Hildegarde

I keep telling myself that there has to be a reason–other than the bleeding obvious–that every time I try to click on the link in my bookmarks to access the add a new post section on the blog, I end up clicking on the one that says “Living in the moment on the Island of Oahu.”

And yes, that’s exactly how the capitalization goes.

It’s not my fault.  Go complain to the Hawaii tourism people.

Anyway, you probably remember from a few posts back that I was reading a book called The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War by Perry Miller.

I’ve been meaning to say something about this for days now, and I’ve been circling around it like my cats circle birds.

Perry Miller is a writer I’d recommend to anybody who wants to know how America got to be the way it is.  He’s a better writer and a better thinker than most of the more modern writers on American intellectual history, and he still manages to hit all the things I think about as if he’d been living in my own head.

Okay, that’s a recommendation for why I should read the stuff, not you, but you know what I mean.

Or maybe not.

There are some complicated things going on with this book, though, so before I get to the point, let me outline them.

The most important one is the fact that the book was never finished. 

Miller was in the middle of writing it when he died, and his students and widow put together what he had–a completed first two sections and a partially completed third, plus the outline for the next six chapters of that third, plus the general outline of what were supposed to be nine complete sections.

In other words, this was going to be an immense book, much like his two volume intellectual history of New England, and what we have instead is an incredibly interesting but truncated fragment.

Granted, it’s longer and more comprehensive as a fragment than most people’s books are finished.  Miller seems to have been an incredibly methodical writer, finishing each section before going on to the next, moving from point to point and year to year like–well, I don’t know what it’s like.  Something to do with engineering, rather than something having to do with prose.

The book traces what Miller saw as two separate and largely antagonistic approaches to knowledge–to education, yes, but also to knowledge itself, to what kind of investigations into the natural world are good and right and proper, to–

Hell.  When I put it that way it sounds both dull and theoretical. 

But there really isn’t anything theoretical about what he’s talking about here.

The issue he’s discussing is, to a large extent, the same one now animating the animosity between Republicans and Democrats, between the Tea Party and the Progressives, between the coasts and the “heartland.”

It is the antagonism between people who think that knowledge is good in itself and should be pursued for its own sake and those who feel that knowledge is worthless unless it has some “practical” application.

It is the antagonism between people who are perceived as “intellectuals” and people who define themselves as “just plain folks.”

It is the difference between the real equality possible as “equality under the law” and the kind that insists that equality can only mean that we are all equal in fact in every way, and any assertion of superiority or inferiority (especially of intelligence) can never be anything more than a sneak attack on democracy, an attempt to restore aristocracy and to keep the (masses, people, pick your side of the political spectrum) down.

And what hit me in the face while I was finishing this up was a phrase from the long outline of what would have been the next six chapters of part three:

“…that there does exist in the country a deep, angry, sullen hatred of the concept of intellect maintained by the advocates of pure, unproductive science.  The democracy and the religious community both sense that it [pure, unproductive science] is their enemy.”

And now, I’m sure, everybody’s going to yell at me.

But Miller was no left wing kook.  He didn’t sit in his office sneering at dumb hicks. He was looking back on a century and a half of American life, on the growth of the country and its institutions, on strands of American thought that ranged from the Puritan to the utilitarian to the abolitionist to the Revivals.

And he recognized there, as he recognized in his own time and as I recognize in mine, “a deep, angry, sullen hatred” of the idea of learning for its own sake.

I will say here what I’ve said before–that this attitude does not seem particularly “left” or “right.”  There’s a lot of it in people the press quotes as being part of the Tea Party, but there’s a TON of it in the kind of public school teacher and administrator who wants to cancel Honors Night because it’s “too exclusive.”

Its existence has been noted–and identified as a hatred of mind and not just of a particular kind of taste or attitude– by liberals like William A. Henry, conservatives like William F. Buckley, and anarchic liberatarians like Ayn Rand.

In fact, the hatred of mind, and of intelligence, is one of Ayn Rand’s favorite themes. 

In other words, if I’m crazy, I seem to have a lot of company.

FWIW, it was this–the recognition of, and naming of, that deep and sullen and angry hatred of intelligence that first drew me to Ayn Rand’s work.   Atlas Shrugged is a lot of things, but it is first and foremost a passionate brief on behalf of “the men of mind.”

The only reason Rand wants an anarchically libertarian world is because she thinks it’s the one form of government in which the people with that sullen anger and hatred won’t be able to get in the way of people with great and superior minds.

Unfortunately, I find myself here, as I have with every other book I’ve come across that recognizes this phenomenon for what is is, stymied.

Miller didn’t live to finish his book. Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life turned out to be about something else.  Rand’s novel did a beautiful job of drawing the picture without actually explaining what such a thing should exist to begin with.

I’m left again with the feeling that, yes, I’m not crazy.  This thing does, in fact, exist, and it exists in quite a few people with university degrees (and LOTS of people who become elementary and high school teachers, and a good number who become university professors).

On the other hand, I still don’t understand why this exists at all, or why it is so prevalent in almost all societies.

My little Darwinian soul wants to know what the evolutionary adaptive advantage was in such an attitude. 

There has to be something going on around here, and it can’t be the “I met lots of teachers who looked down on me thing,” because THOSE teachers are the ones, above, who have this attitude in spades.

Every once in a while I get into one of those frustrating bottlenecks that make me despair of ever finding my way out, and that’s where I got to today with something called the Book A Day Challenge.

I first saw the Book A Day Challenge because people were posting their answers to it on FB, and I naturally–being a simpleminded person–thought it was a FB thing.

It turns out that it is, instead, a Twitter thing, but that doesn’t help.

FB makes my computer freeze up, which is why I look at it on my Kindle.  Twitter won’t let me copy and past the photograph with the questions on it, and I can’t figure out how to link to it here.

If you like, you can go to

#BookADayChallenge

and see it for yourself.

Right now, I’m just going to answer the first twelve items, and after that I may go on from there.

I will say that I’m having one of those days when the Spirit of Capitalism seems to me to be rank stupid.

Yes, everybody makes money from the ads and we need ads to keep going, but if your ads make it impossible for even 20% of your audience to access your site, you’re not doing yourself any favors.

Now, in the probably vain hope that I will one day be able to put these things up on FB, I’ll answer the first twelve items and see what you think of them.

Or see if you’ll post your own.

Or something.

Day 1: Favorite book from childhood.

Caroline Keene.  The Ghost of Blackwood Hall.  My first Nancy Drew and, please note, from the original editions of the series.  The later editions really blew the whole point of the series, which was empowerment for girls before anybody had ever heard of such a thing.

Day 2: Best Bargain.

