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...in his special theory of relativity published in 1905, Albert Einstein showed that matter can be created out of energy and can disappear into energy. What all science writers call “Einstein’s famous equation,” E=mc2, relates the mass m of a body to an equivalent rest energy, E, where e is a universal constant, the speed of light in a vacuum. That is, a body at rest still contains energy.
As promoted by Oprah Winfrey, scores of megachurch pastors and an endless flow of self-help best sellers, the idea is to firmly believe that you will get what you want, not only because it will make you feel better to do so, but because “visualizing” something — ardently and with concentration — actually makes it happen.
Youie summer
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| Early blue and white ware, first half of 14th century |
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,Stevens's act of making the poem sprang from the same rage. The poem expresses a human's drive to understand and represent what he or she experiences.
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
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| Thanks to Greg Houston and indyweek.com |
the Tea Party is increasingly swimming against the tide of public opinion: among most Americans, even before the furor over the debt limit, its brand was becoming toxic....Less popular than atheists? The Christian Right unpopular? If true, this is very good news.
Polls show that disapproval of the Tea Party is climbing. In April 2010, a New York Times/CBS News survey found that 18 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of it, 21 percent had a favorable opinion and 46 percent had not heard enough. Now, 14 months later, Tea Party supporters have slipped to 20 percent, while their opponents have more than doubled, to 40 percent.
Of course, politicians of all stripes are not faring well among the public these days. But in data we have recently collected, the Tea Party ranks lower than any of the 23 other groups we asked about—lower than both Republicans and Democrats. It is even less popular than much maligned groups like "atheists" [emphasis mine] and "Muslims." Interestingly, one group that approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right.
Could we start, at least, by dismissing candidates who called for President Obama's birth certificate or raised the specter of Shariah law in America, followed by briskly ushering offstage lunatics who dismiss global warming as a socialist plot?....In John M. Broder's August 17 article in the Times ("Bashing E.P.A. Is New Theme in G.O.P. Race"), Michelle Bachmann is quoted from Iowa:
...When tea-stained legislators gut environmental laws to protect corporate profits, when they sneer at climate change while America bakes in its bedrock like a big green casserole, when Republican educational reform means classrooms with fewer teachers and more guns—there's a temptation for reasonable Americans to throw up their hands and succumb to despair. Is it a death wish or a scheme to kill the rest of us, when "conservatives" fight against clean air laws, or legislate to place a loaded pistol in every yahoo's holster? I've reached the second half of my seventh decade, and I've never seen such an intimidating swarm of fanatics and fools marching under one banner....
"I guarantee you the E.P.A. will have doors locked and lights turned off, and they will only be about conservation. It will be a new day and a new sheriff in Washington, D.C."Another foolishness is the role sought for religion (Christianity, strikingly in parallel with the role Islamists seek for Islam). Say Campbell and Putnam:
In an earlier debate she said the agency should be renamed the "job-killing organization of America." She has called global-warming science a hoax.
...[She] wants to padlock the E.P.A.’s doors, as does former Speaker Newt Gingrich. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas wants to impose an immediate moratorium on environmental regulation.
...In his book, Fed Up, Our Fight to Save America from Washington, Mr. Perry described global-warming science as "one contrived phony mess that is falling apart under its own weight" and a "secular carbon cult" led by false prophets like Al Gore.
But...the American people, by substantial majorities, are concerned about air and water pollution, and largely trust the E.P.A., national surveys say.
Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And Tea Partiers continue to hold these views: they seek "deeply religious" elected officials, approve of religious leaders' engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates....
This inclination among the Tea Party faithful to mix religion and politics explains their support for Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Governor Rick Perry of Texas....
Now I told myself that we, as human individuals, are our own guides to good and evil. We must think for ourselves; we are responsible for our own morality. I arrived at the conclusion that I couldn't be honest with others unless I was honest with myself. I wanted to comply with the goals of religion—which are to be a better and more generous person—without suppressing my will and forcing it to obey an intricate and inhumanly detailed web of rules. I had lied many times in my life, but now, I told myself, that was over: I had had enough of lying.The point, though, is that, however much we might want more, we are not going to get it. An individual's project in facing la condition humain is as it has always been: Deal with it.
After I wrote my memoir, Infidel (published in the United States in 2007), I did a book tour in the United States. I found that interviewers from the Heartland often asked if I had considered adopting the message of Jesus Christ. The idea seems to be that I should shop for a better, more humane religion than Islam, rather than taking refuge in unbelief. A religion of talking serpents and heavenly gardens? I usually respond that I suffer from hayfever. The Christian take on Hellfire seems less dramatic than the Muslim version, which I grew up with, but Christian magical thinking appeals to me no more than my grandmother's angels and djins.
