Locking the echo chamber

It must be awfully convenient to start out from the baseline assumption that everyone who disagrees with you is wrong.

This observation comes about because Thursday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I posted the following on Facebook: "On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, I'm thinking about our cousins, Armand Simon, Céline (Bollack) Simon, and Irène Simon, and Baila Dvora (Bloomgarden) Serejski, Avish Serejski, Tsipe Serejski, and Sholem Serejski, who died at the hands of the Nazis in Auschwitz.  May they never be forgotten."  I also appended a link to a post I did five years ago about the Simon family, who were part of the French Resistance.

Most of the responses were wonderful, but one person, a cousin of mine, wrote the following:

I could never understand how everyday people went along with packing their possessions up and moving to the ghetto thinking how could it get worse?  And yet it became much worse.  I see this going on in our country today.  When we visited Hawaii last March to see our daughter who was living there, we had to get a specific COVID test to enter the state.  And it was negative.  But when we got there, it wasn’t from the lab approved by their Governor and we were hauled into an area for “processing”.  They called our hotel and we’re going to force us in a 14 day quarantine - they wouldn’t even look at our antigen test results!  And we went to a lab at the airport recommended by our airline.  Well I refused to pay for a resort and be forced to stay in a hotel room for 14 days, so we told them we would stay at our daughter’s apartment.  I wasn’t about to give this state a penny of our money and be under their control.  When I said to the lady at the airport Aloha, Welcome to Hawaii - she replied, "We don’t want you here."  I felt like we were no longer in the USA.  And you should see all the homeless in Hawaii because the Governor there shut down all the businesses - tents everywhere. For a state that relies on tourism as a huge part of their livelihood- this was beyond stupid.  Many people in the tourist industry had to move to the mainland and those that couldn’t afford to, now had to live on the streets.  And now you can’t go in restaurants or bars unless you have a vaccine passport.  I have a bad reaction to vaccines so I’m not about to get that shot and it’s my body - nobody should be forced to have to take an injection - EVER!  Our country is FUBAR.  Thank God we live in Florida and our Governor is the best combination of intelligence and common sense.  To think I have to check which states I can travel to is unconscionable.  Our country is on a very bad path as a whole. We can only hope that at some point there will be a mass resistance.

When someone pointed out that it was out of line to compare being mildly inconvenienced on your Hawaii vacation to six million people being systematically killed by the Nazis, she responded:

My point was definitely not a comparison. My point is that we are like the frog and boiling water theory if we don’t pay attention to our gradual loss of freedoms. And that is exactly what is taking [sic] with President Numbnuts in office right now.

And damn straight I am in the right state. I would appreciate if all the people flocking here from Democrat states would stay the hell out unless they have the intelligence to know why they want to be here. Don’t come here and ruin our freedom!

This, of course, isn't the first thing like this she's posted; it's just the first one directed at me.  She's had gems like a diatribe starting out "All Democrats are pinheads," implying that one-half of the American public are hopelessly stupid.  No need to know anything else about them; Democrat = idiot.  Done thinking.

I honestly can't comprehend this level of confident arrogance.  One of my (many) besetting sins is that I'm almost never 100% sure of anything; to me, most of the world is made up of gray areas, ambiguity, and extenuating circumstances.  But my cousin's attitude goes way beyond being sure of oneself.  Confidence and a strong trust in your own beliefs and principles are just fine; in her, it has morphed into a conviction that the people who share her beliefs are the only ones worth listening to.  

It's a scary position to be in.  I wrote a couple of years ago about how absolutely essential it is to keep in mind that your opinion could be based in error -- and cited some research showing that this willingness to consider our own fallibility is essential in science.  (I'd argue that it's essential in damn near everything.)

It reminds me of what Kathryn Schulz said, in her amazing TED Talk "On Being Wrong:"

It's like we want to believe that our minds are these perfectly transparent windows, and we just gaze out of them and describe the world as it unfolds.  And we want everybody to gaze out of the exact same window and see the exact same thing...  If you want to rediscover wonder, you have to step outside of that tiny, terrified space of rightness -- and look around at each other, and look at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe, and be able to say, "Wow.  I don't know.  Maybe I'm wrong."

I chose not to try to argue with her.  Maybe that was the cowardly choice, but my impression is that it would have been entirely futile.  Once you've landed in that position -- believing that everyone who disagrees with you is either misinformed, stupid, or lying outright -- you're kind of stuck there.  I don't shy away from an argument when there's ground to be gained, or at least when both sides are listening; but this person has so locked herself in an echo chamber that it's pointless even to engage.

If what I really crave is slamming my head into a wall, it'd be easier and quicker just to go find a wall and do it.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Evbestie, FilterBubble, CC BY-SA 4.0]

In any case, I just decided to disconnect.  I'm kind of done posting on social media.  I'll still throw links to Skeptophilia on Facebook and Twitter every day, and probably will continue to post the occasional pic of my dogs on Instagram, but other than that, I've kind of had it.  I'm just weary unto death of the vitriol -- when you can't post a tribute to relatives who died in the Holocaust without it turning into a Fox News-inspired extremist screed, it's a sign that the platform itself is no longer worth the time and anguish.  And I unfriended my cousin (reducing the number of my blood relatives who still want to have anything to do with me to "almost one"), because I know about her that one of her mottos is "Death before backing down."  Interacting with someone like that isn't worth the toll it takes on me personally.

