Notes on Reason and Empathy

Have you ever noticed how some people will get all red-faced and blustery, and then say, “I think with logic, not emotion!!” I've heard that several times recently, and I'm always curious about what they mean. They must not think all emotions are contrary to logic, or they would see the contradiction in angrily declaring how logical they are. Maybe anger doesn't seem like one of the soft, squishy emotions to them, so they think it can't affect their logic (though of course it can). No, the emotions they seem to have in mind are the “softer” ones...particularly empathy. Lots of people seem to think think the less empathy they have, the more reasonable or logical they will be. Put another way, they think a hard head requires a hard heart.

I want to explain why I think they're wrong, but first I should acknowledge the grain of truth in their thinking. It's true that empathy (as well as other emotions, like anger) can push reason aside. If you give your life savings to a homeless person because you feel sorry for them, then empathy has clearly overrun reason. There's also the well-known logical fallacy called the appeal to pity. If a juror thinks, "The defendant was abused as a child, therefore he didn't rob that store", that's clearly bad reasoning. So, there's no doubt that empathy can clash with reason, just as any emotion can. But I think the folks who claim that a lack of empathy makes them more reasonable are mistaken, for a couple of reasons.

First, they weren't that logical in the first place. Most of them wouldn't know a syllogism from Shinola. Second, studies have shown that people with emotional impairments caused by brain injuries can become quite irrational. They make bad decisions, apparently because they can't assign the proper emotional weight to different outcomes. I can be a little too coldly analytical myself, and I know I've made that kind of mistake. Finally, I think they're wrong because reason and empathy can help us accomplish the same thing: finding truth.

Finding truth is clearly one of the main purposes of reasoning. Being reasonable just means having good reasons for what you believe or do. You don't just believe things willy-nilly, or because they make you feel good. You believe them because you have good reasons to think they're true. Your conclusions are true (or at least highly plausible) because they follow logically from premises which are also true or highly plausible. Reasoning is a kind of truth-seeking.

To show how that relates to empathy, I need to say what I mean by truth. Defining truth is a messy business that philosophers have argued about for millennia, but I think most people would agree that a belief is true if it accurately reflects reality. If there's an elephant in front of me, and I think, “That's an elephant in front of me”, then what I think is true. Simple enough. I don't think that's the only kind of truth (as I'll explain below) but it's certainly a crucial kind. It's been fashionable recently for people to say they don't believe in this kind of truth, but they still get plenty mad when they're lied to, so I think they believe in it more than they let on.

Now, how does all that relate to empathy? Empathy is also a reflection of reality. When you feel empathy for someone, you're imagining what they're feeling, and doing so by feeling a little bit of it yourself. Your experience is a pale reflection of theirs. So, if truth is an accurate reflection of reality, and empathy is feeling what another person is feeling, then could empathy be a kind of truth? I think so. After all, if we're empathizing well, we're experiencing an accurate reflection of reality. It's another person's internal, subjective reality, but surely that's a "real" reality. If you disagree, would you be willing to say your internal experience isn't real? I know mine is plenty real to me.

Anyway, that's why I think empathy is a path to truth, just like reason is. In fact, in some ways it's a more profound path, because it goes beyond mere description. Most of the time, when we talk about truth, we're talking about a description or picture of the world. If I describe the fact that there's a chocolate cake on the table in front of me, and there really is, then my description is true. But description has its limits, because there are some things it can't convey. Describing a chocolate cake to a person who's never had chocolate won't tell them what the cake tastes like. The only way they'll know that is by tasting it. The taste will give them a different, and more direct, kind of truth about the cake.

Similarly, if empathy is feeling what another person feels, then it's more like the “tasting” kind of truth than the “describing” kind of truth. And it's a lot more profound than tasting a cake, because it's not just a fleeting pleasure, but a way of understanding the experience of another person. Empathy takes us beyond ourselves, makes us larger, and helps us behave morally. It pushes us to give the proper emotional weight to another person's predicament, and see that their feelings and hopes are just as real to them as ours are to us.

Interestingly enough, reason can do the same thing. Some of the folks who get all angrily “logical” are the same ones who have trouble feeling empathy for people who aren't like them—people with different religions, or languages, or nationalities. I suspect that's an innate human tendency. For some reason it can be harder to empathize with those who aren't like us. Maybe it's harder imagining being in such different shoes? Maybe it's biological? Whatever the causes, this failure of empathy has caused untold pain and suffering throughout history. Luckily, this is a case where reason can come to the rescue. If we put our knee-jerk, tribal emotions to the side and really think about it, there's no reason to think a person's hope, fears, pleasures, and pains are any less real than ours just because they're different from us.

Both reason and empathy, then, tell us we should see people as humans whose lives are just as important to them as ours are to us. That's why I think empathy should be reason's partner, not its enemy. Reason is about finding truth, and so is empathy, because it's a way of directly experiencing the truth of other people's lives. Sure, empathy without reason can cause problems, but so can reason without empathy. So how about we stop thinking of reason and empathy as opposed to each other? That just makes people think they need to pick one or the other, when they really need both. We all need both, and the sooner we realize it, the better off we'll all be.

On Political Moderation (In Moderation)

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

- W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming

Photo by kevint3141, Wikimedia Commons

If you read the news or follow social media in these polarized times, you might get the impression that moderates are a dying breed. The right marches farther right, the left marches farther left, while the center seems to have vanished entirely. And some people at both ends of the political spectrum think that's fine, because they don't really care for moderates. They think of them as wishy-washy fence-sitters who lack firm convictions. Personally, I admire moderates.

Well, I admire some of them--the ones who believe what they believe out of principle, not apathy or convenience. I'm glad there are still people hovering around the political center. While I'm worried sick about the country descending into Trumpian authoritarianism, I'm equally worried that growing polarization will tear the country apart. If "the center cannot hold", then things really are in danger of falling apart. That's why I believe a country needs a political center, even though I'm a moderately left-leaning independent. In our current situation, where the two sides react to each other by growing farther apart, the growing centrifugal forces could spiral out of control and plunge us into mere anarchy (or authoritarianism if one side wins). So I think we need people who aren't rushing to one side or the other. We need the center to hold.

But I want to be clear about what I mean. I don't admire all moderates and centrists. Some people are moderate just because they don't particularly care about politics, and don't want to rock the boat in one direction or the other. There are politicians who aim for the center just to maximize their popularity. These things aren't particularly admirable. What is admirable, though, is taking a principled, thoughtful stance that happens not to align with the orthodoxy of the right or left. That stance probably isn't in the dead center, either, but it's somewhere between the two ends of the political spectrum, and may therefore be considered "moderate".

And why do I admire people who take such stances? Because it shows independence, and it shows guts. It's easy to adopt the standard liberal or conservative stance to fit in with your peers. It's a lot harder to think for yourself and draw your own conclusions. It's harder intellectually, because it requires that you wrestle with the issues, and it's harder socially, because if you're going your own way, you don't have a comfortable group of like-minded people to hang out and agree with. You don't have a tribe to belong to, and that's hard and lonely. As the poet and children's book author Phyllis McGinley put it:

How comfortable to rest with the safe and armored folk
Congenitally blessed with opinions stout as oak.
Assured that every question one single answer hath,
They keep a good digestion and whistle in their bath. 

