Survival, Revelations, Falling Standards

Posted on Tuesday 4 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Samuel McKee on how our brains are wired to survive, not to find truth;
  • Adam Gopnik from 2012 about an Elaine Pagels book on Revelations;
  • Jonathan Chait on how falling standards of behavior in Washington;
  • Brief items about tariffs on people moving to Texas, and a bailout to coal plants.
– – –

This piece isn’t news, but it is something core to my own understanding and themes, and something which I suspect is not widely understood.

IAI.tv (Institute of Art and Ideas), Samuel McKee, 4 Nov 2025: Our brains evolved to survive, not to find truth, subtitled “We are social animals, not truth-seeking ones”

Intro:

We like to believe that reason is our pathway to truth. Yet from Popper’s demand for falsifiability to Darwin’s doubt about the mind’s origins, a more unsettling picture is emerging. Our brains were shaped not to perceive reality, but to survive within it. Evolution has optimized us for social cohesion rather than accuracy, leaving false beliefs not as evolutionary errors but as features of our survival. In an age that prizes truth, philosopher of science Samuel McKee argues that our greatest obstacle may be the very mind that seeks it.

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Jonathan Haidt, THE HAPPINESS HYPOTHESIS, post 1

Posted on Tuesday 4 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom”
With second subtitle “Why the Meaningful Life is Closer than You Think”

(Basic Books, 2006, xiii + 297pp, including 54pp acknowledgements, notes, references, and index. Hardcover with no dust jacket.)

Here is a fascinating book that I didn’t get around to reading until the writer published later books, especially THE RIGHTEOUS MIND (review begins here), that I read first. This one seemed intriguing when I bought it in 2007, despite the whiff of self-helpiness about it, for presuming to compare “ancient wisdom” with modern-day scientific findings. This is exactly one of my core themes, even if in the guise of the discussion of base human nature with more modern enlightenment thinking. In fact, it’s almost exactly analogous to the theme of my book, which compares the assumptions by science fiction writers of how the world might be with the discoveries by actual science of how the world actually is.

So this book focuses on 10 great ideas, as discovered by the world’s civilizations, and then considers them in light of current scientific research. But they’re not just any 10 great ideas; they’re ideas, as the second subtitle says, about how to live, and how to be happy.

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Troubled Children, Cognitive Collapse, Cave Man Morality

Posted on Monday 3 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Paul Krugman about how Trump has ceded the future to China;
  • Tom Nichols on how the Trump administration resembles a bunch of toddlers, and what Americans who care about democracy should do.
  • Salon’s Sophia A. McClennen on how the Trump administration is leading to Americans’ cognitive collapse;
  • Short items about Christian hypocrisy, Trump’s 60 Minutes lies, Musk’s mispronunciations, cave man morality, and Trump’s investing in the past.
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Paul Krugman, 3 Nov 2025: We’re Number Two!, subtitled “How Trump ceded the future to China”

Does Donald Trump realize that he has ceded world leadership to China? Probably not: During his recent Asian trip, foreign leaders flattered him and showered him with personal gifts, so he came home with his ego even more inflated than usual. Nobody close to him would dare tell him that if you look at the substance of what he agreed to, it amounted to an ignominious retreat. When Chuck Schumer pointed out the reality of what Trump didn’t accomplish, his reaction was hysterical:

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Politics is more about tribal human nature than about solving problems

Posted on Monday 3 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • David French on why Trump gets away with everything;
  • Ezra Klein on how to beat Trumpism: something about Democrats not being so judgmental;
  • Short items about Norman Rockwell, Nigeria and Christians, the welfare queen stereotype, how faith-base bigotry is just fine in Texas; and Noem’s lie about arrests of American citizens.
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Everything we think we know about the world, the universe, about reality, is necessarily filtered through the perceptual limitations of the human body and the biases of human nature. As fish with water, there are some things we simply can’t see. And the things we do see are interpreted through protocols that evolved to promote human survival, not for accurate perception of reality.

All the political stories I mention here are of interest because they reveal, implicitly, these filters. All interactions among humans, politics broadly, come not so much from different takes on reality (though they’re a good part of it), let alone good vs evil (a simpleton’s take on reality), but from different goals, which ultimately boil down to my tribe vs your tribe. And the rules we establish, or ignore, about how to deal with each other. Those rules amount to different types of governments.

NY Times, opinion column by David French, 2 Nov 2025: Why Trump Can Do No Wrong

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Narrative Closure in A House of Dynamite

Posted on Saturday 1 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • And David Brin on the persistent idiocies of the UFO cultists
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We watched the new film about a potential nuclear war, A House of Dynamite, last Sunday on Netflix, and then I watched it again on Netflix Monday evening (while Y was on the phone with work). It’s a taut, well-made film about a contemporary missile crisis, roughly analogous to the situation in Fail Safe (book and film reviewed here), in which a foreign missile is detected heading for the US, origin unknown, intent unknown — is it real? An accident? More to the point — as in Fail Safe — if it really is a nuclear bomb and it detonates over its target, Chicago, what does the president do? All sorts of potential response strategies are alluded to, just as they were discussed in Fail Safe.

