What will continue

Like many Americans, I spent most of yesterday in a state of shock and incredulity.  I felt, honestly, like I'd been kicked in the gut.  It's not that I thought a Harris presidency was a foregone conclusion; but the margin by which she lost was a horrible wake-up call, and a reminder that racism, sexism, xenophobia, and Christian nationalism are still forces to be reckoned with.

In yesterday's post, I gave voice to my anger that a man like Donald Trump could win a national election not once, but twice.  All of us know exactly who he is, or should.  When the chaos comes, which I am certain it will, no one will have available the excuse of "we didn't know."  Whatever else you can say about him, he's never been stealthy.

The lion's share of the blame, though, goes to the corporate capitalists who bankrolled and supported him -- men like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Rupert Murdoch -- purely out of self-interest.  Also to the media, which scrutinized every damn thing Kamala Harris said and did, and gave Donald Trump carte blanche to babble nonsense and fraternize with racists and right-wing extremists of the worst sort, barely giving any of it a mention.  (Of course, those are not unrelated factors; the media itself is controlled by the very wealthy, who more than anyone else stand to gain from a Trump presidency.)

So yesterday was devoted to processing my own rage.

But today, I'm trying to figure out how I and my family and friends are going to cope with all this.  Just feeling hopeful for the future is a struggle right now.  But when hope is far away, you have to fall back on commitment.  So in today's post I want to focus on what will continue -- what I did last week, when I was still hopeful that sanity would prevail, and will still do now, when I am forced to concede that it did not.

So here's what I'm going to do going forward.

• I will continue to take care of my family and friends, to let them know I'm here when they need me, and to fight like hell for them when I have to.

• I will always be a voice for marginalized communities, especially religious and ethnic minorities, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people, and I vow to protect them physically and materially if it becomes necessary.

• I will continue to write about critical issues like climate change, public health policy, and the environment, regardless of the repercussions.

• I will stand up to bullies who attempt to destroy our rights and freedoms, even if it's at risk of my own bodily harm.

• I will speak truth to power.

• I will keep doing the small things -- tending my garden, making good food for my family and friends, and giving loving homes to our wonderful canine companions.

• I will continue to support artists, writers, and musicians and their commitment to bring some beauty into this poor, struggling world -- and I will continue to create as well.

• Tomorrow, I will be back to writing about cool and interesting stuff here at Skeptophilia, because teaching and learning and curiosity and humor will always be important.

• I will never, ever stop fighting for what is right, what is true, what is compassionate, and what is kind.

Even in my optimistic moments, I suspect we've got some dark times ahead.  Nothing will change my stance that American voters made a huge, huge, mistake on Tuesday, and will all too soon be finding that out.  But despite all that, I'm determined to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and to make sure that the people I love are doing the same thing.

Day by day, step by step.  It's all we can do.  That, and to help each other.  So check up on the people you care about.  Frequently.  Don't be afraid to reach out when you need help, or even a hug or a shoulder to cry on; you'll find it.

Whatever happened two days ago, and whatever will happen in the upcoming days and weeks, keep your mind focused on the things that need to continue, and turn your hope into a rock-solid commitment to hold fast to those.

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Tribal tactics

Given the right context, people tend to be cooperative.

That's the gist of a study out of the University of Texas - Austin this week, called, "Prosocial Modeling: A Meta-analytic Review and Synthesis," by Haesung Jung, Eunjin Seo, Eunjoo Han, Marlone Henderson, and Erika Patall.  If behavior is characterized as helpful to others -- such as wearing a mask during a pandemic -- it triggers similar prosocial behavior in those who witness it.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Wereskowa, Wearing FFP mask during the COVID-19 pandemic in Khmelnytskyi, April 2020, CC BY-SA 4.0]

"Just like the deadly virus, cooperative behavior can also be transmitted across people,” said Haesung Jung, lead author of the study, in a press release.  "These findings remind the public that their behavior can impact what others around do; and the more individuals cooperate to stop the spread of the disease, the more likely others nearby will do the same...  We found that people can readily improvise new forms of prosocial actions.  They engaged in behaviors that were different from what they witnessed and extended help to different targets in need than those helped by the prosocial model."