Almost certainly a copy of Meyer Shapiro’s volume of essays on Medieval Art, bought for a quarter–that’s 25 cents–at the local library’s little used book store.  Plates and everything.  I love books about painting and sculpture and all the rest of it, but they’re just SO expensive.

Day 3: One With A Blue Cover.

Here’s a dilemma.  I don’t usually notice covers.  Let me put in the paperback edition of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique because it did indeed have a blue cover, sort of grey blue, and I noticed.  I never bought a copy of that for its cover, though.

Day 4: Least Favorite Book by Favorite Author.

Definitely Death at Pemberley by P.D. James.  James is, as far as I’m concerned, the greatest writer of mystery in the history of the genre, and like half the other writers I know, she’s enormously enamored of Jane Austen.  But she’s not Jane Austen.  The sensibility is not the same, and this book just irks me.  It’s neither good Austen nor good P.D. James.

Day 5: Doesn’t Belong to Me.

My first instinct here is go go–wait! Do you mean there are books that don’t belong to me?

But I’ll try to get a little serious here.  Because we should all get a little serious.  Although I don’t know why.

I’ll go with Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett, which lives in the house but belongs to one of my sons.

I once had a very funny afternoon with that book.  I went in for an ambulatory hernia operation and I brought the book with me as something to read while I waited.  The edition my sons have has a picture of the Grim Reaper as a skeleton with a scythe wearing a pair of overalls on the front cover, and I was so nervous about the operation, it took me quite a while to figure out why all the little old ladies in the waiting room kept staring at it.

Day 6: The One I Always Give As a Gift.

Terry Pratchett again, this time Small Gods, which is both very funny and the most remarkably elegant extended metaphor for Christianity I’ve ever seen.  If I ever got a chance to construct the Canon for myself, this would be on it.

Day 7: Forgot I Owned It.

Niven and Pournelle, The Mote in God’s Eye. Forgot I owned it twice and bought it a third time.  And I still haven’t managed to read it yet.

Day 8: Have More Than One Copy.

See above.  They’re in the house somewhere.  But I’ve also got more than one copy of The Razor’s Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham, because it’s one of my favorite books of all time.  I’ve got the matched Maugham set edition that was my mother’s, a hardcover copy of another edition I bought used many years ago, and a paperback Penguin edition I bought in London to carry around on the bus.  I used to read this book every Christmas. Some Christmases, I still do.

Day 9: Film or tv tie-in.

I’m not too sure how I’m supposed to interpret this one.  A film or tv tie in where I read the book before I saw the other media? Or that I read because I saw the other media?

With the first interpretation, I would say Jose Saramago’s Blindness, which is the book that made me want to learn how to read Portuguese.

With the second interpretation, I would say The Nun’s Story by K. Hulme. 

In both cases, the work was better in the version I originally encountered it in. 

Day 10: Reminds Me of Someone I love.

Well, for God’s said.  William L. DeAndrea.  The Lunatic Fringe. It was his favorite book of his.  It’s not mine, but it’s one of those things.  When I reread it, I can hear his voice in my head.

Day 11: Secondhand Bookshop Gem.

This is difficult, because what I tend to do in secondhand book shops is to buy things I’ve already read but that I don’t have a copy of anymore, for whatever reason.

Let me go with Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Velvet Claw, which was the first Perry Mason novel (as opposed to short story, etc).  And you can’t get the damned thing anywhere anymore, and I have of course lost my copy.

Because, when you have this many books, you lose them all the time.

Day 12: I Pretend to Have Read It.

This is something that, as far as I know, I don’t do.  I do sometimes make polite noises around other writers whose work I don’t know, but I don’t actually claim to have read anything.

I’m not entirely sure why this is the case, but it is. 

I keep trying to think of a comparable situation, but I can’t, except for the being professionally polite thing. 

Somewhere in the middle of all that, there must be someone I gave that kind of impression to, but I can’t think of who.

So those are the first twelve.

I’ll get around to the rest of the month later, if I can negotiate ad-encrusted web sites to let me have the list again.

For the past week or so, I’ve been having this weird mental hitch where I think it’s later in the week than it is.  This morning, I thought it was Wednesday, which is a day on which I have to do a whole ton of stuff I’m not really prepared to do.

I scuttled around this morning trying to gear myself up to do things I later–much later–realized couldn’t even be done before another 24 hours. 

Then I realized what I was doing and sat down to see if I couldn’t get my head to start dealing with reality.

The situation is even weirder than it seems on the surface, because it oddly connects with what I’ve been reading, and even with some of the conversations I’ve been in on FB.

What I’m reading is still Perry Miller’s Life of the Mind in America from Revolution to the Civil War, which is an account–by a New Deal liberal–of how Americans came to understand their society and the place of religion, law and government in it.

This is a very odd book to be reading these days, because, if Miller’s history can be trusted, these days are an awful lot like the ones that led from the founding to the Civil War.

The players these days are not only pretty much the same people as they ever were, but they’re pretty much ranting and railing about the same topics and in mostly the same way.

The issues are going to sound very familiar: the power of the federal government, the place of religion in American life and politics, the expanding power of experts and the use of those experts by Eastern elites to foil the will of ordinary people.

In fact, all of this is so familiar, I’d almost suspect Miller of writing a spoof.  I know he didn’t, because he died in the Fifties, when he, like most historians, thought that all these issues had been resolved.

Of course, ten or so years after Miller died, Richard Hofstadter brought out Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, so hope on the part of New Dealers that the acceptance of what we now call Big Government was complete were undoubtedly exaggerated.

That said, the issues aren’t anywhere near as easy to work out as I once thought they were, or as Hofstadter thought they were, either.

You have to give it to Perry Miller for understanding that, and being careful.

The foundational principle of this nation is that ordinary people–the mechanic in the gas station on Main Street, the lawyer in a New York highrise office, the Christian fundamentalist mother of four driving her children to a religious school, the band members of Florida Georgia Line–are fully competent to make their own decisions about their own lives and to run their own government theirselves.

This is, of course, a political fiction, and everybody knows it, but the bottom line is very simple: we must behave, politically, AS IF it were true.

We must behave that way because the alternative leads to far worse–to the imposition of an established religion (metaphorically), of the spectacle of people who think they’re morally and intellectually superior to their fellow citizens running roughshod over everybody else.

But.

And it’s a big but.

I don’t think there’s any one of us out here with an IQ over 2 who hasn’t looked at the some of the specimens of our fellow citizens and gone, “Oh, my God.”

If you’ve never done that, I’d recommend about a week of reality television.  Forget the “outrageous” stuff like Duck Dynasty (those people built and run a successful business) and go straight for the mind-numbing mindless.

Party Down South would be a good one–following the adventures of a group of people who seem to do nothing but get drunk, get pregnant and fight with each other.