The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more. [pp. 479-480]
...Though the troglodyte triumvirate of [Rush] Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity is paid $114 million annually to seduce the subliterate multitudes—for nine hours daily on Fox Radio—the usual lavish smorgasbord of reactionary bile and gibberish was deemed insufficient for 2010. Unleashed by a Supreme Court majority who ruled that corporate campaign spending, even anonymous spending, was the exact equivalent of First Amendment free speech, those dark forces "outside" the political system reached deep into their well-lined pockets and spent nearly half a billion dollars, a quarter of it from "undisclosed" sources, to underwrite attack ads and steer a staggering, half-bankrupt nation to the right.To paraphrase what many people have said with reference to Strunk & White's Elements of Style2, read Crowther's essay!
...Shrinking or neutering the government never helped anyone with a net worth less than eight figures. You can sell almost anything in America but common sense. This country is notorious, and unique, for all its poor people who want to keep wealth unchained, just in case they should acquire some.
...It may be that voters below a certain level of ratiocination, their logical faculties permanently maimed by reality TV and video games, are no longer able to resist the kind of attack ads that came at them in a $4 billion tidal wave. The big corporate contributors wouldn't fund this operation so generously if they weren't confident of a handsome return. Never in human history has so much cash and so much expertise been devoted to what would once have been called mind control, or brainwashing, and is now called free speech. [emphasis mine1] There's no apparent limit to what the right-wing coalition can spend, or will spend, to bring out the worst in Americans.
Today's problems are a lot more dire than [those of] 1994. The "cheap entertainment" that the D's and R's are treating us to is costing us dearly.Well, now The Independent has published Crowther specifically on our recent election ("Gone Missing: The Country's Conscience, Brain, and Heart "), and he seems to agree with Ken:
In a democracy, you get the government you deserve. Ultimately, the ignorance of the ...electorate is the problem.
The midterms...mark the most successful manipulation of the gullible by the cynical that this deceitful republic has yet witnessed. Billionaires and "undisclosed" corporate donors poured kings' ransoms into relentless attack ads against vulnerable Democrats. Right-wing broadcasters circulated myths and lies that would have made Joseph Goebbels blush, and every racist and xenophobic impulse threatening to a nonwhite president was exploited without apology. The secret money served it up, and the logic-impaired tea party irregulars swallowed the poisoned bait with relish. The net result of the vaunted populist rebellion of 2010 was a sharp turn toward corporate feudalism, as the House of Representatives and many state legislatures and governor's mansions reverted to a rudderless but ruthless Republican Party that has never been less deserving of another chance.Whew! I think that Crowther more than agrees with Ken. And more than agrees with me, too, when I commented to Ken on Facebook that
...America will survive this election. It will not, in the long run, survive what the voting revealed about our political system.
We've finally achieved institutional incoherence....
...
...[T]here was nothing much in this election cycle to inspire confidence in the American electorate or the candidates it produces and elects. And far less to inspire confidence in the media that egged them on, and not coincidentally milked them and their "undisclosed" cash cows for several billion dollars in venomous, repetitive, content-free attack ads.
The one way the media blitz swayed me was to change my stance on immigration. Though easygoing Australians have always been among my favorite national types, in the future I vote to keep them out of America. If we could have stopped just one Aussie, Rupert Murdoch, from achieving naturalization, what a much kinder, cleaner, smarter nation we would be. If Rush Limbaugh deserved a lion's share of the credit for getting out the Neanderthal vote in 1994, we can thank Murdoch's Fox News and Fox Radio, the boiler rooms of neo-fascist reaction, for the triumphant return of the American knuckle-dragger in 2010.
it may be even worse than you say, for even if the electorate could magically become informed and wise, the money system Senator Mitchell mentioned back in 1994 has become even more entrenched and would hinder [I should have said prevent] the electorate's exercising their new-found smarts. Of course, no such magical transformation is going to take place anyway. Ironically, the electorate's predilection for magical thinking more or less ensures that.I haven't defined "magical thinking" lately, although I use the term frequently. Magical thinking, which has an entry in Wikipedia, is not a precise term. It has different senses depending on context and theorist. Rather than attempt to define it, I'll give some examples. The voodoo belief that a practitioner can cause someone pain by sticking pins in an effigy of the person is magical thinking. Thinking that a prayer or ritual can prevent a plane from crashing, a child from dying, a nation from declining (or anything else from happening) is magical thinking. I joke that as long as I own books I haven't read yet I won't die; that would be magical thinking if I actually believed it.
Cleaning up after breakfast this morning, I felt a sense of the miraculous (or the providential) that I should be privileged to live (and to have lived for almost sixty-eight years now) when children die young (of defect, disease, starvation, accident, mayhem), when one of the almost always two young Nazca booby hatchlings is pushed out of the nest by its older sibling ("It always dies," said the narrator of the BBC program about Galapágos), etc., etc., etc., to the countless gazillions of blameless creatures on the Planet Earth who don't enjoy a long, full life.Dr. Phillips Stevens Jr. [writes that] "the vast majority of the world's peoples...believe that there are real connections between the symbol and its referent, and that some real and potentially measurable power flows between them." He believes there is a neurobiological basis for this, though the specific content of any symbol is culturally determined.
Where's the country's conscience? Where's its heart? Where's its brain?I think it's in its knee, which jerks predictably at the slightest magical provocation.
