Chavs

After reading "Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class" by Owen Jones, I felt like to do it justice would require a researched college-style essay instead of a blog post. Not gonna happen! So go read it! It was a great book, and at the same time I learned a little bit about UK politics and history.

But even though I won't write an essay, I've made some notes about the pages I marked while reading. Also, most of the social commentary applies in some way to the dialogue going on in America around class, but of course there are important differences... someone should write a book about that. (Or a college-style essay!)

Racism bad, Sexism bad, Classism funny!
"Chav" is a derogatory term in the UK for working-class people. The closest thing I can relate it to in US terms is "white trash" - though of course one of the things that struck me while reading this book is that there is no derogatory term for poor people in the US that isn't also about race. (So we have that going for us?) The chav stereotype is of an uneducated young street thug wearing "Burberry" or other bling; laziness, drunkenness, violence, teenage pregnancies, racism, etc. are all traits associated with chavs. Literally the term comes from the Romany word for child, 'chavi', though people often associate the term with acronyms like 'Council Housed And Violent'. Another US analogy is needed here: council housing can be considered a nicer, British version of the projects... plus without the guns.

Jones opens the book with an anecdote: he was at a dinner party with educated, middle-class, liberal friends, and yet someone cracked a joke about chavs and everyone laughed. Why has it become okay to make fun of poor people? Why are there TV shows in the UK devoted to this very thing? I think this all hinges on the popular notion that class is a choice, or a result of your choices, as opposed to things like your race or your gender, which you are born with. This is a ridiculous and upside-down idea in the face of all the data about upward mobility (i.e. the lack thereof). But if being poor is your own fault, then it's okay to make fun of you for it, and not feel guilty. Game on!

There are probably other psychological things going on though that explain why people would rather believe people are poor entirely because of their choices than that education, race, gender, parental income, the structure of society, etc. have a huge impact on your life. Part of the story is perhaps that believing that the disadvantaged deserve what they get makes it easier for the wealthy to think they are entirely responsible for their own wealth ("I BUILT IT!!!!"), rather than accepting that they were dealt a good hand and used it well.

What is the working class?
"Interestingly, more people in Britain call themselves working class now than did in 1950," despite Tony Blair's insistence that "we're all middle class now." Stock-brokers "ask with faux puzzlement: 'I work, don't I? So why aren't I working class?'" A childhood friend which Jones considered indisputably working class "felt that being working class meant being poor, while being middle class meant being educated." (p. 141)

I think the last quote is why I marked this page. Also, after reading the entire book, I'm still not entirely certain what is meant by working-class. Maybe it just sounds better than "lower-class" (after all, we have "middle" and "upper").

The lack of upward class mobility scapegoated by the lack of aspiration
A common criticism of the working-class (I might just start calling it "victim-blaming") is that they have no aspiration - that they could make their lives better but they just don't care enough to try. Jones interviews Liam, who came from a working-class background: "I literally didn't know what university was, aged sixteen. University, to be honest, was kind of where posh people go!... It's just not what we do, it's just not on the radar... You can only ever really aspire to something if you know it and understand it." (p. 174-175)

I thought the last bit was incredibly profound. How can we expect poor people to work really hard (and spend a lot of money that they don't have... at least that's how it works in America) to get a University education when they have no frame of reference for such an aspiration? Especially now when a college degree is often a ticket to live with your parents in your early 20s rather than a ticket to a good job? In poor communities in the US, the most that kids have to aspire to is to work at McDonald's and not get shot. These are the kinds of things they can point to as attainable goals. These are the jobs they are trained for with what our education system is providing them.

The "get a job" argument, i.e. "try harder," i.e. "it's your fault you're poor"
Perhaps this is just a variant of the above "victim-blaming" excuse, both of which stem from the assumption that people have complete and total control over their own lives no matter what... But as it turns out, in the UK "the majority of people living in poverty actually have a job." New Labour (close enough to Democrats) attempted to tackle this problem, but they did it by "allowing the market to run amok," according to Jones. A Labour MP (Congressperson) describes this as introducing tax credits and redistributing wealth by forcing people into the lowest paid jobs: "In that way, you become the guilty person if you can't afford to dig yourself out of poverty. There's a Victorian, patronizing attitude towards working people." All the while, the minimum wage has been allowed to become less and less meaningful. (p. 201-202)

If there were one word to describe the 'chav' stereotype, patronizing would be it.