I have no idea why anybody, anywhere, would want to appear on national television behaving like this, but there they are.  It’s the ultimate example of the principle that it doesn’t matter what you’re famous for, as long as you’re famous.

For me, though, the issue isn’t people like the ones on Party Down South. They don’t seem to be very bright and they’re mostly wasting their lives in ways that aren’t even interesting, but we all have the right to pursue happiness, and this is how they pursue theirs.

No, the people who get me going are the ones I always identify in my head as the ones who “ought to know better,” although I’m not sure why they ought to know anything.

The prime example of the breed is a woman named Jenny McCarthy.

Ms. McCarthy is an actress who had something of a vogue about a decade ago.  She also lived for a long time with the actor Jim Carrey, who is a truly astounding actor, and therefore probably somebody you do in fact know.

None of this matters next to the fact that the woman has spent the last fifteen or so years declaring to all and sundry that vaccines cause autism and that parents shouldn’t vaccinate your children.

Note here, that the anti-science stand is coming strictly from the Left.  Ms. McCarthy is convinced that we only vaccinate our children because we have been hoodwinked into it by Big Pharma, which is making a mint off the fears they themselves have invented.

Sorry.  I get REALLY sick and tired of people telling me that one side is “pro-science” and the other is “anti,” when both sides deny science as soon as it gets in the way of their ideology.

At any rate, Miss McCarthy.

The first time I heard about Jenny McCarthy’s anti-vaxx campaign, the first thing I thought of was that she was obviously much younger than I am.

I was a little over 2 during the last great polio epidemic to hit the US.  It’s one of my earliest and definitely one of my strongest memories: being forced to stay in the house all the time, listening to my parents discussing what had happened to a boy down the block that I played with all the time and would never play with again.

If you think vaccinations are nothing but a plot by Big Pharma to make a bunch of money, you’re a very lucky person.  You’re too young to remember when not being vaccinated meant dying at the age of 5 or spending the rest of a short life in an iron lung or paralyzed from the waist down.

There are lots of things out there like this, things that ought to be no-brainers.  There’s the fluorescent light bulb thing. I think it was wrong of the US government to institute a ban on incandescent bulbs. 

On the other hand, if you’re still using incandescent bulbs, you’re an idiot.  The fluorescents last long, use less power, and–in spite of a higher initial cost–end up costing you less money.

Things like the anti-vaxx crusade are a type of stupidity that seems to have its own natural history.

This type of stupidity always comes accompanied by high levels of paranoia–Hofstadter also wrote a book called The Paranoid Style in American Politics–and the paranoia always seems to come wrapped in a conviction that the world is being run by secret forces with absolute power conspiring against the rest of us.

In other words, it’s the paranoia of what we ordinarily think of as true nutcases. David Icke. The Reptilian people.  The Illuminati.

I’m not saying Jenny McCarthy natters on about the Illuminati.  She doesn’t.  It’s just that her theories about the Big Pharma plot to trick us into giving our children vaccines they don’t need and that will cause them autism is that kind of paranoia.

Big Pharma is all powerful.  In can operate in complete secrecy without ever being detected, or even–in outright contradiction to all human nature everywhere–losing one of its conspiracy members to book deals and whistleblower fame.

Some of the Christian versions of this kind of thing come right out and blame the devil for what’s going on, and that at least makes a certain kind of sense, since the Devil is supernatural.  The chairman of Glaxxo-Klein, on the other hand, is most likely a middle aged functionary who has enough trouble trying to stay ahead of international tax codes.

I think what I’m trying to say here is that this way of looking at the world seems to be a standard variant of the way our brains work. 

All of us do a little of it, and some of us do a lot of it.

Right now, one of the groups of people doing a lot of it is running around the American West shooting police officers and declaring that we’re about to see “the revolution.”

One of the police officers working on the mess out in Nevada yesterday helpfully explained to CNN that the perpetrators hadn’t left the swastika because they were neo Nazis.  They’d left the swastika because they thought the POLICE were Nazis.

Which was helpful as a distinction, but I’d already figured it out.

Rachel Maddow spent last night asking the question that’s now a favorite all over the Internet–are these guys being egged on by Republicans who write books and produce radio shows talking about how awful the government is?

It’s cute, but it doesn’t even begin to address the issue.

The US has always had a large and vocal segment of its population that is anti-government to the point of anarchy.  It was here in 1776, in 1828, in 1861 and yes, now, and it will always be with us.

What’s actually egging these people on at the moment is the fact that this government no longer seems sure enough of itself to provide a credible threat.

It was the Obama Administration, not the Republicans, that backed down during the Cliven Bundy mess, and did it on international media.

And that is the point, and it’s a big one.

Those people know the Republicans are more-or-less with them.  They now think the Democrats don’t have the will to successfully oppose them.

I think it’s going to turn out to be the worst mistake any American government has made in 100 years.

The Jenny McCarthys in our midst, though, will earnestly and stridently tell us that the whole thing is being orchestrated by Big Pharma.

Or Big Oil. Or Big Tobacco.  Or—

Every once in a while, I have one of those days that seem to go wrong as a matter of principle.

Not seriously wrong, you understand. 

Days that go seriously wrong always feel to me as if they had solid rationales behind them:  the universe hates me, and it’s doing what it’s doing to me on purpose.

Days like today are just…ack. 

Let’s take, for instance, the book I was going to read:  Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.

Absolutely none of the problems I usually have with books I wanted to read applied here.

I owned a copy.  I knew where it was.  Last night, before going to bed, I put it out on the coffee table so that I’d see it first thing in the morning.

I did this even though I knew I wasn’t going to get to it first thing in the morning, because I had a book I was finishing up, and the Wharton was likely going to have to wait until after tea and work and all that kind of thing.

And, as it happens, I did get to The Age of Innocence first thing this morning, just not in the way I’d expected.

I got to it because it was lying in the middle of the living room floor, ripped to shreds and marked to within an inch of its life by one or the other of the cats, each of whom was out of the room when I made the discovery.

What I have now, instead of a Victorian novel to read, is confetti and those gorgeous Penquin Classics covers, front and back.

Apparently, my cats are even lazier than I thought they were.  Cardboard covers are too much work to shred.

It sort of went that way from off. 

I spent my third day in a row flailing around in a scene I can’t seem to get right, and which is unfortunately too important to skip.

I first tried to flail around in it in my usual manner, and then I gave up and put on my favorite Bach CD and tried flailing around in it with music.

Normally, I can’t write fiction with music on–any kind of music–but I was doing so screamingly badly at this, I figured it couldn’t hurt.

I don’t think it did hurt.

Unfortunately, it also didn’t help.

My favorite Bach CD, by the way, is called Bach: Harpsichord Concertos and was recorded by the Academy of Ancient Music for the Harmonia Mundi label.

