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the delusions that damage us all
Aug. 24th, 2008 08:00 amI've only recently established an RSS feed from Pharyngula ("Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal"), and now wish I'd done so a long time ago. The atmosphere of the blog is reminiscent of some idealized commonroom in a minor but highly respected university, with intelligent people kicking off their shoes and, over beer or coffee, speaking pretty directly to relevant issues.
The site's run by biologist PZ Myers, whose most recent post starts thus:
Krazy Kansas Kook wants to eliminate all biologists
When last we heard from Tom Willis, big-wig in the Creation Science Association for Mid-America, he was pondering whether evolutionists should be allowed to vote. Since Tom Willis is batshit insane, he decided that no, they should not, because they're wicked godless atheists with no moral sense (you theistic evolutionists aren't spared — you're even worse).
Now he has upped the ante and is wondering, Should Evolutionists Be Allowed to Roam Free in the Land?. I wonder what his answer will be?
The rest of the piece largely quotes Willis's "solution" to deal with rational people who accept what science has discovered, and -- although laughter is the obvious first reaction -- the overall effect is chilling: this lunatic really means it! His proposal is essentially much the same as the "solution" the Nazis doled out to so many whose views they regarded as troublesome.
One of the great myths of democratic societies is that, in them, there is complete freedom of opinion/belief. I've heard this notion expressed in countries on two continents, and of course it's a fallacy. There are certain false beliefs -- born of delusion, ignorance, laziness, self-indulgence, or just plumb stupidity -- which are so detrimental to the national interest that countries legislate against them, or at least against the expression of them, in order to aid the survival of the community as a whole. Racism and hate-speech are the headline examples.
As a further instance, when the Russian launch of Sputnik 1 brought a rude awakening to the US body politic that giving in to Fundamentalist bullying to the extent of teaching Creationism to kids had dealt a near-mortal blow to US science as a whole (much as Stalin's support for Lysenko's loony ideas had almost destroyed Soviet genetics), the government clamped down on the promulgation, at least in the public schools, of this particular irrational belief. Obviously this inhibited the freedom of certain nutcases to poison the minds of the young with false knowledge and blithely hamper kids' understanding of the world around them, but in the long run it promised hugely to increase the freedom of the rest of us, both physically through increasing the country's prosperity (having people who're competent to do science and technology helps the economy) and psychologically, through allowing those kids, now adults, to rejoice in the true beauty and wonder of the universe.
In other words, it was a matter of balancing freedoms. Almost always -- i.e., in every instance I can think of, but I may be missing something -- truth, the acceptance of reality in place of the irrational, brings with it greater freedom, however much some of us may childishly wince and shriek and tantrumize to see our cherished beliefs dismantled.
The idea of balancing freedoms is instant, kneejerk anathema to some: it seems to be incompatible with the American Dream of complete freedom for all. But that dream is quite obviously illusory -- and not just because during the McCarthy years there was the most extraordinary clampdown on the freedom to believe in the ideals of communism (a belief system perceived, whether misguidedly or not, to be damaging to the national interest; op cit).
The everyday illustration of the dream's illusoriness is of course that I do not have the freedom to kill you, I do not have the freedom to rape you, I do not have the freedom to burgle your house, and so on. If I did any of these things I'd obviously be impinging mightily on your freedom. It takes no Einstein to recognize where the balance of freedoms should lie -- indeed, we accept so fundamentally this particular balancing that most of us don't even think about it as a restriction on the hundred per cent freedom we think we have.
And so back to Willis, and his vile beliefs. Or to Jim Adkisson who, a few weeks ago, fueled by the similarly vile hate-speech of people like Michael Savage and Sean Hannity, set off for the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville to kill himself a few liberals. He was a deluded lunatic, we tell ourselves complacently . . . deliberately ignoring, because it's convenient to our comfort-blanket belief system so to do, the fact that his lunacy didn't come out of nowhere. Clearly Adkisson horrendously violated the freedoms of the Knoxville Unitarians; that came about because he and others grossly abused the commendable desire of the rest of us to offer members of our society -- ourselves included! -- as much freedom as possible.
We regard it as a truism that everyone's entitled to their own opinion. That's not quite as true as a truism should be. When your opinion impacts other people, then really your entitlement is, or should be, modified. What you're entitled to express -- and from the very rooftops, if that's your choice -- is an informed opinion. If your "opinion" is based on superstition and ignorance then it's not really an opinion at all; it's a bias or (likely) a bigotry. If you cannot be bothered to gain at least a modicum of education on a topic, then you have no right to inflict upon the rest of us your ignorant views. (What's terribly, terribly difficult to accept is that this applies to me, too. Excuse me while I go and punch the floor and hold my breath and scream.) You might regard it as an exercise of your God-gifted freedom; in fact, it's very often severely damaging to the freedom of your fellow human beings. It becomes monstrous, a true act of tyranny, if you indoctrinate this nonsense into the minds of kids, your own or others'.
Still, they're only opinions, ain't they?
The truth is that some irrational opinions are potentially so dangerous to a society as a whole, or even at a species level, that they must in some way be reined in. The obvious example today is not religious extremism, although that may play a major part in the cancelation of humankind's future, but the denial of anthropogenic global warming. (This is so even if, through some extraordinary improbability, all those climate scientists have got it wrong: if you're told you have faulty brakes on your car you have to be astonishingly dumb to respond that there's a remote chance they may be okay and so you're not going to get them checked.)
The vast majority of those who deny the necessity to cut back on human contributions to climate change do so through ignorance. In the US that ignorance is a deliberate one, almost certainly a product of wishful thinking: I'd rather not have to get up off my fat ass and do something, so I'll just not find out there's a need to. The "opinion" is really just a piece of self-indulgence. And, as the glaciers melt, and the seas rise, and the hurricanes increase in frequency and ferocity, and the dustbowls spread, and the kids starve, and the various species become extinct -- ourselves quite probably on that list of extinctions in the terrifyingly near future -- it's legitimate to ask how long our civilization can commit the matching self-indulgence of smiling benignly upon a false and overwhelmingly destructive anti-freedom view of freedom.
When civilization collapses, where will be our freedoms then?
