Call Me a Sewer Rat, Then

It is hard not to agree with the Bill O'Reillys and Glenn Becks of the world when they say things that amount to "Our country is going to hell in a handbasket."

We've known that for a long time. It might be the only sentence in American English about which there is a consensus. Kurt Vonnegut put his finger on this in an article about the 1972 Republican National Convention*.

During the Nixon and Johnson years, or the Nam years, tons of kids, youngsters of all walks of life, staged hundreds of protests against the war. Each of them came home learning the same bitter lesson: our government just isn't interested in our opinion anymore.

That was, I think, when we all should have thrown our hands up. Which reminds me, now, of the 2008 presidential campaign. Obama ran, and won, on the word "Hope". Hope sells. Sex, like hope, sells. Unlike hope, sex is something we can have.

Our country is going to hell in a handbasket.

It's not hard to agree with Beck and O'Reilly about that. It is hard to agree with them about why our country is headed there. They think we're headed there because our disenfranchised few are trying to stake out some part of the American Dream for themselves. They aren't so up front about that. They try and push the idea that "equal under the law" is a property of socialism or communism, which is true. It is true in the same way that "having a tail" is a property of sewer rats.

According to FOX logic, a horse is trying to be a sewer rat because a horse has a tail.

That's the logic. People buy it. And so, our country is going to hell in a handbasket.

*"In a Manner that Must Shame God Himself", in Wampeters, Foma, & Granfalloons

A Revolution of Thought

I have decided, after much thought, to write a book. The purpose of this book is to advocate a revolution of thought. I think this sort of a revolution is what we need desperately in our world (not just our country), and so, I have decided to advocate strongly for it.

Let me start, I guess, by saying what a revolution need not be. The American Revolution was an example of what a revolution need not be. A group of rebels, who we now oxymoronically call “patriots”, fought against their government and gained their independence from it. The sort of revolution I am challenging you to take part in is not that sort of revolution.

Instead, the sort of revolution I am challenging you to take part in is much more akin to what Thomas Kuhn calls a “Scientific Revolution”. A large upswing and re-valuation of things.

As I hope to make clear, we are in desperate need of just such a revolution. A revolution of thought.

In the early part of the 20^th century, there was a revolution of physics. It began simply in 1905 with Swiss patent clerk publishing some thoughts he had about what makes the universe tick away. This launched, of course, the Theory of Relativity. At one time, you might be considered a genius if you read this theory and understood what it was all about.

Within thirty years, Relativity found itself in combat with Quantum Mechanics. The history of physics ever since has been one attempt to reconcile these two theories after another. What is important, what makes this so revolutionary was that Einstein’s thoughts, in large measure, junked the physical theory that had preceded: Newtonian Mechanics.

Suddenly, Newtonian mechanics was only so good. It will still suffice if you plan to build a bridge, but will not suffice if you want to talk about space-time, gravity, stars, and the like. It will also not suffice if you want to talk about the behavior of electrons, neutrons, gluons, and the like.

In short, a good revolution takes the old with it, even though the old may seem less useful.

You might ask, then, what sort of thing is the “old” if our revolution is to be a revolution of thought. You might guess things like faith. That is on the table, certainly, but hardly captures the thought-less-ness of our day. Faith, like Newtonian mechanics, we will keep. For those of you who may be expecting a Hitchens-esque story of how faith is ruining our world and the antidote is reason, I am sorry to disappoint you. The moral of this story is not that faith is ruining our world. The moral of this story is that a lack of thought is ruining our world. To save it, we must think, but to think, we do not need to abandon faith. If faith is what you have, it no doubt serves a psychologically necessary function in your life.

Many of things I think we should be wary of are also things that serve psychologically necessary functions in our lives. The danger they represent is not intrinsic to them, but is rather found in their use. And the way in which they are used threatens us in ways that are not at all apparent.

I talked about this some last time. The antidote is not to abandon those things we have which are psychologically necessary: faith, distraction, &c. The antidote, I think, is to revalue our thinkers, and to create an environment where thinkers are free to do the work we desperately need them to do. We need to promote rational inquiry rather than dollar accumulation. Or perhaps a better way of saying it is that we need to promote rational inquiry as well as the other things we already promote. The survival of our society, in a few short decades, is going to depend on an environment of rationality emerging now.

So, I'm going to write a book about it. Perhaps, I will even post its contents here. Stay tuned.

Time to Cook

My friend Josh Jones has recently written something similar to this. I don't want to detract from his point, but rather support something along the lines of the point he is making:

We have a problem. Even as I am typing this up, I am guilty of participating in that problem. Here it is: we overvalue our entertainment. We are far too invested in giving ourselves thrills. I started on this topic a few years ago. Here's the anecdote in a nutshell:

Me and a friend at my previous job were quoting lines from Caddyshack for yuks one day in the break room. He said, "Comedy is what makes the world go round." I responded, "No, comedy is what makes us forget that the world goes round."

He has since told me that he still quotes that line to people. Again, in the novel I've been working on (which, as a working title is now called "Outhouse Rat"), the main character, like me, was enrolled in an accelerated learning program as an elementary school student. He was branded a nerd and subsequently outcast.

It is more socially acceptable, the story goes, to be LD than LA.

Our problem is that we are so invested in our sources of entertainment, and so underinvested in the sorts of enquiry that we need to be taking much more seriously, that we are running an enormous risk.

Think about how much the sum of all the salaries of Major League Baseball players for one season is. It is absurd. Now consider a recent PEW Poll that found, among other things, that less than 25% (of American respondents) know who the Prime Minister of the UK is.

You often hear about people who work on alternative fuel sources for automobiles. The catch, they say, isn't getting the cars to work, but on having the infrastructure to make it economically viable to sell them. Well, all right, then why aren't we building the infrastructure that we desperately need?

People are far too invested in watching talking kittens on YouTube, is the answer.

We aren't just "dumbing down", we are cramming our lives with willful apathy. Furthermore, because we can't be bothered to invest ourselves in knowing more or thinking more, we are basing our vital decisions on less evidence and worse arguments. We are grounding ourselves in our emotional responses to things, rather than on rational argument or evidence. This means that we are more inclined to accept materially false claims, and more inclined to base our decisions on misinformation. When we base our decisions on misinformation we are more likely to make mistakes. And, obviously the bigger the decision, the more deadly the mistake can be.

Now, this is why: emotions are much more exciting than rational arguments. This is why this is a problem that is nearly impossible to resolve. Its only possibility of resolution has to come from decisions of individuals who decide to think more seriously about the information and claims that are given to them. Which means giving up some Facebook and Twitter time (which I evidently can't do) in favor of digging into the facts and considering what we are being told. But it's worth sacrificing a bit of wasted internet time to do this.

We have bigger fish to fry, and, to continue the metaphor, if we don't start cooking, we're going to be cooked.

"Dark Ominous Clouds on the Horizon"

Yesterday, two different people told me of the foreboding e-mails they received from a certain philosophy professor at Indiana University Southeast. The subject of these e-mails was "Dark Ominous Clouds on the Horizon".

When I was in his class, the e-mail subject line was "Time is Short, and the Water Rises".

I think you get the picture.

Today, while killing time on Reddit, I find an article hinting at the rumor that there is a price on the head of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

I don't know if there really is a price on his head, but it wouldn't surprise me. The fact that there is a rumor going around about it means, minimally, that someone has thought about it.

Here is the dark ominous cloud on our horizon: we live among people who would rather kill to remain in ignorance.

Have a nice day.