I have no idea if it is even any longer in the CD equivalent of print, but I think it’s one of the best CDs ever made, beautifully performed and beautifully recorded.

That didn’t go wrong.  It’s a two-disc set, and the second disc is playing right behind my head at the moment.

Given the perversity of the day, though, it’s made me think of how many of the things I grew to love seem to be dying natural deaths in the larger culture.

Classical music stations are dropping like flies.  Bookstores are closing right and left.  Publishing is in the kind of panic that causes people and institutions to commit accidental suicide.  My students think the American Civil War happened in the Middle Ages.

Okay.  Only one of my students thought that.  But I’d say that given the subject matter, one is enough.

All of this is making me sound more down than I actually feel, although the thing about my having outlived the things I love hit me more and more often lately.

When I’m in a chipper mood, I tend to think that I got very, very lucky–I may have come in at the end of that marvel of civilization that brought us Bach and Michaelangelo and John Donne and Henry James, but better late and never, and my students seem to be stuck with never.

But it’s not just the Bach and the Henry James, it’s a spirit of being human that seems to have completely collapsed.

We went to the moon.  We just got up one morning and decided to go, and we went.

I suppose there were people at the time whining about how we shouldn’t “waste” our money on space travel, we should “fix the problems” here at home, but they didn’t impinge on my consciousness much.

And I’m the daughter of a man who wouldn’t have had much patience with them.

We got up one morning and decided to go, and we went.

I think the world would be a better place if we did that again.  Right now.  Mars would be good.

Part of the reason I have always supported a liberal education–liberal in the ancient sense–is that I’ve always thought that an acquaintance with people like Bach and Aristotle and the rest of them would give people of sense of something they could aspire to be that was greater that what they saw around them–

And REALLY, if anybody starts whaling at me that I’m channeling Matthew Arnold, I’ll go upside your head.

I think that knowing about Jonas Salk refusing to patent his polio vaccine because it wasn’t about the money, but making sure that he never saw another child with polio in his office; of Hector and Achilles caring not only each for their own honor but for each other’s; of John Donne looking into the face of death and declaring victory–

That knowing those things helps you see past a world where the only wisdom seems to be “he who dies with the most toys, wins.”

I really am in some kind of mood here.

I’d better go do something semi-constructive, like mutilate a chicken.

But maybe  you see what I mean.

During the last 24 hours, posts appeared on both FB and Twitter that set my head spinning, and after having spent a night trying to figure out my response to the first one, and this morning being unable to shake free of the second, I thought I’d put my meanderings out here.

The problem these posts represent is not a minor thing, and the issue represent isn’t about to go away soon, or quietly.

So here we are.

The first was a tweet from my friend K, who has two young sons and wanted to find something he could read to them at bedtime.  He was looking for something in the vein of Philip Marlowe, because up until then they’d been reading fantasy. 

It was my recommendation that he should try Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels.  He tweeted back that he hadn’t read Stout, but that he had found attitudes to race “disappointing” in older novels, and did he have anything to worry about like that with Wolfe?

The FB post was from my friend L, who said she had a moral dilemma.  She had recently found that a friend of hers was “a bigot.”  He kept his bigotry very well hidden, but now she knew.  Should she retain his friendship, or not?

I expect I’m going to get some flack from some of you, saying that these two things are not the same.

But I’m going to stick with it here.  These things may not be “the same,” but they are very closely related, and they represent a kind of thinking that is–in the long run and the short–a very bad idea.

Let’s take the tweet first.

My reply to K about whether he had anything to worry about in the work of Rex Stout on the subject of race was that I couldn’t remember anything (which means there was probably nothing really outrageous), but that older books were likely to have attitudes that were…older.

This is something that is undeniably true in a way that would be trivial if it wasn’t for the fact that people don’t realize what they’re doing when they do it.

Our attitudes to a lot of things–sex (and gender) as well as race, religion and atheism, I could go on for a week–are not just very different from what they were in this country in, say, 1930, but very different from what they have been anywhere, ever.

In fact, attitudes to these things are very different in the modern industrialized west than they are in any other place on the planet, including the equally modern nations of Asia. 

We may think it is self evident that there is no connection between race and personal character (intelligence, criminality, temperament), but no other society on the planet has ever thought that, and most of them don’t now.

We may think it is right and fair that women should be paid the same as men and that gays should have the right to marry, but no other society on the planet has ever thought that, either. 

Only a very few years ago, a group of Iraqis protesting the American occupation told a report from, I think, the AP, that they didn’t want democracy, because democracy always “comes with the gays.”

I can see an argument welling up–as it has, in some Amerian universities–that if people in other times didn’t share our convictions on race and gender, then we should just stop reading and publishing and teaching them, because our way is better.

The problem with that is that the Western take on race and gender didn’t spring fully formed from our own particular version of Zeus’s forehead.

It is the product of a long and complicated intellectual history that begins with St. Paul and probably isn’t over yet. 

And that history is moving very fast.  Even thirty years ago, this society did not have the same (or even comparable) attitudes on race and gender as it has now.

If you really want only contemporary attitudes towards these things in the books you read, you’re going to have to give up not only Sophocles and Shakespeare,  Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie, but at least some Vonnegut, Pynchon, and Alix Kates Schulman.

In 1969, my father was considered a flaming egalitarian radical for asserting the belief that gay people were born gay, and couldn’t help it, and therefore shouldn’t be blamed for it.

The “enlightened” position at that period was that homosexuality was a mental illness, which should be treated.

I’m not saying that we should all go on thinking as if it were 1969.

I am saying that if we refuse to read books from other times and places because they didn’t think the way we do now, we not only impoverish ourselves beyond measure, we lose any sense of WHY we think the way we think now.

We lose, in other words, or ability to articulate the reason why our way is better.

We lose any sense of how we exist in history–and without a sense of how we exist in history, we don’t know who we are, or what we are, or why we are.

And without knowing those things, all we have to say to the overwhelming population of the earth that believes black people are inherently stupid and gay people ought to be executed is “I’m just better and so THERE.”

My friend L’s FB post about what she should do now that she’s found out her friend is a bigot posed a big problem for me right away.

I had no idea what she was talking about.

Define “bigotry,” for instance.  That could be somebody who believes that black people are inherently intellectually inferior to whites and Asians.  It could also mean somebody who has no problem with homosexuality as a life choice but doesn’t think the government should recognize gay marriages.

We define and redefine and redefine again what constitutes “bigotry.”

The word will have a new meaning and new parameters tomorrow, and everybody will pretend that they had been thinking the new way all along.

Then we’ll find ourselves running around trying to explain people we like saying things we don’t.