[...] But I sleep cold forever, and cold sleep all my kind.Born nakedly to shiver in the draft of an open mind

People who are somewhere in the vast middle area between the left and right don't have this comfort. What's more, they're often scorned, not just by the other side, but by both sides. As the western writer Elmer Kelton said, the middle "can be the most dangerous place of all. People shoot at you from both sides." As a moderate liberal, I know that's true. People on one side say you're not liberal enough, and people on the other say you're too liberal. Moderates who really are in the center must feel a kind of identity crisis, because these days the right sees them as liberals while the left sees them as conservatives. I suspect people think there's no such thing as a moderate these days. It's an understandable conclusion, but it's not true. According to annual polls by Gallup, the number of moderates has declined a little since the early nineties, but 35% of Americans considered themselves moderates in 2017. That's equal to the percentage of conservatives (35%) and substantially higher than the percentage of liberals (26%). So, there are still a lot of moderates, and I think that's a good thing, because I honestly think they will help hold our country together.

But I don't mean this post as a hymn to political moderation, because I don't think the moderate answer is always the right one. Growing up, I always liked the phrase, "All things in moderation" (I was a strange child). When I got to college, I read about Aristotle's Golden Mean, and about the Taoist idea of balance and harmony between opposing forces--between Yin and Yang. I read about how the Buddha renounced extreme asceticism when when he heard a music teacher tell his student, "If you make the string too tight, it will break. If you make it too loose, it won't play." After that, he formulated his idea of the Middle Path between unhealthy extremes.

All these ideas seemed sensible to me, and still do...for the most part. But later on, I read Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. In it, points out the limitations of the Golden Mean/Middle Path by asking if we should aim for moderation when it comes to truth. Think about it--should we seek a middle path between truth and falsehood? Well, of course not. I mean, maybe we shouldn't be so devoted to truth that we go around telling ugly people how ugly they are, but clearly the proper balance between truth and falsehood is much closer to the "truth" end than the "falsehood" end. The right answer isn't in the middle.

But it's not at the absolute extreme, either, and that's common. In many cases, it seems to me that the right answer isn't to be found at one extreme or the other, or in the exact middle. In politics, though, I think the right answer is often to be found somewhere relatively close to the center. Often, but not always. But how do we know when the middle path is really the right one? That's what I want to examine here, by looking at some pros and cons of political moderation. Isn't that just like a moderate to do that?

Points in Favor of Political Moderation

• Perhaps the main reason I think moderate policies, and politicians who favor them, can be a good thing is that we live in a democratic society. In a properly-functioning democratic society--where everyone across the political spectrum has a voice--most policies will naturally tend toward the center. This isn't necessarily how things go in the United States, but our democracy hasn't exactly been firing on all cylinders lately.

• A related reason is this: what if neither side is right? What are the chances that, in this particular country, at this particular point in history, one side or the other finally has it all figured out? Quite low, if you ask me. What seems far more likely is that thoughtful people at many points on the political spectrum have part of the truth. What if it's like the old Indian story of the blind men feeling different parts of the elephant? In the story, each blind man is wrong about what elephants are like, but if they had talked to each other, they might have realized that they were feeling parts of a greater, more complex truth. The limitation of this analogy, of course, is that our society is full of people who think they are experts on elephants, and haven't even managed to touch the elephant yet. In any case, none of us should be too smug about thinking we see the whole elephant.

• The philosophers throughout history who sang the praises of moderation and balance really were on to something. In politics as well as life, the answer is more often "some" than "all" or "none". I don't want all the hot sauce in the bottle on my tacos, and I also don't want no hot sauce at all. I want the right amount of hot sauce.

• The country needs a political center to keep from tearing itself apart. Recently, many on the far right and left seem to want to destroy the system entirely. The far right wants to destroy the "deep state" or New Deal-style government, while the far left can more and more be heard saying they want to destroy capitalism or other systems they see as perpetuating oppression. As a moderate liberal, I think some systems should be destroyed (institutional racism) or reigned in (capitalism), but we need to consider what we will put in their place. What good is reform if we destroy the country in the process? Capitalism has its issues, but it's better than lawlessness or war.

• Too much power concentrated on either the far right or far left can lead to an erosion of civil liberties. Today we have students at liberal universities shutting down conservative speakers, and conservatives talking about jailing journalists and peaceful protesters. I don't want either of these factions to be unopposed enough to get their way. The so called "Horseshoe theory" posits that people on the far left and the far right can be closer to each other than the center in many ways, such as opposition to the free exchange of ideas. There's something to that, I think. Extremists don't like people disagreeing with them.

• The left/right political spectrum is arbitrary, anyway. Where did we get the idea that the complexity of politics could be represented in one single dimension? Why can't people lean left on some issues and right on others, or have opinions that don't neatly fit on the spectrum at all? These folks might be better called "independents" than "moderates", but they don't fall neatly into one camp or the other, and here's the thing: we live in a country where you don't have to.

That last point was more an argument for independence than moderation, so maybe that's a sign that I've run out of arguments for moderation, and need to look at arguments against it.

• Just as the right answer isn't necessarily (or even likely) at one extreme or the other, it isn't necessarily in the center, either. In these polarized times, it's common to hear the false dichotomy fallacy, where people imagine there are only two possible answers to a question. Just yesterday, someone told me that people eventually have to "pick a side" when it comes to politics. Well, that assumes that either one side or the other--either the left or the right--is correct. That's a false dichotomy. Maybe neither side is correct? But there's another fallacy called the middle ground fallacy, which assumes that the right answer must lie in the middle. And that's a faulty assumption, too.

• What about justice and injustice? Is the middle ground the right place to be there? When he was sitting in jail in Birmingham, Alabama, Martin Luther King wrote his famous letter to people who were telling him his methods were too extreme. He said,"I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season.' Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection." Those words stop me in my moderate liberal white dude tracks, because he was right. The Jim Crow laws he was fighting were utterly unjust, and his methods (which were resolutely non-violent) were certainly not too extreme. So, to be a fence-sitter in the face of grave injustice is certainly no virtue. That doesn't mean we have to become extremists--Martin Luther King didn't join the Black Panthers because of his issues with white moderates--but it does mean the moderate answer isn't always the right one.

So where are we? When we add up all the pros and cons, is political moderation a good thing or not? The answer, I think, is "often, but not always". There is certainly a place for moderates our our society, and I think they serve the very important function of keeping us from breaking into two warring camps. Many moderates have principled positions that they've developed by carefully considering points of view on all sides, and they deserve more respect than they are often given. But moderation isn't always the answer, either. Martin Luther King was right to call out the people urging him to be more moderate in the face of a grave injustice. As the cliche goes, "All things in moderation, including moderation." What it comes down to is that there are no easy answers. The left doesn't hold all the answers, the right doesn't hold all the answers, and the center doesn't hold all the answers. None of us knows everything, and many people across the political spectrum have reasonable points to make, and the right to make them. And if saying that makes me sound like a moderate, well, I'm OK with that. 

Certainty, Censorship, and the Spirit of Liberty

The best thing I've read in the past year is a speech that Judge Learned Hand gave to a group of immigrants who had just become American citizens. He began by pointing out that most Americans are either immigrants or descended from immigrants; from people who gave up their old lives to try to make it in an unfamiliar new country. Then he asked why they took such a perilous step.

His answer: "We sought liberty; freedom from oppression, freedom from want, freedom to be ourselves. This we then sought; this we now believe that we are by way of winning." (This was during World War II.)