It's unsurprising, given that we're social primates, that we're influenced by the behavior of those around us.  Not only do we learn by imitation, there's the tendency -- often nicknamed "peer pressure" -- to pick up behaviors, good or bad, from our friends and acquaintances, usually for reasons of group acceptance and fitting in.  I vividly remember being a graduate student at the University of Washington, where my classmates were some of the most foul-mouthed, snarky, hard-drinking folks I've ever been around.  They weren't bad people, mind you; but it definitely was the intellectual version of a "rough crowd."  It took very little time for me to adopt those behaviors myself.  We tend to conform to the norm for the group we belong to.

(Yes, I know, I still swear a lot.  I swore even more then, hard though that may be to imagine.  Like I said -- rough crowd.)

So the results of the Jung et al. study make sense.  Get the ball rolling, she suggests, and the influence we have over the people we associate with can cause an increase in the overall prosocial behavior of the group.

But.

The example the paper focuses on -- the wearing of masks during the COVID-19 pandemic -- isn't as simple as that.  This isn't simply a case of enlightened people who understand risks wearing masks and waking up the uninformed, or at least encouraging them to behave in a socially responsible manner.  Simultaneously we have a group of people who are consciously and deliberately using the same tribal tendencies to stop people from wearing masks.  From the very beginning of the pandemic, we have had Fox News bombarding their listeners with the following messages:

• COVID is a hoax.
• Even if it's not a hoax, it's China's fault.
• It's really just seasonal flu, so it's nothing to worry about.
• Okay, it's worse than the flu, but the numbers being reported, especially from blue states, are wild exaggerations made to disparage the Trump administration.
• Which, by the way, has been doing an absolutely stellar job of managing the pandemic.
• Wearing masks is giving in to the Democrats' alarmist propaganda.
• All this is just the "deep state" trying to get you to give up your liberties, so it's nobler and braver to defy them and not wear a mask.

Just this morning I saw a post on social media of the "Meh, why worry?" variety, to the effect that Woodstock happened right in the middle of the Hong Kong flu epidemic, and that didn't stop people from partying.

Which may well be true, but doesn't make it smart.

So we've got a "news" outlet deliberately downplaying the danger, and worse, making it look like a conspiracy to bring down Dear Leader.  The result is that wearing masks isn't seen as prosocial, at least amongst Fox viewers; it's seen as falling for the lies of the Democrats, and thus betraying Donald Trump and everything the GOP stands for.

This kind of thinking is remarkably hard to counteract, because the Fox mouthpieces -- people like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham -- started out by training their listeners to disbelieve the facts.  The administration quickly picked up on this strategy, starting with Kellyanne Conway's infamous "alternative facts" comment, and it has proven wildly successful, if you can characterize getting a significant slice of the American public to trust nothing but the party line as "success."

As I've pointed out before, once you get people to mistrust the hard evidence itself, you can convince them of anything.

So the problem with mask-wearing in the United States is that it isn't universally being seen as a compassionate protective measure, it's seen as being a dupe.  Besides the "how others are seeing our actions" factor that Jung et al. focused on, there's "how we see ourselves" -- and if we've been trained that a behavior is going to make us look like a gullible sucker, that's going to counteract the positive forces of prosocial modeling.  (Especially if the training has included a message that the risk the behavior is supposed to protect us from doesn't exist in the first place.)

Yes, we're motivated to be compassionate and protect the people around us.  But the ugly side of tribalism is equally powerful, and we now have a group of people in charge who are callously choosing their tactics to exploit those tendencies, with the end of gaining power and money.