Chavs are all racist idiots who blame immigrants for their problems
If Children of Men taught me anything, it's that the British hate immigrants. The British National Party (one of those minor Nth parties that other democracies have) represents those sentiments. Hackney (a town? a part of London? something like that...) got a lot of votes in the 70s for the National party, but more recently they got virtually none, which a former London mayor thinks is because "you tend to get a problem of racism in an area undergoing transition." Very insightful! Jones goes on: "Hackney is one of the most mixed areas in the country, and as a result the far right has died out there." (The U.S. analogy is major cities, which are the most diverse and the most Democratic.) "But it [far right/BNP] flourishes in areas... where mass immigration is a new phenomenon... or, conversely, where there is very little immigration but a tremendous fear of it." Additionally "liberal multiculturalism has understood inequality purely through the prism of race, disregarding that of class." This is also what we often do in the U.S. but with good reason; however, in the UK, the white majority is a real 90% majority (which I learned from this book). (p. 224-225)

If you are middle-class and don't exactly have swimming pools filled with gold, you are probably worried about sending your kids to college and saving for retirement. It may seem unfair that some people are getting help from the government. You might have some reasonable things to say about that. BUT, it may seem even more unfair if those people getting help don't look like you. (I'm saying this simply as a statement of human nature and not a moral judgment.) "Why do they get handouts just because they are minorities?" is unfortunately something that real people say. It doesn't help that "affirmative action" policies in the UK are called "positive discrimination" (!!), but I will have to leave that discussion to future work.

A new sense of aspiration
"The new aspiration must be about improving people's communities and bettering the conditions of the working class as a whole, rather than simply lifting able individuals up the ladder." (p. 258)

Word.

"Live" Blogging the 2nd Presidential Debate

Starting around 8pm UTC (3pm EST) the 2nd presidential debate will be streaming LIVE from my laptop!  I will be following closely and keeping you updated on any notable things that happen (which, judging from the first debate, includes staying awake). Occasionally I may pause the LIVE feed to collect my thoughts. (It's cool, I can just say, "Rockabama, Mo Ro, calm down for a sec okay?" and they will wait for me.)

Join me and watch the PBS Newshour feed here (but don't click too soon or you will break space-time!)

8:15pm HMRT (Her Majesty's Royal Time): Just about to get this thing started. Keep re-freshing the page to get updates, and it's probably a good idea to load the video in a different window so you won't lose your spot when you refresh.

....and we're LIVE! I'm so glad this is on at a reasonable hour over here!

8:20pm HMRT (1:15 video time): Both of you sit down already!

8:25pm HMRT( 5:44 video): Super-young kid asks about college. When did they get so young?

Anyway, I will note that Romney said he will create jobs, Obama said how he will create them.

8:30pm HMRT (11:20 video): BOOOOO drilling and fracking! boooooo!! how do people think Obama is far-left?

17:16 video:  FIGHT FIGHT! awww.....

I wish somebody would fact check this "yes you did!", "no I didn't!" nonsense. (they won't.)

8:46pm HMRT (26:40 video): that's right, the middle class has been struggling much longer than the last 4 years and it certainly isn't because of higher taxes! Middle-income wages have stopped growing.

30:30 video: Hahaha "sketchy deal", Obama you are bad at making jokes right now!

36-38: love all of Obama's response on equal pay for women!

9:02 HMRT (38:46 video): Romney got "binders full of women"? My, that is colorful language. I wonder if anything will come of that remark or if the story's even true.

BTW making sure to recruit and hire qualified women as part of diverse hiring practices is indeed important, but doesn't really address equal pay. I hope Romney paid the women in those binders on the same scale he paid the men.

"Women have lost 580,000 jobs. That's the net of what happened in the last 4 years."