Then another question and answer: "And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.

What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias."

Lots of big ideas there, but what really grabs me is the idea that the spirit of liberty is "not too sure that it is right".

So many people these days seem so sure they're right. That might be the one thing that unites the two far ends of the American political spectrum: they're both full of people who are sure they're right. Some are so sure of themselves that they've lost sight of the spirit of liberty, and started trying to suppress the free exchange of ideas. They see opposing views as unpatriotic, blasphemous, politically incorrect, or more recently,  "problematic". They often state opinions on complex, value-laden issues as though they were empirical facts. This degree of certainty and intolerance seems dangerous to me, especially when the two sides keep reacting to each other by pulling harder in opposite directions, as the center starts to pop and fray. What happens when it breaks?

Besides, should either side be so sure they're right? Sure enough to censor those they consider wrong? What are the chances that one political group, in this one particular country, in this one particular moment in time, finally has it all figured out?

And who am I to pontificate? What about that speck in my eye? I can be too smug in my opinions, too, but when I really think about it, the list of things I'm certain about is a short one: I'm fairly certain of verifiable facts and well-supported scientific theories. I'm reasonably sure a few arguments are logically sound (the Pythagorean Theorem and such), and that others are fallacies (and popular ones!). I'm sure we shouldn't trash the planet we live on, or destroy old, irreplaceable things (except stuff like smallpox). I'm sure hard truth is preferable to comforting falsehood, because falsehood causes suffering.

I guess what I'm most sure of is something I can't prove. I'm sure that other humans (not just other Americans or people otherwise like me) have pleasures, pains, and hopes as real to them as mine are to me. So I'm sure I should try to treat them as I would want to treated: with fairness, decency, and compassion. And I'm sure people who destroy good things, lack compassion, and disregard truth should be opposed.

And...that's really about it. I've always had a mad desire to learn as much as I can about this vast, weird, ancient universe in the brief flash of time I'm in it. But I'll never get very far. My brain is just so much smaller than the universe, and my senses so feeble. Reality won't fit inside my head--only a distorted, childlike sketch of it will.

So I guess that's one last thing I'm sure about: that there's a lot I don't know, and a lot I'm probably wrong about. And that's why I have no business trying to script the way others think, speak, or act. Yes, I'll call out unkindness, destructiveness, or dishonesty, and I may show rude people the door, but I shouldn't try to suppress an honest, well-meant opinion because I disagree with it. Argue against it? Sure. Censor it? No. Who am I to be that sure that I'm right?

Russian Bots and Our Own Worst Enemy

Last night I did a silly thing. I wrote a long, hotheaded, self-righteous Facebook rant urging people to be less hotheaded and self-righteous. I even began by saying, "I started writing, and it turned into a diatribe. Eh, damn the torpedoes." Eventually, my head grew somewhat cooler and I realized that my own impassioned righteousness was a great example of the frame of mind I was warning other people to watch for. So I deleted my rant and decided it would work better as a blog post.

The bee in my bonnet this time was Russian bots and troll farms, and how they've worked to undermine American democracy. I was catching up on the story after the House and Senate Intelligence committees grilled lawyers from Google, Facebook, and Twitter about Russian meddling using their platforms. I try to follow stories like this, because in my job as a reference librarian I teach a class about recognizing fake news and other misinformation. I had honestly fallen behind on this story, though, and I was pretty gobsmacked by some of its details. Hence, the rant below:

Two things in particular were really stunning to me: 1. Russian Facebook pages posing as American activist groups, across the political spectrum, were able to organize actual protests. Using nothing but computer terminals in St. Petersburg, they were able to get people in the United States to leave their computers and go march for various causes. One protest in New York had at least 5,000 people show up. In Houston, pro-Muslim protesters and anti-Sharia-law protesters clashed outside a mosque, and BOTH groups were manipulated into doing so by Russian Facebook pages. 2. Russia is trolling both sides. That's the second thing I hadn't fully realized. Russian trolls, bots, pages, and ads on social media were (and are) posing as partisans at each end of the political spectrum.

But why play both sides like that? Like most people, I had heard that Putin favored Trump over Clinton, and I knew that Russian intelligence and propaganda organizations had tried to influence the election (that's not my liberal bias; it's the conclusion of the American intelligence community, as outlined in this brief from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.) But I hadn't realized that Russian trolls and bots had posed as partisans on the left as well as the right. What was their goal? Apparently it was to make democracy weak and chaotic; and to appear weak and chaotic, both to Americans and to Russians who might sympathize with pro-democracy movements there. Yes, they wanted Trump elected, but their broader goal was fostering division and weakening democracy in the United States. And they did a pretty good job of it. Just how good, we don't know yet.

But what we can conclude right now is that Russians aren't the only ones to blame. All they did was add fuel to a fire we lit ourselves. American civility, unity, and critical thinking were already in decline. We had already let ourselves become hyper-polarized and fearful of each other. The internet had helped us cluster into little tribal bubbles of ideology until anyone outside our bubble seemed insane and evil. Many of us had already begun thinking of other Americans as our enemies. I've certainly been guilty of these things. Russia just fanned the flames, and they did it by playing on our hotheadedness, our gullibility, and our partisan tribalism. On both sides, we're so sure we're right that a foreign government can count on us to share false information without questioning it--often without even reading it--if it outrages us enough and fits our pre-existing beliefs. And if it fits the pre-existing beliefs of the like-minded people we've surrounded ourselves with. They can't count on everyone to share it, but they can count on a certain percentage of us to. And again, that's true across the political spectrum.

And that's a big problem. Hyper-polarization, gullibility, ideological absolutism, and demonization of decent people who disagree with us--these things are like cyanide to a democracy. Judge Learned Hand once said, "The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interest alongside its own without bias." If he was right, then we've lost sight of the spirit of liberty, which in my opinion is also the spirit of democracy.

I guess what I'm saying is, things won't get better unless we as Americans take a hard look at ourselves. We're too gullible, too hotheaded, too divided, and too sure of our own tribe's righteousness. Sanctions against Russia and increased diligence from Silicon Valley can only go so far. As the great sage Pogo once observed, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

So that was my rant. It's not that scathing, but after an hour or so I realized it was, in fact, rather hotheaded and self-righteous. Not only that, but it was written in the same emotional frame of mind that causes people to share false stories without checking them. In an article I read a couple of days ago, a college professor who teaches media literacy said, "When you feel strong emotion — happiness, anger, pride, vindication — and that emotion pushes you to share a 'fact' with others, STOP." Now, I hadn't shared any false information--the Russian troll farms are all too real--but as the professor says later, it's a good idea to recognize strong emotions in yourself, and take them as a cue that you're not in the most reasonable frame of mind. He's right. My emotional state blinded me to the fact that I was being hotheaded and self-righteous just as I was warning others not to be.

Plus, I was offering glittering generalities. It's easy to say we should be less hot-headed, less gullible, and less "Us-vs-Them" partisan, but it's a lot harder to offer concrete steps to achieve those goals. So, what steps can we take? That's something I need to think about more; something we all need to think about more.