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Democratic Erosion, SNAP, and God-Sized Holes

Posted on Friday 31 October 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • A NYT Scale of markers of democratic erosion;
  • Heather Cox Richardson’s even-handed assessment of the SNAP crisis;
  • Jerry Coyne dismantles Arthur C. Brooks’ arguments for not dismissing the idea of God;
  • (And my take on how the common conceptions of God betray a several lack of imagination, even a conceptual limit to human cognition);
  • Short takes on the SNAP program, how ticket sales at the Kennedy Center have plummeted, and the newly MAGA CBS News has fired its climate change team;
  • Even shorter takes from the fringe.
– – –

Two days ago I noted an essay that described five ways you can tell when America has become a dictatorship.

Today comes an analogous, much more elaborate piece at NYT, designed to be scrolled through, listing 12 “markers of democratic erosion,” with scales showing how far along we are along each one, moving away from democracy.

NY Times, Editorial Board, 31 Oct 2025: Are We Losing Our Democracy?

Countries that slide from democracy toward autocracy tend to follow similar patterns. To measure what is happening in the United States, the Times editorial board has compiled a list of 12 markers of democratic erosion, with help from scholars who have studied this phenomenon. The sobering reality is that the United States has regressed, to different degrees, on all 12.

Our country is still not close to being a true autocracy, in the mold of Russia or China. But once countries begin taking steps away from democracy, the march often continues. We offer these 12 markers as a warning of how much Americans have already lost and how much more we still could lose.

I’ll screen-capture the first.

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Posted in Conservative Resistance, Religion | Comments Off on Democratic Erosion, SNAP, and God-Sized Holes

Notes from the Reality-Based Community

Posted on Friday 31 October 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Hemant Mehta on a new wave of atheist content creators;
  • Scientific “groupthink” is a myth, an effect of how our fundamental theories are extremely successful;
  • Richard Dawkins can’t understand how Tom Holland and his readers believe ancient legends and myths are literally true;
  • (My comment: especially when they don’t trust modern media to get yesterday’s news right);
  • Short items about Reagan, Grokipedia, living on military bases, nuclear weapons, those Aryan posters, predator pastors, and Trump’s agenda.
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Let’s give Hemant Mehta his due when he says his post today is an important one. (Why? Because he’s trying to be positive, instead of relentlessly negative in reporting about the religious shenanigans going on every day in the world.)

Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 30 Oct 2025: How the American Humanist Association is empowering a new wave of atheist content creators, subtitled “A quiet experiment could redefine how secular voices reach millions online and revive a movement that’s lost momentum”

A few months ago, I was given the Humanist Media Award from the American Humanist Association. Rather than speak directly about my own work, I used my time to highlight a growing concern I’ve had about the broader atheism movement.

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Sam Harris: THE MORAL LANDSCAPE

Posted on Thursday 30 October 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “How Science Can Determine Human Values”
(Free Press, Oct. 2010, 291pp, including 100pp of acknowledgements, notes, references, and index)

Sam Harris came to fame in the years after 9/11 for writing a critique of religion called THE END OF FAITH. He, along with writers of later books, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, became known as the “four horsemen” of the “new atheists”. I reread that book a few years ago and reviewed it here. The present book followed in 2010, and I read it the first time in 2014 and quoted from it a bit in this post. Then I reread this book about three years ago and took detailed notes, which I’m now summarizing here.

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Gist: Harris is challenging the nostrum that science can tell us about the world but not about how to behave: that is, science can have nothing to say about morality. Yes it can, he claims, essentially by applying a utilitarian policy upon the world: design society to maximize the happiness, or well-being, of as many people possible. Further, what science can say avoids the trap of inconsistent religions making contradictory, and incorrect, claims about the nature of reality

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Useful Categories

Posted on Wednesday 29 October 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Five ideas to tell when America has become a dictatorship;
  • A Jesus and Mo cartoon that reflects my discussions of secular awe and religion;
  • Phil Zuckerman on how social justice is secular;
  • Short items about worries of American’s impending population collapse, national emergencies and election fraud, the firing of the commission on design, how Musk’s project is cribbing from Wikipedia, and yet another example of conservative bigotry and nonsense.
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Slate, Herb Bowman, 29 Oct 2025: How Will You Know That America Has Become a Dictatorship? After 20 Years Living in One, I Can Tell You.
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Moral Rot

Posted on Tuesday 28 October 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Paul Krugman on food stamps/SNAP; the common conservative belief that recipients are malingerers; and some facts about who actually gets those benefits;
  • The Labor Department’s white supremacist posters;
  • Short items;
  • Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld on Trump’s disrespect, and how he’s wrong in the head.
– – –

Paul Krugman, 28 Oct 2025: The Hunger Games Begin, subtitled “40 million Americans are about to lose food stamps”

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