...in his special theory of relativity published in 1905, Albert Einstein showed that matter can be created out of energy and can disappear into energy. What all science writers call "Einstein's famous equation," E=mc2, relates the mass m of a body to an equivalent rest energy, E, where e is a universal constant, the speed of light in a vacuum. That is, a body at rest still contains energy.
Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Super-duper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. [p. 3]Sound good? Instant, easy bliss. No sweat, no pain.
There’s an important difference between having a friend and having the experience of having a friend. There’s an important difference between writing a great novel and having the experience of writing a great novel...Plugged in, we would have the sorts of experience that people who actually achieve or accomplish those things have, but they would all be, in a way, false—an intellectual mirage. A drug addict is often experiencing intense pleasure. But his is not a life we admire.A former correspondent who went by the Last Judgment eponym "Sheepandgoats" once suggested that my rejection of theistic belief might be motivated by my wishing to avoid being duped. I failed to realize at the time how appropriate the suggestion was. I didn't want to be hooked up to his happiness machine. The Jehovah's Witness brand, in his case. (They're big on separating the sheep from the goats.)
Now, of course, the difference would be lost on you if you were plugged into the machine—you wouldn’t know you weren’t really anyone’s friend. But what’s striking is that even that fact is not adequately reassuring. On the contrary it adds to the horror of the prospect. We’d be ignorant, too—duped, to boot!...
In refusing to plug in to Nozick’s machine, we express our deep-seated belief that the sort of thing we can get from a machine isn’t the most valuable thing we can get; it isn’t what we most deeply want, whatever we might think if we were plugged in. Life on the machine wouldn’t constitute achieving what we’re after when we’re pursuing a happy life. There’s an important difference between having a friend and having the experience of having a friend.No imaginary friends on high for me, thank you very much.2
...Happiness is more like knowledge than like belief...Happiness, like knowledge, and unlike belief and pleasure, is not a state of mind.
How much like the "happiness machine" are the major theistic religions of the world, given their visions of a blissful afterlife? Do they make their practitioners happy?
Decatur embraced Obama in 2008. Voter turnout surged, and he carried some precincts by 85 percent or even 95 percent. Yet now, as in struggling cities across the country, some independents and conservative Democrats—particularly white men who supported Obama before—say they no longer believe Obama and the Democratic Congress can help them.Religion isn't the only magical thinking that people indulge in. They also indulge massively in political magical thinking. They believe that if something isn't going right, the thing to do is to vote out the party currently holding office. The magic they count on is that the party they vote for next time is the one that will fix things and save us.
One interesting thing is how old age impacts one's attitude towards religion. At [a recent] luncheon, someone reported on two former...executives who upon retirement had gone into the ministry. [A mutual friend of ours] and I have certainly become more active in terms of church groups. You on the other hand, have become a complete atheist. I am certainly not consistent in my beliefs because I belong to the Anglican Church of North America (which has split off from the Episcopal Church) although I have neither supported the secession nor the opposition to gay marriage. Religion as well as politics makes strange bedfellows.Hmm, I wonder whether aging per se is the operative factor in one's attitude toward religion. I'd say it's more a matter of whether and how a person spends his time thinking about it. There's the believing way of thinking and the skeptical way. As a teenager, I chose the latter, although I didn't come to a conclusion until many years later.
A brief sidebar on religion—a line I've always considered one of the simplest and yet most humorous and profound thoughts on the subject: "If a baseball hitter thanks God when he hits a homerun, shouldn't he blame God when he strikes out?"The baseball example has occurred to me a number of times in listening to people thanking God for this and that. They choose not to condemn God (or come to doubt that He exists) for bad things that have happened to them, but they're quick to fall down and worship Him for the good things that happen. That is, they (1) chose up front to believe that God exists and (2) continually cherry-pick what to attend to in order to ensure that they don't begin to doubt that existence.
The first use noted by the [Oxford English Dictionary] is from 1915: "an aeroplane pilot commanded to remain in place (aloft) for another hour, replies 'the machine is not fitted with skyhooks.'" The skyhook concept is perhaps a descendant of the deus ex machina of ancient Greek dramaturgy: when second-rate playwrights found their plots leading their heroes into inescapable difficulties, they were often tempted to crank down a god onto the scene, like Superman, to save the situation supernaturally. Or skyhooks may be an entirely independent creation of convergent folkloric evolution. Skyhooks would be wonderful things to have, great for lifting unwieldy objects out of difficult circumstances, and speeding up all sorts of construction projects. Sad to say, they are impossible. [p. 74]Dennett uses the term extensively in his 1995 book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (there are thirty-six page citations in the index, some of them spanning several pages of text).
I've come to the realization that people's brains are wired in entirely different ways such that truth is as useless a concept to some as it is useful to others.I suppose, for "full disclosure," that I'd better provide the rest of Xavier's comment, for he was counseling me on the futility of trying to convince certain people by appealing to reason:
As such, skepticism is either a personal endeavor or an endeavor pursued with like-minded individuals.Xavier appears to have developed better tongue-biting skills than I.
To put it bluntly, when it comes to certain subjects, I just bite my tongue and see the conversations as an exploration into the human psyche.
