Cassandra had it easy

Our species has had wild success in the natural world, to such a degree that much of the world draws its nature from our designs. Most of that success has come in the past few tens of thousands of years. Often, we self-flatteringly credit our intelligence for this result - when we're not claiming even more self-flatteringly that god made us special.

We have souls, fer chrissakes. That makes us and us alone eligible for eternal paradise. God made us in his own image, so we're like so goddamn good-looking that it's a wonder satan doesn't hit on us. (Oh, right, he does. Yeah, in your hairy butt cleavage dreams.)

So we have to be the most intelligent species that ever could exist. We have to believe in human exceptionalism. We can't admit that eating and breathing and fucking and shitting and dying make us pretty much exactly like every other mammal, reptile, or amphibian that ever lived. Where's the wanking self-flattery in that!

In thirty years, we Americans have gone backward on accepting the plain truth that humans have existed longer than 10,000 years:

[T]he ”prevalence of this creationist view” has remained essentially unchanged since 1982.

The underlying Gallup poll shows that both religiosity and Republicanism damage American reason, but the damage doesn't stop there by any means. Four in ten Democrats believe god spat in a handful of dust and made Adam, navel-free and special. Never mind anything we might have learned since a bunch of scientifically illiterate Jews found their promised messiah. Never mind that Genesis is so filled with errors of fact that Bible literalism is falsified.

One thing that has changed in the past three decades: The profusion of fools in media has increased the ability of fools to assert they know things that just ain't so. Their tribe tells them to know nothing, and they do, not quietly, not ashamed of their ignorance, but ardently asserting it. They aren't stupid. But they willfully deny confirmed truth. They choose to bear the tribal markers of that chosen ignorance with pride.

It's not our intelligence that has made us successful, not in the sense of our ability to do science. Science is extremely recent, too recent to have been the evolutionary goal of our intelligence. Not many people can do it - or even understand it.

The big brains that permit us the pre-scientific intelligence to dominate the world, to proliferate across it, to alter the landscape and the atmosphere, evolved because social cooperation was so important to a weak and slow primate - perhaps the least physically imposing large primate. Weapons were (and are) important, but we needed language most of all. No one of us could bring down a mammoth. We needed a tribe. It took a village.

Tribalism has been very successful, and conservatives try to sneak it back in even when we've excluded it:

 In 1990 a colleague at the College of Charleston, where I was a math professor, pointed out that the South Carolina Constitution prohibited atheists from becoming governor.

Since the U.S. Constitution bars religious tests for public office, I asked a local ACLU lawyer how this obviously unconstitutional provision could be removed.

South Carolina's wackaloon voters were not going to elect an open atheist anyway. It's doubtful they would even consider someone who professed evolution guided by god. But it was tribal to continue the plainly illegal prohibition, the treatment of a group of citizens as second class, as outside the tribe:

I assumed, in my political naïveté, that state officials would consent to bring South Carolina into compliance with federal law. They didn’t. Governor Carroll Campbell said, “The South Carolina Constitution was fine as it was because this country was founded on Godly principles.”

When a social scientist tells you that conservatives are loyal and value authority, that sounds positive. But it isn't. Loyalty to the tribe can destroy ardor for the truth. Valuing authority to the exclusion of all else inevitably puts shameless shamans and charlatans in charge. Or royalty, if there's any difference.

In the immortal words of Kay:

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.

I've been expecting too much rationality from our society and our politics. Most humans just aren't built to examine their cherished beliefs. They're built to rationalize in order to stay right with the tribe.

Cassandra had it easy.

Know nothings

It's an article of faith in modern journalism that the reporter is not allowed to know anything. No, that's not quite right. The modern reporter is allowed to know what the conventional wisdom is.

Everything other than the conventional wisdom is controversial.

Take evolution. (Please!) Anyone who is willing to engage with the evidence knows that the Genesis accounts of creation are not natural history - or, if they are, they're dead and provably wrong. Young earth creationism is farcically laughable and a lie.

So-called intelligent design is not far behind. It's not a research program; it's a polemic.