Wow, that factually incorrect number is big, Mr. Romney! Turns out it's more like 93,000. Also, I like to point to this graph when people talk about "net jobs" as an example of how taking an integral often washes out important information.

P.S. J. Ro, slow down, the guys are on pause right now waiting for me to type and link to things! We are only on minute 40!

9:09 HMRT (40:40 video): Also I like how Romney's argument seems to be: "The best answer is to have a strong economy so employers have money to throw around and will hire women! Let's face it, in a weak economy who would take that risk?"

46:40: Bored. Here's the image I just linked to. Also topical to what they're talking about.

.... nevermind, it's not a static image, but in looking for it I found something more awesome. Go here and view the source code (Ctrl-U). :-)

9:25 HMRT (54:30): Still bored. Romney still doesn't understand integrals.

On a side note, I filled in my absentee ballot today! It was nice doing it in front of a computer so I could look up the down-ballot candidates for Board of Education etc. and know something at all about who they are, even though I saw a couple horrible websites.

9:33pm HMRT (1:03:00): Immigration Fact-check point goes to Romney. (Also gets in a good jab! He wasn't the standard-bearer 4 years ago, chuckle!)

1:05:20: Definitely almost fought again! Calm down!

9:39 HMRT (1:08:00 video): I hate it when they don't answer the question.

 1:13:38: Oh shit, Obama is getting stern with Romney.

1:14:29: Point to the moderator on instant fact-checking! Though Romney has a point as well that Obama didn't say with certainty that it was terrorism for a while after that.

We all know how much I care about being certain here...

9:50 HMRT (1:19:38 video): Ugghhh... did Romney just say that the solution to gun violence is... marriage?  OUTLAW DIVORCE RIGHT NOW!!

Ugh. It's the culture of violence, because the parents aren't married.

1:21:19: Another point for the moderator. 1:22:00: +2.

1:24:09: Ugh Obama sit down.

10pm HMRT (1:27:30): Actually, Romney, maybe de-regulation actually led to the economy tanking? Maybe just a little bit?? Anybody remember credit default swaps?

1:31:48: Invest in science research! Yea! Rockabama!

1:36:20: Obama brings up the 47%. I might have had something to say about all that.


And that's it! Everybody remember to vote!

Those Poor People

Romney's off-camera remarks to his supporters have generated quite a buzz on the interwebs. In brief, the remarks I'm concerned with are when he describes the 47% of people that pay no federal income tax, “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”

I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

~ Mitt Romney, candidate for President of the USA

Now, there are many things to be said, and many rationalizations that will be made. I happen to think these are extremely revealing remarks, and I've decided, for my own entertainment as much as anything, to lay it out in a dialogue. Roughly, I will deal first with the politically, then culturally, then economically motivated reactions of hypothetical conservatives.

Politically Disappointed Interlocuter: "How horrible for the campaign! How could he so blatantly air these politically unsavory hard truths?! What a huge error in this political game!"

Abandoned Certainty: Yes, this is quite a blunder politically, but more important is that you seem to agree with Romney. What I find significant is not that Romney said something crazy and fringe, but that many other people share the sentiment. He was speaking to his supporters, people he knew would agree with him. To them, the gaffe is just that it sounds bad.

PDI: "It's a bad political move, but not a big deal. Others have said the same before; Democrats are going to blow this out of proportion, and aren't being fair to Romney."

AC: That's right, remember when the Wall Street Journal referred to them as lucky duckies? The people at the bottom who pay no taxes are so lucky! So maybe this isn't new, but it's still as appalling. And the point I'm concerned about is not that Romney said he won't try to get their votes, but why he thinks he won't get them, which is that he'll "never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives." What concerns me is that so many people agree.

Somewhat-Exaggeratingly Culturally Insensitive Interlocuter: "I for one think Romney's right! It's those poor people who are making it harder for the rest of us by having nothing, and making us bail them out all the time. We can't just let them die -"

AC: Though I bet some would! Remember that moment in the Republican primary debates where Wolf Blitzer asks Ron Paul who should pay for someone with no health insurance that shows up at the emergency room? Wolf asks if we should let him die, and the crowd cheers and someone screams "Yea!"

