Random Blogging – Page 98

A Faustian Bargain

There are currently three categories of Republican elected officials: the incredibly stupid (QAnon believers, pandemic and climate change deniers, the “representatives” who make you wonder who in the world voted for them); the not-stupid-but-willing-to-pander; and a very few willing to publicly oppose both. (And when I say “very few,” I mean one or two at most.)

Of course, there are also the “Never Trumpers” who are mostly former lawmakers or former campaign strategists, but for purposes of this analysis, I’m only categorizing those currently holding public office.

Senator Josh Hawley falls into the second category. He is someone willing to pursue goals by taking positions that he knows to be ridiculous and unlikely to succeed in order to ingratiate himself with the rabid, uneducated GOP base.

Of course, he isn’t the only one. The execrable Ted Cruz and ten other Senate Republicans–including Indiana’s dim, embarrassing Senator Mike Braun– also plan to protest the non-existent “voter fraud” that led to Trump’s loss. Like Hawley, Cruz clearly knows better. The two of them are already competing for the 2024 GOP nomination, which will largely be delivered by the party’s ignorant Trumpian base.

It’s the very definition of a Faustian bargain– an action or agreement in which a person sells his soul, abandoning his spiritual values, moral principles and presumed afterlife in heaven, in order to reap a benefit in the here and now. Another way to put it is to make a deal with the devil.

Peter Wehner called Hawley out in a New Year’s Eve article in The Atlantic. Wehner suggests that Hawley’s planned objection to the Electoral College vote is evidence of what he calls “the enduring power of Trumpian unreality.”

Hawley knows this effort will fail, just as every other effort to undo the results of the lawful presidential election will fail. (A brief reminder for those with faulty short-term memories: Joe Biden defeated Trump by more than 7 million popular votes and 74 Electoral College votes.) Every single attempt to prove that the election was marked by fraud or that President-elect Biden’s win is illegitimate—an effort that now includes about 60 lawsuits—has flopped. In fact, what we’ve discovered since the November 3 election is that it was “the most secure in American history,” as election experts in Trump’s own administration have declared. But this immutable, eminently provable fact doesn’t deter Trump and many of his allies from trying to overturn the election; perversely, it seems to embolden them.

One such Trump ally is Tommy Tuberville, the newly elected senator from Alabama, who has suggested that he might challenge the Electoral College count. And there are others. But what makes Hawley’s declaration ominously noteworthy is that unlike Tuberville—a former college football coach who owes his political career in a deep-red state to Trump’s endorsement in the GOP primary against Jeff Sessions—Hawley is a man who clearly knows better. According to his Senate biography, he is “recognized as one of the nation’s leading constitutional lawyers.” A former state attorney general, Hawley has litigated before the Supreme Court. He graduated from Stanford University in 2002 and Yale Law School in 2006. He has clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts; he taught at one of London’s elite private schools, St. Paul’s; and he served as an appellate litigator at one of the world’s biggest law firms.

Wehner accurately calls Hawley’s planned action unpatriotic “civic vandalism.”

He quotes an acquaintance of Senator Hawley for confirmation of his assertion that Hawley is perfectly aware that the election wasn’t “rigged” or otherwise illegitimate, and that the legal arguments he his parroting are ridiculous. Nevertheless, he has calculated that he will benefit politically from the lie, from the pretense. He has made his deal with the devil and has dispensed with any shred of integrity he may once have had.

As Wehner says, this is obviously a very bad sign about the direction of the GOP in the coming years.

What is happening in the GOP is that figures such as Hawley, along with many of his Senate and House colleagues, and important Republican players, including the former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, are all trying to position themselves as the heirs of Trump. None of them possesses the same sociopathic qualities as Trump, and their efforts will be less impulsive and presumably less clownish, more calculated and probably less conspiracy-minded. It may be that not all of them support Hawley’s stunt; perhaps some are even embarrassed by it. But these figures are seismographers; they are determined to act in ways that win the approval of the Republican Party’s base. And this goes to the heart of the danger.

