I've been taking some audio courses lately. I've taken two philosophy classes, a linguistics class, and a class on the history of ancient Rome. Currently, I'm taking a class on modern political thought. I feel so much happier when I'm learning new things, particularly in areas that have always been interesting to me but which I haven't really pursued.
It has been interesting to see how the classes, all taught at different times by different professors, have actually overlapped. The linguistics class overlapped with Rome, which overlaps with political thought, which overlaps with philosophy, etc. So much of the human condition is mirrored in other aspects of itself.
The story of language and how it has spread and evolved reminds me so much of evolutionary biology. Everything is constantly changing, evolving with no goal in sight. People misunderstand evolution enormously. There is a tendency to talk about a "next step" in evolution, as if it is going somewhere specific. It's really just like language. Changes happen for reasons too intricate to determine, and ones that seem to work catch on, sometimes for reasons only tangentially to how useful a change actually is. There is no inherent benefit to speaking Latin, but it spread because it was a trait of the Romans, who were powerful and conquered a lot of land. And then, eventually, Rome fell, and its language mixed with local dialects and such to become the Romance languages, and those further evolved and influenced other languages, including English. Those, in turn, mixed with the languages of African slaves to pepper the world with various creole languages. There is this constant interchange between the languages in a pattern that is incalculably intricate yet simple and fluid. So much of reality seems to fit that same description.
Unfortunately, our human minds aren't really capable of really understanding things as they are. We have this need to categorize and filter that, while useful for our survival, particularly in earlier times, can be a real hindrance to a quest for knowledge of any kind. We become blind to our blindnesses, believing we know things when we only suspect them, and we build beliefs on top of beliefs in such ways that the removal of one would cause the rest to crumble. We are biased and easily duped.
I was watching the Republican debate the other day. Primaries have begun, and they were going at each other, trying to win the favor of the people. What struck me strongly was that there were these five or six guys up there on the stage, spouting canned lies and misleading statistics, and the vast majority of people seemed to take what they said at face value. Blatant lies that would get a person fired from a job or hit with a divorce in some other settings are just eaten up. Even when lies are revealed to be lies, people just kind of shrug and continue. It should be a bigger deal when someone claims, "I never said that," but there is video of him saying it. It should be a bigger deal when someone claims they created jobs when they clearly didn't. It's lying in the job interview, and they're caught red handed. But no one cares.
We seem to have a tribal kind of approach to elections. It's like a sport in so many ways. I am automatically biased against Republican candidates because I can't help but think of them as the Bad Guys. I'd like to say it's for real well-considered ideological reasons, but often it isn't. It's just knowing that they are Republicans. It's mostly like how I'm a Mets fan and will automatically root against a team if they are playing against the Mets. There is no rational reason for it - they're just part of my tribe.
It's not exactly the same, as there are certainly some ideological differences between the Republicans and myself. But I automatically put them in a certain box as soon as I know they are Republicans. I know I do it, and I don't think I can actually stop myself from doing that. I can only acknowledge that bias and do my best to consider it as a factor in my own judgements.
I can't say I'm blown away by the Democratic candidates, either. I like Bernie Sanders, but the man is unelectable. And Hillary Clinton? Well, I guess she'd be better than the guys I saw the other night, but she's far from an ideal candidate. She has too much of her husband's slippery slickness, but she isn't as good as him at pretending to be sincere. I just don't trust her very much at all. I look across the ocean at countries like Norway and wonder why people here are so reluctant to take some ideas from them. There's no shortage of innovation, and the people are much happier and better educated. Oh well.
...wherein one man's delusions of profundity are communicated to the world.
Tuesday, February 9, 2016
Monday, February 1, 2016
Democracy and the Political Machine
Tonight, voters in Iowa take the first step in determining who the next President of the United States will be. It's just the beginning of the nomination season, but already I'm tired of it. Election years can be so draining. Donald Trump has been leading the way for Republicans in the early going, and Hillary Clinton seems to have a pretty good lead over Bernie Sanders. The prospect of a Trump vs. Clinton showdown in November does not fill me with anything close to delight.
As a young adult, I was not what you would call a politically-minded person. I was vaguely aware that there were various crooks and liars vying for control of the country, but their names and faces were mostly just a blur. I didn't vote at all because I felt like I never wanted to be part of it. National politics were too far removed from me, and local politics didn't matter much because I wasn't in one stable place.
Nowadays, I'm considerably more aware of the specifics involved. There are still various crooks and liars vying for control of the country, but at least I know who some of them are now, and I can see that some are worse than others. I vote now, but mostly it's to keep someone out of office rather than to put someone in. It's always a least-of-all-evils situation. I sometimes wish I could get caught up in the magnetic pull of a candidate I really believed in, the way so many people seem to be caught up, but I've never even come close. I guess the closest I ever did get to that was Obama's first turn. The idea of someone different being in charge was a pretty nice one. He didn't look the same or speak the same, and he was so much less embarrassing on the world stage than Dubya. But people tried to make a deity of him, which set him up to fail.
