Risk versus chaos

I got up this morning and with some reluctance looked at the news, and I was immediately reminded of something a former student of mine said years ago.

The subject was environmental degradation and climate change, and the question I asked the class was when Americans would be motivated in sufficient numbers to initiate a real change in our environmental policy.  What she said, near as I can recall, was this.

"It won't happen until things have gotten a great deal worse.  Nothing will change until ordinary middle-class people with houses and cars and bank accounts turn on the taps in their kitchen and no water comes out.  Until their kids can't walk to school without wearing gas masks because of the air pollution.  When they go to the grocery store and find the shelves empty.  We're all too comfortable, and when we're comfortable, it's too easy to disappear into that comfort and assume it could never be any other way."

I think we might have crossed that line, not with respect to the environment, but in the governance of the United States as a whole.

In a few short weeks we've been catapulted into chaos.  The powder keg was already there, fashioned over long careful years of preparation by the constant fear-talk of people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.  That message of the Big Bad Other is, honestly, what propelled Donald Trump into the presidency, with his constant harping on illegal aliens destroying America.  Your way of life is in significant peril, they said -- all the while creating exactly the conditions that would imperil our way of life once the match was lit.

What exactly set the powder keg off was almost irrelevant; it could have been anything.  In this case, it was twofold; the lockdown from the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with the murder of a black civilian by a white policeman who had already been investigated multiple times for using excessive force.  It's like the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by Serbian extremist Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo in 1914.  That one act was the first card falling, but the entire house of cards was already there -- and in five years, twenty million people were dead and whole countries devastated beyond recognition.

And like in World War I, the people who could step in and prevent the catastrophe instead are inflaming matters and making it far, far worse.  Donald Trump, who will do anything to protect his bloated ego, was so pissed off by being mocked as "BunkerBoy" on Twitter for his escape into a protected bunker and refusal to appear publicly that he decided to stage a photo-op to prove what a tough, macho strongman he is.  He had the police attack peaceful demonstrators in front of St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington D. C. with tear gas and rubber bullets, then marched out in front of it holding a Bible (upside down) and threatened to unleash the military on civilians exercising their right of assembly.

"If the city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residence," he said, "then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gage Skidmore, Donald Trump (29496131773), CC BY-SA 2.0]

His loyal ass-kissers were effusive in their praise.  "No one else would have had the guts to do this," crowed former governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker.  Florida Representative Matt Gaetz said this was the start of the military hunting down "members of Antifa... like we do those in the Middle East."  Not to be outdone, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas had this to say:

Anarchy, rioting, and looting needs to end tonight.  If local law enforcement is overwhelmed and needs backup, let’s see how tough these Antifa terrorists are when they’re facing off with the 101st Airborne Division.  We need to have zero tolerance for this destruction.  And, if necessary, the 10th Mountain, 82nd Airborne, 1st Cav, 3rd Infantry—whatever it takes to restore order.  No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.

And you know what "no quarter" means.

Shoot to kill.

We're on a precipice right now, and the people who could rein in this lurching, out-of-control president -- the men and women of his own party -- are refusing to do anything but throw gasoline on the fire.  The only possible solution, the only thing that might keep us from descending into chaos, is if the ordinary middle-class people like the ones my student spoke of will stand up and say "Enough."  We've got to be willing to give up our comfortable, privileged safety and risk being seen and heard by a government that at the moment is doing everything in its power to stop citizens from speaking up and acting in the cause of justice.

I'll end with a quote from Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, which was written in 1935 but is frighteningly prescient:

The tyranny of this dictatorship isn't primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work.  It's the fault of Doremus Jessup!  Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest. 

A few months ago I thought the slaughter of the Civil War, and the agitation of the violent Abolitionists who helped bring it on, were evil.  But possibly they had to be violent, because easy-going citizens like me couldn't be stirred up otherwise.  If our grandfathers had had the alertness and courage to see the evils of slavery and of a government conducted by gentlemen for gentlemen only, there wouldn't have been any need of agitators and war and blood. 

It's my sort, the Responsible Citizens who've felt ourselves superior because we've been well-to-do and what we thought was 'educated,' who brought on the Civil War, the French Revolution, and now the Fascist Dictatorship.  It's I who murdered Rabbi de Verez.  It's I who persecuted the Jews and the Negroes.  I can blame no Aras Dilley, no Shad Ledue, no Buzz Windrip, but only my own timid soul and drowsy mind.  Forgive, O Lord! 

Is it too late?

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a fun one -- George Zaidan's Ingredients: The Strange Chemistry of What We Put In Us and On Us.  Springboarding off the loony recommendations that have been rampant in the last few years -- fad diets, alarmist warnings about everything from vaccines to sunscreen, the pros and cons of processed food, substances that seem to be good for us one week and bad for us the next, Zaidan goes through the reality behind the hype, taking apart the claims in a way that is both factually accurate and laugh-out-loud funny.