What that says about the state of affairs in the United States today is scary, though.  The media found out a couple of decades ago that polarization and agitation gets viewers, and has whipped up the partisan rancor to the point that each side thinks the other is actively evil.  It's kind of ironic that the whole nasty exchange started because of a post about the Holocaust, though.  It reminds me of the trenchant quote -- attributed incorrectly to Werner Herzog, and actually of unknown provenance -- "Dear America, you are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that one-third of your people would happily kill another one-third, while the remaining one-third stands there watching."

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It's kind of sad that there are so many math-phobes in the world, because at its basis, there is something compelling and fascinating about the world of numbers.  Humans have been driven to quantify things for millennia -- probably beginning with the understandable desire to count goods and belongings -- but it very quickly became a source of curiosity to find out why numbers work as they do.

The history of mathematics and its impact on humanity is the subject of the brilliant book The Art of More: How Mathematics Created Civilization by Michael Brooks.  In it he looks at how our ancestors' discovery of how to measure and enumerate the world grew into a field of study that unlocked hidden realms of science -- leading Galileo to comment, with some awe, that "Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe."  Brooks's deft handling of this difficult and intimidating subject makes it uniquely accessible to the layperson -- so don't let your past experiences in math class dissuade you from reading this wonderful and eye-opening book.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Speaking truth to power

My mother's grandfather, Joseph Meyer, was one of a small community of French Jews near Donaldsonville, Louisiana.  His family, like many Jewish families, had their names changed in the 19th century -- Joseph's paternal grandparents were born Schillen Lévy and Mindel Bloch in Dauendorf, Bas-Rhin département, Alsace, France.  But the French authorities decided their names were too Jewish-sounding, and altered them by decree to Joseph and Minette Meyer.

Some of my Bloch and Lévy relatives chose to stay in Alsace, and a couple of generations further along one of my Bloch cousins, Céline Bollack, was born in the little town of Wintzenheim in 1893.  When the Nazis rose to power, Céline and her husband, Armand Simon, became involved in the French Resistance.  They passed out anti-Nazi literature, worked to organize people to fight the German infiltration into France, and even as circumstances looked darker and darker, would not be silenced.

In spring of 1944 they were in the town of Brive-le-Gaillarde, in the département of Corrèze in south-central France.  Brive-le-Gaillarde was a hub of the Resistance, and in fact had been the home of Resistance fighter Edmond Michelet (who was imprisoned at Dachau, contracted typhus, but survived both).

Armand and Céline were not so lucky.  They were arrested along with their fifteen-year-old daughter Irène in Brive-le-Gaillarde on April 4, 1944 for sedition and agitation (and not least because they were Jewish themselves).  They were transferred to a holding camp in Drancy, northeast of Paris, and on April 29 were part of Convoy 72 from Drancy to Auschwitz.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The Nazis were meticulous record-keepers.  There were 1,004 men, women, and children on Convoy 72.  Only 100 of them were chosen to work in the camp; the other 904 were gassed.

Armand, Céline, and Irène Simon were among the 904 executed shortly after their arrival at Auschwitz.

It bears mention, however, that even of the 100 who were allowed to live after arriving in the camp, only 38 survived to the liberation of the death camp on January 27, 1945.

What always strikes me about the Nazi atrocities is the complicity of ordinary folks.  It is easy enough to imagine horrific things being done by people who are truly evil; what is hard to wrap my brain around is how thousands of regular people, with families and friends and hobbies and jobs and pets, not only sat idly by while the Nazis arrested their neighbors, but actively helped.  These are the people who became informants, prison guards, collaborators.

These are the people without whom the Holocaust would never have happened.

I would like to say that such atrocities could never happen again.  But I see the same things going on today -- ordinary folks excusing elected officials for saying and doing terrible things; ridiculing, denigrating, or threatening people who speak up; agitating anger against those who look different or think differently.  If you believe that such behavior couldn't escalate into violence and oppression, if you think we've learned our lesson from the horrors of World War II, you're fooling yourself.  Those same tendencies are still with us, waiting to be whipped into a frenzy by leaders who gain power from inciting hate, making us afraid, and teaching us to distrust the truth.

The only way to stop this is to speak up and continue speaking up.  Such acts of courage are risky; my cousin Céline and her husband and daughter paid for their resistance with their lives.  But the risks -- whether they are minor ones such as ridicule and condemnation, or major ones such as imprisonment or execution -- do not abrogate our responsibility to stand up for what is right.

When I have attended Passover celebrations and the time comes for remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust, I have spoken the names of Céline, Armand, and Irène Simon along with the words "May they never be forgotten."  But I'll go a step further.  May we never lose our courage to do what they did, to speak truth to power.  We must not simply remember the ones who gave their lives for a noble cause, but be like them --  be unafraid to put ourselves in harm's way to stop those who would see our country and our world once again descend into a maelstrom of hatred, violence, and despair.