In terms of dealing with attempts to by Russian troll farms to weaken democracy, there are a few things we can do, I think. One is to recognize the problem and how serious it is, and to understand how this kind of Russian propaganda works. This video is an excellent summary, which defines terms like "bot" and "troll farm" that many people may be fuzzy about. It also has advice on how to recognize when you're dealing with one. But it's not easy. With many of the Russian-generated memes, the graphics are lurid and the grammar is bad. Often there are no definite articles like "a" and "the", apparently because those aren't used in Russian. But many memes generated by Americans also have lurid graphics and bad grammar. Maybe a better idea is to distrust any hyper-partisan page, ad, or meme with these features. If it's not the Russians, it's people who are more interested in appealing to your fear and outrage than in getting you to think critically. There's a place for outrage, and even a place for fear, but we shouldn't let people use either to manipulate us.

Another thing we can do is refrain from arguing online with people we don't know, especially people we have no mutual friends with. Those people may be sitting in a troll farm in Russia, getting paid to rattle our cage. Or they may not be people at all. There are computer programs sophisticated enough to make people think they're a real person. People have even fallen in love with bots on dating sites, thinking they were real people. I don't know about you, but I would hate to find that I had wasting an hour arguing with a computer program. Maybe I have already? In any case, the way to avoid that is not to argue with strangers on public pages, especially if they seem to be arguing just to argue. What's the point of arguing with people you'll never meet, anyway? The chance you'll convince them of anything are about the same whether they're in a warehouse in Russia, their mom's basement in Pasadena, or inside a computer, existing only as lines of code.

There are probably many other steps we can take, and I need to learn them, but this post is long enough. One thing I know we need to do is realize that the threat to democracy is real. Russian troll farms are real, and they're only going to get better at what they do. But they can only weaken democracy if we let them push us in directions we were already moving in.

It seems to me there are two things that are absolutely essential in a democracy. 1. Citizens have to be reasonable and informed enough for a government by the people to be viable. This means they can't be too gullible, too uninformed, or too blinded by in-group and confirmation biases. 2. Citizens with different points of view have to be able to coexist. And that means we have to compromise--not about everything, but about many things. Living in a democracy means not always getting your way. And maybe we shouldn't get our way, because we were wrong in the first place. None of us knows everything, or has it all figured out. I certainly don't, and I can be as hotheaded and self-righteous as anybody. But one thing I'm pretty sure about is this: if Americans keep thinking they can't be wrong, and that other Americans with different opinions are their enemies, then we'll tear our democracy apart without any help from Russian trolls.

Morning Thoughts on Freedom of Speech

I woke up this morning thinking about freedom of speech, and what it means. Yes, that is kinda weird. But it's a topic that's been on my mind a lot lately, because it seems to me that some folks on both sides of the political spectrum have become alarmingly hostile to freedom of speech and freedom of thought. For some on the left, liberalism now seems to be about policing what people say and think. That doesn't seem very liberal to me. While I think many hateful, racist, and sexist expressions are truly unacceptable, I also think these folks take things too far. This is also the group that is often in the news for shouting down, and occasionally violently disrupting, right wing speakers on campuses. I can't agree with that, either, for reasons I'll get to below.

Lest any conservatives read that paragraph and cheer, well, y'all ain't all innocent, either. Consider the people I ran into this weekend in front of the Colorado state capitol. I happened to see a small gathering of about 40 people as I walked by, so I stopped to hear what they were saying, as I always do if I have time. This was a mixed bag of right-wing groups. There was a group called Bikers Against Radical Islam, several people waving Trump banners, a few camo clad or cowboy-hat-wearing sagebrush militia types, some people from the south waving confederate flags, and even one African-American guy who apparently calls himself "The Black Rebel". Many of the people there were wearing body armor and helmets, and I imagine most of them were armed.

Anyway, one of the neo-confederate types got up and spoke, and he said that his freedom of speech is under attack. But here's the strange thing: almost in the same breath, he went on to say that there's no place in this country for socialists, or for people who disrespect the flag (presumably by sitting during the national anthem). A guy in front of me cheered. His jacket said, "Stomp my flag and I'll stomp your ass".

Clearly, these guys don't believe in freedom for all types of speech or expression. They don't believe socialists should have it, apparently, and they don't believe people who they see as disrespecting the flag should have it. (I can't resist pointing out that they were waving confederate flags, which seems fairly disrespectful of the American flag to me, and they were displaying American flags in ways that violate the flag code in all kinds of ways. I didn't point that out. I didn't have body armor on.)

As the speaker with the microphone attacked socialists and anthem-sitters, the Bikers Against Radical Islam cheered, too. Now, I don't know their exact thoughts, and I'm against radical, violent forms of Islam, too. (I don't like any form of fundamentalism.) But I've heard many people with similar beliefs (often in biker garb, for some reason) say that they think Islam--even moderate Islam--shouldn't get First Amendment protection, because "Islam is an ideology, not a religion". That makes no sense at all, of course, but the point is that if these people believe something like that, then they don't believe in free speech or thought for Muslims, either. Polls also show that many people don't believe in First Amendment protections for atheists, though nobody at this gathering mentioned them.

So these folks don't believe in freedom of speech for others. But that doesn't necessarily mean that their freedom of speech isn't under attack. Is it under attack? I don't want to dismiss the idea without giving it a fair hearing, even if I dislike this guy's worldview. One thing is clear. His First Amendment rights are intact. After all, he made his speech into a microphone on the steps of the state capitol, and the state troopers nearby were keeping the peace, not arresting him.

But the First Amendment only protects you from being punished by the government for what you say. It doesn't protect you from social consequences. It doesn't keep people from disagreeing with you---freedom of speech is a double-edged sword that way. It also doesn't keep people from shunning or ridiculing you.

However. What I woke up realizing this morning is that freedom of speech and the First Amendment aren't identical things. If fear of social consequences keeps you from speaking your mind, even if the First Amendment doesn't, do you really have freedom of speech? I'm not sure you do. The First Amendment (probably) won't protect you from losing your job for what you say. But if you do lose your job, you don't really have freedom of speech, even if you have First Amendment protection from the government. And sometimes that's OK, because freedom of speech isn't an absolute right. I have no problem with somebody who shows up on the news marching with a swastika losing their job. But at the same time, society should be wary of shutting down free speech through social or financial pressure, because the free exchange of ideas is important.

But why is it important? Some on the right and left may be asking that right now, and it's a fair question. There are a few commonly-cited reasons, but I only want to mention a couple. First is the "marketplace of ideas" argument. The classic early expression of this idea is by Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said, "when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas -- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment."

Soaring words, but I don't fully agree with them. I think the marketplace of ideas is important, but for a different reason. Holmes seemed to believe that popular acceptance of an idea is a good test for truth. I don't think it is--lots of terrible ideas are extremely popular. While it seems like hubris for me to question the great Holmes, I think the reason the marketplace of ideas is important is that without it, good ideas will never see the light of day in the first place (whether they win popular acceptance or not). If Galileo had been thrown in a dungeon and his books burned, the truth about the solar system would not have emerged, perhaps for decades. And he was speaking the truth, even if the masses had never accepted it. Even if--God forbid-- today's flat earthers come to dominate popular thought, Galileo was right.

So, the free exchange of ideas is important, even if those ideas don't win popular acceptance. But what about truly awful, hateful ideas? Does hate speech deserve a place in the marketplace of ideas? If bad ideas often gain popular acceptance, isn't that an argument against having ideas like Nazism in the marketplace at all? Should the emerging strands of American Nazism we saw in Charlottesville see the light of day at all? Why not just shut that down, and declare that it's unacceptable in a decent society; that such a poisonous product has no place in the marketplace of ideas? Should it even be cast outside of the protection of the First Amendment, and be declared illegal, as it has been in many other countries?