And high time.  Bogus health claims, fueled by such sites as Natural News, are potentially dangerous.  Zaidan's book holds a lens up to the chemicals we ingest, inhale, and put on our skin -- and will help you sort the fact from the fiction.

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

Lysenko, Walker, and the dangers of state-controlled science

Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet agrobiologist during the Stalin years, whose interest in trying to improve crop yields led him into some seriously sketchy pseudoscience.  He believed in a warped version of Lamarckism -- that plants exposed to certain environmental conditions during their lives would alter what they do to adjust to those conditions, and (furthermore) those alterations would be passed down to subsequent generations.

He not only threw away everything Mendel and Darwin had uncovered, he disbelieved in DNA as the hereditary material.  Lysenko wrote:

An immortal hereditary substance, independent of the qualitative features attending the development of the living body, directing the mortal body, but not produced by the latter - that is Weismann’s frankly idealist, essentially mystical conception, which he disguised as “Neo-Darwinism”.  Weismann’s conception has been fully accepted and, we might say, carried further by Mendelism-Morganism.

So basically, since there were no genes there to constrain the possibilities, humans could mold organisms in whatever way they chose.  "It is possible, with man’s intervention," Lysenko wrote, "to force any form of animal or plant to change more quickly and in a direction desirable to man.  There opens before man a broad field of activity of the greatest value to him."

Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The Soviet agricultural industry was ordered to use Lysenko's theories (if I can dignify them by that name) to inform their practices.  Deeper plowing of fields, for example, was said by Lysenko to induce plants' roots to delve deeper for minerals, creating deeper-rooted plants in following years and increased crop yields.  Farmers dutifully began to plow fields to a depth of five feet, requiring enormous expenditure of time and labor.

Crop yields didn't change.  But that didn't matter; Lysenko's ideas were beloved by Stalin, as they seemed to give a scientific basis to the concept of striving by the sturdy peasant stock, thus improving their own lot.  Evidence and data took a back seat to ideology.  Lysenko was given award after award and rose to the post of Director of the Institute of Genetics in the USSR's Academy of Sciences.  Scientists who followed Lysenko's lead in making up data out of whole cloth to support the state-approved model of heredity got advancements, grants, and gifts from Stalin himself.  Scientists who pointed out that Lysenko's experiments were flawed and his data doctored or fabricated outright were purged -- by some estimates 3,000 of them were fired, exiled, jailed, or executed for choosing "bourgeois science" (i.e. actual evidence-based research) over Lysenko.  His stranglehold on Soviet biological research and agricultural practice didn't cease until his retirement in 1965, by which time an entire generation of Soviet scientists had been hindered from making any progress at all.

Which brings us to Scott Walker.

Walker, you probably know, is the governor of Wisconsin, whose notoriety primarily comes from his union-busting, a failed presidential bid, and a narrow escape from losing his office to a vote recall.  But now Walker's in the news for a different reason; he is trying to out-Lysenko Lysenko by scrubbing from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources webpage every mention of the words "climate" and "climate change."

Fortunately, James Rowen of Urban Milwaukee has a screenshot of the original text and the changes made -- it's on the link provided in the preceding paragraph, and has to be seen to be believed.  Rowen writes:

Climate change censors driven by science denial and obeisance to polluters these days at the GOP-managed, Scott Walker-redefined “chamber of commerce mentality” Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources are at it again. 

Not content with having already stripped content and links from an agency webpage about climate change – deletions I documented some years ago and which I have frequently referenced – the ideologues intent on scrubbing science off these pages and sowing doubt and confusion about the consensus view of experts worldwide about climate change have edited, deleted and otherwise compressed information in order to whitewash long-standing concepts and facts off a climate change page about the Great Lakes... 

It’s a continuation of Walker’s deliberate destruction of the DNR – which we also learned he is considering completely breaking apart to further hamstring and weaken public science, conservation and pollution enforcement while further playing to corporate donors and manipulating GOP base voters to help embed partisan Republican advancement and entrenchment by propagandizing that government – and especially agencies like DNR which Walker has intentionally doomed – does not work for them.

So just like in Stalin's day, we are moving toward a state-endorsed scientific party line, which non-scientists (and scientists in the pay of corporate interests or the politicians themselves) are enforcing using such sticks as censorship, funding cuts, and layoffs.  We have not yet progressed to outright purges and imprisonment, but we sure as hell have taken a large step in that direction.