Mass media, though, has to have bullshit balance between reality and fantasy. Wouldn't want to alienate the idiot demographic. After all, they'll buy things from the advertisers.

Update: ... which is why only 39% of Americans believing in evolution is a great advancement.

Godless liberals

On this, Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, some intelligent commentary on religious diversity is a good thing:

Obviously, these data only compare the importance of religion in people's lives -- they say nothing about what being highly religious means in different parts of the world and among different faiths. Nonetheless, it's fascinating to note that in terms of religiosity, Americans span a range that invites comparisons to some predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East and tribal societies in Southern Africa, as well as to some relatively secular nations in Europe and developed East Asia. Examining regional variations within many other large countries would almost certainly uncover similar diversity.

Recognition of that fact should give Americans pause when we're tempted to apply blanket generalizations to other cultures; for example, to say residents in those nations are less devout or more prone to zealotry than people in America. It should also help those outside the United States avoid applying such oversimplified judgments to Americans.

This is one case of a much greater rule: Large populations are wrongly stereotyped by those who are ignorant of them.

The implicit challenge for me: Recognize diversity among conservatives.

In recognition of (historical) diversity among Republicans, let me also celebrate Abe Lincoln's 200th birthday. He was a liberal for his time and resistant to fundamentalist piety, though he was not godless.

Lincoln, the first Republican president, would find himself marginalized in the party he helped to found, by the political descendants of the Southern Jeffersonians and Jacksonians whom he opposed throughout his political career and defeated in war. While today's Democrats are not necessarily the party of Lincoln, the GOP definitely is not Mr. Lincoln's party anymore.

Click images for Wikimedia Commons licensing information.

(h/t Pharyngula)

Hillary

The problem for Hillary is not her lead among Democrats. It's the negative perception of her among all voters, which verges on 50%. Hard to win an election if you start out there.

Granted, it's not impossible. Nixon had high negatives in 1968 (though I don't have a number). Of course, like Bill Clinton in 1992, he had a third-party candidate splitting the vote. Hillary is more likely to be a victim of a third-party candidate than a beneficiary.

The problem for voters who want change is twofold: Which candidate(s) would make a change? Which candidate(s) can get elected?

To me, Hillary looks like a loser on both counts. She's too strongly tied, and by all appearances willingly, to the foolish unilateral centrism of Beltway Democrats and their useless consultants and corporate hangers-on. She'd keep Social Security more or less intact and appoint more Stephen Breyers, which would be a marginal improvement, but she wouldn't do anything to close this Second Gilded Age. I suspect she would also decide to leave a garrison in Iraq of, say, 80,000 troops, giving the neocons exactly what they wanted from the beginning. Splitting the difference is the right move if you believe in triangulation as a principle of governing, as I think Hillary does, based on her performance in the Senate.

In any case, the challenge for Hillary, if she is the nominee, is to push her existing negatives down, which is always difficult. On the other hand, Obama and Edwards need only keep their negatives from rising too much, which should leave them more money to expose the Republican nominee's eager Bushism. (Against that, Hillary has more of that corporate money; maybe she can afford to do both.)

The most important question about Hillary's negatives is: How much comes from the left? I suspect not much; if a pollster called me, I'd grit my teeth and go positive because I know how these polls get used. And it's true I'll support Hillary if she's the nominee.

Granted that much of Hillary's large negative image comes from the right. That's not going to change, and I'm not worried about it. Even if a few of them think she's a nice person or they sympathize with her over her marriage, they aren't going to vote for her. But there's just too much venom left over from the negatives among independents, persuadables, and the vapid idiots who only pay superficial attention and vote based on taking seriously their own uninformed whims.

Hillary's too centrist, but I'm not even flirting with the Greens. Why not? I want change immediately, and I think it's possible, despite the Congressional Democrats' utter failure this year to do much of anything against the Bushists' fascist dreams.

The Greens are willing to wait for structural political change, a promise that seems timely to them only because they're already economically comfortable. For them, half a loaf is not better than none.

So, Edwards or Obama?

(First posted on Pharyngula.)