- How conservatives distrust science because it does not accommodate “moral and religious values”, thus missing the point of science;
- Mark Lilla on the allure of ignorance;
- Dinesh D’Souza admits 2000 Mules was flawed;
- Heather Cox Richardson on how government institutions were designed to work;
- RIP Hal Lindsey, whose Biblical prophecies failed.
The key to this piece is that the writer is a “senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute,” which is a right-wing think tank.
NY Times, M. Anthony Mill, 27 Nov 2024: The MAGA Science Agenda Reveals America’s Future
The piece dwells on RFK Jr and vaccine-resistance, then identifies historical events that have affected American views on science. This is the passage that struck me.
To be sure, the MAGA approach to science echoes some traditional Republican concerns. Right-wing disdain for intellectual elites is hardly new. Social conservatives have long expressed unease about appeals to scientific authority that ignore moral and religious values.
So… social conservatives think “scientific authority” should be subservient to “moral and religious values”? Sorry, that’s not how science works. You can quibble about whether moral values influence the things that scientists study, but science is ultimately answerable only to reality. Not to the moral and religious values of one species on one tiny planet in a vast universe.
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Similarly.
NY Times, guest essay by Mark Lilla, 2 Dec 2024: The Surprising Allure of Ignorance
I reviewed Lilla’s previous book here, and he has a new one coming out tomorrow: Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know, from which this essay is adapted. I won’t summarize, just sample.
Increasing numbers of people today reject reasoning as a fool’s game that only cloaks the machinations of power. Others think instead that they have a special access to truth that exempts them from questioning, like a draft deferment. Mesmerized crowds follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumors trigger fanatical acts and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise. And to top it off we have elite prophets of ignorance, those learned despisers of learning who idealize “the people” and encourage them to resist doubt and build ramparts around their fixed beliefs.
It’s always been true that people prefer the stories of their religion and their nation over brute reality and relatively objective history.
Why does this happen? Because seeking and having knowledge is not just a cognitive pursuit; it is also an emotional experience. The desire to know is exactly that, a desire. And whenever our desires are satisfied or thwarted, our feelings are engaged.
Given how rapidly everything changes in life today, doesn’t it often feel better to rest on our intellectual and moral laurels? Why seek truth if truth will require us to do the hard work of rethinking what we already know? Just as we can develop a love of truth that stirs us within, so, too, we can develop a hatred of truth that fills us with a passionate sense of purpose. There can be a clash of emotions, with the desire to defend our ignorance standing as a powerful adversary to the desire to escape it.
Once again, as in so much else, motivations are psychological; people are not rational, nor do they particularly care about what is actually true, in the sense of real. We are all subject to this inner conflict. Lilla concludes:
So as we shake our heads at those charmed by charlatans and demagogues, let us not exempt ourselves. We all want to know — and want not to know. We accept truth, we resist truth. Back and forth the mind shuttles, playing badminton with itself. But it doesn’t feel like a game. It feels as if our lives are at stake. And they are.
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This reminds me of one of the iterations of the TV show Cosmos, from about ten years ago, in which Neil deGrasse Tyson concluded the final episode with a soliloquy that repeated the refrain I want to know! Here’s a section, from this post, emphasis added.
Learning the age of the earth or the distance to the stars, or how life evolves—what difference does that make?
Part of it depends on how big a universe you’re willing to live in. Some of us like it small. That’s fine. Understandable.
But I like it big. And when I take all of this into my heart and my mind, I’m uplifted by it. And when I have that feeling, I want to know that it’s real, that it’s not just something happening inside my own head, because it matters what’s true, and our imagination is nothing compared with Nature’s awesome reality.
I want to know what’s in those dark places. And what happened before the big bang. I want to know what lies beyond the cosmic horizon, and how life began. Are there other places in the cosmos where matter and energy have become alive … and aware?
I want to know my ancestors—all of them. I want to be a good, strong link in the chain of generations. I want to protect my children, and the children of ages to come.
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Shorter items.
Of course that 2000 Mules film was nonsense. Director Dinesh D’Souza finally admits it.
NY Times, Nick Corasaniti and Ken Bensinger, 2 Dec 2024: Director of ‘2000 Mules’ Acknowledges the Conspiratorial Film Was Flawed, subtitled “The director, Dinesh D’Souza, who is facing a lawsuit over the documentary, admitted that an analysis used to make claims about election fraud that were later debunked had been faulty.”
An underlying key point: conspiracy-mongers like D’Souza are never simply victims of flawed analyses; their claims are always about *what they fervently want to believe is true* and whatever analyses they have are twisted toward those conclusions. Pure motivated reasoning, and the opposite of honest science. That was apparent when this film came out, and that’s why it was obviously nonsense.
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Another matter-of-fact observation from historian Heather Cox Richardson.
Letters from an American, December 1, 2024
Over the holiday weekend, President-elect Trump continued to name the people he wants in his incoming administration. His picks seem designed to destroy the institutions of the democratic American state and replace those institutions with an authoritarian government whose officials are all loyal to Trump.
With words about how government institutions were designed to work.
It is precisely that stability of the American state that MAGA leaders want to destroy. In their view, the modern American state has weakened the nation by trying to enforce equality for all Americans, making women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and racial, ethnic, and religious minorities equal to white, Christian men. But they have been unable to persuade voters to vote away the institutions that support the modern state.
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Anyone remember Hal Lindsey? A bestselling author in the 1970s. And a failed prophet, as are they all, except by accident.
NY Times, obituary by David Stout, 30 Nov 2024 (though in today’s print paper): Hal Lindsey, Author of ‘The Late Great Planet Earth,’ Dies at 95, subtitled “In that 1970 book and others, he wrote of history and apocalyptic predictions based on biblical interpretations and actual events of the time.”
Hal Lindsey, a onetime Mississippi Delta tugboat captain who became a campus preacher and improbably vaulted to fame and riches by writing that the world would soon end with natural catastrophes and ruinous wars, followed by the return of Jesus Christ, died on Monday at his home. He was 95.
…
Mr. Lindsey took the book world by storm with “The Late Great Planet Earth,” released in 1970 by Zondervan, a small religious publisher in Grand Rapids, Mich. Written with C.C. Carlson (some Lindsey followers said it was ghostwritten by her), the book is a breezy blend of history and apocalyptic predictions based on biblical interpretations and actual events of the time.…
Mr. Lindsey’s doomsday predictions did not come true, and his prophesies of imminent end-of-the-world events seem less credible with each passing day. Yet Mr. Lindsey was indeed a harbinger — of a movement he helped create.
There are people like this in every generation. These days they do podcasts. And still have millions of followers. There are always people who want to believe. And are unaware of all the past prophets whose predictions were false. (Despite the selective interpretations of NT writers who claimed that Jesus fulfilled OT prophecies; see Thomas Paine.)