Maybe. But that makes me nervous, too. For one thing, who gets to say what counts as hate speech? What if we declared hate speech illegal, and then in a few years radical theocratic Christians gained enough political power to start prosecuting people who criticized them, using hate speech laws? Can you imagine that happening? I can. What truly counts as hate is not an easy thing to pin down, and though this may get me in trouble with other liberals, I don't think everything that gets called hate speech really is. Let's go back to that neo-confederate dude speaking on the state capitol steps. He was holding a shield with a confederate flag on it, and he was saying it's a symbol of history, not hate. Then he pointed to the Black Rebel in the audience, and said, "He's here with us. He knows we don't hate him."

And I don't think they do hate him; at least not most of them. I do think the confederate flag is an ugly symbol of a hideous time, and not something to be celebrated. I think waving it is incredibly insensitive, but I think somebody could actually wave it while not hating African-Americans. Does the guy speaking actually have hate in his heart? I don't know. Some people that wave that flag do. I imagine some people in that audience actually do hate blacks (and Muslims, and atheists, and socialists, etc.) and some don't. I didn't see any obvious white supremacists there. I've learned to recognize white supremacist symbols, and I see them fairly regularly--usually as tattoos on ex-convicts--but I didn't spot any there. Maybe I just missed them.

In any case, I think some people truly think that flag is a harmless expression of heritage. I disagree that it's harmless, but I do believe some people who wave it don't actually hate African-Americans. And some wave it who do. It's an ugly symbol, either way, but should it be suppressed? What about when it clearly is a symbol of hate--when it's carried by someone with an SS tattoo on their neck, for example? Should it be illegal then?

Even if it really is hate, and even if it has no place in the marketplace of ideas, there is another argument that it shouldn't be made illegal. That's the "safety valve" idea of freedom of speech. The idea here is that a society needs to give even hateful ideas an expression, so that people don't go underground with them, where they will fester and bubble up and surprise us later.

Recent history shows how this can happen. When you try to suppress an idea, you don't kill it. You'll likely just make the person who holds it believe it even more strongly, and start thinking of themselves as an oppressed martyr. The suppressed idea then gets whispered in living rooms (I've been stuck in those living rooms) and circulated in underground magazines and websites. Then, people who think those ideas have disappeared are in for a very unpleasant surprise when they return later.

Whether an idea is truly hateful, or simply conservative and therefore distasteful to liberals, something I think liberals need to consider more is that any attempt to control people usually results in a backlash. Conservatives especially hate being told what to do, and they extra-especially hate being told what to do by liberals. If we liberals think we can tell them what they're allowed to say and think, and they'll say, "Oh, OK", we're delusional. We may succeed in shushing them for a while, but they will resent it, and they will start looking for revenge. The election of Trump can be seen in many ways, but one thing it clearly was is an act of rebellion against "bossy liberal elitists". It was a backlash, and liberals (including me) should have seen it coming.

Don't get me wrong. And if you're a liberal, I'm not saying liberals are responsible for people voting for Trump. We aren't the ones who checked that box on the ballot. But we have to learn that trying to control the way people think and speak usually causes a backlash, and that can contribute to things we really, really don't want happening. Like having a nightmare like Donald Trump as president.

You may say that people shouldn't lash back like that. Maybe they shouldn't, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that they do. We can't control how they react. All we can do is try to engage with them in a way that doesn't make things worse.

And both liberals and conservatives need to be careful that they don't forget the value of freedom of speech and thought. They--or rather, we, as Americans--need to remember that freedom of speech isn't just freedom for people you agree with. As Noam Chomsky once said, "If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." We need to remember that freedom of speech is not identical with the First Amendment. It can be suppressed without touching the First Amendment. Does that mean all speech should be socially acceptable? Of course not. But it does mean the free exchange of ideas is a vital part of an open, healthy, democratic society, and whether we are liberals, conservatives, or moderates, we forget that at our peril.

White Privilege and the Weight of History

I love Billie Holiday, but I don't enjoy the song "Strange Fruit". It's the most powerful song I've ever heard, and I think every American should hear it at least once, but to be honest, I turn it off when it comes on. It's just too sad. I made myself listen to it tonight, though. It's on my mind because of a comment I saw on Facebook that I can't stop thinking about. The man who made it was white, and he said this:

We could be lynched today for having been born "privileged" never mind the facts of the hard work and sachrifices [sic] made by our loved ones to put us where we are today. 

Now, despite the title of this post, I don't use the term "white privilege" much, though I think it's a real thing. I lean liberal, but I shy away from recently-popular political terms like that. Saying them makes me feel like I'm jumping on a bandwagon and not thinking for myself. I also figure conservatives will stop listening to me as soon as I say them, and I want them to keep listening. I don't know if that makes sense or not. But I looked at that comment and thought, "If that's not white privilege, I don't know what is."

I hope it's mere ignorance that allows someone to say a thing like that. Surely this man had a faulty education, and he's never seen a photo of a lynching, even though many were taken. He must not realize that not so long ago--within the lifetime of people still living--white people could hang, dismember, and burn black people, with no consequences. He must not know that after many lynchings, those white people were so sure they wouldn't be punished that they would pose for a big group picture next to the broken body, their faces in full view. Only a person who doesn't feel the generational weight of a word like "lynched" could use it so lightly.

The worst such picture I've ever seen is of a black teenager who was castrated, dismembered, and burned to death near Waco, Texas while 10,000 people watched. They made a postcard of it, as was common at the time. One participant in the lynching sent a copy to his father, and wrote:

This is the Barbecue we had last night my picture is to the left with a cross over it your son Joe

The victim's name was Jesse Washington. I think every white American should force themselves to look at that postcard. I imagine most black Americans have already seen it.

As for that white man who thinks he might meet such a fate because he was born privileged, I agree with him. Not that he's at risk of being lynched, of course--that's outrageous, and truly offensive. I just agree that he was was born privileged. He was born to parents and grandparents who would never have met Jesse Washington's fate, because of the color of their skin. He may even owe his existence to that fact--how many babies were never born because their potential forebears were lynched? I also don't doubt that his parents and grandparents worked hard. But I know they never had to take an impossible-to-pass test before they could vote. I know they never bought a Negro Motorist's Green Book so they could take a trip and still eat in restaurants, stay in motels, and use restrooms. They never had to sit in the back of a bus, be called "boy" into their old age, or wait at a counter until all the white people had been served. They never earned lower wages for their hard work because of the color of their skin. They never listened to Billie Holiday sing "Strange Fruit", and thought, "That could be me."

My parents and grandparents never had to face those things, either. Yes, they worked hard too, and that's one reason I'm privileged. Another reason is that they were white, and so am I. Yes, things are better than they used to be. But I've never once been pulled over by the police and wondered if I would live through it. Yes, I think most cops are good, but I've never looked in the rear-view mirror and thought, "Is this one of the bad ones? One who hates me before he even knows my name?" If I were black--right now in 2017--I would know what that's like. I think that's something white people need to realize. Whether they agree with black athletes kneeling for the national anthem or not, they need to realize that they do so knowing what it's like to worry about running into that bad cop. They do so knowing what the word "lynched" really means. They feel the true weight of that word.