SECII: "Okay, but I'm not that insensitive. Don't interrupt!"

AC: I apologize. Continue.

SECII: "We can't just let them die, so they are taking our hard earned money and sitting on their asses for thanks! Or worse, using our money to buy drugs and alcohol!"

AC: Two things. First, you seem to think that 47% of Americans are on welfare or pay no taxes at all, which would be astonishing if it were true, but it's not. Over half of those 47% pay some form of payroll tax, and the breakdown of those 47% is quite interesting. Yes, the number is quite high, but Romney seems to equate it all with a culture of entitlement - people walking around with their hands out asking the government - asking you the taxpayer - for money, because they "believe they are victims." He seems to think half the country are complete degenerates.

SECII: "But what about those that really don't pay any taxes at all, those on welfare; Romney was right about them, even if he didn't say it "elegantly." They do want handouts. I never asked for handouts. I built it!!"

AC: That brings me to my second point, which is the complete devaluing of the self-worth of the poor. The main message behind "I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives" is that they are not like us; we have responsibility and those people don't; not just that they're different but that they're not worthy of the benefits they get. Even some of the poor share those beliefs. They know people who work the system to get welfare disability checks. But it's "those poor people, not us. We take personal responsibility for our lives, except we just can't get a break."

SECII: "You see! Those poor people work the system!"

AC: Sure, some people do, but the perception is that they all do, and Romney seems to think 47% of Americans do. Look, there is some merit to the un-exaggerated version of the above argument. Yes, it would be better if people could work, and if they didn't use what little they have to buy drugs and alcohol. If it were so simple, and yet they still insist on living in poverty, it must be their fault; but of course it isn't simple. Nothing about poverty is simple.

And this is where, uncomfortably, race comes into the discussion, because blacks have long been stereotyped in this country as lazy and stupid. Romney and the GOP's shameful (and repeated) lie that Obama removed the welfare work requirement was criticized by some as racist, not because most of the people on welfare are black (overwhelmingly, most are white), but because it fits with the stereotype that black people on welfare don't want to work. Incidentally, though race and poverty are intertwined and thorny issues, I don't think Romney's remarks were racist - which just means he disparages those poor people, of all colors, equally.

Well-Intentioned Interlocuter: "Look, what Romney really meant was: 'Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime.' If we stop giving those poor people fish, they would become productive members of society, and they wouldn't be poor. It's all about incentives. They need to help themselves."

AC: This argument is sound, WII, even reasonable... except for the fact that we aren't teaching them to fish either. The worst schools are in the poorest neighborhoods, the high school drop-out rate is astonishing, 10th-graders read at a 2nd grade level, etc. The poor in this country are without both fish and the means to acquire fish... and so they starve. It takes fish to make more fish, and the top 1% of fish-holders are controlling more and more of it - some even waving it in our faces going "haha, you can't have it!"

(At this point I can't help but bring religious conservatism into the picture, which has aligned itself with the political conservatism of "stop giving people fish," because as I recall, Jesus had no problem giving people fish. Lots of it.)

Ahem, moving on, I certainly hope most conservatives are of the WII variety, i.e. only disagreeing on how the problem of poverty can be solved. But, I don't agree that this is all that Romney meant. To say that those poor people have no personal responsibility, no care for their lives, is to believe that they can't be taught to fish no matter what we do because they think they are entitled to fish. Government fish. Your fish.

WII: "That's right, and the Democrats just want to keep throwing my fish at those people! It's not my fault the economy is in the crapper and the social safety net has holes; I work hard for my fish."

AC: Presumably your net has no holes! You know, to catch fish! :-D

WII: ...... *cough* ......

AC: Well.... I understand where you're coming from, and assuming you aren't a hedge-fund manager, I don't think you should give up any more of your fish either. I think the best way is to raise taxes on capital gains so people like Romney don't have a lower effective tax rate (13.9%) than their secretaries. But, as I said before, I think Romney is saying something far worse. I think his comments express a complete disdain for the poor, and that makes me sad.


