Saturday, June 9, 2012

Bloggery Suspended

Ed E. Lyne will be offshore on a sailing vessel during most of the month of June without access the internet.

This means no new blogs on this site during that period.

Without access to any of the lies, falsehoods, and reports of  cheating and stealing lurking in the digital world, this blog cannot be produced.

Mushroom Growing on Pile of  Manure



But when I return, filled with new inspiration and brilliant insights, the blog will again burst forth like a mushroom sprouting on the gigantic dung heap of American politics and "culture."

Thursday, June 7, 2012

Denial


Searching for a Place to Implant Head in Sand


One of the most powerful forces at work today in American politics is denial. Denial of facts is nothing new; it is an intensely human trait, recognized and studied by psychologists ever since there were psychologists. [1] I personally am a world class expert in denial, and so, for the first time since this blog started, I am actually writing about something I experience every day.

In a 2011 Psychology today article, Professor Paul Thaguard explained that denial is everywhere in our lives.

 We fall in love with someone who is bad for us, believing he or she will change.

Many Christians have lives that are hard and getting harder, but they continue to pray and believe that god will make things better. When prayer does not work, they pray harder (especially if they want a pony.)

Democrats know that the current Medicare and Social Security system is unsustainable, yet they refuse to even consider any miniscule changes in those programs.

We enter a  period of rapid economic growth and investment gurus explain it as a new paradigm for the economy, not just a bubble. Repeatedly.

Professor Thaguard calls this phenomenon  “motivate interference,” meaning that our goals and desires lead us to absorb evidence very selectively. This mind malfunction allows us to believe an emotion-heavy fact-light belief that is far from rational.

Bill Watterson famously said this about denial: “It’s not denial. I’m just selective about the reality I accept.”[2]

I recently had the opportunity to experience the power of denial in a personal way. (Yet again.) Last week, I suffered a serious injury on a sailboat, requiring crutches and in a cast.

In three days time I am scheduled to go on a long ocean sailing trip in the Atlantic, a trip which I have been itching to do for a long time. Denying the seriousness of the injury--in fact-- almost denying the injury at all-- I am keeping the plan in place and am due to be in the Atlantic ocean headed offshore the day after tomorrow. 

This can only be attributed to total stupid denial, a way of thinking that I know only too well.  But I am not alone. [3]

Denial of obvious facts is individual, but it is also social and political. History is full of all kinds of episodes of massive socio-political denial. The phenomenon leads to some good observations:

“You can almost create a formula for it. The greater the denial at the front end, the longer the term of penance to get free on the back side.  (James Cox)
We went into massive denial because what could we do other than completely freak out?  (Malcolm Sharp)
The most worrisome aspect of Greenspan’s …remarks is that he is in denial, and as long as the most powerful central banker in the world is kidding himself that he knows what he is doing, we all have to fasten our seatbelts.  (Jude Wanniski)
We’re back in denial. If people are saying there isn’t a problem, that’s part of the problem. (Mary Hodell)
Denial is the number one aspect of medicine. That’s why people don’t get check-ups. (Larry King)
 He has climbed into his own spider hole of denial. (Joe Lieberman)

We have all kinds of denial going on today. Middle Eastern radicals and many others continue to deny the Holocaust. [4] Donald Trump and his gang of birthers continue to deny that Obamas’ birth certificate is valid. [5] Oil and coal industry leaders, together with flocks of gullibles throughout the nation, continue to deny the scientific findings about climate change. [6]

Most interesting of all, politicians, advised and funded by the real estate development industry, have finally found an ingenious way in North Carolina to prevent sea levels from rising, at least along their coastline: legislate that it cannot happen and cannot be forecast.

One of the most curious things about denial of big catastrophes that can be headed our way, is that the closer the likelihood of the harm, the more powerful becomes the denial of the danger. Studies have shown that people living downstream of dams and in the floodway where evacuation would be needed in case of a break, tend to deny the likelihood of a dam failure.  Interestingly, as you move upstream closer and closer to the dam the level of denial grows larger. At the very foot of the dam where evacuation is impossible, 100% of the population denies that it could ever happen.

So don’t anyone get the idea that people are suddenly going to start listening to climate change warnings from those measuring sea levels and making predictions based on studies and science. Quite the contrary. As the dangers from climate change move closer, the denial that it even exists will become stronger and stronger. 

Other explanations will be found for the fact that houses on the North Carolina Outer Banks are underwater. 
Outer Banks, NC storm damage (Credit: University of Pennsylvania)

 Possibly an Al Queida plot?


[2] Bills brainy quotes can be found at this website.
[3] For an article on how other people deny their injuries, Stripping Away Denial | Psychology Today.
[4] Their views can be found here.
[5] One the best websites for this view is http://birthers.org/.
[6] A good article on the climate deniers appears at the Salon website.

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Ignorance


Like so many things in life, ignorance is paradoxical.