And I don't--not the way they do. Yet here I sit pounding angrily on a keyboard, even though none of this has ever affected me personally. And that's another kind of privilege. I'm sitting here livid about things I was never subjected to; things my parents and grandparents were never subjected to. I wonder how upset I would be if I were black, and saw that white man's breezy comment about a horror he can't begin to understand? I know I wouldn't handle it with the grace most African-Americans show in those circumstances. Maybe that's because I haven't had a lifetime of practice dealing with things like that. Like they have.

From the Gangplank to the Big Hole: Deep History in the High Plains

If you drive west along Interstate 80 from Cheyenne, Wyoming, you'll soon begin to cross the Rocky Mountains. But the strange thing is, you might not realize it. In this part of Wyoming, the high plains are really, really high. They form a great ramp that goes up to 7,000 feet--almost to the top of this section of the Laramie Range, which is low by Rocky Mountain standards. When you get to the place where the plains touch the granite of the mountains, you're higher than any point in the eastern United States, but it's mostly a big flat place. The only clue at first that you're crossing a mountain range are a few low granite hills that poke up through the plains.

This highest section of the high plains is called the Gangplank, and it played a key role in American history. When the Union Pacific railroad was looking for a way across the Rockies, they weren't interested in the soaring, craggy peaks to the north and south. That's much grander scenery, but you don't want to build a railroad through it. What they needed was a smooth climb to a gentle mountain pass, and this is where they found it. The trains still go this way today, sharing the Gangplank with Interstate 80.

The Gangplank isn't the most scenic entrance to the Rockies, but it's an fascinating place--once you know what what you're looking at. This is a landscape with a story to tell, and that story is much, much older than the Transcontinental Railroad. If you could go back in time about 30 million years, most of the Rocky Mountain region looked a lot like this stretch of I-80 today. The mountains were already millions of years old, and they had eroded until they were almost buried in their own debris, which formed sloping plains like the Gangplank. Only the tops of the mountains protruded, as the granite hills still do here. The Gangplank region is a fossil landscape; a window into a mostly-vanished world.

This world began to change a few million years ago, when rivers began to eat away at the plains and uncover the mountains. Geologists aren't sure if this happened because the whole region was lifted, making the rivers steeper, or because the climate grew wetter, making the rivers more powerful. Perhaps it was a bit of both. In any case, the mountains were uncovered, in an event known as the Exhumation of the Rockies. Because the Gangplank is between two rivers, it was left behind as one of the only places where the plains still rise to the mountaintops. The rocks here preserve an unusually complete record of the rise, burial, and resurrection of the Rocky Mountains.

It's an epic tale, and to understand it, a good place to start is to leave the interstate at Exit 345, and pull into a parking lot full of big rigs. At the east end of the lot is a sign about the Gangplank and its geologic history, with a nice (though slightly outdated) diagram, shown to the right.

As the image shows, three very different geologic structures come together here. The "You are here" marker is at the edge of the Gangplank, which is made of almost-horizontal layers of rock. At 5 to 37 million years old, these rocks are youngsters. But just a couple miles west, you enter a far more ancient landscape. Here the granite and metamorphic rocks are between 1.4 and 1.7 billion years old. Hard, ancient rocks like this are called basement rocks, because they form the foundation for most of North America (though they're often deeply buried below younger layers of sedimentary rock).

Now, if you look north or south, you may see layers of red and tan rock that poke up through the plains at a steep angle. These range from about 300 million to 65 million years old. They're mostly buried here, but in other parts of the Rockies they're exposed and and breathtaking. At places like Red Rocks near Denver, or the Flatirons near Boulder, you can see that they lean against the ancient basement rocks like a stack of plywood against a wall.

But they weren't always tilted like this. Before the Rockies began to rise around 70 million years ago, they were flat. Then the basement rocks rose from deep underground and tilted them upward; pushing them aside like a man coming up through a trap door. But what about the near-horizontal rocks of the Gangplank? Why weren't they shoved sideways? Because they weren't there yet. They formed as the mountains began to wear down, and that's why they're still relatively flat.

That's the basic story you get as you stand on the high, flat expanse of the Gangplank and read the sign above. But standing by the interstate looking at a sign isn't that satisfying. What we need is a place where we can descend down into the the rocks sketched on the sign, and see them in real life. Luckily, there's just such a place a few miles to the south, just across the Colorado border.

To get there, take the I-80 service road a couple miles west and head south on Harriman Road. It's a dirt road, but a relatively civilized one. To your left, you'll soon get a good look at the tilted sedimentary rocks that lean against the ancient granite. After driving among stubby granite hills for a few miles, you'll emerge into a sweeping landscape of red mesas and the high, snow-capped peaks of the Colorado Front Range. It's big, beautiful country.

Our destination is Red Mountain Open Space, a public park managed by the city of Fort Collins, Colorado. The park is in a valley the ranchers here call the Big Hole. As holes go, it is quite large, especially if you look into it from the edge of the Gangplank. To get a basic sense of the geology of the Big Hole, take a look back at the sign from I-80. South of the Gangplank is an eroded region of older, tilted sedimentary rocks. That's the landscape we're in now, but with one wrinkle.

No, seriously--there's an actual wrinkle in the rocks here, and it's a big one, called the Sand Creek Anticline. To see it, head east from the open space parking lot on Bent Rock trail, following Sand Creek. Soon you'll enter a canyon that cuts straight through a hill of red and salmon-colored rock. We'll call this Red Mountain. The rocks here rise and then fall again in a big arch, or anticline. The picture above shows the curve in the rocks inside the canyon. When you leave the canyon and look back to the south at Red Mountain, as in the picture below, you get an even better view of the anticline. The yellow lines show how the rock layers bend inside the canyon, while the steep layers in the foreground have eroded into formations called flatirons. This anticline is an asymmetrical one--the layers on one side are much steeper than the other. There's a reason for that, as we'll see.

If you turn around here and look north, you'll see that the Sand Creek Anticline runs for several miles through the Big Hole. The hill in the next picture doesn't have a name that I can find, so I'll call it Swoop Mountain, because the rocks here take a big swooping path across it. On the left side of Swoop Mountain, you can see the same red rocks that form Red Mountain, but there are several younger layers lying on top (these layers once covered Red Mountain, too, but have eroded away.) As the yellow lines show, all the layers across Swoop Mountain drop down from the west (slanting down off the Rocky Mountain front) and suddenly rise again steeply, like the rocks in Red Mountain (visible on the far right). Then they slope gradually to the east. Some of the yellow lines go through empty space, because some of the rocks have eroded away. The lines show how the rocks would bend if they were all still there. Swoop Mountain shows that surface landforms don't necessarily mirror the shape of the rocks below. Here the rocks bend downward right where the surface bends upward as a hill.

From down here in the Big Hole, we see that the sign on I-80 is basically correct, but simplified. The layers here do slope down to the east, but they have a sharp bend in the middle that doesn't appear on the sign. The reason for the bend, most likely, is that the basement rocks below the surface have a fault in them--they've broken into two blocks here. The block on the east side of the valley has lifted and rotated, leaving the sedimentary rocks draped over the fault like carpet over a cracked concrete floor.

But what about the Gangplank? How does it fit into all this? You can see it on the horizon in the picture above, but to get a better look, we need to hike to the other side of Swoop Mountain. From there, you see the view below. The cliffs on the right are the Chalk Bluffs; the escarpment formed by the southern edge of the Gangplank. The picture shows that these rock layers are basically flat. They weren't tilted and warped by the rising Rockies, because they formed afterward--from the eroding Rockies. The red layers on the left are tilted, though you can't see it very well in the picture.