Think of Joe Biden, saying during the first Obama Presidential campaign that he made a good candidate because he didn’t “sound black.”

Was that “bigotry?” Is it still “bigotry” is you acknowledge that it was also true–or is acknowledging a fact now also an act of “bigotry,” so that we must all pretend that most Americans aren’t disposed against people who sound “ghetto,” or who talk like country singers or even Chris Christie?

My response to L’s post was to say that I don’t judge people by what they think, but by what they do.  Abraham Lincoln had a lot of racialist attitudes common to his time, but he also signed the Emancipation Proclamation. 

I also said that I don’t choose my friends for their politics, and that is also true.

When we accuse people of “racism” and “bigotry,” we too often accuse them of a thought crime that rests on no firm objective foundation, requires psychic abilities none of us have, and serves to turn what ought to be an open conversation about things that matter to us into a form of witch-hunting hysteria where no one is permanently safe.

It try not to judge people by what they think, but by what they do.  I don’t care if you think all Latinos are crazy illegal immigrants, as long as you hire them because they’re the best candidate, pay them the same wage as everybody else in their position, and respect them while they are working for you.

You’ll be a better human being like that than you would be if you thought all the right thoughts and treated your Latino workers like…excrement.

And reading older books from other times with other attitudes helps you to get to the point where you know how to behave decently–something you really can’t do if you believe that everybody who doesn’t think just like you is either evil or stupid or worthless.

Or if you think that there’s no argument in the world that says the things you thing are right and just and proper, aren’t.

I should probably stop blithering now and go off and do something serious.

K should give a shot to Stout.  There’s nothing much about race in the books that I remember, and Stout is an interesting writer and a classic one in the mystery field.

And the boys will love Archie Goodwin.

I am having one of those weirdly amorphous days when things aren’t so much going wrong as just petering out.

Work went, but that was about all you could say about it.  I tried four times to throw a girl in a white dress in front of a speeding green Chevy without actually killing her off–or killing off the driver–and all I got was a green Chevy mess in a ditch on one try and a tangle of rain-soaked confusion in the other.  This was obviously not what I was looking for, so I’ve put it aside to get back to tomorrow.

With work not going anywhere, I find myself fretting about things that could not be changed or fixed, and that I don’t think it would be a good idea to try.

The unchangeable and unfixable this morning has to do with what I think of as the natural history of start ups.

Somebody gets a great idea to produce a product or service that nobody has thought of before.  He goes to work, founds the business, builds the business, and then gets hugely successful. 

At that point, a large conglomerate comes along, offers to buy him out for a gazillion dollars–and the guy takes the money and runs.

Before we go haring off in the direction of Big Evil Corporations, I want to note here that I find nothing at all wrong with this sequence.  Businesses are hard to start and hard to run, and if you start one as a young person you’re likely to find yourself facing that conglomerate’s offer at about the time other people retire.

There’s nothing magic about “entrepreneurship” that makes it unlikely that you’re going to want to chuck the work when you’re sixty five–or, better yet, fifty. 

And that is particularly true in this particular time and place, where getting bigger and more successful as a business inevitably lands you with increased regulations and mandates. 

There is a problem, however, for your customers.  Almost always, when such a new business emerges as successful, it’s because it’s addressing a demand that nobody else is addressing.

In other words, there’s something out there that at least some people want that nobody else thinks it worthwhile to supply, and you’re supplying it.

Whatever this thing is is almost always a minority taste–it doesn’t tap into the most profitable demographic, say, or it appeals to a relatively small segment of the population.

What happens next, of course, is that this large conglomerate takes a look at this business of yours it’s bought and starts to smooth out the edges, make the thing more palatable to a larger public, make it more like everything else…

…and, in no time at all, the business you founded is no longer supplying the need you identified. 

It is also nowhere near as successful as the conglomerate projected it would be, because it’s now just like everything else, and there’s a lot of competition for the attention of people who want things that are just like everything else.

I want to stress, again, that I don’t see anything wrong with this series of events.  I don’t think the conglomerate is a Big Evil Corporation enforcing conformity on the American public, or harrassing quirky new businesses until they have to run for cover.

Nor do I think the resulting (temporary) homogenization is some kind of public menance that ought to be constrained by government power.

There is often another stage in this series of events, the one in which the entrepreneur, having waited out the three or five or ten year period in which he promised not to start a competing business–starts a competing business.

And the whole cycle starts all over again.

At the moment, the particular example of this cycle that has me annoyed concerns a television cable channel that used to be called CourtTv.

CourtTV had a very simple premise–provide real-time life footage (and later replay the recordings) of real trials in real courtrooms.

Some of these trials were famous and important, but a lot of them were not. 

They were just the day to day stuff of (almost always criminal) courtrooms.  I have no idea who chose the trials to broadcast, but whoever it was had a good sense of what might make a trial interesting to the general public.

It was on CourtTv that I first heard about the woman who had hit a man with her car while she was drunk–and with a suspended license for a previous DUI. 

The man she hit flew up into the air and came down on her windshield, with his head smashing right through it.  He was still alive, and instead of stopping and calling the police, she drove the car and the man home, parked it in her garage, and spent the next several days getting high as a kite on everything imaginable while drifting out to the garage to apologize to the (still living) guy with the head through her windshield.

The man did die eventually, of course.  And the first time I heard about this woman, CourtTv was broadcasting her trial for murder.

The CourtTv case that affected me the most and stayed with me the longest was a lot less bizarre.  In fact, it was entirely too commonplace.

It concerned a young woman in her twenties who had gone out one night, alone, to a two-for-one Tequila Sunrise happy hour at a local bar.  She drank about seven of these things, and then she got into her car and started to drive home.

By then, it was getting dark, and she was in no condition anyway.  She ran a stop sign at a deserted intersection a mile or two away, and ending up t-boning a car coming through from the other direction, instantly killing all four of the teen-agers inside it.

Unlike the the woman on trial for carrying the body around in her windshield for days, it was impossible to make fun of this person.  She was completely and utterly distraught, so much so that she kept pulling her hair over her face as if it were a curtain.

There is a lot of stuff in the law about how a defendant is supposed to be able to assist in her own defense.  This young woman couldn’t assist in her own lunch.  Long before the inevitable verdict had been pronounced, she was just plain gone. 

Of course, I have no way of knowing if she was gone because she was wracked with guilt over what she had done, or because she was devastated to see that her life was over.

Still, I’ll never forget her.  And my instinct says it was the guilt.

There is no longer anything called CourtTv.  It changed its name a few years back, having been taken over by one of the large media companies, and is now TruTv.

When the change happened, there was a lot of fanfare about how the name indicated even more, even better CourtTv–with a slogan that was something like “not reality, actuality.”

