I can admit that I do not know much about climate science. Can you?

Are you smart enough to know you don't know? “Climate science”

I recently asked myself, “Self, what do you actually know about climate science?”  My honest response: “not much.”  I happen to believe that it is very important for me to be aware of where I am ignorant.  In fact, there are a boatload of things that I do not know much about.  Allow me to list a few:

• Hematology (physiology of the blood)
• Photolithography of silicon chips (computers)
• CDMA (radio system for cell phones)

I have no problem admitting that I know next to nothing about these particular subjects HOWEVER, I also do not hesitate to rely on them every day.  Neither do I question the validity of the science that serves as their foundation.  My ignorance of these subjects has NOTHING to do with the validity of the science behind these technologies WHATSOEVER.

• Am I a hypocrite?  No.  
• Am I ignorant of the details? Definitely.  
• Is this normal?  Very. 

Now… let me ask you: would it make any sense if at some point I chose not to “believe in” or “trust” the scientific methodology that produced the results of my blood panel or that governs how the apps function on my phone?  How about if I chose not to accept the physics of the combustion engine or the chemistry of fuel/energy conversion in my vehicle?  Not only would it not make sense, it would expose an ugly tendency that leads me to accept a contradiction within my thinking that exposes me as a hypocrite.  Another way of putting this is that I would be engaging in unwarranted doubt.  Ask yourself what it even means to “doubt” the science behind these technologies?  

And please note that I did not say you could not be skeptical about the social or political aspects of these technologies.  Questions about the effects and impact of these technologies can create very productive discussions that can be enlightening and informative.  But that is completely different from questioning the time-tested and near-universal acceptance of the scientific methodology that produces these phenomena in the first place.  Skepticism comes with a certain responsibility; one has to be willing to learn enough to know how to develop questions that have a specific target.  “Shotgun” skepticism is as incoherent as all-encompassing faith or belief; these cognitive extremes are always unhealthy.

So here are some things to consider:

You, like me, have very little actual knowledge about the science undergirding climate change.  This is not a license to speak irresponsibly about it.  For example:

1. Although you probably have no idea how blood is analyzed to yield a full panel, you probably don’t think that your doctor “just made them up.”  You accept the science that produced them.  
2. You use a cell phone which is the epitome of advanced science and the technology produced from it; you trust that your Facebook app will tickle your fancy and your GPS will get you to your destination.  Or do you think it is some magical rectangular box whose insides are comprised of pixie dust and miniature fairies?

It is time for some brutal honesty: you have as little knowledge of these things as you do of the same exact scientific method that is the foundation of climatology.  For example, here are some of the most basic concepts of climatology:

• Equation for energy balance: the Stefan-Boltzmann Constant
• Distinction between solar radiation and thermal radiation.
• Ice cores and isotopes
• Milankovitch cycles
• Albedo
• Solar flux

If you are honest, you will admit that you have probably never heard of these things.  All you need to do now is admit that you have no respectable basis upon which to “question” climate science.  Speaking as if you do just betrays two things: 1. that you are ignorant and either don’t care or don’t know you are, and 2. You have lost your ability to be embarrassed by your own display of #1.  Either way, withholding your “opinion” is the wisest and mature thing to do.

Last question: How can truth mean anything if the very precondition of its existence is absent in your mind?  

Cherry picking your “truths” is less than flattering.

The tricky mirage of the "new normal"

Why resisting this all-too-American tendency will make you stronger.

On the heels of Trump’s big speech to the Senate, how many of us have heard or read something like the following from one of his bow-chested supporters: “so what did you think of that?” or “how do you like him now?” or “pretty impressive, huh?!”  This is a mark of true desperation for his supporters and many of them are blind to it… let me explain how.

Cut the ropes and think freely

Any individual who can sincerely ask the question above is a person who suffers from the delusion-inducing meme of “the new normal.”  If you are unfamiliar with this phrase, here is how this phenomenon operates: no matter how shocking or strange something might be initially, if exposed to it long enough, we can be easily lulled into accepting it as routine.  This viral meme infects both liberals and conservatives; neither are immune to this.  Let me show you how to break out of this hypnotic mindset; you will revel in how good it feels to be self-aware.

