Forgiveness and Reckoning: Preserving American Democracy in the 21st Century

On January 6, 2021, a mob of frenzied insurrectionists, fueled by the lies of Donald J. Trump and his allies in the Republican Party, stormed the U.S. Capitol building. Their aim, it has become clear, was to overturn the outcome of a free and open election by force of violence. 

Most of us are still processing what happened. It’s going to take a while—certainly months, quite possibly years. But the path forward, whatever shape it ultimately takes, must begin with a clear and honest accounting of what is actually happening in the United States. 

That reality is ugly. Among its many hideous facets: the fact that millions of Americans willing voted for a would-be autocrat, and that one of only two viable political parties in the United States—the Republican Party—has spent the last few decades displaying what can be most charitably described as an increasingly gleeful indifference to representative governance and the rule of law in the United States.

Continue reading

Partisan Identity and the Death of Representative Governance

 

There is a danger in thinking of ourselves as political and—more precisely—partisan animals. A big chunk of our modern political derangement flows directly from incorporating ideas like “liberal” and “conservative” into our individual identities. As I write in an essay at MerionWest, this is dry kindling for the spread of partisan discord.

On either side of the political spectrum, discourse is dominated by unhinged ideologues whose voices are amplified by their reactionary opposites and an attention-hungry media that feasts on controversy. The most salient opinions are often those most thoroughly divorced from discernible reality. From pole to pole, nuance and clarity are actively derided. On the political right, a pandemic has become a hub for belligerence and conspiracy theories. On the political left, race, gender, and power have suddenly transformed into religious fetishes, and dissent has become an act of intolerable violence. The political arena is no longer a contest of ideas, but of identities.

None of this reflects a political reality anyone would esteem. And most of us—regardless of how we voted in the last election—recognize this. But because the idea of left and right, of liberal and conservative, has seeped so deeply into our brains and characterizes so much of our political discourse, many of us are left fumbling for fresh traction. There is something kooky—even dangerous—going on in the shrill fringes. It is true wherever you look. Unfortunately, our way of understanding ourselves as political animals does not leave us with a lot of options. Open dissent from political orthodoxy risks excommunication—from friends, from family, from professional affiliations.

Read more at MerionWest.

Postmodernism Isn’t A Scourge on Civil Society—It’s Just a Pointless Indulgence

I wrote a new thing for Areo Magazine. Here are some excerpts:

Science is first and foremost a cultural phenomenon. Individual scientists are riddled with biases and blind spots. Their views are subtly influenced by their sociopolitical contexts. The scope of their thought and investigation is substantially curtailed by the limits of extant knowledge and technology, some of which might well be faulty. But science is also a structured in a way that imbues it with peculiar properties. It can produce mistakes, but, to a degree unmatched by any other discipline, it is uniquely designed to identify those mistakes. Though imperfect, science is—by a considerable margin—the most powerful knowledge-gaining mechanism humans have ever devised.

 

But, even with a theory like general relativity, whose predictions have been tested and confirmed countless times, scientists still don’t claim to have discovered the final, unimpeachable description of space and time. In fact, most physicists will probably tell you that, at very vast or very tiny scales, the physics of general relativity is useless, if not entirely wrong. General relativity is one of the most successful theoretical frameworks ever devised, but it is not true beyond all doubt. There’s more reason to be confident in general relativity than there is to be confident about any of the comforting assumptions we use to get through the day—my spouse loves memy job is secureI’ll see my family again in the evening—but, in the strictest sense, it is not true beyond doubt.

 

Because postmodernists reject the idea of a final arbiter, such as a universally accessible and ultimately knowable reality against which claims can be evaluated, when postmodernists ask themselves are you sure? they can never really know the answer. Postmodernism lacks an anchor point for error correction. As a result, it is fundamentally illegitimate—and ultimately pointless—as an intellectual enterprise. It is, at best, a self-perpetuating indulgence, ostensibly doing the work scientific disciplines naturally do on their own.

 

In repudiating the notion that truths are fixed for eternity, postmodernism denies itself the capacity to course correct. Its students may pay lip service to the crude notion that some truths are better than others. But, without recourse to something universal and knowable outside their individual and social contexts, they’ll never be able to tell which truths those are.

As always, I encourage you to read the full piece here. And take some time to explore Areo, because they publish a lot of other interesting and insightful stuff.

Can’t We All Agree to Just Not F*@king Touch Each Other?

Everyone’s seen the headlines by now. Grabby grandpa Joe Biden is in trouble for making a growing list of women feel uncomfortable with his unhinged displays of physical affection. A few months back it was Neil DeGrasse Tyson, excoriated in the social media-sphere for getting too goddamn handsy with colleagues and coworkers.

From my understanding, none of the offending events was sufficient to land Biden or Tyson a ticket to Cosby-Weinstein Island, a place populated by vile degenerates with no place in civil society. But neither does that make all this wild touching of strangers okay.

It’s a simple fact that there is a wide spectrum of human behavior, one dimension of which is introversion-extroversion. You could probably even chart it out on something like a normal curve. The fat middle bit would be populated by regular folks who like spending time with their fellow humans but also occasionally feel beset by social obligations.

Then you have the long tails.

Continue reading

The Dull Art of Problematizing Everything

Here’s an essay for Areo Magazine, a very fine place to go if you like to read interesting things:

Few things in life are certain. Some will populate a short list of inevitabilities with death and taxes, but really, only the former is guaranteed—just ask the sitting president of the United States. If you have spent any amount of time on the internet, however, I’d wager a lofty sum that you’ve seen plenty of headlines of the “Why Blank Is Problematic” variety. More often than not, these aren’t essays that offer insight or clarity. Instead, they simultaneously monetize a boring fact about the world—that everyone’s conception of it is necessarily incomplete—while snidely sidestepping all efforts to understand the intent behind a given act of communication or creation and empathize with its originator.

Read more here.

Old Hobbies, Reinvigorated: Building Models

Back in the days of my youth–roughly between the middle 80s and middle 90s–I would sometimes build model airplanes or spaceships. B2 bombers and Miranda Class starships fell together in sloppy assemblages of glue and shoddily applied decals. It was truly atrocious work, owing largely to the fact that I didn’t have the attention span to build things with greater care.

Continue reading