Quite right. The current Republican base is racist, ignorant and terrified of modernity. (It is also uncomfortably large.) A willingness to pander to that base isn’t simply a Faustian bargain–it’s an overwhelming threat to America’s future.

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Repudiating Reality

Speaking of misinformation…

Can America be “built back better” in the (much-anticipated) wake of the Trump Administration? Or did the disasters of the last four years simply make the fact of the country’s decline over a much longer period impossible to ignore?

I don’t claim to know the answer to that question. (I’m actually not sure I want to know the answer.) But we are absolutely awash in blogs, books and essays on the subject. One of those explorations was in the Guardian, a couple of weeks after the election, in a book review titled “Can American Democracy Survive Donald Trump?” It began by setting out the core problem we face:

I WON THE ELECTION!” Donald Trump tweeted in the early hours of 16 November 2020, 10 days after he lost the election. At the same time, Atlantic magazine announced an interview with Barack Obama, in which he warns that the US is “entering into an epistemological crisis” – a crisis of knowing. “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false,” Obama explains, “by definition our democracy doesn’t work.” I saw the two assertions juxtaposed on Twitter as I was finishing writing this essay, and together they demonstrate its proposition: that American democracy is facing not merely a crisis in trust, but in knowledge itself, largely because language has become increasingly untethered from reality, as we find ourselves in a swirling maelstrom of lies, disinformation, paranoia and conspiracy theories.

The author points out that lying, paranoia and conspiracy have long been seen as the defining features of totalitarian societies, and that the prevalence of those behaviors in contemporary America is increasingly being cited as evidence that we are becoming such a society.

As Federico Finchelstein maintained in his recent A Brief History of Fascist Lies: “As facts are presented as ‘fake news’ and ideas originating among those who deny the facts become government policy, we must remember that current talk about ‘post-truth’ has a political and intellectual lineage: the history of fascist lying.” Both George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, two of history’s most acute observers of totalitarianism, situated lying squarely at the heart of the totalitarian project.

With less than three weeks until President Biden is sworn in, America’s current president is still refusing to concede, still insisting that the results of an election that was found by international observers and state election officials alike as “transparently fair” was somehow rigged. Worse still, much of what passes for Republican leadership these days is passively or actively encouraging that belief.

An acknowledgement of the legitimacy of one’s political opponents is absolutely necessary for democracy to function. Increasingly, the GOP is refusing to admit to the legitimacy of either the Democratic Party or electoral outcomes unfavorable to the party.

As the New York Times reported last year: “At Christian nationalist gatherings and strategy meetings, the Democratic party and its supporters are routinely described as ‘demonic’ and associated with ‘rulers of the darkness’.” Republicans no longer oppose Democrats politically: they are opposing them existentially.

At the end of the day, American citizens are faced with a different–and far more significant– existential decision: what is true and what is not?

If Trump is symptomatic of America’s diseases of power, then his compulsive dishonesty might be the most revealing pathology of all. The US is a chronically untruthful country, deceit written into its very framework. The constitution contains explicit protections of slavery but never uses the word “slavery”, a deeply mendacious deception that eventually became a collective self-deception. The declaration “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” was written by a man who enslaved men he did not consider his equal, and became the foundation of a country that incessantly declared its belief in truth and justice while enslaving and oppressing much of its population.

Like many Americans, I have spent four years struggling against a pathological liar in the White House, only to realise, belatedly, that American culture fetishises the truth for a reason. “We hold these truths”, “truth, justice, and the American way”, the fable of the boy George Washington insisting he cannot tell a lie, “Honest Abe” Lincoln: this is a society protesting too much. American history is riddled with lies: that we talk about truth so much is just a tell.

In order to tell truth from falsehood, however, citizens need at the very least a baseline of accurate information about their government and the philosophy that animates it–something approximately 70 million of us evidently lack.

Unless we can somehow rescue fact from fiction, American democracy is unlikely to survive.

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Happy New Year (Maybe?? Finally??)

No one I know is sorry to see 2020 depart. I’m certainly not!