For example… Hillary’s discourse markers were a distillation of hackneyed, regressivist thinking that, over time, metastasized into its own Frankenstein-ish persona of ultra politically-correct drivel.  This jargon warped her mind to the point where, if questioned as to whether a circle was round, she would be initially non-committal only to then ask what demographic she might be speaking to.  WTF! Right?  Her chameleon-esque word-play leads one to honestly speculate as to whether she is the intellectual equivalent of the Borg in Star Trek.  For several years now, this phenomenon has developed a life of its own, becoming our “new normal.”

Are you sufficiently self aware?

So it is with Trump; while his unorthodox “straight talk” was both shocking and refreshing precisely because our political discourse had been so empty for so long, his undisciplined, uncultivated and immature rhetoric gradually established a new low for our political discourse; and we are nowhere near the bottom yet.  


But wait!  Oddly, even among the most fervent of his supporters, there are still some who rightly cringe at some of the wild and indiscriminate statements that emerge from his puerile mind.  No matter; our nearly constant exposure to his Tweets makes it typical.  We expect it from him, or, more importantly, we don’t expect any more from him.  And viola, we gently slide into a “new normal.”

Now we come to the crux: if you were truly impressed with Trump’s speech then you have confused his ability to read from a teleprompter with who he has revealed himself to be. The “new normal” has hoodwinked you; subconsciously expecting the usual chaotic Trumpisms, you are now shocked that he can hold it together for more than 30 minutes and follow the script laid out for him.  Caught up in the wistful and wishful fantasy of wanting to believe that he is more, you grasp impetuously at the first sign that Trump can be anything other than a disordered, vindictive adolescent…  You proudly exclaim...

“You see! He is not completely unhinged!”

And therein you betray your hand and reveal what you really think.  Unfortunately, only someone who is either in denial or romantically wistful of Trump could produce a comment like this.  

Don’t be this person.  Find YOUR center and be unapologetic about it.  Go tell it on the mountain: the dualisms of “right and left,” “democrat and republican,” and “liberal and conservative” are bankrupt and need to be seen as the principal obstacle to any chance of having responsible and productive discourse.  

Abandon the sinking ship of inbred political polarization.  There is an ocean of ideas out there that don’t fit into these false categories.
Jump in... the “independent” water feels great.

Some Americans have a new fetish: ignorance… (a 2-part series)

Ignorance gone viral, the death of personal accountability, and the successive gradations of epistemic failure in our conversation.

Never before, it seems, have people worn their ignorance like a badge of honor as they do now in our social media ecosystem.  For many, it seems “cool” not to know something.  Like it was in high school, only the “sell-outs” study or research an issue.  Being willfully ignorant is today’s version of “sticking it to the man!”  It is as if knowing something about anything betrays your inner nerd.  Ignorance has taken on a persona of its own; there is a deeply narcissistic and prideful quality in its public manifestations.  

Choosing the right word is so 1990s… or should it be the 1890s?  In 2017, conversational immodesty is hip and edgy; the sexual currency of our conversations are word-gasms.  In the orgy of social media, people compete in order to see who can produce the most promiscuous, sluttish, and loose string of words possible.  Being true to the cause means that you don’t dare attempt to ‘make sense’; coherence, logic, and evidence is for losers, geeks, and goody-two-shoes.  

There can be no greater proof of our fetishism of ignorance than the rise of Donald Trump to the presidency.  While Hillary Clinton’s language was lifeless and nauseatingly predictable, perpetually cagey and utterly flavorless, Trump is the virtual porn-star of an orgy of ignorance and ADHD.  Hillary represented a style of speaking that had been in its death throes for a while.  The beautiful irony is this: while her stance was presented as a string of politically hypoallergenic talking-points, it became the anaphylactic equivalent of a speech-allergy millions of Americans had developed from overexposure to the politically-correct drivel that has been sweeping our nation.

When Trump speaks, it is like watching someone set knowledge on fire.  His language is a frenetic, mostly monosyllabic word-salad; the conceptual equivalent of a talking Frankenstein.  While Hillary’s speech symbolized a linguistic mausoleum of calcified PC-tropes, Trump’s language is an epistemological conflagration of civil discourse and droves of his supporters could not care any less.  The same orgiastic word-minions, for whom ignorance is their new family crest, are those who hear him as the voice of their anger, fear, and resentment; the very things that drove them to the polls to deliver Hillary her shocking defeat.  

