Vagabond Scholar's Best of 2015

Once again, Batocchio has posted his annual Jon Swift Memorial Roundup, carrying on the good work of the late Al Weisel, alias Jon Swift.  Bloggers choose their own favorite post of the year, and Batocchio posts them.  I'm in there, of course, but so are a good many other writers you might not have heard of.  Take a look and see what you think.

The Trouble with Science Is That It Has Never Been Tried

I'm not yet quite halfway through Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative Account of Philosophy (Princeton, 2004), but so far it's very impressive, though disturbing in many ways.  At the point I've reached, Neiman shows that Enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire, Kant, and David Hume were trying, not to vindicate Science and Reason as the legitimate heirs to religion, but to show that Science and Reason could not make sense of the world any more than religion does, and that the Enlightenment critique of religion was invalid in many important respects.

Hume, for example, wrote in The Natural History of Religion (1757):

Even at this day, and in EUROPE, ask any of the vulgar, why he believes in an omnipotent creator of the world; he will never mention the beauty of final causes, of which he is wholly ignorant: He will not hold out his hand, and bid you contemplate the suppleness and variety of joints in his fingers, their bending all one way, the counterpoise which they receive from the thumb, the softness and fleshy parts of the inside of his hand, with all the other circumstances, which render that member fit for the use, to which it was destined. To these he has been long accustomed; and he beholds them with listlessness and unconcern. He will tell you of the sudden and unexpected death of such a one: The fall and bruise of such another: The excessive drought of this season: The cold and rains of another. These he ascribes to the immediate cooperation of providence: And such events, as, with good reasoners, are the chief difficulties in admitting a supreme intelligence, are with him the sole arguments for it [quoted by Neiman, 153].

The Argument from Design* has filtered down to the "vulgar" in our day: people who've never studied philosophy have invoked it to me, though usually as a reason why I should believe in an omnipotent creator, not why they believe in one.  As Neiman observes, "These sorts of claims concern psychology" (154), that is, why people find religious or other claims convincing, rather than the validity of the arguments used.  Natural religion, or natural theology as it was also called, was a somewhat confused philosophical project.  It was the work of educated people, rather than the "vulgar," intended to provide rational support for belief in God, though this generally led to a God who wasn't the god of Christianity.  But it was also meant, as Neiman shows, to produce a new religion, a rational religion, free of superstition and miracles and priests, that a modern rational person could accept.

This should sound familiar. When I was criticizing the philosopher Philip Kitcher's book Living with Darwin a few years ago, I connected him to nineteenth-century liberal Christianity, which was true enough; I forgot that he is also the heir to the philosophes a century earlier, who also thought that Reason and Science could govern the world much better than religion had.  But Hume seems not to have shared that illusion; he was, Neiman tries to show, as interested in demolishing the pretenses of Reason as he was those of Revealed Religion.

He described the innocent heathen's view of the doctrine of the Real Presence to suggest that mythological reasons do less violence to intellect.  Later he attacked most any form of conventional worship by suggesting that all ascribe to God "the lowest of human passions, a restless appetite for applause [Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion]".  But traditional dogma was an easy target in England.  The Dialogues were bolder.  They proceeded to show that the natural religion allegedly founded on common sense is in fact less reasonable than other hypotheses.  As myths go, monotheism is not only less salutary but less scientific than alternatives.  Natural inductive procedures will lead us to polytheism [Neiman, 156].

Hume, like Voltaire before him, showed that the world does not make sense, and that Reason is of limited use in dealing with its senselessness.  (That he used Reason to demonstrate that isn't self-contradictory; that a tool is only of limited use doesn't mean it's of no use whatever.  I can't build the Great Pyramid using only a hammer, but that doesn't mean I can't use it to drive a nail.)  This is the road where modern non-theist scientists and philosophers generally prefer not to follow Hume.  They're happy to applaud his demolition of revealed religion, but they mostly have great faith in reason.  So we get revivalists like Neal DeGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye arguing that science can resolve moral problems like abortion, or how to govern a society.  In a free country they're as entitled to bloviate as any minister or Pope, but they have no authority in these subjects and shouldn't be taken seriously.  G. K. Chesterton famously declared, "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried."  But as the Christian writer Graham Shaw riposted in The Cost of Authority (SCM / Fortress, 1982) , this is "glib deceit." 