Is it possible that ignorance is an intelligent response to the universe, and conversely, the lack of ignorance is a stupid and self-destructive response?

As usual with this blog, we start with politics.

No politician who admits ignorance of anything could ever be elected even to any political office, even the office of Chief Dog Catcher.  Therefore, accepting this reality, all politicians know that they need to know everything or at least, pretend to know everything. A politician must have all the answers and no unanswered questions.  The most successful politicians will always have a clever and ready answer to every question asked of them in any forum, a public meeting,  a TV interview, whatever.

Have you ever heard a politician dare to answer a question of any kind by saying, “I really am ignorant of that. I am happy to admit that I cannot answer that question, and I probably never will be able to answer it.”?

That kind of political animal, if it ever existed, has been extinct for a long time.

No politician could ever admit, especially to himself, how little he knows know about anything. The modern political animal may actually know very little about almost everything, but he or she must have an opinion about everything. That opinion must be strongly held and can never change, even in the face of completely contradictory facts.  In order for this to work, the politicians themselves must strongly believe in their own omniscience.

The need to believe strongly in one’s own omniscience creates problems.  For one thing, it means that political beliefs must be totally disconnected from science and changes in scientific knowledge.

Even more troubling, it means that politicians must be, in part, have narcissistic personalities. If the politician has only a small dose of narcissism his personality, he may  be content with being elected dog catcher, but if a politician is a huge narcissist, he or she is per se eligible to run for the top office of President. Think Gary Hart, John Edwards, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, Bill Clinton.  In fact, think of any major politician and try to imagine that person discussing how comfortable he is with his own ignorance of everything.  That kind of person does not exist.

The public is an integral part of this sham as the politician. The public inflates the politician’s narcissism with political ads, signs, cheers, big rallies, and political events of all kinds, not to mention donating money, buying the candidates books, political buttons, etc.  All of this feeds the monster of political narcissism.

This is one reason why we have such a love-hate relationship with our political leaders and why we are always so disappointed in them. We expect them to be omniscient. When it turns out that they are clearly not omniscient, but continue to think that they are, and then make mistakes as they blunder along, we become disappointed. Case in point:  Barak Obama. Another case, George W. Bush.

King Tut
In some nations, the political leader is thought to be so omniscient that he is actually deified. Of course, the political leader plays along with this and encourages it to the max. But does any man really believe that he is really a god?  The answer is that many actually do. Think of Fidel Castrol, Hugo Chavez, Papa Doc Duvalier, Stalin, Hitler, and all the monarchs and sultans throughout history.

Science is on the other side of the paradox of ignorance. Science values ignorance. Scientists value questions more than answers. Answers are boring and uninteresting unless they lead to more questions. Scientists think that there can be no discovery and no new knowledge without ignorance of that which is sought to be known. The greatest scientists are those who have the most questions. One of the  ultimate questions in science is how much of the unknown is unknowable?

How different from the political sphere is that?

Neuroscientist, Stuart Firestein, has written a book entitled “Ignorance: How it Drives Science.” Recently, on NPR’s “Science Friday” show, Firestein explained to interviewer Ira Flatow  how science is really pursued among scientists:.
When we go to meeting together and talk or go out to the bar and have a beer or whatever, we never talk about what we know. We talk about what we don't know, what we need to know, what we'd like to know, what we think we could know, what we may not even know we don't know just yet and things of that nature. And that's what propels the whole operation along.
Firestein argues that we put too much emphasis on answers and not enough on questions.  He says that if we start with a hypothesis, it is likely to lead us to the wrong answer. Scientists need to start, he says, only with collecting facts and let the theory come later.

Firestein is fascinated not by the known unknown but by the unknown unknowns. He is interested more in the limits of ignorance than the limits of knowledge.

One of the best quotes in the interview is from the comic Emo Philips, who says “I always thought the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body, and then one day I thought, wait a minute, who's telling me that?”
To read the whole NPR interview, click on this link, or you can listen to the archived podcast.
Einstein had a visual metaphor about knowledge and ignorance. He saw us as inside a balloon containing all of our knowledge.  As we gain more knowledge, the balloon grows, and the surface of the balloon grows, which means it touches on more and more of that universe of what we don't know. So that the more we learn, the more we don’t know.[1]
File:Albert Einstein 1947.jpgFirestein and Einstein are not alone in their comfort with ignorance.  The eccentric Nobel Prize winning Richard Feynman who works on quantum electrodynamics (the field of science concerning how light and matter interact) said in his book, “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out” that “I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose - which is the way it really is so far as I can tell - it does not frighten me.”
Los Alamos Id Photo of Feynman

When awarded the Nobel Prize Feynman said that he was uncomfortable with accepting it because when a person held a prize or gained a position of authority, people are inclined to think that he must be correct, and Feynman was uncomfortable with that.[2]

Don’t even try to imagine a politician trying to think this way.


[1] This metaphor came from one of the callers to the NPR show. For another look at this paradox of ignorance and science, see
[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11299244.