Where does this go from here?  Stay tuned… part 2 coming to timeline near you soon.

Embrace yourself as a “Cultural Christian”: accept what you already suspect to be true.

Stay with me here: I suggest to you that there is no such thing as a Christian, Muslim or Jew nor has there ever been.  There are only people who identify as such; YOU may be one of them.  This should be a relief to you.  Let me explain why.

People are naturally predisposed to identifying with groups of various kinds.  While this can lead to judgemental groupthink-type behavior, it does not have to.  Calling oneself a Christian or a Muslim is no more significant than calling oneself a democrat or a republican; it is merely a label that often serves a particular purpose: political, social, educational, egoic, etc...  Moreover, many of you never had a choice in the matter; “X” tradition was foisted upon you at an early age, as it was for your parents.  

More interestingly, the fact that you were born in a certain city, state and country is as arbitrary as it is for those who were born in Aleppo, Jerusalem or Paris.  Happenstance is why you identify as one thing and not another.  This should be incredibly liberating; if it isn’t, this is an opportunity for growth.  That label you wear has no real permanency; “human” a.k.a. Homo Sapiens Sapiens is the only one you can’t wash off.  

We are all struggling to figure out the bewildering, permutational nature of our existence.  Finding fulfillment in life is like trying to hit a perpetually moving target.  Life does not come with a manual; we are the ones who create them.  Every religious text we have bears the unmistakable marks of human authorship; what could betray this fact more than an overweening concern for not wearing blended fabrics?  And no specific mention of polyester?  Are we to believe that an omniscient being was unaware of this future discovery?

One also wonders this: Is the New Testament bereft of a discussion of the germ theory of disease because an omniscient entity is uninformed as to the existence of such a thing? Or is it because the Bronze Age people who wrote it were utterly unaware of what microbes were?  Similarly, the bible mentions a “Golden Rule” but lacks even the most rudimentary discussion of Euclid's Golden Ratio — a mathematical proportion so ubiquitous in the universe that it is also known colloquially as the “signature of God.”  

While these texts can occasionally provide us with good lessons, they also encourage brutish violence and hatred that should strike any 21st-century human being as bizarre and anachronistic.  I suspect that for many inwardly reflective believers, these books create more questions and confusion than provide answers.  This is precisely why an honest admission of your identification with Christian culture is the key that can open up new doors of understanding; you know you are more than a box with a label on it.

We have no center anymore… the labels of “democrat” and “republican” are bankrupt

The political is now a binary of illiberal extremes; the “right” is increasingly rabid and the “left” is so regressive that both sides may be irredeemable at this point.

In our current climate, almost nothing should be more obvious than the absurdity of labeling oneself as a “democrat” or a “republican.”  Only those who are enamored with the sound of their own partisan BS could possibly think that this duality still has any merit or consequence.  I suspect that more and more people sense how imbecilic and farcical it is to pretend as if any issue could be easily and neatly bifurcated in such a way.  “Liberal” and “conservative” don’t fare much better because these terms are loaded with such emotional baggage that they have become nothing more than ways to end a conversation rather than serve as a starting point.  We need a new “center.”  But how?

If you have gotten this far, this post is for you — an individual who refuses to succumb to the intellectual retrogression that has gone viral in our culture and inevitably leads one into a pit of confusion and factional hysteria. Allow me to suggest a possible pathway out of this cerebral chasm; I will attempt the reclamation of a very misunderstood word… “liberal.”

To say that this word is encumbered with connotations is an understatement. Highly uninformed folks on the right will shudder at the sight of it just as thoroughly ignorant folks on the left will get dewy-eyed at the sound of it.  Ready for the facts?  Democrats and Republicans, left and right, “regressives” and “neo-cons” are ALL “liberals”...  Is this crazy talk? Allow me to make sense of it.