It gains its plausibility from the guilty awareness of all believers of the distance between profession and life, but if true it would be a devastating verdict on Christianity.  Few ideals have so preoccupied the imagination of men, or inspired more utter devotion.  If therefore the ideals are still untried, it may well be that they are inadequate to guide men through the complexities of life.  The same simplicity which gives them their imaginative power to haunt and obsess may also condemn them to ineffectiveness in actual life [5].

Reason and Science may not have been as widely popular as Christianity, but they have inspired many, and certainly their devotees would also claim that they have not failed but found difficult and left untried.  But that, to the extent it was true, would also be an indictment of those who claim to speak in the name of Science and Reason, but unscientifically and irrationally; even dishonestly.

Scientists will concede, a bit uncomfortably I think, that science has not been an unmitigated source of Good in the world.  True, Science has given us vaccines and rockets to the moon; it has also given us atomic bombs and eugenic sterilization.  Like Christian apologists, they will protest that it's not their fault or the fault of Science, it's because Men have misused Science to their evil ends.  (That's the Problem of Evil: Why do Men do bad things, and why does Science let them?  Because we don't have free will!) No True Scotsman comes in handy: those who did these bad things were not True Scientists or Christians.  To the extent that this is true, it undercuts the claim that Science (or Christianity) is basically Good; at best they should be judged neutral, without inherent moral content or consequences.  Since Neil DeGrasse Tyson appears to be the big celebrity scientist nowadays, I'm going to focus on his well-intentioned but blundering attempts to deal with this problem.

Tyson told NPR:

You will never find people who truly grasp the cosmic perspective ... leading nations into battle. No, that doesn't happen. When you have a cosmic perspective there's this little speck called Earth and you say, "You're going to what? You're on this side of a line in the sand and you want to kill people for what? Oh, to pull oil out of the ground, what? WHAT?" ... Not enough people in this world, I think, carry a cosmic perspective with them. It could be life-changing.

Here he is saying that "the cosmic perspective" would direct us better than whatever its opposite would be.  Of course, any religious believer could also claim to possess or have access to "the cosmic perspective."  The cosmic perspective on war can be found in the Bhagavad-Gita, and was summed up by whoever said "Kill them all, God will know His own."  Tyson, however, was talking about a perspective that he presumably associates with science.

But he also told a Scientific American blogger,

Lastly, you speak as though all War is bad. I tend to agree with you on a personal level. But I know as a matter of political awareness that not all wars are unjust and some wars are, in fact, worth fighting. Many scientists who serve military interests do so because they believe deeply in the value of their work to the security of our country

So maybe you will find someone with the cosmic perspective leading, or at any rate following, nations into battle.  I think as a description of reality, whether religious or scientific, that's more accurate than Tyson's fantasy about the moral effects of the cosmic perspective.  But the real problem is how we mere laypersons are supposed to tell who truly grasps the cosmic perspective and who doesn't.

This is a more serious problem.  On the one hand Tyson has denounced attempts by religious believers (whom he represents as "a few," though they probably greatly outnumber scientists in the US) to "control the behavior of everyone else." "That's no longer a free democracy," he says, though I wonder if we've ever had one by that criterion.  On the other, Tyson believes that "astrophysicists should be under no obligation to poll the public. I don't care how deeply affectionate you felt for these objects [the former planet Pluto, in this case] that we had talked about."

Still, alas, in America scientists are at the mercy of the dang sheeple.  In theory, at least.  So Tyson told Scientific American, "I can scream at lawmakers without limit, but their duty is to serve their constituents. And so it’s the electorate that I, as a scientist and educator, will always target for my messages."  I've pointed out before how doubtful it is that the lawmakers' constituents are the electorate, but at the moment I'm more interested in how Tyson feels as a scientist about public input into the science budget.  Scientists tend to view any restrictions on funding for their research as an intolerable infringement of their freedom to pursue knowledge wherever it may lead them, no matter how far, and have greatly lamented the decline in government spending on science since the end of the Cold War.  Tyson admits that he directs his persuasive efforts to the electorate, but his successes appear to have been through patronage from our elites. Contrary to liberal Democrats' view of George W. Bush and the Republican Party as anti-science, Tyson told the Daily Beast,

People can say and think what they want, but what matters is whether or not it becomes policy or legislation, and I don’t remember any legislation that restricted science. In fact, the budget for the National Science Foundation went up. What matters is money in Congress. What does Congress do? Allocate money. That’s really what they do. So the science budget of the country went up during the Bush administration, and the budget for NASA went up 3 percent—and it had actually dropped 25 percent in real spending dollars under the eight years of President Clinton. I don’t care what you say or think. I care about legislation, and policy.

