luke he had to go there because he was remotely descended from King David.  Also, Yahweh couldn't arrange housing for his only begotten son, though he could send vast heavenly choirs to announce the blessed event and send shepherds to pay homage.  None of this makes any sense, and there is no evidence either of a Roman census at the time Jesus was probably born, nor that men had to uproot their households and travel to the hometowns of their distant ancestors to be counted.  Luke's Nativity story is almost certainly a fiction he invented, as is Matthew's.  Matthew, by the way, has the baby Jesus and his parents staying in a house in Bethlehem (Matthew 2:11).  Why they moved to Nazareth when they returned from Egypt is not explained, unless it's to fulfill a bogus prophecy that Teh Christ would be a "Nazarene."  (I say "bogus" because there's no such prophecy in the Hebrew Bible.)

Still, both Matthew and Luke probably intended to move their audiences with the pathos of the Messiah, the Son of God, passing his infancy in humble, even difficult circumstances, just as Scalzi and other people today want to move us with the plight of Syrian and other refugees.  And of course it's hypocritical of American right-wing Christians to try to gin up panic about people who are refugees as a direct result of US policy and aggression in the Middle East.  If you're going to mock their ignorance and distortion of the Bible, though, you need to be more scrupulous in your own account than they are in theirs.  After all, there are plenty of other Biblical passages that could be used, on the theme "Do not oppress or mistreat a foreigner, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt" (Exodus 22:21; compare Exodus 23:9, Deuteronomy 10:19, Leviticus 19:34) This fine sentiment was honored by Israel more in the breach than in the observance, like most of the Torah's ethical teachings; especially when you consider that Israel occupied its land by massacring and enslaving its inhabitants rather than coexisting with them.  And besides, Christians are free from the restrictive Old Testament law.

It's fun to throw Christians' hypocrisy in their faces, as long as they're the right Christians.  (Liberals aren't hypocrites by definition.)  As Christmas approaches we're going to see more convenient distortions of biblical material by all and sundry; I figure it's not too early to start the corrections.

#NotJustRichCollegeKids

Samuel Delany linked the other day* to a tumblr called Shit Rich College Kids Say.  He remarked:

This one requires a little thought, but work your way through it ... And by the way, it's not all rich college kids. But it's enough of them to be noticeable. And it's also noticeable that over the last decade a lot of not so rich kids have been saying it too, not to mention faculty. Things will be better if you understand what's at stake here, and life will make a little more sense.

Delany's a college professor, so he has more direct interaction with students than I do these days.  When I looked at the tumblr, the first, most current entries were these:

Having a good sense of humor is so much more progressive than taking offense to everything. If you go looking to take offense to things, you’re going to be offended

and:

I don’t know why you got so offended by that joke [targeting lesbians]. I mean I don’t think it’s offensive and I could probably even be considered a little bit bisexual at times.

The Stupid is certainly strong in these, but that's nothing new, either on college campuses or in society at large.  As I read more of the entries, though, the more baffled I got.  What, aside from playing "Ain't It Awful?", is the point?  I wrote a comment asking "Are we talking about the entries about being offended? I'm working class, and I think we need to rethink our approach to that issue." Delany replied:

Ultimately, I don't think this is about being offended and not being offended. It's understanding where people are coming from and not understanding where they are coming from--and why or why not certain arguments do or don't make sense--at least as I read it. But Duncan, I'll certainly look again. If you could point out some of the ones you find problematic, that might be a good place to start.

I realized that when Delany looked at the tumblr, the entries I quoted above might not have been posted yet, so I found the links and replied to him.  Another person, who'd directed Delany to the tumblr originally, paraphrased its mission statement: "omg These Assholes Are Our Nation's Future".  This seemed even stranger to me.  As Delany, at least, must know, these assholes are also our nation's present and past.  In the past, college education was more or less limited to rich kids (with a scattering of poor scholarship kids), and we may be moving in that direction again.  But like all schooling, college was, and is, a process of socialization.  It doesn't just teach students facts or skills, it teaches them courses (discourses, to be more exact) and limits of thought and conduct -- though it can also teach them to transgress those limits.  As Tom Lehrer might have said (but didn't), education is like a sewer -- what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.

Another one: "Wait, isn’t transgender when they have boy parts AND girl parts?"  This will be risible ignorance to those who are more informed than the average person is about sex and gender, but even they/we should be careful.  I can't think of many areas beside gender where the level of even informed discourse is so low.