Until we can stop the disinformation and propaganda, the kind of prosocial modeling Jung et al. describe is unlikely to have much effect.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is six years old, but more important today than it was when it was written; Richard Alley's The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future.  Alley tackles the subject of proxy records -- indirect ways we can understand things we weren't around to see, such as the climate thousands of years ago.

The one he focuses on is the characteristics of glacial ice, deposited as snow one winter at a time, leaving behind layers much like the rings in tree trunks.  The chemistry of the ice gives us a clear picture of the global average temperature; the presence (or absence) of contaminants like pollen, windblown dust, volcanic ash, and so on tell us what else might have contributed to the climate at the time.  From that, we can develop a remarkably consistent picture of what the Earth was like, year by year, for the past ten thousand years.

What it tells us as well, though, is a little terrifying; that the climate is not immune to sudden changes.  In recent memory things have been relatively benevolent, at least on a planet-wide view, but that hasn't always been the case.  And the effect of our frantic burning of fossil fuels is leading us toward a climate precipice that there may be no way to turn back from.

The Two-Mile Time Machine should be mandatory reading for the people who are setting our climate policy -- but because that's probably a forlorn hope, it should be mandatory reading for voters.  Because the long-term habitability of the planet is what is at stake here, and we cannot afford to make a mistake.

As Richard Branson put it, "There is no Planet B."

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

Anesthetized by power

Watching Donald Trump and our other so-called leaders over the last year and a half has been one long exercise in horrified astonishment.  The graft, corruption, self-aggrandizement, and bullying are beyond anything I've ever seen in government in my fifty-odd years of being at least somewhat aware of what was going on.  And, merciful heavens above, the lying.  An article was going around a few days ago that had the headline, "How Can You Tell If Donald Trump Is Lying?"  My answer to that question is, "If his lips are moving."

But the one thing that has stood out the most is the utter lack of empathy and compassion.  It's in the news every single day.  Our fellow humans called "animals," and anyone who even suggests that we should come up with a humane policy for illegal immigrants is shouted down as someone who "loves MS-13" (the notorious, ultraviolent Central American gang that has established itself in the United States).  At the same time, pretending that the humanitarian crises over a lack of drinkable water in Flint, Michigan, and a lack of basic necessities in Puerto Rico, simply don't exist.  (And here, the "they're illegals" argument doesn't work; we're talking about American citizens.)

Some recent research, led by University of California - Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner, has given us a lens into why this sort of thing is appallingly common.  He has studied the dynamics of power, and in particularly, how power interacts with a sense of empathy, and found something disturbing; power seems to dull a person's capacity for empathy, even in people who were empathetic to start with.

Keltner writes:

These findings suggest that iconic abuses of power—Jeffrey Skilling’s fraudulent accounting at Enron, Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski’s illegal bonuses, Silvio Berlusconi’s bunga bunga parties, Leona Helmsley’s tax evasion—are extreme examples of the kinds of misbehavior to which all leaders, at any level, are susceptible.  Studies show that people in positions of corporate power are three times as likely as those at the lower rungs of the ladder to interrupt coworkers, multitask during meetings, raise their voices, and say insulting things at the office.  And people who’ve just moved into senior roles are particularly vulnerable to losing their virtues, my research and other studies indicate.

The problem seems to be a loss of the capacity for what psychologists call "mirroring" -- being able to imagine yourself in someone else's mind.  This ability is critical for compassion; it's why many of us have a hard time watching violent scenes in movies, because we imagine ourselves in that situation all too easily.  A 2006 study by Adam D. Galinsky, Joe C. Magee, M. Ena Inesi, and Deborah Gruenfeld showed that just priming a person's brain by having half the subjects recall a time during which they were in a position of high power, and the other half a time during when they were powerless, alters their ability to perform simple mirroring tests -- such as drawing a letter "E" on their own forehead, in the proper orientation to someone who is looking at their face.  Even recalling being in a powerful position made a person more likely to be "self-oriented" -- and to draw the E backwards with respect to everyone else.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons NeetiR, Leadership and Power, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Wilfred Laurier University psychologists Sukhvinder Obhi and Jeremy Hogeveen, and University of Toronto - Scarborough researcher Michael Inzlicht, have found something even more interesting, and considerably more frightening.  They put test subjects into an fMRI machine, and had them watch a simple video -- for example, of someone squeezing a rubber ball.  The "non-powerful group" showed strong activation of the parts of the brain that would fire if the subject him/herself were squeezing the ball; they were, apparently, imagining themselves doing the task.  The "powerful group," though, showed much less activation of those pathways.