He didn't quite fail - overall I think Obama did a pretty good job with what he had to work with, which was constant opposition and an increasingly circus-like atmosphere in Washington. I think he'll go down as a middle-of-the-pack president, maybe a bit better than that.
Anyway, getting to the point I wanted to make here... I'm really disheartened by the whole state of politics in this country. I'm not sure it's fixable. One of the biggest problems is the general ignorance of the population. A democracy simply can't function properly if its constituents are not educated well. I don't mean we need a nation of Rhodes Scholars. We just need people to not be completely foolish. Young Earth creationism? Really? That's a thing that a significant number of people in this country adhere to? And the so-called "anti-vaxxers"? Our anti-intellectual culture has allowed a variety of such fact-challenged worldviews to proliferate among the masses, and their influence has allowed those pulling the strings to manipulate them into voting against their own best interests time and again.
And those strings are getting tighter. All that dark money will ensure that whoever wins the seat in the Oval Office will be beholden to the interests of the elite. That, or they'll be Donald Trump, and they'll just be awful.
The ancient Greeks knew that the biggest weakness of democracy, the thing that could bring about its downfall, was an uneducated voting population. We know that now, too, of course, and that knowledge is used to keep people dumb and distracted enough that they can be manipulated more easily. I guess it's better than having a totalitarian in charge, but it's not the shining light of hope that people seem to think it is.
The United States set an awesome example for how to have a functioning nation, but it has been surpassed. In the marketplace of ideas, the US has stalled out. The framers were breakers of tradition who wanted ideas rather than people to be held up as examples. How would they feel about how often their names are used as if they are gods or saints, to be venerated like kings?
We spend too much time staring in the mirror and admiring ourselves while the rest of the world moves on. It would be so much better to spend that time figuring out how to improve.
Anyway, I'm tired and at this point I'm just ranting, probably somewhat incoherently. Maybe I'll come back and fix this post up tomorrow. Probably not. No reason to spend time fixing it when I could write another instead.
As a young adult, I was not what you would call a politically-minded person. I was vaguely aware that there were various crooks and liars vying for control of the country, but their names and faces were mostly just a blur. I didn't vote at all because I felt like I never wanted to be part of it. National politics were too far removed from me, and local politics didn't matter much because I wasn't in one stable place.
Nowadays, I'm considerably more aware of the specifics involved. There are still various crooks and liars vying for control of the country, but at least I know who some of them are now, and I can see that some are worse than others. I vote now, but mostly it's to keep someone out of office rather than to put someone in. It's always a least-of-all-evils situation. I sometimes wish I could get caught up in the magnetic pull of a candidate I really believed in, the way so many people seem to be caught up, but I've never even come close. I guess the closest I ever did get to that was Obama's first turn. The idea of someone different being in charge was a pretty nice one. He didn't look the same or speak the same, and he was so much less embarrassing on the world stage than Dubya. But people tried to make a deity of him, which set him up to fail.
He didn't quite fail - overall I think Obama did a pretty good job with what he had to work with, which was constant opposition and an increasingly circus-like atmosphere in Washington. I think he'll go down as a middle-of-the-pack president, maybe a bit better than that.
Anyway, getting to the point I wanted to make here... I'm really disheartened by the whole state of politics in this country. I'm not sure it's fixable. One of the biggest problems is the general ignorance of the population. A democracy simply can't function properly if its constituents are not educated well. I don't mean we need a nation of Rhodes Scholars. We just need people to not be completely foolish. Young Earth creationism? Really? That's a thing that a significant number of people in this country adhere to? And the so-called "anti-vaxxers"? Our anti-intellectual culture has allowed a variety of such fact-challenged worldviews to proliferate among the masses, and their influence has allowed those pulling the strings to manipulate them into voting against their own best interests time and again.
And those strings are getting tighter. All that dark money will ensure that whoever wins the seat in the Oval Office will be beholden to the interests of the elite. That, or they'll be Donald Trump, and they'll just be awful.
The ancient Greeks knew that the biggest weakness of democracy, the thing that could bring about its downfall, was an uneducated voting population. We know that now, too, of course, and that knowledge is used to keep people dumb and distracted enough that they can be manipulated more easily. I guess it's better than having a totalitarian in charge, but it's not the shining light of hope that people seem to think it is.
The United States set an awesome example for how to have a functioning nation, but it has been surpassed. In the marketplace of ideas, the US has stalled out. The framers were breakers of tradition who wanted ideas rather than people to be held up as examples. How would they feel about how often their names are used as if they are gods or saints, to be venerated like kings?
We spend too much time staring in the mirror and admiring ourselves while the rest of the world moves on. It would be so much better to spend that time figuring out how to improve.
Anyway, I'm tired and at this point I'm just ranting, probably somewhat incoherently. Maybe I'll come back and fix this post up tomorrow. Probably not. No reason to spend time fixing it when I could write another instead.
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