What we got instead, of course, was yet another cable channel that seems to be dedicated to nothing but “reality” shows, most of them indescribably boring, and compliation shows like World’s Dumbest Criminals and World’s Smartest Inventions.

I loved watching real trial on CourtTv, but I’m under no illusion that anybody owed me the service.

And sometimes, if a case is making enough noise, we get the old format back–TruTv did broadcast the Casey Anthony trial, for instance.

I’ve been wondering over the last couple of days if this case in Wisconsin will merit a return to broadcasting trials.

For those of you who live on Pluto and haven’t heard any of this: sometime in the past week, police in a small town in Wisconsin arrested two twelve-year-old girls after they lured a mutual friend into the woods and stabbed her 19 times. 

According to the girls, they did this in order to meet a person they’d met online, who wanted them to kill somebody as a kind of introduction.

The somebody turned out to be a fictional character with no real life counterpart, the protagonist in a series of very popular web horror stories.

And nobody was entirely sure where the girls got the idea that you had to kill somebody to meet him, since that isn’t part of his character, or why they thought he lived in a nearby national park.

The stabbed girl was in critical condition but still alive last time I checked the news.

The whole incident reaches well beyond the bizarre into the surreal.

And the prosecutor in Wisconsin has charged to girls as adults.

To restate something I actually managed to say on Twitter yesterday:  I’ve met chihuahuas with stronger holds on reality.

I think the likeliest outcome here is that somebody with a cooler head and more common sense will talk the prosecutor down from the trying-them-as-adults thing. 

There is certainly something very awful going on here, but I don’t think it’s a Bad Seed kind of thing.

On the other hand, I’d be hard pressed to tell you what I think it was.

This is the kind of thing I think we ought to have an answer to, but we don’t.

In the meantime, if CourtTv was still in its original incarnation, I’d know for sure I’d get to see any trial that came out of this case.  Now, I’m not sure.

And yes, that has me annoyed.

I was wandering around on City Journal this morning when I found this:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/when-automation-comes-for-the-professional-class/

It’s not anything that hasn’t been said on this blog before, or even anything I haven’t responded to before.  It’s distinct only that it comes from the American Conservative, while observations of this kind here tend to come from people on the left.

The observation is, in my opinion, both true and of no particular  importance, and it goes as follows.

We’re getting really really good at designing software that can substitute for human beings at all kinds of tasks.

These tasks include not only the typical targets of automation–work of brute force, or work done by people (like fast food cashiers) who cannot be assumed to hold even the simple skill level required to make change for your five–but increasingly jobs considered to be “middle class.”  These include, as the article states, the basic grunt work of research in law firms and the kind of “journalism” that results in newspaper pieces that read “The Red Sox beat the Yankees at Yankee Stadium last night 3-2.”

I said at the beginning of this post that I think these things are true–these things are actually happening, and will probably accelerate, and take over more and more of what we now think of as “middle class” or (as the article put it) “middle skills” jobs.

I will give this article one point against the liberal expositions of the same thing: it doesn’t engage in the kind of frenzied panic and commands to freak out now that are a staple of progressive articles (and FB posts, and…) about this kind of thing.

I see this as a plus because I, myself, am not panicking, and it’s not because I think it’s impossible that my own work will be taken over by computers.

Okay–not impossible, but probably unlikely. There are many different kinds of books in this world, and the kind of thing I like to read is unlikely ever to be written by a computer, unless we advance to the point something like Data.

I can see an economy where certain kinds of best sellers are generated by formula and computer, thereby choking off traditional publication for riskier kinds of books.

But I don’t have to look deep into the future or posit the existence of supercomputers to see my way into that future.  It’s happening now.  Most of the major publishers have been taken over by large media conglomerates who expect returns on investment in the range of 17%.   Books never did return much more on investment than 4-6%.

The result is a shrinking traditional marketplace, bookstores failing right and left, dropped authors without number, and the distinct feeling that publishing as we know it has come to an end.

And yet, here I am, not panicking, and it really, really, really isn’t because I have a gazillion dollars in the bank.  I don’t.

Why I’m not panicking, is, I think, the result of a number of things.

The first is that I never, ever expected that I was likely–never mind entitled–to live in a world of safety and security. 

For whatever reason, I always did assume, from the beginning, that life would always be a risk, that there would be no place to rest, not even in “retirement.”

Of course, I’ve also never been interested in retirement, so there’s that.

But the sudden appearance of this particular risk doesn’t hit me as hard as it hits other people because it just didn’t surprise me.  I’ve always expected it to be, to quote Roseanne Roseannadanna, “always something.”

That, however, is a matter of temperament, and temperament (if you believe Steven Pinker) is mostly a matter of genetics.  So let me chalk that one up to luck.

I have other reasons not to be panicking, and those come down to common sense.

In the first place, these things have happened before.  The proverbial buggy whip makers lost their livelihoods, as did the hand weavers and seamstresses who fueled the original Luddite movement. 

It wasn’t fun, and it wasn’t easy, but it also wasn’t a holocaust of people starving in the streets, even though “social programs” were virtually nonexistant and “poor relief” was poor without leading to much relief.

For all the fear and panic, people did eventually find other means of livelihood and life went on.  We are not poorer because the machines came into do the brute work once done by hand.  The end result was not less available employment but more.

In the second place, I know that an economy requires buyers as well as sellers.  The fantasy that Big Evil Corporation X will take over all the jobs, reduce them to wages that don’t allow a person to eat, and then triumphantly march away with all the money is delusional.

And it’s delusional on more than one front.  The world so described, for instance, would be one in which the stockholders and upper management of Big Evil Corporation X  would have nobody to sell their product to, and therefore no way to make money.

At some point, if rich people want to stay rich, something would have to give.

The only other alternative would be for Big Evil Corporation X to reduce itself to artisan status–to make one product at a time, custom, for only the richest customers.

But although that would always be possible, we’ve been there before.  Rich people weren’t richer then.  They were poorer.  And there were a lot fewer of them.

The next thing is that, given history, what should happen next is that the people released from the drudge work by computers should start to find other things to do and other ways to make a living.

This doesn’t mean that everybody who tries will succeed–in fact, under the best of conditions, most people won’t.

But little by little, day by day, week by week, year by year, a new work landscape will emerge out of the changing conditions of the old.

I’ll admit that it’s likely to take longer this time than it did the last, because we’ve put up a lot of barriers not only to people starting new businesses but growing to the point where they can challenge existing large firms.

And we’re made even worse off because both the Democrats and the Republicans collaborate in this attempt to protect large corporations from competition–the Republicans by simply doing it and the Democrats by promoting “solutions” that actually make things worse (any company with over 50 employees must…).

Even so, the change will happen and the new landscape will emerge, and it’s beyond my comprehension what people think they can do that would make it work otherwise.