Lysenko died forty years ago, but his propaganda-based, anti-science spirit lives on.  My hope is that because of the greater transparency and freedom of information afforded by the internet, moves like Walker's scrubbing of the Department of Natural Resources website will not be shrouded in secrecy the way that Stalin's and Lysenko's actions were.  But it behooves us all to remain aware, watchful, and vigilant, because you can just as easily see it slipping under the radar -- and for the claws of partisan politics to sink so deeply into scientific research that it will, as it did in the USSR, take generations to repair the damage.

Voting for the voice of god

Below I present to you a series of quotes.  You'll see a pattern pretty quickly.

• It’s the natural law of God. We have a theocracy right now.  You know, the only thing worse than not being elected president would be to be elected president without God’s blessing. I can’t think of a worse place in the world to be than in the Oval Office without God’s hand upon you.  -- Mike Huckabee
• It was as if there was a presence of the Holy Spirit in the room and we all were at awe and Ted, all that came out of his mouth, he said, ‘Here am I Lord, use me.  Here am I Lord, I surrender to whatever Your will for my life is.’  And it was at that time that he felt a peace about running for president of the United States. -- Rafael Cruz, speaking of his son, Senator Ted Cruz
• I feel fingers [of god]...  I finally said, ‘Lord if you truly want me to do this, you’ll have to open the doors, because I’m certainly not going to kick them down.  And if you open the doors I will walk through them.  And as long as you hold them open, I will walk through them...  I believe God will make it clear to me if that’s something I’m supposed to do.  I will run if God grabs me by the collar and asks me to run. -- Ben Carson
• Our goal is eternity.  The purpose of our life is to cooperate with God’s plan, and I believe that's what this [the presidential race] is about...  To those who much has been given, much is expected, and we will be asked to account for that, whether your treasures are stored up on earth or in heaven.  And to me, I try to allow that to influence me in everything that I do. -- Marco Rubio
• We have prayed a lot about this decision, and we believe with all our hearts that this [Santorum running for president] is what God wants. -- Rick Santorum
• My relationship with God drives every major decision in my life.  Our country is at a crossroads and we need a proven conservative leader who is not afraid to fight for what is right — even when it’s not politically expedient.  My decisions are guided by my relationship with God. -- Scott Walker
• He and his wife believe they are touched by God, and that this is his time.  It's like – they can't lose – that's the sense of it.  I don't know if he'll win the nomination, but I'm absolutely sure he'll be one of the last two Republicans standing. -- an anonymous supporter and financier, speaking of Governor Rick Perry

So what we have here is a host of presidential candidates who are all basically claiming that god told them personally that he wanted them to run.  Fortunately, one of them at least is aware that god can't simultaneously support everybody:

I think sometimes, while people say, “we’re praying about this, we’re asking God,” that’s fine, but it seems like the criteria that I’ve been told for selecting candidates seems very secular.  It’s about well, this person is polling well, this person has the cash.  And I’m thinking, you know if these guys were going up against Goliath they would’ve insisted that it was the big guy, with the king’s armor—they never would’ve allowed that shepherd boy with the five smooth stones, and with Gideon’s army, they would’ve run for cover when God got Gideon’s army down to 300. -- Mike Huckabee, speaking about his rivals Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz

But of course, since he's implying that because of all of this, god's supporting him, I'm not sure we've gained any ground, here.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And of course, the other problem is that the unifying theme between all of these guys is that none of them are going to get the Republican nomination.  (We could argue over whether Ted Cruz still has a shot, but I think that realistically, he's done for.)  So what's going on here?  Was god trolling all of them?  Or saying, basically, "Yes.  It's my will that you run" without adding, "... but you're all gonna lose."  Or just telling them what they wanted to hear, because the almighty didn't want to hurt their feelings?

The problem is exactly what Susan B. Anthony observed -- "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because it so often coincides with their own desires."

So anyway, it's all rather amusing to we non-religious types that one of the only Republican candidates who didn't claim to be anointed by god -- Donald Trump -- is looking like a shoo-in for the nomination.  Of course, the downside is that Donald Trump winning the nomination doesn't only mean that the God Squad didn't get it, but that, um, Donald Trump will have won the nomination.  So my laughter is ringing a little hollow at the moment.

Maybe god could tell Donald that he was destined to become president.  Given god's batting average so far, it'd pretty much assure that he'd lose.

Hearing voices

I'm a little concerned that the next president of the United States might be either delusional or else an outright liar.

I know this statement probably has a lot of people shrugging.  We here in the United States have a long history of electing a colorful combination of the insane and the dishonest to public office.  But this is the first time in my memory that we have so many people seeking the highest office in the land who are proud to announce that they hear voices.

