Random Blogging – Page 72

That Sagan Quote…

Tomorrow, we begin 2022– a new year. It promises to be a turning point–since I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that the barbarians are at the gate.

The divisions that characterize our “body politic” are deep, and every day appear more insurmountable. As yesterday’s post noted, we are rapidly approaching a point where the country will choose between two seemingly irreconcilable visions of what it means to be an American.

Or for that matter, a human.

I can’t describe the stakes as well as Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan did in their 1995 book “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.”A widely quoted observation from that book rings eerily prescient.

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”

The only element of our current landscape that that quote from Sagan didn’t predict is the “silo-ing” of that “enormously influential” American media–and the consequential division between those of us who occupy a credible, if confusing, evidence-based reality, and those whose “research” and selective media consumption lead them to…goodness knows where.

Somewhere else.

Credible and substantive information remains available, so we still have a choice–we can still opt for reality, messy and ambiguous as that reality is. But I don’t know how long that choice will be available. The institutional mechanisms of democratic government are being steadily appropriated by a barbarian cult composed of White Supremicists– along with the venal, the frightened and the ignorant. I worry that our window of opportunity for defeating that cult is closing.

The Democrats can’t do it alone–especially when they’re burdened with faux Senate Democrats like Manchin.

If at least a couple of “good guys”– aka honorable adult Republican politicians living in the real world and having the guts to speak truth to power– are ever going to show up, this would be a really good time.

Happy New Year….

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The Story Of Today’s America

Discussions on this blog tend to be conducted in relatively abstract terms. It can be easy to forget the power of particularity–the power of stories–to bring them home.

A lengthy report in last Sunday’s New York Times reminded me of that power–rather forcefully.

The article described one of the numerous fights over mask requirements, this particular one in Enid, Oklahoma. It began by focusing on a public meeting, and the discomfort of an Air Force sergeant, Jonathan Waddell, who had moved to Enid with his family seven years before, when he’d retired. He’d thrown himself into the community, and won a seat on the City Council. He supported the mask mandate–unlike the throng of people dressed in red who filled the chamber that night.

He had noticed something was different when he drove up in his truck. The parking lot was full, and people wearing red were getting out of their cars greeting one another, looking a bit like players on a sports team. As the meeting began, he realized that they opposed the mandate. It was almost everybody in the room.

The meeting was unlike any he had ever attended. One woman cried and said wearing a mask made her feel like she did when she was raped at 17. Another read the Lord’s Prayer and said the word “agenda” at the top of the meeting schedule seemed suspicious. A man quoted Patrick Henry and handed out copies of the Constitution.

“The line is being drawn, folks,” said a man in jeans and a red T-shirt. He said the people in the audience “had been shouted down for the last 20 years, and they’re finally here to draw a line, and I think they’re saying, ‘We’ve had enough.’”

People were talking about masks, but Waddell said “it felt like something else.”

That “something else” became depressingly clear as the Times described the woman who had organized the red-shirted attendees. It’s one thing to speculate about the fears and resentments motivating QAnon and “Big Lie” believers and anti-vaccine cultists…but the Times story put a face on those resentments.

Melissa Crabtree is “a home-schooling mother who owns a business selling essential oils and cleaning products.

She said she came to the conclusion that the government was misleading Americans. For whose benefit she could not tell. Maybe drug companies. Maybe politicians. Whatever the case, it made her feel like the people in charge saw her — and the whole country of people like her — as easy to take advantage of.

“I don’t like to be played the fool,” said Ms. Crabtree, who also works as an assistant to a Christian author and speaker. “And I felt like they were counting on us — us being the general population — on being the fool.”

She felt contempt radiating from the other side, a sense that those who disagreed with her felt superior and wanted to humiliate her.

The article went into considerable detail about Crabtree’s unquestioning Evangelical religiosity, including her decision to homeschool her children to protect them from a culture she deplores–from its sexual “perversions” and the left’s “preoccupation with race” and its telling of history.