I want to wish all of you who visit here–those who comment and those who “lurk”–a much, much better 2021! We will soon have a sane occupant in the Oval Office, and a government managed by people who actually understand what a government is and how it is supposed to function.

Thanks to that new administration, those of us wanting protection against COVID-19 should have access to a vaccine by late spring–meaning we will once again be able to hug our family members, meet and mingle with our friends, and resume at least a semblance of our former activities.

Tonight–probably not at midnight, as I rarely stay up that late anymore!–I will raise a glass and wish you all a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year. A year very different from the year we are completing.

See you tomorrow for my usual rant…..

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The Fermi Paradox

Ours is a science-fiction family.

That fandom probably explains our fascination with the possibility of extra-terrestrial life, and conversations in which we exchange theories about why no representative of other civilizations has ever contacted us. (I continue to assume that reports of alien abductions and Roswell conspiracies are evidence of something other than intergalactic visitations.)

Which brings me to an article my middle son recently shared about the “Fermi paradox.”

The article begins with the math. Using the most conservative estimates, there are 500 quintillion, or 500 billion billion sun-like stars, a 100 billion billion earth-like planets, and 10 million billion potentially intelligent civilizations in the observable universe. If we limit the calculations to our own galaxy, and use the lowest estimate for stars in the Milky Way (100 billion), that would come to 1 billion Earth-like planets and 100,000 potentially intelligent civilizations in our galaxy. (The bases for these estimates is in the article.)

So: why hasn’t anyone called? Written? Why hasn’t SETI picked up any signs of such civilizations?

Welcome to the Fermi Paradox…

In taking a look at some of the most-discussed possible explanations for the Fermi Paradox, let’s divide them into two broad categories—those explanations which assume that there’s no sign of Type II and Type III Civilizations because there are none of them out there, and those which assume they’re out there and we’re not seeing or hearing anything for other reasons.

For his part, my son is convinced that civilizations get to a certain point in their development and destroy themselves–that technological innovation outstrips social progress/maturation, and they self-destruct. (As he notes, perhaps they are unable to combat climate change in time)… In the Fermi Paradox, this theory is called The Great Filter.

The Great Filter theory says that at some point from pre-life to Type III intelligence, there’s a wall that all or nearly all attempts at life hit. There’s some stage in that long evolutionary process that is extremely unlikely or impossible for life to get beyond.

There are more comforting theories.

Super-intelligent life might have already visited Earth before we were here. Sentient humans have only been around for about 50,000 years (assuming we can consider humanity sentient–see Wednesday’s post)…Or we might live in the galactic equivalent of “the sticks”–some out-of-the way part of the galaxy. Perhaps civilizations that endure lose interest in exploration. Or on the other hand, maybe there’s only one such civilization, and it’s a “superpredator” (the Borg??) devoid of what we would consider ethics, that exterminates (or assimilates) other intelligent civilizations once they get past a certain level.

Or maybe there’s plenty of activity and noise out there, but our technology is too primitive to hear it, or because we’re listening for the wrong things.

Like walking into a modern-day office building, turning on a walkie-talkie, and when you hear no activity (which of course you wouldn’t hear because everyone’s texting, not using walkie-talkies), determining that the building must be empty. Or maybe, as Carl Sagan has pointed out, it could be that our minds work exponentially faster or slower than another form of intelligence out there—e.g. it takes them 12 years to say “Hello,” and when we hear that communication, it just sounds like white noise to us.

Of course, it’s also possible that super-intelligent civilizations have created a tightly-regulated galaxy–sort of like Star Trek’s Federation– in which Earth has been labeled a “no go” zone because we’re part of a strict “Look but don’t touch” rule applicable to still-uncivilized planets.

As the author of this explanatory piece notes in his conclusion,

Beyond its shocking science fiction component, The Fermi Paradox also leaves me with a deep humbling. Not just the normal “Oh yeah, I’m microscopic and my existence lasts for three seconds” humbling that the universe always triggers. The Fermi Paradox brings out a sharper, more personal humbling, one that can only happen after spending hours of research hearing your species’ most renowned scientists present insane theories, change their minds again and again, and wildly contradict each other—reminding us that future generations will look at us the same way we see the ancient people who were sure that the stars were the underside of the dome of heaven, and they’ll think “Wow they really had no idea what was going on.”