Let's start with Ben Carson, who last November told Christian Broadcast Network's David Brody that he felt the "fingers of god" pushing him to run for president.  He's been up front ever since that he's running because god has told him that's what he wants.  "I serve God, and my purpose is to please Him, and if God be for you, who can be against you?...  I am running for president because God grabbed me by the collar and asked me to run."

Pat Robertson concurred, and said that god sent him a personal message that Carson's the real deal:

God came to me in a dream. He had a white robe and a white beard, and told me our next president would be another colored man.  I’m interpreting that to be Dr. Ben Carson. Unless Barack Obama seeks a third term.

I wouldn't expect the Lord of Hosts to use verbiage that makes him sound like a bigoted white dude, but what do I know?

Then there's Mike Huckabee, who attributes his political support to... Jesus Christ:

There’s only one explanation for it, and it’s not a human one. It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of five thousand people.  That’s the only way that our campaign can be doing what it’s doing.  And I’m not being facetious nor am I trying to be trite.  There literally are thousands of people across this country who are praying that a little will become much, and it has.  And it defies all explanation, it has confounded the pundits.  And I’m enjoying every minute of them trying to figure it out, and until they look at it, from a, just experience beyond human, they’ll never figure it out. And it’s probably just as well.  That’s honestly why it’s happening.

Rick Perry also received a message from god that he should run for president:

And it has been an incredible outpouring and I can tell you that has given me the calmness in my soul that, you know, God sends messages through a lot of ways and through a lot of messengers... You may not see that burning bush, but there are people seeing that burning bush for you. I’m getting more and more comfortable every day that this is what I’ve been called to do.

Burning bushes notwithstanding, Perry decided on September 11 to throw in the towel.  Maybe it's just as well, given the mixed messages god's sending to everyone.

But no one sounded as sure that he has a direct phone line to to the almighty as Scott Walker, who went on record as saying:

My relationship with God drives every major decision in my life.  Each day I pray and then take time to read from the Bible and from a devotional named Jesus Calling.  As you can imagine, the months leading up to my announcement that I would run for President of the United States were filled with a lot of prayer and soul searching.  Here’s why: I needed to be certain that running was God’s calling — not just man’s calling. I am certain: This is God’s plan for me and I am humbled to be a candidate for President of the United States.

But in another startling change in the divine plan, Walker also called it quits, just four days ago.  I guess maybe god's calling of Scott Walker was a misdial.

I don't know about you, but why are so many people accepting of the fact that we have multiple candidates who will state outright that they hear voices?  It doesn't take a Ph.D. to recognize that if more than one person is claiming that god said they'd be the next president, they can't all be right.  In fact, the great likelihood is that all of them are either (1) lying, or else (2) insane.

It is a sorry state of affairs that we have come to a place where to succeed in politics, you have to pander to the ultra religious -- or else be one of them yourself.  I'm willing to believe that Walker and Perry might have just been saying what they thought their constituency wanted to hear; but there's no doubt about Huckabee and Carson, both of whom are avowed young-earth creationists.  In fact, just a couple of days ago, Carson proved that to be a brain surgeon, you don't necessarily have to be rational on any other topic:

I do believe in the six-day creation.  It says in the beginning God created the heaven and Earth.  It doesn’t say when he created them, except for in the beginning.  So the Earth could have been here for a long time before he started creating things on it.  But when he did start doing that, he made it very specifically clear to us the evening and the morning were the next day because he knew that people would come along and try to say that, ‘Oh, it was millions and millions of years.’  And then what else did he say in the very first chapter?  That each thing brought forth after its own kind.  Because he knew that people would come along and say, you know, this changed into that and this changed into that and this changed into that.  So at the very beginning of the Bible, he puts that to rest.

The power of the Religious Right is even affecting Donald Trump, who recently said that the bible is his favorite book.  Pressed for details, though, he began to waffle a little.  "The bible means a lot to me," he said.  "but I don't want to get into specifics."

He later did say that his favorite bible verse was the part in Proverbs where god commands us "never to bend to envy," a passage that is laudable but unfortunately doesn't exist.  Maybe he was confusing the bible with his other favorite book, The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump.

I find myself watching this race with an increasing sense of horror.  How did we get to a place where a group of people who are, honestly, a minority of practicing Christians can wield such political clout?  I am a little aghast that to maintain credibility amongst the Republican powers-that-be, you have to state outright that you are experiencing what amounts to a psychotic break.

Oh, but these are the same people who claim that Christians in America are an embattled and persecuted minority.  So we're not talking about having a serious grasp on reality right from the get-go.

I live in hope that rationality will prevail, and whoever ends up left in the race by the time the serious campaigning starts will at least be sane.  Because what we're looking at right now is more akin to being forced to choose between the Mad Hatter and the March Hare.  And if that's what we end up with, I'm thinking of moving to Costa Rica.