Now, this one is especially weird, I thought: "I’m a trisexual - I fuck girls, guys and tr***ies."  The idea that relating erotically to trans people as well as cis people puts one in a separate category is not unheard of, though among our Speakers Bureau volunteers the preferred label is "pansexual."  I get that the person quoted thinks he's being funny, and I get that he's using blunt, crude language, but there's the weird part: someone thought that "fuck" is inoffensive, but "trannies" was so beyond the pale that it had to be censored with asterisks.  Except for "trannies," though, I see this kind of crudeness all the time among hip, class-conscious queer academics I know on Facebook who have a very sensitive nose for privilege in others, though less so among themselves.

I'm not sure that Delany and I are "reading" SRCKS the same way.  The mission statement claims that it's not intended to demonize other people. "Most of the original content is said by our [the moderators’] friends–who we are friends with ... Lots of my friends when they start learning new shit tell me to put up their old quotes so they can remind themselves never to be that way again," according to some of the FAQ responses.  But the entire lack of context in or for the posts makes it difficult to know what the mods' intentions are.  The title of the tumblr itself doesn't help -- are the rich college kids talking shit supposed to be the mods and their friends, or someone else?  A "we" or something to that effect would help a great deal.  And wouldn't it make more sense to provide some sense of how those people who were "that way" before came to be the way they are now, whatever it is?  As it's set up, the easiest and most natural way to read SRCKS is a finger-pointing exercise at a more or less depersonalized if not demonized Other.  The Microaggressions tumblr I've mentioned before makes similar disclaimers about its intent, no more persuasively.

A strange one here: "[R]ich college kids do not have as many excuses to be so ignorant. They just lack incentive to learn that their bullshit opinions are bullshit."  Oh, you think so?  Privilege is a shield as well as an enabler, and growing up in comfort and safety produces and encourages ignorance of what lies outside that shelter.  You'd think from this that "their bullshit opinions" were the rich kids' own, rather than something they'd learned from their parents and their class.  (The origin myth of the Buddha literalizes this: Prince Gautama's parents deliberately kept him isolated from awareness of human suffering until he was almost thirty.  Not until he glimpsed debilitating age, illness and death outside the family palace did he realize that not everyone had it as good as he.  Many parents have more foresight than Gautama's: instead of trying only to isolate them, they inculcate their children with rationales for their privilege and the disadvantages of others -- the Others are inferior, lazy, etc.  This allows people to believe that they deserve their good fortune even when confronted directly with the misery of others.  It doesn't always work, but often enough.  Non-rich kids have more reason to try to understand why the world works as it does, but there's no guarantee that they'll find better answers.  And the University historically is just as likely to be a repository of those justifications for privilege as to undermine them.

Some online conversations I've had on these matters don't make me more optimistic.  Even graduate students and post-docs in edgy specialties like Queer Theory or Post-Colonial Studies don't exhibit a firm grasp of the concepts they're working with.  Instead of learning from Foucault, for instance, American academics have turned his work into Scripture to mine for proof texts.  Critical thinking is seldom in evidence, and jargon (which is valid in itself) is used as a substitute for thought.  Learning to shoehorn one's thinking into the Procrustean bed of the academic paper too often produces distortion rather than clarification.  (Recently I listened to a grad student reading per paper on Queer Theory and Popular Culture, and I was struck by the way its rhetorical strategies steered away from substantive discussion.  The result was a kind of abstract poetry, where the language had its own logic and requirements that took it away from lived experience.)

I just looked again at Shit Rich College Kids Say, and I'm even less clear on what its mission is.  As I write this, the newest post is an appeal for help for a "homeless trans girl" and her mother.  There's another similar appeal posted on the landing page.  Is this what rich college kids say?  And it's no dismissal of the plight of many trans people to say that I don't trust appeals like these when they turn up on Facebook (because they're usually out of date at best, bogus at worst), so why would I trust a reposted item on this tumblr?  Do the moderators vouch for their validity?  These were followed by a call for submissions to a projected (online?) anthology on the ostensible theme of Road Trips from Hell, though it was hard to make that title fit up with the description.  And then, finally, another Ain't It Awful post about a "psychology professor" who said something dumb about Caitlyn Jenner and trans people in general.  Followed by a weird and not terribly coherent post by a moderator who said that person was upset by intra-community complaints being posted to SRCKS, when it 's supposed to be for inter-community complaints.

discussions about intra-community issues belong intra-community. not here where 41,000 other people can indiscriminately invade the conversations, manipulate the arguments, and deny the humanity of the subjects in question.