Regardless of political opinions, I think we need to stop thinking about poverty as those poor people and start thinking about how to help those poor people.

Coffee or Tea? A discourse on Discourse.

By now everyone has heard about the Tea Party, but I doubt many are aware of the Coffee Party or their horribly-named “Enough is Enough!” rally planned for October. According to their mission statement: 

The Coffee Party USA believes that the influence of money, and the politics of fear and exclusion, stand in the way of a government of, by, for the people.

I can get behind a lot of their ideas, but more than that I support their focus on process: they advocate civil discourse and believe change can come about by “seeking and spreading accurate information” and providing a place for the “respectful and honest exchange of ideas.”  In a Coffee Party USA video, co-founder Annabel Lee asks some tough questions: “How do we make these really hard decisions? What values do we use?”

Presumably, when deciding which political candidate to support, we are supposed to research what their positions are on the various issues we care about. This is seen as responsible voting, as opposed to being swayed by soundbites or charisma. However, I am more interested in knowing how they make decisions. The process is more important than the eventual result, because a good process has the capability of producing the best results. How do they get their information? What effort is made to understand the facts? Is their reasoning logical, and are they aware of common biases? 

Another important aspect of how people make decisions are their foundational assumptions (whether or not they are viewed as assumptions), because these will influence every decision. These are the starting point, the axioms they take as given, so that even if the logic is sound and there is a good process of making decisions, wrong axioms will lead to wrong conclusions. Optimally these foundational assumptions would also be tested against available facts, but this is not always possible, such as when they represent moral and ethical values (i.e. beliefs about how things should be instead of how they are).

The current political discourse, much of it driven by the Tea Party, is dominated by fear and panic. This is not an environment conducive to a sound decision-making process, but it does get a lot of people motivated and willing to listen to a leader who will tell them what to do. As columnist Mark Shields said on the Newshour:

I think, you know, it's an angry electorate. I mean, if you are angry, Rick Perry is your candidate. If you are nervous, Rick Perry might not be your candidate. But if you are angry, he is. And, I mean, Jon Huntsman is reasonable. He's thoughtful. And I don't know if there is a constituency out there for him to win.

Being thoughtful and reasonable will not win you votes. It is boring, and doesn’t connect with people, unlike anger.

What is fueling this anger-driven discourse? There are probably many complex issues at work, but I learned a few things reading Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker article, “The Transformation of Michele Bachmann.”  On page 4, we learn that one of the people Bachmann was influenced by, Francis Schaeffer, believed Roe v. Wade signified that “they” (The Supreme Court, the federal government, and humanism) are evil, because “now ‘they’ are killing babies.” It goes without saying that abortion is a very emotionally-charged issue, but this way of thinking makes some sort of sense to me. I disagree with both the proposition (they are killing babies) and its conclusion (humanists are evil), but if the federal government were really killing babies, wouldn’t you also think it evil? Wouldn’t it make you angry? And what would you do about it?

Another gem we learn about is Dominionism, which was also recently featured in articles about Rick Perry’s evangelical roots (here, and here; more here and here; another op-ed suggests caution when associating Christian conservatism with political conspiracy here). According to Sara Diamond, the philosophy that resulted from the Schaeffer’s idea of Dominionism, which is the idea that man has dominion over all things of the Earth (Genesis 1:26), is that Christians "are Biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns.” This is far from a mainstream Christian idea, and it is unclear to what extent (if at all) the candidates themselves believe it, but it is there and it is not going away.

We should be concerned, not with what the articles tell us about Bachmann or Perry, but about the movement they represent. And this movement is not the Tea Party; the Tea Party is merely the latest manifestation of the fundamentalist and evangelical Christian surge for political power. (Also, everyone watch  “Jesus Camp.”) Their ideas may be crazy, and these ideas may be held by a small minority, but they are a loud minority that enjoys lots of national media coverage (perhaps because their craziness is entertaining). We should be concerned. It is one thing to recognize that only a small minority of Muslims want to blow themselves up or crash airplanes into buildings. It is another to ignore the fundamentalist movement in our own backyard.

