Review of “The Danish Girl”

Posted on Thursday 31 December 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

from Facebook, today:

Today’s movie: “The Danish Girl”, which both Yeong and I liked better than I’d expected given the lukewarm reviews. (Glancing at those negative reviews, their theme seems to be that the movie is too polished, too flat and cold, too mainstream, rather like some of the criticisms directed at “Carol”; I’m thinking those critics are jaded.) Redmayne and the character’s wife played by Alicia Vikander are both great [though Redmayne, after playing Stephen Hawking last year, might be at risk becoming merely an expert stunt actor], and we also liked Matthias Schoenaerts and Ben Whishaw. I thought the subject was handled frankly but not without some delicacy, with some insight about the idea of why a person would feel they are at their core a different gender, but without alluding to any easy explanations — because there are no easy explanations (despite the quick and drastic diagnoses of the several doctors Redmayne’s character visits at one point), and because whatever explanations there might be are surely different from individual to individual. A lovely and moving film. (With characteristically glittery, Philip Glassesque music by Alexandre Desplat.)

(We saw this at a three-screen theater in Berkeley, with a parking structure nearby to alleviate worries of parking tickets, but which cost $9 for the stay. It being Berkeley, the host who came in to introduce the film advised us of the theater’s composting policy, reminding us to deposit our soda and popcorn garbage in the green bins…)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0810819/

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The Yearning for the Golden Past

Posted on Thursday 31 December 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

The Conservative Grand Narrative, according to Jonathan Haidt (mentioned in my discussion of his book The Righteous Mind in this post) is about “the struggle to return to a golden past” — a theme we hear echoed in Republican presidential candidates’ platforms, e.g. Trump’s “Make America Great Again”. Those who appeal to this theme never seem to spell out which past era they want to return to. When was America last great in a way it is not now? My guess would be the era after World War II, the last war the US won, and before all the other wars since then in which the US has gotten involved, in which the US has not won, again and again. (The Republican candidates, it might be noted, seem eager to start new wars. Carpet-bomb ISIS, says Ted Cruz.) But of course that late 1940s to early 1960s [before the Vietnam War] era was one of great social change, and this yearning for an era of unbridled US dominance across the world ignores what we would now consider social inequities of those eras. I’m guessing, again, that those inequities are of very little concern to the conservatives yearning for that golden past of US domination across the globe.

An op-ed in last Tuesday’s New York Times explores some of this, and how the conservative narrative, composed of many lies, seems not to matter: Donald Trump’s Unstoppable Virality, by Emma Roller. It’s partly about how Trump says outlandish things just to get attention — “As long as stories about Mr. Trump are receiving as many eyeballs as possible, it doesn’t really matter if people are reacting negatively to him. In fact, it probably helps his popularity.”

Echoing Chris Mooney’s book:

And people with certain political leanings may be more predisposed to sharing. According to Bradley M. Okdie, a social psychologist at Ohio State University at Newark, conservatives are more likely to share a given piece of content than liberals are, especially if it provokes a negative emotion.

“Conservatives tend to be a lot more reactive to negative information and they also tend to be a lot more insular in nature, and they also tend to have less tolerance for ambiguity,” Professor Okdie said. “Conservatives would prefer a negative concrete statement to a slightly positive, uncertain statement.”

With his us vs. them invective and his refusal to denounce hate-filled speech from some of his supporters, Mr. Trump is an echo chamber for certain corners of the far right, as evinced by his popularity with white nationalists and the so-called alt-right movement of mostly online activists.

“Donald Trump is telling them something they already believe, and they’re sharing it because they want other people to believe it too,” Professor Hemsley, who studies virality, said.

When was this golden era again? Two other op-eds in the same day’s paper describe ignominious moments of America’s past.

The Great Christmas Strike of 1906, by Peter Manseau: keying off a recent event in which a Virginia mother objected to a lesson at the local school to copy out an Arabic religious phrase, as an exercise in calligraphy. She perceived it as an attempt at indoctrination to Islam. [The parallel to the perceived ‘war on Christmas’ as somehow *not* being about Christian privilege in a nominally secular society is too obvious to pursue.]

There is perhaps no greater indication of the potency of religious language than the fear it sometimes inspires. Both those who believe the Shahada and those who don’t appear to agree that some words have spiritual consequences.

Concerned that their faith is being challenged in the classroom, Christians like Ms. Herndon have lately led the charge against supposed religious indoctrination in Virginia, Georgia and Tennessee. They have not had a monopoly on such fears in American history, however.

In fact, what may well be the single largest action taken by parents worried about religious indoctrination in American schools was made not in defense of Christianity, but against it.

The piece goes on to describe the event of the title, in which Jewish children in New York City, back in 1906, rebelled against the inclusion of Christian hymns, compositions, pictures, and decorations in the public schools, to the point where 20,000 of them boycotted.

And then there is Los Angeles, a City of Better Angels, by Héctor Tobar [author of that book about the 33 Chilean miners]. About lynches and mob killings in the city, in 1870 and 1871.