Talk about meta!  The post is in its way an example of what the writer is complaining about.  But as far as I can tell, manipulating the arguments and denying the humanity of the subjects in question is the purpose of this tumblr.  This writer just wants to be sure that the right people are having their humanity denied.  It would be reasonable simply to say something like: "The topic of this tumblr is inter-community conflicts, in order to enable certain minorities to play Ain't It Awful about certain majorities and run around crying Someone was offensive on the Internet!  We're not playing Ain't It Awful about conflicts within those minority communities, though they certainly happen and are cause for concern."  The writer puts per concern in terms of not airing our dirty laundry where those mean ol' Outsiders can see and exploit it, which is an old controversy in numerous communities including LGBTQ ones.  I don't object to defining and limiting the content of a publication, nor do I object to people having a place to vent their complaints and enjoy their ragegasms.  (As a blogger, I could hardly cast the first stone.)  But it seems to me that SRCKS is part of the problem.  The posts don't have any context, they don't lead to any kind of thoughtful discussion and aren't really meant to.  I look at sites like it and think "omg, these whining, unreflective babies are the LGBTQ community's future!"

*Actually, several months ago.  I'm plundering the drafts folder again, though much of this post was written today.

Go, Little Meme: Marriage Gravity and Viral Ignorance

I haven't bothered to check whether these memes contain authentic quotations from the men whose photographs they use.  What interests me here is that whether or not Tyson and Whedon said these things, some of their fans were happy to believe that they did.

Okay, I did look this one up, hoping for some context.  Who's "we"?  Tyson and his fans?  I can't find a source for it, so it may well be bogus, like this one probably was.  I did find this article, which I haven't read in full yet but it doesn't contain the quotation from the meme.  But again, what interests me is that it's popular among his fans, as something they agree with, so they take for granted that he must have said it.

Ignorance is not a virus, and reason won't "cure" it.  Ignorance doesn't have to "spread," because it's an inescapable part of the human condition.  What we know will always be limited, incomplete, and subject to revision, especially what we know about things much larger or smaller than human beings.  We will always be ignorant about some things, and I believe that our ignorance will always be greater than our knowledge.  The real problem, once again, is not that people are ignorant, it's that they know so much that isn't so.

I recognize that Tyson didn't mean "virus" or "cure" literally.  That's the trouble.  He's preaching, not sharing information.  He's a revivalist, and he's highly selective in his use of reason.  This meme is an altar call, the very opposite of reason.  Tyson's language shows that he belongs to the ancient religious tradition which teaches that if your spiritual eyes are opened, if you are awakened and enlightened all error will immediately fall away.  It isn't true, but a lot of people believe it, because they want to believe it; and of course it's very satisfying to believe that you are one of the enlightened elite, part of the cure, and the ignorant masses, with their myths and superstitions are the problem.  If anything should be cast metaphorically as a malignant virus, it's that belief.

Joss Whedon isn't a scientist, but he's every bit as incoherent as one.  Even if equality were a "necessity," that wouldn't mean it needn't be striven for -- as his penultimate sentence admits: we need equality, but we don't have it, so I would suppose we need to strive for it, "kinda."  But it's not a necessity, since human beings have managed to live without it for millennia.

No one really knows what equality is anyway.  Amartya Sen wrote a useful book on the subject, Inequality Reexamined (Harvard, 1995), which pointed out some of the conceptual problems involved, but Noam Chomsky did a good discussion as well.

Nor is equality like gravity, which is not really a "necessity" either.  Gravity is a fact, but like equality no one really knows what it is; scientists are still trying to figure that out.  Like many basic realities, everybody knows what gravity is until they try to explain or describe it.  Equality is different; rather like justice, or the Good, it refers to what isn't rather than what is.  Its very vagueness is useful, since people can advocate it without having to think very hard about what they mean by it.  But unlike equality, gravity is something that we needn't be bound by.  Many species have found ways to get around it, and human beings tried to do the same for thousands of years.  If we treated gravity the way Whedon wants us to treat equality, we'd reject the very idea of flight, let alone space travel.  When we're trying to get off the surface of the earth, gravity is our (metaphorical) opponent.

Notice too how Whedon loses track of his pronouns and their antecedents.  The "it" in "It is life out of balance" is presumably meant to refer to misogyny, but in context it points to "equality," which is not what Whedon means at all.

It appears that Whedon was talking about sexual/gender equality, though I suppose he didn't mean to exclude other areas.  And I suppose he was extemporizing here, so it's unfair to blame him for getting lost on the way to his thought; but in that case it's unfair to put his ramblings into a meme and send them, naked and unprotected, into the lethal vacuum of the Intertoobz.

Memes like these are part of the reason I've been in a foul mood lately.  I agree about the value of reason.  I think that equality is important.  But too many of the people who are nominally on my side on these issues are depressingly irrational.  I can't blame them.  I know the limits of my own rationality, and I know how hard it is to use reason, to ascertain facts, to talk about reality, to tell the truth.  But the popularity of people like Tyson and Whedon (and even of people like Noam Chomsky, who knows this and tries to resist it) just reminds me that what many people want is a Champion they can cheer for in the great gladiatorial arena, our guy versus their guy.  And it's largely accidental which side they're on.