The authors write:

[T]he main results we report are robust, and strongly suggest that power is negatively related to motor resonance.  Indeed, anecdotes abound about the worker on the shop floor whose boss seems oblivious to his existence, or the junior sales associate whose regional manager never remembers her name and seems to look straight through her in meetings.  Perhaps the pattern of activity within the motor resonance system that we observed in the present study can begin to explain how these occurrences take place and, more generally, can shed light on the tendency for the powerful to neglect the powerless, and the tendency for the powerless to expend effort in understanding the powerful.

The Obhi et al. experiment's conclusion is profoundly depressing.  Recall that the test subjects weren't actually different in their overall power level; they were all college students who had simply been primed to recall being powerful, or not.  Obhi remarked that the mirroring pathways in the "powerful group" appeared to be "anesthetized" -- and would presumably return to their baseline once the experiment was over.

What about people who are in more-or-less permanent positions of power?  Could a long enough exposure to being in a power role permanently damage the ability to feel empathy?  It's easy enough to believe that about Donald Trump, who has had the money and position to pull everyone's strings at will for decades.  But the results of the research supports the famous line from Lord Acton, that "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."  It'd be nice to think that the most empathetic and compassionate of us would still feel that way if we were elected to public office, but the truth seems to be darker than that.  I surmise that the individuals with the highest levels of empathy probably wouldn't run for office in the first place, but that's a guess.  But those that do seem inevitably to experience a dulling of their capacity for compassion.

As David Owen and Jonathan Davidson wrote in an article on hubris in the journal Brain in 2009:

Charisma, charm, the ability to inspire, persuasiveness, breadth of vision, willingness to take risks, grandiose aspirations and bold self-confidence—these qualities are often associated with successful leadership.  Yet there is another side to this profile, for these very same qualities can be marked by impetuosity, a refusal to listen to or take advice and a particular form of incompetence when impulsivity, recklessness and frequent inattention to detail predominate.  This can result in disastrous leadership and cause damage on a large scale.  The attendant loss of capacity to make rational decisions is perceived by the general public to be more than ‘just making a mistake’.  While they may use discarded medical or colloquial terms, such as ‘madness’ or ‘he's lost it’, to describe such behaviour, they instinctively sense a change of behaviour although their words do not adequately capture its essence.

It bears keeping this in mind when we look at our own leaders -- especially in situations, such as the current administration, where it appears that the branches of government tasked with providing checks and balances on the power of the leaders has decided instead to give them carte blanche to do anything they want -- however foolish, ignorant, callous, and inhumane their actions are.

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This week's recommended book is one that blew me away when I first read it, upon the urging of a student.  By groundbreaking neuroscientist David Eagleman, Incognito is a brilliant and often astonishing analysis of how our brains work.  In clear, lucid prose, Eagleman probes the innermost workings of our nervous systems -- and you'll learn not only how sophisticated it is, but how easy it can be to fool.

The first word

Happy New Year to all of my devoted readers.  I appreciate you more than you know, and don't say it often enough.  I hope 2018 is a wonderful, rewarding, and productive year for you all.