“Why all of a sudden are we teaching our 5-year-olds to be divided by color?” she said. “They don’t care what color your skin is until you tell them that that 5-year-old’s grandpa was mean 200 years ago.”

Crabtree’s organizing was successful; the mask mandate died. But the schism in Enid hardened.

Mr. Waddell voted for the mask mandate, and the reaction was immediate. The following Sunday, people he had prayed with for years avoided him at church. The greeters, an older couple he knew well, looked the other way when he walked by. Several people left the church altogether because of his association with it, he said.

It wasn’t just Waddell. Ben Ezzell, the city commissioner who introduced the mask mandate got veiled warnings — mostly via email and Facebook. Someone dumped trash on his lawn. At one City Council meeting, “a man shouted that he knew where Mr. Ezzell lived. Another meeting got so tense that police officers insisted on escorting him to his car.”

In February, the Red Shirts swept the local elections, winning three seats on the City Council — including Mr. Waddell’s and Mr. Ezzell’s. During the year, through a series of elections, appointments and City Council votes, they’ve placed four candidates on the school board and another four on the library board.

The article is lengthy, but I strongly encourage you to click through and read it in its entirety. It is eye-opening.

As the reporter noted, what we are seeing–nationally, and not just in Enid– is a deeply disturbing argument about what it means to be an American, and whose version of the country will prevail.

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Um…Really?

I have a bad habit of categorizing behaviors I don’t understand–behaviors that I just cannot make sense of–as insane. Nuts. Wacko.

I have to remind myself that many of the positions and decisions that I find incomprehensible aren’t really evidence of mental illness, and that the mere fact that they seem devoid of any sensible basis (and–like the anti-vaccine hysteria– often seem likely to personally endanger the person holding them) is hardly justification for my dismissal as too “looney” to merit efforts at serious debate. Shame on me.

But then I run across something like this.

Talking Points Memo is a reputable, credible source of political information–one that I visit frequently. As this year draws to a close, the editor, Josh Marshall, posted an essay he titled “Looking Back on the Dumb.” It included things like the effort by Rudy Guliani’s son to run for Governor of New York, despite the fact his entire government experience is apparently limited to an internship. But then, Marshall’s recitation included the following:

Tom Cotton was somehow not joking: It was a while ago, but Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-AK) Saturday Night Live script-esque warning to President Biden this summer about the Beijing Olympics still lives in my head rent-free. In June, Cotton sent Biden a letter demanding the President should stop Americans from participating in the 2022 Olympics unless China promised it wouldn’t … steal U.S. athlete’s DNA. “In 2022, thousands of world-class athletes will gather to compete in China,” the letter read. “Their DNA will present an irresistible target for the CCP … thus, we should expect that the Chinese government will attempt to collect genetic samples of Olympians at the Games, perhaps disguised as testing for illegal drugs or COVID-19.” He also somehow concluded that the Chinese government was going to use said harvested DNA to create an army of super soldiers.

Okay, it wasn’t April 1st, but surely, I thought, this had to be tongue-in-cheek. Tom Cotton is a dangerous rightwing ideologue, but he’s a United States Senator, for heaven’s sake! Surely, a Google search would explain the joke…

Nope.

The accusation was covered at the time in a number of publications. My favorite was Esquire’s “Tom Cotton Is a Few Reindeer Short of Santa’s Sleigh,” by the always acerbic Charles Pierce.

The shebeen has been keeping a weather eye on Senator Tom Cotton (R), the bobble-throated slapstick from the state of Arkansas, ever since he enlivened his first term by writing a letter to the leadership of Iran telling its members not to assume that any action taken by the President of the United States is in any way permanent. This nugget of larval Trumpism marked Cotton as a potentially dangerous autocrat. What I was not prepared for was the prospect that Cotton is also perhaps three tiny reindeer short of Santa’s sleigh.