We are all sons and daughters of what is known as the “liberal” enlightenment (Google it… you might be surprised by what you learn).  The Framers of the Declaration and the Constitution were greatly influenced by the likes of Thomas Paine and John Locke, among many others.  In a nutshell, liberalism is a philosophy that encompasses concepts such as: property rights, civil rights, liberty, equality, individualism, and rationalism, often with close attachments to the idea of progress, market economics, and internationalism.  

These *liberal* cornerstones are no less important today than they were in 1776; there is not a progressive, a conservative or an “alt-right theocon” who wouldn’t defend their right to own property, pursue being an entrepreneur or practice freedom of their religion to name only a few.  So-called “conservatives” and “progressives” are merely particular flavors on the broad spectrum of general principles that constitute liberalism.

Ultimately, it may be the case that rescuing the tradition of “liberalism” is a hope whose ship has sailed.  The reclamation of “liberal” from the burdensome and politically-laden term “left” may be impossible at this point.  I have tried to furnish a new perspective on the issue and one can only hope to reinvigorate the public’s interest in the tradition that is the thread that makes up the fabric of this country.  We need a new center for our politics; the very possibility of intelligible and productive discourse seems to depend on it, indeed, require it.

The illusion of choice

Allow me to disabuse you of something: you didn’t have a choice this past November and I am here to tell you that you can stop pretending that you did, even though deep down, you should have already sensed this. Only the hardcore ideologues could go to the polls believing that they were voting “for” and not “against” someone. Ignorance is not bliss, it is ignorance; there will always and only be one cure for it.  

Sometimes however, the illusion of democracy is better than the alternative, even though it would be more accurate to describe our current governmental system as a Kakistocracy—government under the control of the nation’s worst or least qualified citizens. As Yoda would say, “A ship of fools, we most certainly have.”

I also want to help those of you who may be burdened with the guilt of not voting; those of you like me who were so sickened by all three candidates (remember “What is Aleppo?”) that the act of getting in your car to go to the polls was truly absurd; I feel your pain. Are we un-American? No. Are we unappreciative of our unique history and our democratic ideals? Again, no. Publius’ words live on in my home. Interestingly however, there are many people who seem to have developed a deeply shortsighted notion of our ‘right’ to suffrage. To some, not voting gives them a whiff of the unpatriotic; it stirs up some vague and instinctual pejorative feeling which makes them want to swing their moral hatchet.

Allow me to bury this particular hatchet. The aforementioned reaction is the product of ignorance; it is the result of a failure to understand the distinction between a “right” and a “duty.” While it is within your ‘right’ to research this distinction if you want to, it is not your ‘duty’ to do so… catching on?  Let me also point out that there is no affirmative right to vote in the constitution although many will speak as if there is. Some folks are also under the delusion that if enough people did not vote, somehow democracy would disintegrate; it can only be a lack of political imagination which allows someone to believe this. For those who hold themselves hostage to this belief, may I suggest that voting — or not voting — is much like the relation between vaccinations and “herd immunity”: as long as enough people get the vaccine, the likelihood of a pandemic is almost nil.  

So take a deep breath and relax; regardless of how you “exercised” your “right,” the fascinating experiment that is America will continue; Trump will be on television to greet you everyday, just as Hillary would have been.  

Let me close with the following quote: “It is apodictic that a vote does not lose its constitutional significance merely because it is cast for a candidate who has little or no chance of winning. Nor do we think it loses this character if cast for a non-existent or fictional person, for surely the right to vote for the candidate of one's choice includes the right to say that no candidate is acceptable.”  Dixon v. Maryland State Administrative Bd. 4th Cir. Md. 1989

Meme-du-jour #1: Are we in a "post-factual" era?

The phenomenon of "epistemological funambulism," otherwise known as intellectual tightrope walking. 

This occurs when a person attempts—and epically fails—to *equate* knowledge with belief.  THEY ARE NOT IDENTICAL IN ANY WAY. This is usually the mark of a mind which has lost its moorings to the systemic regularities that make our speech noises mutually intelligible.

This is brilliantly illustrated by Kellyanne Conway's infamous phrase, "alternative facts." Like Trump, she traffics in obfuscation and peddles confusion, inadvertently trumpeting the advent of our "post-factual era"...

Avoid intellectual primitivism... leave that to Betsy DeVos