Also, he appointed me! There may have been some science that he hadn’t learned yet or didn’t know fully, but he’s not creating legislation based on it. Speeches are politics, so you can’t fault a politician for saying something political.

What the voters want, then, doesn't matter much, nor does Tyson think it should.  I can understand his position, but it hardly bespeaks a devotion to either Reason or "free democracy."

Education, including science education, is also accountable to the voters, so it may not be surprising that the general population doesn't accept Science as much as Tyson and other scientists would like.  Large numbers of people, not just the few of whom Tyson speaks, don't believe in non-theistic Darwinian evolution.  That's mostly because of resistance to teaching it in schools below the university level, I know, but I can't help wondering whether part of the problem might also be that science isn't taught all that well.  Rather like history.  Remember that students' ignorance about historical facts has remained the same since the first research into the topic a century ago.  In history class students mostly are forcefed propaganda; in science class they dissect frogs and do basic experiments of the kind that physicists did before Galileo.  Under those circumstances, is it surprising that they don't understand the neo-Darwinian synthesis?  One thing I feel pretty sure of, though: you won't teach evolution or persuade people to accept it by the vitriolic abuse that constitutes so much public discourse on science education by liberal and progressive writers.  Whatever else you can say about it, that rhetoric does not model rationality.  Neither do Neil DeGrasse Tyson's less than coherent ramblings about science and society.

It might be argued that the trouble is scientists' and secularists' failure to be rational; if they were, their counsel would be faithful and true, and we could look to them to lead us infallibly into the future.  Maybe so, but they claim to be rational already, and again I wonder how I am supposed to tell whom to believe and follow.  The same dilemma is presented by religion, even if you limit it to one religion.  There is wide disagreement about what Christianity, for example, teaches about specific issues, a disagreement that goes back to the earliest days of the cult.  There are no authorities on whom we can rely without question.

We might start by teaching critical thinking from elementary school onward, but that course would meet fierce opposition from the religious and the non-religious alike.  Besides, it doesn't seem that reason and science now have the knowledge needed to make decisions, any more than religion does.  Rationalists have faith that someday all will be understood, and all manner of thing will be well; I think that's Pie in the Sky, and it doesn't help us in the meantime anyway.  For now we must recognize the limits of both science and reason.  That doesn't mean abandoning them for religion -- which religion? which minister or pope or mullah or lama?  That Darwinian evolutionary theory has serious problems doesn't mean that Genesis or some other creation myth of your choice is true.  Refusing to admit the limits of one's wisdom and knowledge is a common fault of both religion and science, despite the lip service both pay to that admission in principle.  Reason won't save us, nor will religion; we must make our own decisions and judgments, knowing that we make them from incomplete and inadequate knowledge.

This, I think, is the point of Sartre's existentialism, not the blank-slate vacuousness Mary Midgley ascribes to him.  But I'll go with something like Walter Kaufmann's version, as he developed it in Without Guilt and Justice: we must decide; no one else can do it for us; we must think hard about our choices but in the end we must act (even refusing to act is an act). If we turn out to be wrong we must take responsibility for our action and do our best to repair or ameliorate the damage.  If you have a better idea, let's discuss it.

Which brings me back to Evil in Modern Thought. Modern philosophy emerged, Neiman argues, from attempts to resolve the Problem of Evil.  Christianity can't do it; indeed, the Problem of Evil is a particular stumbling block for conventional Jewish and Christian monotheism, and the rationalist project showed this forcefully.  But that was a negative result; rationalists couldn't prove how we ought positively to deal with the painful finitude of human existence.  I'm looking forward to seeing how Neiman's account proceeds.

*Antony Flew argued, I think correctly, that it would better be called the Argument to Design rather than the Argument from Design, since  involves arguing from the regularities we see in the world to claim that they must be the result of design rather than happenstance; the move from there to a Designer is less of a leap.