I owe most of what I know about my cousin and her family to the research of my dear friend Dr. Diana Wagner, Holocaust Educator at Salisbury University (Maryland).  She has been working with the Holocaust Survivors and Victims Resource Center to hand-transcribe hundreds of documents related to the Holocaust, and to make those documents available through the World Memory Project.  I owe a debt of gratitude to Diana for not only my personal knowledge about my own family, but for all of the hours she has put in to make sure that these stories truly will never be forgotten -- and to help us to vow that we will never let such things happen again.

Doomed to repeat

This weekend, I inadvertently started an online argument about the Syrian refugees.

I rarely get involved in political discussions online (or anywhere else) because of this very thing.  It's the most fruitless of pursuits, really; it usually accomplishes nothing but eliciting shouts of acclamation from the people who already agree with you, and snorts of derision from the people who don't.

In other words, nothing.

I got the ball rolling by comparing the plight of the refugees, and the reluctance of the United States government to give them asylum, to the attitudes of the majority of English policymakers during the Irish Potato Famine of the mid-19th century, and the blocking of Jews before World War II trying to flee Germany into the Netherlands (and from the Netherlands and elsewhere into the United States).  Some of you may not know that Anne Frank and her family applied for, and were denied, passage into the United States in 1940 -- a move that would have saved their lives.

Well, that was apparently pasting a bullseye on my chest.  How dare I compare the Syrian refugees to the Jews?  The situation is completely different.  Plus, you know, those people want to kill us.  They are uniformly hostile to the United States and everything we stand for, so we're right to deny them entry.

So I thought it was time to set aside my reluctance to discuss political matters, and offer a little history lesson.  I have pulled some quotes, all from primary sources, that refer either to the Irish during the Potato Famine, the Jews prior to World War II, or the Syrian refugees now.  See if you can tell them apart.  (The only editing I did was to remove obvious giveaway references.)

1. The judgment of God sent the calamity to teach [them] a lesson, and that calamity must not be too much mitigated. … The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil... but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of those people.
2. [They are] more like squalid apes than human beings... Only efficient military despotism [can succeed in this situation], because [they] understand only force.
3. It is probably unwise to say this loudly... but [this situation] is and has been since its beginning guided and controlled by [people] of the greasiest type, who have... absorbed every one of the worst phases of our civilization without having the least understanding of what we really mean by liberty.
4. Two things made this country great: White men & Christianity.  Every problem that has arisen can be traced back to our departure from God’s Law and the disenfranchisement of White men.  And our current actions serve no purpose but to depart even further from those.
5. [They] can go [back home] and stew in their own juice.  The rest had better stop being what they are, and start being human beings.
6. It looks like to me if shooting these immigrating feral hogs works, maybe we have found a [solution] to our... problem.
7. I see no solution to the... problem short of expelling all followers of the religion from the United States.
8. [They] could be put down very plausibly as the most unpleasant race ever heard of.  As commonly encountered they lack any of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence.
9. A policy that will not kill more than one million [of them]... will scarcely be enough to do any good.
10. [They] are a cancer that must be cut out of our society, whose goal is the destruction of civilization from within.
11. [They] hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion.  This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with [our] character. Their ideal of human felicity is an alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry.  Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood.
12. When neighborhoods are occupied by [these people], they establish their own laws and don't respect our own. 

Ready for the answers?

1. The Irish.  Charles Trevelyan, head of the English Administration for Famine Relief, 1845.
2. The Irish.  James Anthony Froude, professor of history, Oxford University, 1860.
3. The Jews.  General Montgomery Schuyler, 1919.
4. Syrian refugees.  Representative Don Davis of North Carolina.
5. The Jews.  George Bernard Shaw, 1932.
6. Syrian refugees.  Representative Virgil Peck of Kansas.
7. Syrian refugees.  Representative Charlie Fuqua of Arkansas.
8. The Jews.  H. L. Mencken, 1930.
9. The Irish.  Nassau Senior, chief economist to Queen Victoria.
10. Syrian refugees.  Representative John Bennett of Oklahoma.
11. The Irish.  Benjamin Disraeli, 1878.
12. Syrian refugees.  Representative Carl Gatto of Alaska.

If you're curious, the sources of the quotes can be found here for the Irish Potato Famine, here for the pre-war antisemitism, and here for the rhetoric against Muslim immigration.

Only the details change.  The hate speech, the fear and loathing of the "other," the wild claims that those people are trying to destroy our society, all stay the same.

It doesn't even seem to do any good to point out how many of the refugees are children or the elderly.  It doesn't help if you tell people that none of the Paris attackers were Syrian -- every last one of them was a citizen of the E.U.  Nor were any of the 9/11 bombers Syrian.

None of that matters.  They may look like starving, homeless refugees, but they're still implacably hostile to us.  You know how They are.

It's just that every generation has a different They.

I will end with a quote from the great Elie Wiesel.  As a survivor of the concentration camps during World War II, he has as good a reason as any to give in to hate, fear, and intolerance.  Instead, here are his words on the subject.