And I sure as hell hope it's better than 2017.  I usually end the year with a retrospective of interesting stories month-by-month, and this time I thought, "Like I want to relive the last twelve months.  Once was enough."  While some good things happened, both personally and on a larger scale, 2017 was by and large a slow-motion train wreck.  Mostly what 2017 brought to the forefront was two things -- the power of ignorant people in large groups to sink to the lowest common denominator of human behavior, and our ability to elect incompetent, immoral, and unqualified people to public office, and to continue to support them even as they tear the house down around our ears.

Which, now that I come to think of it, are kind of the same thing.

So I'm not going to focus on that, being that I already focused on it plenty in posts I did in 2017.  Let's look ahead, instead.  Maybe it's time to think about our dreams and aspirations, to appeal to our highest impulses instead of our lowest ones.  I'm not a big believer in "visualize it and you can achieve it" -- that's always sounded like wishful thinking to me -- but you sure as hell can't achieve something if you don't believe it's possible.

Or, to quote William Lonsdale Watkinson, "It is far better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So here are a few things I'd like to see in 2018.

Let's start with the big picture.  I know "Peace on Earth" is a bit of a lofty goal, so how about: putting more time, effort, energy, and money into the things that improve people's quality of life instead of those that increase suffering, marginalization, and inequity?  Instead of building walls and deporting children and splitting up families, let's work on fixing the conditions that create refugees.  Instead of ceding more power to the corporations that are destroying the environment in the name of short-term profit, let's use the technology -- much of which is already cheap and available -- to convert to renewable energy, high-efficiency resource use, and low waste stream.  Instead of demonizing Planned Parenthood for their role in providing abortions (an extremely small part of what they do), let's work on eliminating the need for abortions by providing high-quality sex education and free access to birth control.  Instead of blaming schools and teachers for the poor performance of students, let's empower educators to make changes to the system based upon research in the psychology of learning -- treating as professionals the people who we've hired to spend thirteen years guiding and caring for our children.

If I could pick out one thing, however, that more than anything else created the shitstorm of 2017, it was the way that fear pushed so many of us into not listening to those with whom we disagreed -- or worse, considering them to be actively evil.  We stopped looking at the other political party, or people of another religion (or no religion at all), as being different, and started considering them the enemy, as people who were deliberately spreading (dare I say it) "fake news" for their own malign purposes.  2017 was the year of the echo chamber, the year that we started being afraid to switch the channel from MSNBC to Fox News or vice versa for fear we'd hear something that challenged our preconceived notions or made us uncomfortable.  It was the year of the Republitards and Democraps, the year we started looking at half of our fellow citizens as ethically bankrupt, morally degenerate, or stupid.

This works to the advantage of a group of people, and let me clue you in on something: it's not the average, middle-class working man or woman.  The ones who benefit by keeping you in fear are the oligarchs and plutocrats, who make you feel like if you don't keep voting them into office, The Bad Guys are gonna get you.  If you're scared that Party X is going to destroy your way of life, you'll keep voting for Party Y regardless of who they are -- a sexual predator, a cheat, a liar, a scoundrel, a narcissistic bully.  We have got to get back to the place where character and vision count for more than party affiliation.

This may all sound pretty pie-in-the-sky, but the thing is, it's all doable.  These are all things we can control, if we'll stop buying the horrible message that we're powerless.  As Christopher Robin said in Winnie the Pooh, "Promise me you will always remember that you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think."

I will end with an exhortation.  Treat the people around you with a little more patience, compassion, and trust.  Most of us want the same things -- a stable place to live, clean food and water, love and acceptance, safety for our family and friends.  The number of people who want to hurt you are few in number, far fewer than the sensationalized media and clickbait websites would have you believe.  I've traveled a great deal, including places where most of the people had different faces than mine, spoke different languages, followed different belief systems.  Virtually everyone I came into contact with met smiles with smiles, kindness with kindness, generosity with generosity.  I think we could go a long way toward fixing our problems if we just stopped looking at the majority of our fellow humans as the enemy.