A Lake Wobegon War on Christmas

Before I forget, someone commented today on Facebook, under a meme mocking the War on Christmas, that she "actually shut Prairie Home Companion off yesterday, because the very first words from the host were, 'It's Christmas, we say Merry Christmas here.' As if 1) Christmas is the origin of these traditions, and 2) none of their listeners would be celebrating the holidays Christmas took its traditions from."

I've long disliked Garrison Keillor (see about halfway through that post), so I was pleased to add another reason for disliking him to my list.  But then I got nervous.  Don't believe everything you see on the Internet, right?  And even without an intention to deceive, people mishear what they hear.  Luckily, thanks to the Internet, it is easy nowadays to check these things.  The show she was referring to is available online, and dang if she wasn't right.  They weren't quite the very first words out of Keillor's mouth, but they came early in his opening monologue, and she didn't take them out of context either.  Perhaps one could argue that he was being ironic, as part of his fake-folksy persona, but I don't think so; listen for yourself and decide.

What Did You Learn in School Today?

A number of people have been saying stuff like this, but this meme, which I first noticed today, has the longest wishlist I've seen of subjects people wanted to impose on kids.

Of course I'm in favor of getting rid of gold stars and other reward systems, and I recognize that the meme isn't necessarily about schooling; it's perhaps deliberately ambiguous on that point.  The great educational reformer and critic of schooling John Holt also advocated the introduction of "real-world" subjects and projects into schools, and Alfie Kohn has been a sound critic of rewards and punishments in general.  But then, when I was in school, we had shop class and Home Ec; "practical" subjects were not excluded even from mainstream schooling, and I doubt they are now either.

It's telling, though, that reading, writing, math, and critical thinking are notable for their absence from that list. So is science. They also are worth doing for their own sake, and doing them is its own reward.

I also think it's funny how freely people pile subjects and tasks onto kids, or at least fantasize about doing it. One size fits all! (And there's at least significant overlap between people who post stuff like the meme above and those who post the one in that post.)  I think that in practice, kids would and do resent having their whole lives regimented by adults, because they have their own interests, and not everybody is interested in everything anyway.  Like it or not, kids are also interested in electronics and other technology, and no matter how much adults choose to simplify their own lives, it's going to be very difficult to return to the eighteenth century completely. 

Kids used to learn the listed tasks from their parents and grandparents, not in school, and that's appropriate. School was where you went to learn academic subjects, not what your family and neighbors taught you anyway.  We don't really live in the kind of society where that sort of thing is possible, and that needs to be thought about, not fantasized about nostalgically.  So this meme reminds me of adults who don't want to take responsibility for educating their children in their own religion, but want the schools to do it.

Whenever I see the words "common sense," I reach for my critical thinking. This meme is a good example of why.

P.S. The meme is also confused about the individual's position in the world.  On the one hand, the logo says the goal is to be "more self-reliant"; on the other, the text talks about encouraging kids to "care about something other than themselves."  Self-reliance, of course, is a great American myth.  American pioneers and homesteaders were self-reliant only when they had to be, and even then they depended heavily on technology (guns, iron tools) that they didn't invent and couldn't always manufacture themselves.  They also relied on neighbors for help, expecting to return the favors they received.  Barn-raising and quilting bees, for example, were group projects and activities, not just because many hands lightened the work but because human beings need company.  There were undoubtedly some pathological individuals who chose the wilderness and the prairie in order to get away from neighbors; we have accounts from the wives of some such men, who weren't as interested in solitude their husbands and longed for friends, company, the support of others.  Solitude and loneliness probably contributed to the failure of many a homestead.

I've also been seeing memes from some of the same people about a more recent period.  This one is representative:

"Do stuff"!  Maybe the words "supply chain" are meant to gesture toward the human networks Grandma was embedded in, but again, this meme puts too much emphasis on the atomized individual.  Grandma also relied on government Relief, on various charities, and just plain human kindness, which she gave as well as got.  This blog post, though probably not the best history, is a reminder of the reality:

My grandfather was born in 1928 and grew into a young boy in the aftermath of the US economic collapse. Pop-pop remembers his parents opening up our hay barn for random people to sleep in on cold winter nights. He also remembers that he and his family were “not so bad off”; they were farmers so they had the land and the knowledge to grow most of the food they consumed. In fact, Pop-pop told me that anyone who spent the night in their barn was also given a plate of food for the night, which shows how valuable their garden truly was. His impressionable years during a time of great financial ruin impacted the rest of his life dramatically, from his hoarding of cash and mistrust of companies and banks, to his refusal to use air conditioners and instead spend his summers in sweat-drenched muscle shirts. When he died he left an inheritance for each of his children from a measly family dairy farmer’s income.