The contact between these two rock layers is an example of an angular unconformity--a place where rocks of different ages and angles meet. There's no physical gap between the two layers, but over 150 million years is missing from the rock record. The deep red rocks are about 245 to 285 million years--older than the dinosaurs. The white rocks sitting on top of them here--more visible in the picture below--are called the White River Formation. They formed in a time when the dinosaurs were long extinct and strange prehistoric mammals roamed the West. But 150 million years is is just a minor gap. Further east, the White River Formation lies directly on top of basement rocks that are at least 1,400 million years old. That's a lot of missing history. Luckily, much of it can be found in other places.

I should mention one more feature, because if you take this hike, you'll notice it. Walking back toward the parking lot, on the east side of Swoop and Red Mountains, you'll see the weird crest of white rocks in the image below. Those are layers of gypsum from the Permian Period, when this part of the country was a shallow, salty lagoon near a hot desert--similar to the salt flats of today's Persian Gulf. Water evaporated rapidly in these conditions, leaving behind deposits of gypsum (or alabaster, if you want it to sound fancy). These layers erode and dissolve faster than most other rocks, often leaving cavities that can cave in as sinkholes. Rattlesnakes like to gather in one of the sinkholes near here to spend the winter in cozy heaps, so watch your step in these parts.

We've covered a lot of ground here, and an enormous amount of time, so maybe it would be good to step back and look at the big picture. That would be the image below. This is an aerial view of the whole region, copied from Google Earth and labeled by me. Now, I'm librarian, not a geologist, so take it with a grain of salt--the lines and boundaries are far from exact, and will likely make real geologists cringe.

Satellite Image from Google Maps. Amateur annotations by the author.

Here we see the Big Hole in the right foreground, the basement rocks of the Laramie Range to the left, and the Gangplank to the northeast. Interstate 80 is a few miles past the top of the image. In the Big Hole, you can see how the sedimentary rocks tilt to the east, pop up again at the Sand Creek Anticline, and then tilt eastward again. To the northeast, the Gangplank is much less tilted, but it also slopes gradually eastward to form the the western Nebraska plains. The caprock of the gangplank is a coarse sandstone called the Ogallala Formation. It's very porous, and it gets waterlogged below the ground to the east, where it forms the famous Ogalalla Aquifer.

This is vast, impressive country, spanning big distances and stupendous amounts of time. It's a whole series of ancient worlds, stacked one on top of the other. That's true in many places, of course, but here you can descend into the remnants of those former worlds, and think about how they rose and fell. It's a wondrous landscape that can tell many stories, and the more stories you learn, the more wondrous it becomes.

__________________________

To Explore Further:

Geology Underfoot Along the Front Range. Lon Abbot and Terri Cook

Roadside Geology of Wyoming. David Lageson and Darwin Spearing

Roadside Geology of Colorado. Felicie Williams and Halka Chronic

Geologic map of the Table Mountain quadrangle and adjacent parts of the Round Butte and Buckeye quadrangles, Larimer County, Colorado, and Laramie County, Wyoming. Courtright, T.R., and Braddock, W.A.

Geologic map of the Laramie 30' x 60' quadrangle, Albany and Laramie Counties, Wyoming: Wyoming. Ver Ploeg, A.J., and Boyd, C.S.

Stratigraphic Chart of Colorado.

Hopes and Dreamers: DACA and the Purpose of Morality

With the fates of 800,000 DACA applicants on the line, I wonder if it’s a good time for Americans to reflect on the moral issues at stake in this situation. These days people on either side of the political spectrum tend think the other side is simply amoral. But that’s usually not true (even if a few on both sides really are amoral). Most people on different sides of the political spectrum actually think morals (or ethics, I’ll use the words interchangeably) are crucially important, but they think of morality in fundamentally different terms. The words “morality” and “ethics” mean something very different to conservatives than to liberals. This isn’t just my opinion--there’s a lot of psychological research to back this up.

The DACA issue highlights these different ways of thinking about ethics or morality. For example, you’ll hear many liberals (including me) and moderate conservatives saying that Dreamers did nothing wrong. They were brought here by their parents, they had no choice in the matter, and often barely remember the country they came from. But you’ll hear other conservatives saying, “The law is the law. They’re here illegally.” For them, that’s the critical moral fact. These folks may actually believe that morality requires that Dreamers be deported. They’re not trying to be evil (how many people really try to be evil?) As hard as it is for liberals like me to imagine, most are actually trying to do the right thing, within their moral framework.

But a lot of pain in this world has been inflicted by people trying to do the right thing--that’s why it’s so important to consider carefully what the right thing actually is. So let’s do that. If different sides are framing morality in such different terms, then maybe it would be helpful to lay these different approaches on the table and compare them. To put it another way, maybe this is a good time for Americans to think about what morality is fundamentally about. What’s the stuff actually for? What’s the point of being moral or ethical in the first place?

I once spent a couple of years reading everything I could about ethical theories, but I finally realized that for me, ethics boils down to something very close to the Golden Rule: treat others as I would want them to treat me. When in doubt about the right thing to do (and there’s often doubt) err on the side of compassion. As I see it, the fundamental fact that even makes ethics necessary is that other people have feelings. They have pleasures and pains, and hopes and dreams, just like I do, and theirs are just as intense as mine. I can’t prove that, but I think it’s an extremely safe assumption. (I should also say I’m not that good at following the Golden Rule, but I should be, and this is why I think so.)

Anyway, if ethics is fundamentally about the fact that other people have hopes and feelings, the next question is: who should I treat ethically? My answer is: anyone capable of pleasure and pain, and hopes and dreams. In other words, any human being (and many animals, too, but that’s another topic). That means how I treat someone shouldn’t depend on what language they speak, or what God they do or don’t pray to, or what country they were born in, or live in now. Those things don’t matter. What matters is that they are human, and have feelings and hopes just as intense as mine.

Some people will be reading all this and shaking their heads, because again, many Americans fundamentally disagree with my view of what morality is about. For them, morality is about other things: maybe it’s about following rules or laws scrupulously, or purity in sex or language. Maybe it’s about doing what they believe God wants, or making sure people get the rewards or punishments they deserve (an eye for an eye, etc.). For many people, a crucial component of morality is in-group loyalty: watching out for “your” people, and being suspicious of others. They actually see that as the right thing to do. Again, that's hard for liberals to remember, so we risk falling into the intellectually-lazy habit of thinking they are simply amoral.

Of course, not all conservatives think in these “if you’re not one of my people, you matter less” terms, but many on the far right do, and it’s not hard to find examples. Not long ago a guy told me he would rather see a million foreigners die than one American. A million! I’ve heard similar sentiments all my life. They’re not uncommon. And for some people with that outlook, it’s a pretty narrow group that counts as an American. You can see this if you drive down the interstate and see those motel billboards that have the little Christian fish on them, or say “American-owned”. That’s to tell travelers that the motel isn’t owned by immigrants with non-English accents and “foreign” religions. It doesn’t matter that those immigrants are most likely naturalized citizens who therefore ARE Americans, every bit as much as I am. They don’t match some people’s image of what an American is, and very often that means they don’t get the same moral consideration. They’re seen as “other”, and you better believe that makes a difference in how some people treat them.