But that is a horrible analogy! It is incredibly unfair to all the fundamentalists and evangelicals who don’t actually want to blow anything up. It comes out of my own fears about where this country is headed and what kind of people want to lead it. They simply do not share most of my core values, and I worry about their vision of the world that is willfully not based on reality but on a 1600 year-old text. I worry about the thought processes that lead people like David A. Noebel, the founder and director of Summit Ministries, to believe that the “Secular Humanist worldview” is one of America’s greatest threats. My initial reaction is that “they don’t understand what it means to be a secular humanist,” but maybe that’s not it at all. If truth comes from the Bible, then being secular and not acknowledging any god will surely lead away from truth. If we are to put ourselves below God in all ways, then a human-centered worldview is prideful and selfish. I disagree with their foundational assumptions and their unwillingness to question these assumptions, and they disagree with mine.

How are we then to have a constructive dialogue? How is civil discourse even possible when both sides strongly disagree with the other’s foundational beliefs? Especially when one of those beliefs includes a mistrust of doubt and an ingrained sense of rightness? … Okay, most likely all sides have an ingrained sense of rightness. As much as I try to abandon certainty, I also believe that I am right, and that it is the correct way to view the world. I am certain about being uncertain. So perhaps what we could all use is the willingness to be wrong.

 

However, that is harder than it sounds. The other aspect of this discourse on discourse is the psychology of why people reason the way they do (i.e. unreasonably) and the science behind it. I suggest you read this entire article by Chris Mooney (which has lots of scholarly references), but here is one of the key points (emphasis mine):

The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience: Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.

This is something that we all do to some degree. It is a challenge to constantly check whether your emotions may be clouding your judgment. But must we completely remove emotions from decision-making? Perhaps then we wouldn’t care about the outcome one way or another. Mooney suggests that we take them into account: “Given the power of our prior beliefs to skew how we respond to new information, one thing is becoming clear: If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn't trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.”

A good example of motivated reasoning is how most Republicans don’t believe in evolution or global warming, despite the overwhelming scientific support for both. In addition to Mooney’s book “The Republican War on Science,” famed economist Paul Krugman recently wrote about “Republicans Against Science” in his op-ed. (I almost talked about how even the libertarian favorite Ron Paul has said he doesn’t “believe in evolution” but, according to a post comment, that video was edited, and Paul is actually agnostic on the matter.) The fact that the evolution “debate” has been phrased as something for which people can have different opinions is what makes it so frustrating. This isn’t a choice between being a Christian or believing in evolution! It’s about whether you think the findings of science can be thrown out according to personal preference; it’s about whether you think it’s acceptable to ignore rational conclusions when you don’t like where those conclusions may lead. A lot of people don’t like falling from heights, but if they stop believing in gravity that won’t make it any less true! But the theory of gravity doesn’t challenge anyone’s foundational beliefs, and apparently evolution and climate change do.

I don’t have any answers. I’ve phrased the discussion in terms of Coffee vs. Tea, but the Tea Party is a well-funded political machine with the backing of a major news corporation that is focused on getting its candidates elected, and the Coffee Party is a lone voice saying “why don’t we listen to each other for a change?” Frankly, the current political discourse disturbs me greatly. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity was great but did nothing of the sort. People are still crazy! Even non-crazy people are crazy! According to the motivated reasoning article, we are very resistant to facts we don’t like, and being more knowledgeable only enables us to find counter-arguments to explain away the facts.

Oh well. I guess I can say that I’m glad the Coffee Party exists, however small and ineffectual it may be.

Abandonded: The Necessity of Humanism

Part of the reason I started this blog was to have a place to put up some pieces I wrote years ago. I have since decided that only one of them deserves it, but it doesn’t make any sense unless you’ve read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig (and to a lesser extent his sequel Lila, though I wouldn’t wish that on anyone). It also references ideas laid down in the other pieces. I’m sure everyone reading this is now jumping to read Zen etc., so I will briefly talk about the other ideas, which I had intended to develop for an essay contest for The Humanist magazine and which I called “The Necessity of Humanism.”