The writer's grandfather didn't experience the Great Depression as an adult, and that surely makes a difference in his account.  (Neither did my parents, who were born in 1923 and 1926.  I wish I knew more about how my grandparents got through those years -- they all died in the 1960s, when I was a child -- but I know they had hard times.)

America was a lot more rural in the 1930s than it is now, and more people had space for gardens to grow food.  I live in a residential area with small lawns, for instance, but I don't know what my landlord would say if I started a vegetable garden.  There are community gardens around town, but they're some distance away from where I live, and some of the ground there has been contaminated over the years by chemical waste. My father kept a good-sized garden when we moved to the country, but never succeeded in getting us kids to really participate in it.  I think all of us could do some gardening if we had to, but we didn't have to.  (Nor did my mother can the vegetables my father grew, or make our clothes; not everyone relished the memory of their impoverished childhoods and wanted to relive them.)

If there were another economic crisis on the scale of the Great Depression -- and 2008, as bad as it was, wasn't on that scale -- the knowledge that people would need for frugality and self-help is still available and would surely be used.  But one always helps oneself among and with other people, with their help.  "Pulling one's own weight" is a better metaphor than "self-reliance."

Service Advisory

The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. 

In a word, Jihad!

I don't know where the guy with the beard was radicalized, but he was certainly a bloodthirsty extremist if anybody was.  Notice also the beard, which he probably began growing in whatever madrassa turned him to the Dark Side.  But there is no question that he used religion to justify a war in which he killed 600,000 of his own people, a war whose consequences we are still living with a century and a half later.

Yes, that war had one positive outcome, in that slavery was ended in the United States.  It was a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.

I've been procrastinating lately because there's so much I think I ought to write about, but I just haven't felt like writing.  Or reading, most of the time.  It happens.  And now I'll be going out of town for the weekend, which will not contribute directly to productivity.  My apologies. But as inadequate recompense, let me refer you to John Scalzi's post today about the Toronto Star's recent decision to turn off comments on their website.  Scalzi then discusses his own comments policy, which led me to reflect again on why I don't enable comments here.  The discussion in comments (which Scalzi moderates) is pretty good -- Whatever is one of the sites where that happens.

One commenter wrote, "It’s amazing how polar opposite a 'comments section' is to what I hear of the current politically correct state of college classrooms with their 'trigger warnings' and such."  Ah, there's a topic I need to write about here.  Instead I replied to him there.

Perhaps you should be more skeptical about what you hear, but even if what you hear is true, imagine a classroom where the discussion was like the comments sections of most newspapers, Youtube, etc.  I avoid them, not because I'm a special snowflake, but because they're useless for learning anything.  There's nothing "politically correct" about not wanting to wade naked in an open sewer. 

Classrooms have never been open spaces like an unmoderated comments section; discussion there has always been moderated by the instructors.  And nobody's as special a snowflake as the legions of reactionaries who are furious that white heterosexual males are no longer given the special status they think they deserve, and feel they must react by verbal and often physical violence. (This is not really new.  In Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, she recounts that male students rioted when it was proposed that female students should be admitted to the elite English universities.  And I don't need, do I, to remind you how American whites reacted to the politically-incorrect presence of free blacks in what they believed was "their" country, thereby triggering terrible anxieties that could only be assuaged by rioting, dismemberment, and lynching of the offenders?)  Again, imagine a classroom where the students yelled death and rape threats at each other, which is the state of too much of the Internet today.  Again, there's nothing "politically correct" about not wanting to be subjected to that.

So.  Back in a few days, I hope.

Who Needs the Peace Corps?

The person who posted this meme commented, "Did you know?"