I discovered that when reports first emerged about Cotton’s DNA concerns, Twitter had had a field day–with more than one tweet showing Cotton with a tin foil hat, and others comparing him to Marjorie Taylor Green. (Given the wealth of reporting and Twitter activity at the time, I really don’t know how I missed this…)

The Hill also reported on Cotton’s “theory.”

Cotton, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, detailed several of his concerns, including China’s “invasive” surveillance system. He said members of the American delegation should expect their rooms to be bugged and their electronic devices to be hacked by Chinese authorities.

He also warned about the possibility the Chinese government could try to obtain DNA samples from athletes.

“The CCP [Chinese Communist Party] also considers DNA collection a vital intelligence-gathering objective,” Cotton wrote.

“The CCP has reportedly conducted tests to develop biologically-enhanced soldiers and intends to use DNA data to catapult Chinese biotechnology companies to global market dominance,” the letter states.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve been under the impression that there are a lot of people in China, and all of them presumably have DNA…I’m missing something.

Tom Cotton is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. And he’s convinced that (only American??) DNA can be harvested and somehow used to create super-soldiers.

I’m rethinking my effort to stop categorizing people as lunatics…

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Modernity, Ambiguity..And Polarization

Back when I was in college (many years ago!), one of “the” raging intellectual arguments concerned the absolute versus relative nature of evil. We weren’t far removed from WWII and the discovery of Hitler’s “Final solution,” and “relativism” was a dirty word. Most Americans looked askance at people who suggested that different cultures might judge behaviors differently.

I haven’t encountered replays of that particular debate lately, but a recent newsletter from Pew brought it to mind. The newsletter–reporting on studies conducted by Pew’s Research Center–included the following paragraph:

About half of U.S. adults (48%) say that most things in society can be clearly divided into good and evil, while the other half (50%) say that most things in society are too complicated to be categorized this way, according to a new analysis of data from a recent Pew Research Center survey. Highly religious Americans are much more likely to see society as split between good and evil, while nonreligious people tend to see more ambiguity.

Ah–either/or. Good or evil. Right or wrong. If only the world was that simple…

Back in those youthful college days, most of us ended up by concluding that the fight between relativism and certainty was being vastly oversimplified. Although certain behaviors (genocide, for example) could undoubtedly be labeled “evil” no matter the culture, the real world confronts us daily with situations in multiple shades of gray. It might be comforting to believe in an accessible bright line that divides always good from always evil, but in the messy reality of the world we occupy, that line is often very fuzzy–and what lawyers like to call “fact-sensitive.”

There’s certainly wise versus unwise, wrong versus right… and then there’s good versus evil….

I still recall my first conversation with an Episcopal clergyman who later became a good friend, in which we discussed the positive and negative role of religion in helping people cope with the growing complexities of modern life, helping them navigate an increasingly complicated social and technological environment in which affixing unambiguous labels like “good” and “bad” was increasingly fraught. He saw his job as helping his congregants deal with the inevitable ambiguities of modern life–helping them ask the right questions, rather than insisting that they accept simple, pre-ordained, one-size-fits-all “right answers.”

My youngest son insists that this is the test of good versus bad religion–the good ones help you wrestle with such questions; the harmful ones insist they have the only acceptable answers….I think it’s fair to say that the growing number of “unchurched” and secular Americans is attributable in no small measure to the large number of religious denominations that insist on acceptance of a particular, doctrinal, always-right “answer.”

The Pew analysis does provide illumination of a fundamental (pun intended) reason for Americans’ current polarization. Whether based on religion or a semi-religious political ideology, the emotional need to categorize other humans–the need to divide an increasingly complex world into simple categories of “good” and “evil” that corresponds with “us” versus “them”–is a significant contributor to our current inability to communicate, let alone live together with at least a measure of civility and mutual respect.

After all, if progressive policies are evil, rather than simply “unwise” or “mistaken,” then the “good” people–the Godly warriors who have affixed that label– are justified in ignoring democratic processes and the rule of law in order to counter that evil.