It basically boils down to the connection between caring and understanding and how they would solve everything. (I was in college; don’t people always solve the world’s problems in college?) If people cared about themselves enough to understand themselves, even love themselves, that would allow them to care for others and at least attempt to understand others. Understanding others is the real crux. On some level it’s obvious: if people understood each other, they would be better able to solve their problems and resolve their differences. So many problems are brought about by a simple lack of understanding. (BTW there is a good TED talk about Empathy that is relevant here.) 

But the other problem is that people don’t want to understand each other. They might end up being wrong! (Also a good TED talk.) It is so much easier to tear down a caricature of what someone else believes, and there you have modern political discourse. There is no philosophical fallacy that angers me more than the straw man. It is like saying, “I am going to ignore you and willfully misrepresent everything you believe in order to have the appearance of being right.” And it works most of the time because straw men are hard to recognize, especially to laymen, and even sometimes, the person attacking the straw man really believes the straw man is the real thing… because they don’t understand! Because empathy is hard, or uncomfortable, and takes effort, and because people don’t care. 

The lack of caring is the problem behind the problem, and why this utopian ideal of everyone understanding each other doesn’t happen. I think there are perhaps biological, or sociological, reasons why people don’t care about the Other, i.e. people that believe in different religions, look different, talk different, or live in the other valley. Survival might have once depended on killing those people, and demonizing the Other might make it easier to kill them, but humanity needs to grow up. And the only way for this to happen is for individuals to grow up.

But they won’t, and don’t, and it’s all very frustrating! I want to scream at everyone to wake up!! Care Bear Stare! (I totally had the ice cream one btw…)

Instead, all I can do is drink some wine and write this blog. For the good of humanity.

The Inner Reaches of Outer Space

A mythological perspective on why we need the James Webb Space Telescope

On July 6 it was announced that a House Appropriations Subcommittee cut JWST from their proposed budget. JWST is the next Hubble – except it will be bigger and better and more amazing! I won’t go into details about why we need this for science, or for education and public outreach, or for the U.S. position as a world leader in space science and technology, or for supporting innovative STEM research and education that will ensure future economic prosperity and national security for generations to come (!!!) .... because others will do that better. The cosmic variance blog had some very informative posts along with this amazing video:

The Top 5 Awesome Things about the Webb Telescope 

This video is awesome itself! And it sums up my point: we don’t need Webb because it will cure malaria or do anything else useful; we need it because it is “awesome in the truest sense of the word awesome.” Astronomy is a unique science in its broad ability to be awe-inspiring. The vastness of space puts our daily lives in a different – and sometimes frightening – perspective. Space is the “final frontier,” the last boundary between everything that is familiar and everything else. Space is amazingly empty, but of the 20% of matter that we can actually see, there are a wide variety of stars, planets, galaxies, nebulae, clusters, etc. that are simply beautiful.

The title of this post refers to the last book written by Joseph Campbell: “The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion,” of which the first chapter is called “Cosmology and the Mythic Imagination.” (Yea, I study cosmology. Word.) The contemplation of space provided us by the study of astronomy takes us out of ourselves into the great unknown. The feeling of awe is, in my opinion, exactly the feeling that we look for in religion: being a part of something “bigger” than ourselves. But what astronomy does is unite the “us” to be all of Earth and not one society, one religion, or one ethnicity. There’s nothing bigger than THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE! And it turns out we actually are a part of it because it actually exists. Campbell suggests that in Space lives a new mythology, able to invoke a sense of wonder and awe in a way that the old myths, founded in an obsolete 3-layer view of the world, cannot.

So yes, Virginia, we DO need the James Webb Space Telescope. Once Hubble dies for good, it is our best chance of keeping the awesome alive. We need to make a Webb 3D Imax that explores other worlds and their ability to support life, the first stars and first galaxies, the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and the new jewels in the vast emptiness that we have not yet imagined. We need to be reminded of our small and insignificant place in a universe that doesn’t care whether our planet survives. And we need more opportunities to be filled with the awe of being alive.