I'll wish for you all a bright new year.  To quote another great philosopher of our time, Anne Shirley of Anne of Green Gables: "Isn't it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?"  Much more so an entire year of tomorrows.

Make the most of them you can.

Failures of compassion

If I was asked, "What is the most important rule to follow in every situation in which you interact with your fellow humans?", I would respond, "Always be more compassionate than you think you need to be."

The inward emotion of empathy, and its outward expression of compassion, are what keep us from acting on our baser instincts -- anger, envy, lust, greed.  And compassion starts with "what would I feel in his/her place?"

However I rail against the religious at times, this principle is foundational to most of the world's religions.  Consider the passage from the Gospel of Mark, chapter 12:

And one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, Which is the first commandment of all?  And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord:  And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.  And the second is like, namely this: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.  There is none other commandment greater than these.

Which is pretty unequivocal.  And while I (understandably) question the first part, I think the second is spot on.  The Muslim tradition says likewise, in the hadith (collected stories of Mohammed).  Check out this passage from Kitab al-Kafi, volume 2:

A Bedouin came to the prophet, grabbed the stirrup of his camel and said: O the messenger of God!  Teach me something to go to heaven with it.  Prophet said: “As you would have people do to you, do to them; and what you dislike to be done to you, don't do to them.  Now let the stirrup go!  This maxim is enough for you; go and act in accordance with it!”

I find it curious how so many of the hyperreligious remember the first bit -- about loving god -- and conveniently forget about the second.  In Islam, it is that spirit that drives the homicidal madmen in ISIS, who in Iraq are currently butchering anyone who doesn't meet their standards of holiness.  Likewise Boko Haram in Nigeria.

Nearer to home, the inability to feel empathy and act with compassion takes a different and subtler guise, but still often cloaked under a veneer of piety.  Take, for example, what Rick Wiles, host of End Times Radio, said about the Ebola epidemic:

Now this Ebola epidemic can become a global pandemic and that’s another name for plague.  It may be the great attitude adjustment that I believe is coming.  Ebola could solve America’s problems with atheism, homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, pornography and abortion. 

If Ebola becomes a global plague, you better make sure the blood of Jesus is upon you, you better make sure you have been marked by the angels so that you are protected by God.  If not, you may be a candidate to meet the Grim Reaper.

Really?  Your God of Mercy is going to visit a plague upon us, wherein we die in agony while bleeding from every orifice, just to teach us a lesson about sexual purity?

And lest you think that this is just one lone voice with no credibility, Wiles said this immediately before interviewing Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA).

Then there's John Hagee, founder and senior pastor of the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, who says that it's "god's position" that if you don't work, you should starve to death:

To those of you who are sick, to those of you who are elderly, to those of you who are disabled, we gladly support you.  To the healthy who can work but won’t work, get your nasty self off the couch and go get a job! 

America has rewarded laziness and we’ve called it welfare.  God’s position is that the man who does not work shall not eat.

Interesting.  I thought it was "god's position" that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it was for a rich man to enter heaven (Matthew 19:24).  Oh, and there's the whole "give everything you have to the poor and follow me" thing, too.  (Luke 12:33).

Inconvenient, that.  Much easier to cherry-pick passages you'd rather rant about, such as the ones about homosexuality, and forget about the ones that might force you to change your lifestyle.  (Hagee's net worth, by the way, is estimated at five million dollars.)

It doesn't stop there, however.  Ultra-religious Texas Representative Louie Gohmert, who self-righteously shoves his Christian beliefs down people's throats at every turn, showed his true colors with regards to the refugee children from Central America now in camps on the US/Mexico border:

I’m hoping that my governor will utilize Article 1, Section 10, that allows a state that is being invaded — in our case more than twice as many just in recent months, more than twice as many than invaded France on D-Day with a doubling of that coming en route, on their way here now under Article 1, Section 10, the state of Texas would appear to have the right, not only to use whatever means, whether it’s troops, even using ships of war... they’d be entitled in order to stop the invasion... 