But the fact is, most people have trouble empathizing with people who are different from them (I’ve already noted how hard it is for liberals like me to remember most conservatives believe they are doing the right thing.) Maybe it just requires more imagination to put ourselves in such different shoes, or maybe it’s human nature. Everyone does it, to some extent. But for some on the right (notice I didn’t say “all”) that basic human tendency is something to be embraced. They think it’s just self-evident that “our people” deserve more moral consideration than “others”. They also tend to think rules or laws should be followed scrupulously even if they cause human suffering.

I think both of these assumptions need to be seriously questioned, because they’ve both caused an enormous amount of pain in this world. That’s why I think people need to stop and ask themselves something they may never have asked before: what is morality really about? Why be moral at all? What if the reason rules and laws exist in the first place isn’t for their own sake, but for the sake of making the world a nicer place to live in; to make societies more conducive to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? And what if all people are, in fact, created equal? What if whether you should treat someone decently doesn’t depend on whether they are “your people”, but whether they’re human beings with hopes, dreams, and feelings? Because that’s exactly what they are, and the hopes and dreams of 800,000 human beings are riding on how people answer these important moral questions.

Thoughts on Ideological Purity

A couple of times recently I've heard the phrase "ideological purity", and thought, "That's really what some people want, isn't it?" Part of the reason our country is so polarized, I think, is that there are vocal minorities on both sides of the political spectrum who insist on ideological purity. They have an orthodoxy, and they try to enforce it. They view moderate and independent members of their own party as heretics (or at least dangerously lapsed), and they view the other party as infidels and villains so irredeemable that it's a waste of time to engage with them.

On the far right is a vocal minority that refuses to compromise on anything, and attacks more moderate conservatives, calling them "Republicans in Name Only" or even "cuckservatives". Or they accuse them of being slaves to political correctness. 

Which brings us to the far left. While some conservatives have distorted the meaning of political correctness beyond recognition, and claim they're "not bowing to political correctness" when they're really just being rude or hateful, some on the left really do insist on a rigid form of political correctness. It is an orthodoxy, and they do try to enforce it. After all, the literal meaning of the words "politically correct" implies that there's a political viewpoint--and manner of speaking--which is indisputably the "correct" one. We've all seen the conservative speakers shouted down on liberal campuses, and even "ideologically impure" liberal professors have been targeted for their heresies. And have you noticed there's a whole genre of articles circulating on social media entitled "Why You Need to Stop Saying ________."?

Some on the far left really do try to tell others, across the political spectrum, exactly how they should be thinking and speaking. It may be worse on the left than the right, and I say that as a moderate liberal. Even as I write this, I'm wondering who will be offended by it, and whether they will write me off as a heretic. Do moderate conservatives have similar fears?

In any case, I think there are many problems with these attempts to enforce orthodoxy. One is that more moderate and independent types on both sides (who are actually the majority) are afraid to speak their minds, not for fear of being attacked by the other side, but for fear of being attacked by the orthodox wing of their own side. So there's fragmentation and bad blood within as well as between political parties, and the country grows more fragmented and dysfunctional. 

But there's another problem with ideological orthodoxy that I want to focus on here, and it is this: Once you declare that one particular stance on an issue cannot be wrong, and should not be questioned, you have stopped reasoning about that issue. And once you declare that others can't question an ideology, you've said that they must stop reasoning, too. People with rigid ideologies may still be "thinking", in the sense of spending mental energy defending or elaborating that ideology, but if there is no possibility of changing their ideology, they aren't really reasoning. Because the whole point of reasoning is to discover truths you didn't already know. Isn't it?

And chances are, there's a lot we don't already know. What are the chances that either extreme on the political spectrum (which is an artificial construct anyway) in this particular country, at this particular time in history, has finally got it figured out? Not very high, if you ask me. The universe is far bigger and more complex than our little primate brains can easily grasp. I have undergraduate and graduate degrees in psychology, and if there's one clear lesson to be learned from psychology it's that the human mind is easily fooled. Our senses are woefully limited, and we fall prey to dozens of different perceptual illusions, cognitive biases, and logical fallacies. As a species, our ability to see the world clearly is so pitiful that for most of human history we didn't know the shape of the planet we spent every day of our lives on. We were so sure it was flat that we attacked the people who said it wasn't. We probably burned a few at the stake for it.

We know more now, of course (and we're slightly more tolerant of opposing views). There are things we can be confident of, but they're mostly things which can be empirically verified. We're confident enough now that the world is round, for example, that we can call it a fact. But most ideologies aren't entirely, or even mostly, factual. They're full of opinions about complex systems like economies and social dynamics that can't easily be pinned down empirically, as well as value judgments and ethical stances that may never be empirically testable. But you wouldn't know this when talking to the ideologically orthodox on both sides of the the political spectrum. They sound for all the world like they're talking about established facts, when they're usually just expressing opinions and forgetting the difference. (I've been guilty of this myself, of course).

And perhaps we can be confident of some things we can't really call facts. As I stop and think this over (that's the main reason I write these--to clarify my thoughts), I suppose there are some moral opinions that we can be pretty confident in, too. We can be confident that murder, rape, and slavery are wrong, for example--confident enough to enforce legal penalties against them. But these are clear cases that most people agree on, whereas many of the opinions people express as though they were facts really are just opinions, and not ones that most people can agree on. 

So here's the question I want to ask people at both far ends of the political spectrum: Are you really that sure that your opinions are right? So sure that you can stop reasoning about them? So sure that you can tell others to stop questioning and reasoning as well? Should anybody be THAT confident in their opinions?

Sagan's Dust Mote: An Evening Reflection

Tonight I sat on my couch just as the evening sun was streaming through my west window, and I noticed a few dust particles glowing and dancing in the light. It made me think of Carl Sagan's famous reflection comparing the Earth to "a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam."

His comparison was inspired by a photo of the Earth taken by the Voyager 1 space probe in 1990, just as it was leaving the solar system. That's it, in the image I've posted here. That little dot in the band of light at the top is Earth, as it looks from beyond the orbit of Neptune. The "sunbeams" are actually bands of refracted sunlight created by the camera's optics, but that's a justifiable bit of poetic license. After all, Earth really is suspended in sunlight.

As I watched the dust motes in my living room swirling in that same sunlight, I thought about Sagan's comparison, and wondered how accurate it was. Is our whole world--the home of every known living thing--really that tiny? To find out, I did some figuring. I'll spare you the math and skip to the results--I think you'll find them impressive.

Imagine the Earth really were the size of one of those dust particles floating in my living room--a big one; about 30 millionths of a meter across. That speck of dust would be about 15 inches from the sun, which would be about the size of a BB. Neptune would be orbiting that BB at a distance of about 37 feet.

And the nearest star? It would be 63 miles away.

That's about the average distance between all the 100 billion or so stars in the Milky Way galaxy. If Earth were a speck of dust, the Milky Way would still be over a million miles across. And that's just one galaxy, in a universe filled with uncountable galaxies.

It seems, then, that Carl Sagan wasn't exaggerating at all. If anything, he was being too generous. On the scale of the stars, our planet is unimaginably tiny--a little speck of nothing. And yet, it's not nothing; not to us. But don't listen to me. Listen to Dr. Sagan, because he said it better than I ever could:

Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. 

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. 

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. 

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. 

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.