Let’s follow up on yesterday’s post here, with a couple more items on the same general topic.
Salon, Mike Lofgren, 4 Nov 2023: Right-wing fake history is making a big comeback — but it never went away, subtitled “We’re a Christian nation! The Civil War wasn’t about slavery! Fighting Hitler was a mistake! The lies run deep”
(Finishing on Sunday a post I began yesterday, Saturday, and am posted in that slot.)
Here’s a longish essay by Damon Linker about conservative “intellectuals” who are trying to justify the takeover of America by Christian Nationalism. On what grounds, I wonder.
NY Times, guest essay by Damon Linker, 4 Nov 2023: Get to Know the Influential Conservative Intellectuals Who Help Explain G.O.P. Extremism
Facebook, post by Farah Mendlesohn
I may or may not have described the ‘hierarchy’ of sciences and how it’s worked out in recent decades. (Harari does this 50,000 foot take on the opening page of Sapiens.) Take the basic sciences, even just those taught in high school, and you come to understand that physics underlies everything. Physics boils everything down to elemental particles and basic forces that (seem to be at least) consistent across the entire observable universe. Knowing physics, you can construct chemistry. You understand how the elementary particles bond together into atoms, heavier and heavier ones, and how the atoms combine into molecules, bigger and bigger ones. You stop speaking in terms of physics and use higher-order formulations, to discuss chemistry. Similarly, chemistry underlies biology, and you can discuss biological constructions in terms of chemistry, or use other sets of higher-order formulations, to discuss biology, and life. At each steps there is an emergence of some sort, in which simpler orders of reality underlie higher orders, and you use different terminology at each level, but ultimately biology boils down to chemistry which boils down to physics. Evolution explains how life (biology) has come to exist in its present form, including human beings, and why such things as history and the arts exist, because evolution is partly about evolution of the human mind, which has become optimized to survival — not (crucial key point) the understanding of physical reality. Thus the arts are obsessed about some topics, and not other theoretical ones.
(This is one of the themes of the essay I placed that will be published in a year or so.)
Further, the understanding of human nature, or human psychology, as it’s evolved for survival, provides a crucial insight. There’s a distinction between what is real (which has been captured and refined by the “constitution of knowledge” over the past 500 years) and what people believe. The latter is the former mediated through evolutionary-driven human nature: psychology. So to realize what people *believe*, the formulation of the above hierarchy turns out to be:
Physics << Chemistry << Biology << Evolution and Human Nature << Psychology << Human Culture and the Humanities (and Politics)
To the point where many people dismiss or deny all the basic science at the left end, if it conflicts with their cultural identities, which have derived in spite of them.
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The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz, 30 Oct 2017: Fantastic Beasts and How to Rank Them, subtitled “The relative plausibility of impossible beings tells you a lot about how the mind works.”
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
—Mark Twain
Here’s an item I saw in this week’s issue of The Week. The link to the article here, alas, won’t work for you unless you’re a subscriber and log in. But you can view the screen capture of the page in question. And I’ll quote the item, below.
The Week, Nov. 3rd issue: Best Columns: The U.S., summary of a column by Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark [which I couldn’t find on its site].
On this Halloween there are Christian forces out there warning against demons, since they apparently believe demons are real. For their definitions of “believe” and “real.” Which are not the same definitions that reality-based people use. My understanding of this distinction has become clarified in recent weeks.
Here is a point I’ve made before: religious people are more persuaded by conspiracy theories than others. Because religious people do not have an anchor in reality. They “believe” things that are not plausible given humanity’s understanding of the real world, built up over recent centuries. They believe in all sorts of outrageous myths, as long as it’s old enough. They are not part of the “reality-based community,” or adhere to Jonathan Rauch’s “Constitution of Knowledge,” either in government, or in science. This article makes this point precisely.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 31 Oct 2023: Mike Johnson’s Satanic panic: How evangelical delusions trained Republicans to love Trump’s lies, subtitled “If you believe Noah’s ark was real and demons come out of the TV, it’s just a small jump to embrace the Big Lie”
Just finished Jonathan Rauch’s 2021 book The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, which argues that the government and science have evolved analogous mechanisms to steadily close in on objective truth, with self-correcting mechanisms, and that modern political forces are at work (as always) to undermine them for their own ends. Will discuss the book in detail soon.
Here’s another example of a force working to undermine objectivity. It’s not even that they’re doing so consciously, necessarily…. it’s that, as Jonathan Haidt has described, humans are instinctive lawyers, working to justify conclusions reached on emotional grounds, or which benefit themselves. As Upton Sinclair (an early 20th-century novelist), or maybe others, said: It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It. There are variations.
Salon, Paul Rosenberg, 29 Oct 2023: Lies, damned lies and “corporate bulls**t”: A consumer’s guide to bad-faith arguments, subtitled “Co-author Donald Cohen on the research into generations of false claims that led to ‘Corporate Bulls**t'”
The news this late October is that I’ve had an 11,000 word essay, the one I’ve been working on since June, accepted by Gary Westfahl for publication in a volume of essays to be published in a year or so by McFarland, provisionally titled A New Sense of Wonder: Re-Defining Science Fiction in the Twenty-First Century. The title of the essay is “Evolutionary Psychology, Science Fiction, and Consilience,” and it brings together many of the themes I’ve discussed on this blog, as drawn from the many nonfiction books I’ve read over the past decade, many (but not all; I’m behind) of those discussed on this blog. As they apply to science fiction, and bring a new understanding to what science fiction *is*. (Some of these ideas appeared in the two dozen plus reviews I did for Black Gate, in 2020 and 2021, and in the reviews of a baker’s dozen of novellas that I did, July-Oct 2022, in support of a short fiction group on Facebook, and posted here on my blog.) The book, presumably, will look like these earlier Westfahl volumes.
Three pieces from Big Think.
Three sciency links, all from the same site on the same day, five days ago.
Big Think, Jonny Thomson, 22 Oct 2023: How storytellers (and their biases) crafted our history, subtitled “Discover how the threads of myth, legend, and artistry have been woven together by storytellers to craft history.”
More about conservatives’ disconnect from reality. They believe what they believe.
Washington Post, Catherine Rampell, 26 Oct 2023: Opinion | When will Americans stop worrying and learn to love the U.S. economy?
It’s not just Paul Krugman saying this.