And as horrifying as it may seem, that’s where we are–reliving a throwback to pre-modern times, and to the religious wars the nation’s Founders they thought they were avoiding by erecting that wall of separation between church and state.

I’ve always realized that there were some folks who needed that bright line, the high degree of moral certainty that characterized simpler times–but Pew’s study found 48% of Americans endorsing that pre-modern mindset.

That explains a lot..and it doesn’t bode well for e pluribus unum.

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Language, Fact & Emotion, Oh My!!

Many thanks for all the kind comments yesterday! They were much appreciated!!

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Computers haven’t only changed our day-to-day lives in multiple ways, their computational capacities have made it possible to conduct studies far beyond the ability of mere humans. One of my sons sent me an article published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists detailing a research project that would have been impossible to conduct prior to the availability of today’s technologies.

The researchers set out to examine the roots of what they dub–accurately, in my view– our “post-truth era.” In order to do so, they employed “massive language analysis” to document the rise of fact-free argumentation. They analyzed language used in millions of books published between 1850 to 2019–an analysis that required Google nGram data.

What they found is illuminating, to put it mildly.

After the year 1850, the use of sentiment-laden words in Google Books declined systematically, while the use of words associated with fact-based argumentation rose steadily. This pattern reversed in the 1980s, and this change accelerated around 2007, when across languages, the frequency of fact-related words dropped while emotion-laden language surged, a trend paralleled by a shift from collectivistic to individualistic language.

The researchers concluded that this “surge of post-truth political argumentation” is evidence that we are living at a time when the balance between emotion and reasoning has shifted.

To explore if this is indeed the case, we analyze language in millions of books covering the period from 1850 to 2019 represented in Google nGram data. We show that the use of words associated with rationality, such as “determine” and “conclusion,” rose systematically after 1850, while words related to human experience such as “feel” and “believe” declined. This pattern reversed over the past decades, paralleled by a shift from a collectivistic to an individualistic focus as reflected, among other things, by the ratio of singular to plural pronouns such as “I”/”we” and “he”/”they.”

The reversal occurred in both fiction and nonfiction. It wasn’t limited to books, either– they found a similar shift in media (like New York Times articles). The results of the research “suggest that over the past decades, there has been a marked shift in public interest from the collective to the individual, and from rationality toward emotion.”

The bulk of the article is a description of the methodology employed, the care taken to avoid “cherry picking” of data, and a variety of theories about the reason for the language shift. (There is definitely a “chicken and egg” aspect to the shift: did disillusionment with science and evidence drive a language shift? Or did something else prompt the change in language and thus promote an anti-science mood in the general public?)

The researchers concluded with a section they captioned “Outlook.”

It seems unlikely that we will ever be able to accurately quantify the role of different mechanisms driving language change. However, the universal and robust shift that we observe does suggest a historical rearrangement of the balance between collectivism and individualism and—inextricably linked—between the rational and the emotional or framed otherwise. As the market for books, the content of the New York Times, and Google search queries must somehow reflect interest of the public, it seems plausible that the change we find is indeed linked to a change in interest, but does this indeed correspond to a profound change in attitudes and thinking? Clearly, the surge of post-truth discourse does suggest such a shift, and our results are consistent with the interpretation that the post-truth phenomenon is linked to a historical seesaw in the balance between our two fundamental modes of thinking. If true, it may well be impossible to reverse the sea change we signal. Instead, societies may need to find a new balance, explicitly recognizing the importance of intuition and emotion, while at the same time making best use of the much needed power of rationality and science to deal with topics in their full complexity. Striking this balance right is urgent as rational, fact-based approaches may well be essential for maintaining functional democracies and addressing global challenges such as global warming, poverty, and the loss of nature.

This study is fascinating, albeit depressing.

I’ve previously suggested that our current era will be labeled (assuming there are humans and historians left to do the labeling) “the age of Unreason.” The language we use matters far more than we generally recognize; it both reflects and produces our biases.

And right now, those biases evidently elevate emotion over reason and logic. Which explains a lot….

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