Hard to say.

I’m just hoping my son’s theory is wrong–and if it’s right, that we don’t hit the Great Filter for a while…

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This Is Your Brain On Grievance

Most of the people I consider “normal”–assuming there is such a thing–view America’s current dysfunctions with incomprehension. A phrase I hear more and more frequently from all sides of the political aisle is “what on earth is wrong with those people?”

Two articles from Politico suggest an answer.

The first is a collection of “explanations of the election” by twenty voters who display the various attitudes we’ve come to expect from an assortment of geographically and philosophically diverse Americans. (Hint: It’s the other guy’s fault…)

The second was a really fascinating article by James Kimmel, Jr., a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, and a co-director of the Yale Collaborative for Motive Control Studies. Evidently, people can become addicted to grievance in much the same way they can be addicted to drugs.

And as the collected opinions of those twenty Americans demonstrates, there’s a lot of grievance around.

Kimmel’s studies show that a brain on grievance looks a lot like a brain on drugs.

In fact, brain imaging studies show that harboring a grievance (a perceived wrong or injustice, real or imagined) activates the same neural reward circuitry as narcotics

This isn’t a metaphor; it’s brain biology. Scientists have found that in substance addiction, environmental cues such as being in a place where drugs are taken or meeting another person who takes drugs cause sharp surges of dopamine in crucial reward and habit regions of the brain, specifically, the nucleus accumbens and dorsal striatum. This triggers cravings in anticipation of experiencing pleasure and relief through intoxication. Recent studies show that similarly, cues such as experiencing or being reminded of a perceived wrong or injustice — a grievance — activate these same reward and habit regions of the brain, triggering cravings in anticipation of experiencing pleasure and relief through retaliation. To be clear, the retaliation doesn’t need to be physically violent—an unkind word, or tweet, can also be very gratifying.

Evidently, people can become addicted to seeking retribution against those they consider their enemies. Kimmel has a name for it: revenge addiction, and he suggests this may explain why some people just can’t “get over it” long after others feel they should have moved on. (He also warns that some of those people may resort to violence.)

The hallmark of addiction is compulsive behavior despite harmful consequences. Trump’s unrelenting efforts to retaliate against those he believes have treated him unjustly (including, now, American voters) appear to be compulsive and uncontrollable.

Unfortunately, this addiction to revenge doesn’t only affect Trump.

Like substance addiction, revenge addiction appears to spread from person to person. For instance, inner-city gun violence spreads in neighborhoods like a social contagion, with one person’s grievances infecting others with a desire to seek vengeance. Because of his unique position and use of the media and social networks, Trump is able to spread his grievances to thousands or millions of others through Twitter, TV and rallies. His demand for retribution becomes their demand, causing his supporters to crave retaliation—and, in a vicious cycle, this in turn causes Trump’s targets and their supporters to feel aggrieved and want to retaliate, too.

If a revenge addiction is as contagious as Kimmel believes, what can we do about it? Kimmel warns that addiction interventions are risky and that they often backfire.

Unfortunately, Kimmel doesn’t have any quick fixes to offer; he says we’re in for a long haul. Worse, neither Trump nor those he’s “infected” are likely to heal until we (and he) realize how the politics of grievance is damaging us.

Several commenters to this blog–not to mention pundits and academics, among others– have worried about the weaponizing of grievance by political parties and interest groups who recognize that playing on our fears and anger generates donations and motivates voters. Similarly, media outlets and social networks use grievance to attract clicks and increase sales. In a very real sense, they’ve become dealers.

We need to turn down the heat.

I still remember those old (ineffective) anti-drug TV ads that showed a hand breaking an egg into a hot frying pan, and a voice-over intoning: This is your brain on drugs!

Can we avoid frying that egg by turning off the burner beneath it? As Trump departs, can we “turn off” some of the incivility and nastiness he promoted–the rhetoric that generates grievance?

Maybe “political correctness” isn’t such a bad thing….

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