Soy Huevon...

... So I'm just going to recycle some online discussion for today's post.  My work week is over until Monday, so I promise to write something more substantial tomorrow.

Anyway, a number of people have linked to this clip from the Jimmy Fallon show, which finds that a surprising number of Americans object to "Obamacare", but not to the "Affordable Care Act," even though those are merely different names the same legislative package.  One of my Facebook friends did, remarking "Do you think an informed citizenry is essential to a democracy? Er....."; and one of his other friends linked to this clip, which apparently (I haven't watched it yet) shows that some "Obama supporters actually hate Obama's policies."  That wouldn't surprise me; I've often pointed out that many vocal Obama supporters have no idea what his policies are.  ("He stopped the wars!"  Not.)

I commented: I don't deny that many Americans are horrifyingly ignorant about our history, our government, and our elected officials. I get my nose rubbed in that ignorance every day. (Though even more, as someone once said, the trouble isn't that people aren't ignorant -- it's that they know so much that isn't so.) But I've been thinking again: I see Democrats calling the Republicans idiots a lot. But suppose that's so: what does it say about the Democrats, including Obama, that those "idiots" keep beating them, over and over again? It's a popular line in many action/horror movies, that the villain says that Good is weak and ineffective, while Evil is powerful and effective, and so will triumph in the end. The Democrats are oddly ready to agree with and confirm that claim, it seems to me (though only if I agree that Democrats are good, which I don't).

Also, as far as I'm concerned, the only real impediment to an informed citizenry is the laziness of the citizenry themselves. People love to complain about how the Media are sapping their precious bodily fluids and all, but I call bullshit. What we need to know is out there, but no one is going to hand it to you -- in fact, wanting to have it handed to you is why we're in trouble now.

Not long after I wrote that, another friend posted a quotation from the liberal comedian and soft-edge satirist Andy Borowitz: "I wasn't happy about the country being controlled by the richest one percent, but I really hate it being controlled by the dumbest one percent."  Which provided a good example of the complaint that the "idiots" are winning.  My friend objected when I said so, saying that "I really don't think the idiots are 'beating' Obama and the Democrats in the present instance." This, in the middle of a US government shutdown engineered by the "idiots!" I linked to Derek Thompson's recent article which pointed out that although Republicans lose various battles, over the long term they've been winning the spending war -- the Democrats keep caving in to their demands.  That's leaving aside the fact that Obama is in close agreement with the "idiots" on many important issues, disagreeing only on a few social issues.

Someone just commented on my comments that the Republicans win because "they're generally the favorites of people with lots and lots of money."  Which doesn't affect my point, since it indicates that "idiocy" is no obstacle to accumulating lots and lots of money; and ignores the fact that the Democrats also take in lots of money from the rich.  Obama raised more money than his opponents in both 2008 and 2012, much or most of it from the wealthy.  That could be one reason Democrats love to accuse the Republicans of idiocy: to divert attention from their own devotion to the wishes of the rich.  I think I'm onto something here.  But I need to blog more, and comment less on Facebook.

Groping the Truth

Then my friend the ambivalent Obama supporter posted this quotation from Thomas Paine:

Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these can be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machinery of Government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.

Reason and Ignorance are not opposites. Everybody is ignorant of far more than he or she knows.  And as someone else said, the trouble isn't that people are ignorant, it's that they know so much that isn't so.  Anyone who fancies him- or herself rational and free of ignorance will take a tumble in no time. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote,

The rational man seeks the truth gropingly, he knows that his reasoning is only probable, that other considerations will arise to make it doubtful; he never knows too well where he's going, he is "open," he may even appear hesitant. But there are people who are attracted by the durability of stone. They want to be massive and impenetrable, they do not want to change: where would change lead them? This is an original fear of oneself and a fear of truth.  And what frightens them is not the content of truth which they do not suspect but the very form of the true -- that hinge of indefinite approximation.  It is as if their very existence were perpetually in suspension. They want to exist all at once and right away.  They do not want acquired opinions, they want them to be innate; since they are afraid of reasoning, they want to adopt a mode of life in which reasoning and research play but a subordinate role, in which one never seeks but that which one has already found, in which one never becomes other than what one originally was ...

The honest person knows that she's ignorant. That is the rationale for freedom of speech and debate: the fact that no one is free of ignorance, and so no one can decide infallibly in advance what opinion or belief should be suppressed.