Many of the children who are coming across the border also lack basic vaccinations such as those to prevent chicken pox or measles... we don't know what diseases they could be bringing in.

And that brings up yet another bible quote, from Matthew Chapter 25, which these people also conveniently forget:

Then He will also say to those on His left, ‘Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry, and you gave Me nothing to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me nothing to drink; I was a stranger, and you did not invite Me in; naked, and you did not clothe Me; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit Me.’  Then they themselves also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take care of You?’  Then He will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.

I try not to be self-righteous myself.  I know I'm not as compassionate as I could be, that I fail, like all human beings fail, to reach the standards I set for myself.  And I need no god to tell me how to act, nor to let me know when I've fallen short.  But I do know that I am not a hypocrite, wielding a Bible or a Qu'ran in one hand and using the other to strike out at minorities, refugees, the oppressed, and people who don't believe as I do.

The whole thing brings to mind another quote, this time from Stephen Colbert, and it seems a fitting way to end:

Fostering awesomeness

I spend a lot of time in this blog being negative.  On some level, it's inevitable, given my subject matter.  I've chosen to seek out bad thinking, stupid ideas, bizarre beliefs, and random illogic, and hope (by bringing that stuff to light) to sharpen awareness of the dangers of irrationality.

The personal danger, of course, both to myself and my readers, is becoming cynical.  One of the first points I make in my Critical Thinking class is that credulity and cynicism are equal and opposite errors; trusting no one is as lazy, and as wrong, as trusting everyone.  But still, it's hard not to be a little critical of humanity at times.  Like George Carlin said:

Yesterday, one of my coworkers (for reasons I'll describe in a moment) challenged me to write something positive, to (for once) not write about failures of human reason, rationality, and compassion, but about its successes.  It's easy enough to poke fun at the woo-woos; my teacher friend set me the task instead to celebrate the ways that the human mind have made things better.

It was an important reminder for me, honestly, because as a teacher, I can't afford to become cynical.  If I ever give up hope that my students can grow up to make the world a better place, that they are capable and smart and moral and worthy of the best I can offer them, I should retire and get a job as a WalMart greeter.  And sadly, I do hear teachers say those sorts of things; any number of negative statements preceded by the words "Kids these days..."  Usually insinuating that when we were children, all of us were hard working, diligent, ethical, honest, and respectful.  Not only do I feel like asking people who make these sorts of statements, "Do you really not remember anything about being a teenager?", I think that attitude is profoundly unfair to kids today.  Admittedly, there are some differences; the ubiquity of electronic media, access to information, changes in attitudes toward relationships and sexuality -- all make today's cultural milieu a different place to grow up than it was the four-odd decades ago that I was a teenager.  But kids are kids, people are people, and they have the same hopes, dreams, and desires that we do.  If you want an outlook that I like better, watch the following:

*brief pause to blow my nose*  Sorry, that one makes me cry every damn time.

And of course, there's the video that's the reason all of this came up.  Yesterday, we had an assembly, run by our principal (who, as an aside, is far and away the best administrator I have ever worked for).  The whole gist of it was that we each need to find our voices -- a message that resonated especially strongly with me, because when I started this blog four years ago it was in an effort to find my own voice, to have a way to express myself about the things I thought were important.  And he ended with this video:

It was as we were leaving that my coworker, the physics teacher, said to me, "You need to work this into your blog."  I told him I'd rise to the challenge if I could.  So I'll end with issuing the same challenge to you; go out and speak up.  Take on the issues you think are critical.  Encourage the people around you to make your community a better place.  People do, you know.  Yes, there are bigots, lazy thinkers, and irrational individuals, but there are also plenty of smart, kind, self-sacrificing, compassionate people, and I live in the hope that the latter are more numerous:

So, in the words of Kid President: "Now go out, and create something that will make the world awesome."