Reality is what it is.  It can’t be denied.

And if traditional publishing becomes a set of conglomerates producing computer-generated novels, I’ll write my own, publish them myself as e books, and see where I can go from there.

I have been in a very odd mood lately–odd enough so that, when I finished Real Work (meaning writing) this morning, I put on Beethoven’s 9th in the background.

I am not usually a person who is interested in listening to Beethoven in the morning, and if I start writing at 4, eight o’clock is still first thing in the morning. 

But there I was, and there was Beethoven, and I was worrying about a man named Charles Grandison Finney.

This is going to be one of those posts that practically none of you will read to the end, and fewer of you will commment on, unless you’re all hijacking the blog.

If I was the kind of person who spent her time worrying about how many hits the blog got, this post wouldn’t be here.

But I am myself, and things like Charles Grandison Finney are what tend to end up on my mind from time to time.

So, a few preliminaries.

I am reading, at the moment, a book called The Life of the Mind in America, by Perry Miller. 

Miller was an academic historian, mostly active in the 40s and 50s, who wrote mostly about American intellectual history from the Colonial period to the Civil War.  I’ve reported here on his books about the intellectual development of Colonial New England.

This book–The Life of the Mind in America–begins just after the Revolution during the Second Great Awakening, and it is the Second Great Awakening that brought me to Charles Grandison Finney, since he was probably the most prominent figure in the entire period.

For those of you who know little or nothing about American history and aren’t in the position of not being able to care less:  the Great Awakenings were popular religious movements in the territory now known as the United States.

I put it that way because the First Great Awakening occured before the country became a country.

And the first Great Awakening was a very strange thing, on many levels.

For one, it was lead by Jonathan Edwards, New England’s premiere Calvinist theologian, and not the sort of person you’d expect to throw in his lot with huge, emotionally-charged revivalist meetings in meadows and fields–but there he was.

The customary explanation for how and why the Awakenings happened is to say that they were a revolt against the Enlightenment–not only against Deism and its offshoots, but against the supremacy of reason over feeling in all walks of life, and especially in religion.

And this, too, makes Edwards’s participation in the First Great Awakening very surprising,

What may be less surprising is that the First Great Awakening ended badly.  It was preached–at least on Edwards’s end–in a thoroughly Calvinist manner, stressing the irredeemably evil nature of human beings and the impossibility of earning grace in any way. 

It ended up with two people dead of suicide, convinced that there was nothing in store for them, ever, but Hell.

 All revolts against the Enlightenment are essentially revolts of emotion against (cold, unfeeling) reason, and Miller spends a fair amount of time drawing the connections between American religious revivalism and the Romantic movement in Europe–Byron and Shelley and those sorts of people.

But what struck me about the Second Great Awakening, the one that got going around the turn of the 19th century and that sort of disintegrated in the run up to the Civil War, consists of these two things.

1) It was a revolt against Calvinism as much as (if not more) a revolt against “reason” AND

2) It was the first major revolt of the “rude Westerners” (flyover country!) against the educated Eastern elite (coastal elites!).

I’ve got to be careful here, because there are some singular differences between this period, although weirdly much fewer than you might think.

In both cases, you had a group of people considered by the elites to be vulgar, uneducated and probably stupid.  In both cases, the probably stupid people contained a fairly high proportion of people who were very well educated indeed, but in different places and to different assumptions than the elites who looked down on them.

In the Second Great Awakening, though, there was no pretense on the part of the Rude Westerners that they were advocated in favor of the uneducated against the educated.

If there really were Rude Westerners out there, Finney was adamant that they did not make up the bulk of his audience.  His audience, he was convinced, was comprised of the very best and most civilized and cultivated people in the areas in which he preached.

The other thing–the anti-Calvinism–also has its counterparts in the America of right this minute.

Calvinism maintained that human beings were destined from all eternity for heaven or hell, and that nothing they could do could change their fate.  God had all the power.  Human beings had none.

Finney and his counterparts rejected this absolutely.  They maintained that human beings could determine their own trip to heaven or hell, if they had the will and the stamina to stay the course.

There had always been something distinctly anti-American about predestination, and once it was out in the open, people deserted Calvinist preachers by the score and set themselves off in dozens of dissident sects, of which Joseph Smith and his Mormons were only the most colorful.

And that, too, is like today.  The largest and most well attended Christian churches in this country are not the doctrinally correct, putting out a stern message about the fallenness of man and the inevitability of sin.

They are almost universally megachurches and denominations that stress the idea that God wants you to be happy, that he wants you to be prosperous, that being happy and prosperous requires only that you take your salvation into your own hands and cooperate with God as he tries to do good things for you.

The conventional wisdom these days is that the megachurches thrive because they are “conservative” in theology and politics–but I don’t think so.

There are lots of conservative churches that don’t do the kind of business of, say, Joel Osteen’s operation down in Oklahoma (?).

What is wanted here is almost the polar opposite of conservatism in its classical sense–the feeling that good things await us in the future, that we should be oriented to the future and not to the past, that suffering and failure are the exceptions, not the rule, and should be rejected as coming from the Devil always, and never God.

I think of Sister Louis Bertrand and her constant exhortations to “over it up” to God and to suffer together with Christ, and I think she must be spinning like a top wherever it is she might be now.

I’m being a little flip here.  I do know there’s a lot that’s deeply flawed in the prosperity Gospel, not least of which is the fact that the world is a cussedly contrary place, and bad things do happen to good people through no fault of their own.

But the prosperity Gospel is also very American, and the appeal to hope has always been stronger here than the appeal to guilt.

I’ve always thought that was one of the weaknesses of a lot of progressive initiatives–too many of them (“white privilege,” for instance) depend on instilling a conviction of guilt as a motivator for action.

I don’t think it works very well here, at the moment.  I don’t think it ever has.

In the meantime, I’ve started looking for what I think ought to be easy to find, but isn’t–a professionally done, sympathetic but not sycophantic, biography of Charles Grandison Finney.

There doesn’t seem to be one anywhere.

When I was growing up, my father used to say to me that if I couldn’t make my opponent’s argument as well as I could make my own, I didn’t know what I was talking about.

This was just the kind of thing he would say that would drive me right out of my gourd, and tended to come right after he’d given me a lecture on not despising my uncle because all he wanted was to be happy.

He was really opposed to my despising my uncle because the things that made him happy seemed to me to be–and sometimes even objectively were–rank stupid.

He felt this way even though he also felt that happiness was a tenth-rate ambition, but that’s another story altogether.

I’m bringing this up because of two things.