I still don't know.  Civics was still a required class when I took it in high school, along with everybody else.  That was 1965 to 1969; in those days (as now, probably) when Americans were shown the text of the Bill of Rights, they repudiated it as Communist propaganda.  We had a very good teacher, well-liked and knowledgeable.  My fellow students who are now on Facebook evidently forgot everything he taught them, or never learned it.  That goes for those who are now liberal, as well as for those who are now right-wing Republicans.

Is it surprising?  Of course not.  People who lament the ignorance of Kids Today are always ignorant themselves, if not wilfully misinformed.  (I'm inclined to put Zappa in the latter category.)  Kids have always been ignorant.  The first research on students' knowledge of "history" (defined as their ability to regurgitate discrete "facts" on a questionnaire), done in 1917, produced the same results, and the same denunciation of public education, as it does today.*  This was, as it happens, about the same time that Social Studies was first formulated by professional educators; as it's now defined, Social Studies is

"the integrated study of the social sciences and humanities to promote civic competence." Within the school program, social studies provides coordinated, systematic study drawing upon such disciplines as anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, law, philosophy, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology, as well as appropriate content from the humanities, mathematics, and natural sciences. In essence, social studies promotes knowledge of and involvement in civic affairs. And because civic issues--such as health care, crime, and foreign policy--are multidisciplinary in nature, understanding these issues and developing resolutions to them require multidisciplinary education. These characteristics are the key defining aspects of social studies.

Zappa's claim that Social Studies had something to do with "all the student rebellions in the 60s" is raving bullshit.  The way he expressed his point puts him in the same crank box as people who whine that children aren't pledging allegiance to Our Flag these days. His history is false, like theirs. One, if Civics is no longer being taught, it's not because of the student rebellions of the 60s, which were about actually implementing the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It doesn't matter what the class is called, but Social Studies was what History class was called when I was in 6th grade, in 1961-2 in a backwater Hoosier school, before the student rebellions of the 60s had happened.  As I recall it, it had all the limitations one would expect from an elementary-school American history, but our teacher did go into some depth on questions like religious freedom and its role (or lack of it) in the early English settlements.

Of course Zappa also ignored the difficulty of teaching history and Civics correctly, thanks to reactionaries who (like him? I don't really know his politics) want students taught propaganda, not accurate history or Civics.  It's so much easier and safer to inculcate flag worship and to regard the Constitution as Holy Writ than to teach the complexities of American history and the controversies over the meaning of the Constitution.

I was relieved to see that numerous commenters on the previous post of this meme pointed out and corrected Zappa's distortions.  The person who'd posted it, who claims to be a former teacher and got it from a group called "Worldwide Hippies," rejected these corrections and defended the distortions.  (Evidently he's unaware that Zappa hated hippies.)

I respect Zappa as a tireless advocate of civil liberties, though in his case that mainly seemed to mean the freedom to say "Fuck" on stage and on records.  I honor him for attacking Tipper and Al Gore's campaign to censor pop music.  But that doesn't make him an authority on American history and political systems, or on the history of American education.  Whether he liked it or not, his struggle to do so was part of the same cultural and political movements he despised and misrepresented.

*See Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (Temple, 2001), pp 32ff.

But Here's a Rat's Ass

A former co-worker, a lovely person in many ways but nonetheless a fascist, shared this meme on Facebook today.

That's odd. Social Security, Medicare, public education, police (when they're doing their job), the fire department, the military (in principle -- and my friend is another one of those "Support Our Troops" people anyway), all kinds of public health service, disaster relief, public roads, public libraries -- do I need to go on? These are all government protecting and caring for us, giving a shit. It doesn't really matter whether a given politician cares or not, it's the government's job to protect and care for us -- "to promote the general Welfare," as it says in the preamble to the Constitution -- and it does that, quite a lot.

It could do more, I suppose, and do better what it already does. But Republicans and a lot of voters don't want it to. They want to get rid of government so that everyone who isn't rich can die. They expect the government to take care of them, but the GOP voters are surprised when it turns out that the guys they voted for don't give a shit about them, but only about the rich. They're deathly afraid that someone else - someone black, someone brown, someone slightly poorer than they are, an immigrant, a (gasp) undocumented immigrant -- might get something from the government, and in order to deny others they're perfectly willing to give up those benefits themselves. Archie Bunker was a perfect example of this mentality. Now he and his kind are reaping the whirlwind. But go on, Archie, support Donald Trump; do you think he gives a shit about you?