One is that a friend of mine sent me a link from ALDaily this morning that is about the lack of conservatives in the humanities and social sciences departments of universities.  It ended up being an argument for why it was necessary to have actual conservatives teaching conservative ideas instead of having liberal professors trying to do the same, even when the liberal professors were doing an honest and prinicpled job of trying to present those ideas accurately.

The second thing is a series of incidents on FB, one having to do with gun control and the other having to do with Marco Rubio.

The gun control thing first: a writer posted one of those little sayings-cards asking why your right to own a gun trumps her right to walk down the street without getting shot.

It wasn’t the gun control that got to me–everybody has limits to their ability to engage the issues of the day, and gun control is mostly off my radar.  I mostly don’t care.

What I do care about is the proper use of the word “rights” when it comes to discussing American political realities, because that word as used in our Constitution is very specific.

The rights in the US Constitution are Lockean–natural and individual, and concerned ONLY with the restraint of government power.

My right to free speech is a right to speak without the government punishing or restraining me.  It is NOT a right to post a political sign on my neighbor’s law without his consent, or to speak without my neighbors or my boss getting angry with me and visiting some consequences on my head.

Rights restrain government, not individuals.  Yes, your company can fire you for advocating against gay marraige–or for advocating for it.

What followed was several demands that I explain this or that argument tendered by “gun advocates,” and I don’t think I ever got it through anybody’s head that I wasn’t a gun advocate. 

That was annoying enough, but the arguments they wanted me to defend were all very weak, and not the actual arguments of open carry/concealed carry laws–they seemed to be mostly the straw man arguments produced by anti-gun advocates trying to illustrate how gun advocates think, or little snippets of some idiot on the net that were usually taken WAY out of context.

It’s fairly unlikely that I could have managed to defend the ACTUAL arguments, never mind the truncated versions that were supposed to represent how “conservatives” “really” think about guns.

The incident about Marco Rubio concerned something I see fairly often–something he advocates (for real) was highlighted in order to show what a jerk he is.

Marco Rubio may very well be a jerk, but he wasn’t being a jerk about this: he’s pushing for a constitutional amendment that would allow the US government to deny social program largess to immigrants.

The quote that was used made it seem as if he was advocating removing government health care benefits only (i.e. Medicaid and the subsidies for ACA health plans), but it didn’t take me long to figure out that he meant all social programs inclusively.

And he was advocating an amendment because SCOTUS had pronounced such denials to immigrants as unConstitutional under the equal protection amendment.

The person who posted the Rubio thing is one of the more fairminded liberals on my friends list–I’ve got a lot of rabid partisans among the liberals and a lot of rabid partisans among the conservatives, too–so I put in that this idea wasn’t exactly new.

Almost all the large welfare states of Europe had similar provisions, and some still do for immigrants who come from outside the EU, not because the European welfare states are full of mean-spirited conservatives, but because prudence dictates some kind of policy if you want your welfare state to survive in the long run.

What followed was a discussion that made it clear that the idea was being assumed–not just by the poster, but by a number of other people making comments–as compleatly without merit because of who had said it.

In other words, people were judging not the ideas, but their (immediate) provenance, with judgment pronounced in advance because of that provenance.

I saw something similar happen on FB during the last Presidential election over the behavior, candidacy and private life of Rick Santorum.

I’ll leave out the thing where numerous people made merciless fun of the way Santorum and his wife responded to the stillbirth of their child–they’d lost a child, for God’s sake.  How they expressed their grief should not be fodder for sarcasm and ridicule.

But one of the things that was notable, to me, about Santorum’s campaign is that he represented the thing we all say we want, but really don’t.

Like Santorum and his politics or not, he was willing to lose the campaign rather than compromise his principles. 

His principles may not be yours–and they most assuredly are not mine–but he is a principled man, and he ought to be given his due on that score if not on any other.

I will say again that conservatives are no better at any of this than liberals are.  I’ve never yet met a pro-life advocate who can thoroughly explain the major pro-choice positions.

And when pro-life advocates do quote pro-choice advocates, they always take quotations out of context or use the stupidest quotes they can find on the net.

And none of this even begins to address the people who respond to some religious statement or the other by saying “that isn’t in the Bible” or “that isn’t in the Koran,” when their very protest proves they haven’t read either.

I’ve got half a mind to draw up a reading list, a sort of pre emptive strike against people who don’t know their opponents’ positions–don’t talk to me about conservatives and affirmative action unless you’ve read Thomas Sowell (the books, NOT the little opinion columns) or about Islamaphobia if you haven’t read Mark Stein’s Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech and the Twilight of the West, or…

Well, you see what I mean.

I have to go do something about lunch now.

I’m still correcting papers like a maniac in an attempt to get all this done before my grades have to go in on Wednesday–

But I’d like to point out a few things:

1) I made NO statement as to the truth or falsity of “climate change” science or the existence of nonexistence of a consensus.

2) I will stipulate that there is a consensus.  So what?  “There’s a consensus” just means “everybody thinks so!” and it’s NOT a valid argument FOR ANYTHING.

3) No, it does not matter if the consensus is among experts.  Experts have been wrong, and “consensus” is the ad populam fallacy. 

4) The two things that make me think, at the back of my mind, that the present presentation of “climate change” science is wrong are not particulars on missing heat or speculations on the state of the oceans, but–

       a) the fact that when I ask for evidence, I too often get “there’s consensus” AND

       b) the use of the term “climate deniers.”  That’s ANOTHER logical fallacy, called “poisoning the well.”

5) The link that lead to the “here’s the ocean theory of why we haven’t seen the heat rise in the last 17 years” reminds me of Christian creationists trying more and more and more possible “explanations” when reality doesn’t meet their predictions. 

For whatever reason, the reality did NOT match the predictions.  I’d also thought the first response to such a circumstance FOR SCIENTISTS was supposed to be to ditch the predictions as flawed, unless a CERTAIN explanation could be found to explain the anomaly, after which more predictions would be made with the new information and then the hypothesis would be retained ONLY if the predictions panned out.

Deciding that you already know the answer and responding to failed predictions by running around looking for excuses does not inspire confidence.

6) What John Oliver is suggesting is the ad authoritatem fallacy–we won’t counter the other side’s arguments, we’ll just declare them obviously untrue and get together to laugh at them. 

That’s a lot of things, but it’s not science.

7) Oliver himself is in fact suggesting a way to shut people up, but the other two links I provided in that post were to information on very straightforward, brutal and bullying attempt to shut people up, including a law suit that, if won by Michael Mann, would put an end to the first amendment guarantee of free speech.

As it is, the lawsuit itself chills speech even if it’s lost–the punishment is in the process, not the verdict. 

Then there are the calls, and there have been many of them, to put “climate deniers” in jail.

I’ll reiterate my point from last time. 

No matter what the validity of your position, tactics like these RIGHTLY make people think you’re probably lying.