Here, as elsewhere, there are those who believe there is safety to be found in cultural homogeneity — and danger lurking in our embrace of diversity and openness. I’ve been listening to our local xenophobes rail about the perils of Mexican immigrants for decades. Now they’ve found Donald J. Trump adding to their “close the border” chorus with calls to bar Muslims as well as Mexicans.

In California, these are old arguments. Thankfully, we also have a long tradition of resistance to intolerance.

I’ve previously linked to other items about the relative intolerance of past eras — e.g. how the Irish were demonized, way back in the 1850s, in much the same way Muslims are these days — not to mention the Chinese and the blacks and many others throughout our history…

The conservative yearning for a golden past is a fantasy; like other conservative engagements with reality, as the Chris Mooney book explored (my comments on his book The Republican Brain), it prioritizes narrative, in the service of social cohesion and resistance to change and new understanding.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Culture, Narrative, Politics | Comments Off on The Yearning for the Golden Past

Review of “Carol”

Posted on Thursday 31 December 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

From Facebook, 30 Dec 15:

Seeing “Carol” at a classic movie theater on Piedmont Avenue–

We saw a film today at a classic old movie theater, the kind on a street corner along a street lined with shops and cafes, where you walk out of the lobby afterwards right onto the street! This was the first time we’ve seen a movie in the Bay Area anywhere other than the AMC theaters in Emeryville, where you park in a large structure behind the theaters and adjacent shops.

The theater was charming but parking problematic: street parking was limited to 2 hours. I asked the ticket clerk about it, and he suggested parking on the side streets several blocks back, where the two-hour limit didn’t apply. It was raining today, so we got a space on the main street in front of the theater, fed the meter immediately before the film, then raced back to the car before the credits finished. (For the first time in likely 20 years, I did not sit through the credits, fearing a parking ticket.)

The film was Carol, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, a lesbian romance set in the early 1950s, adapted from a novel by Patricia Highsmith (who also did the book that the film The Talented Mister Ripley was based on). It’s immaculately produced and subtly acted, with the plot considering the consequences in that era for anyone suspected of behavior that would trigger an “immorality clause”, that threatens the Blanchett character from losing contact with her child. This is not a film of histrionics, but the best scene is when Blanchett’s character, meeting her and her husband’s lawyers, defies their agreement that would brand her some kind of deviant, insisting that they are not ugly people, the kind of people who would drag their dispute through the courts at the expense of their child. It’s a dramatic scene in a film that is mostly about subtle nuances…including, most especially, the final scene.

http://www.landmarktheatres.com/san-francisco-east-b…/…/info

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2402927/

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The Narrative of Narratives

Posted on Monday 28 December 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

A couple of years ago, when I read David McRaney’s second book, You Are Now Less Dumb, with its long section about human beings’ ‘narrative bias’, in which everything must be understood as some kind of story, this was a revelation. (Blog post about it here.) This explained various biases toward ideas like “everything happens for a reason” and why when disasters happens, the faithful become even more faithful, because God must have a reason.

Of course, this is a delusion. The universe is not a narrative, and things happen at scales very small and very large which do not operate in any kind of cause-effect relationship that we humans perceive on our interaction with our environment at the scale at which we live.

It may just be confirmation bias, but I don’t think so: the idea of ‘narrative’ is becoming a cultural meme.

First, from the New York Times Magazine a couple weeks ago: When the ‘Narrative’ Becomes the Story by Mark Leibovich, which focuses on political narratives.

When did a plain story become a perpetual narrative? It used to be that after something happened, our leaders, or would-be leaders, would simply debate whatever occurred. It was not always elegant or polite. But the exercise was at least direct. Politicians would unfurl their platforms and attacks and (if they wanted to get all lofty about it) their ‘‘visions.’’ The media would cover it, and then we could all go on with our lives without having to endure an endless belch of rapid reactions and step-back analyses.

Now we must fashion ‘‘narratives.’’ It has all become so faux-momentous, especially in the dispiriting potboiler of our national politics. There might be ‘‘counternarratives’’ to a ‘‘false narrative’’ that feed a ‘‘meta-narrative.’’ The horrific shootings in San Bernardino were barely more than a few hours old when a headline on the conservative website Breitbart was crowing that the mass shootings ‘‘Destroy Leftist Narrative After Leftist Narrative.’’ After the attacks in Paris, President Obama spoke not just of defeating ISIL but also of undercutting ‘‘the ISIL narrative.’’

Second, Time Magazine’s double issue for Dec 28/ Jan 4, about “The Year Ahead”, has a section about Media, by James Murdoch (the CEO of 21st Century Fox), with this subtitle: “Storytelling — both fiction and nonfiction, for good and for ill — will continue to define the world”.

We have examples of transformative storytelling all around us.

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Storytelling isn’t always positive. In the midst of the chaos of Iraq and Syria, ISIS masterfully tells its story of blood-soaked vengeance against supposed oppressors in their own lands and those from the West. Its stories sow the seeds of unspeakable atrocities from Raqqa to Paris.

Entrenched and compromised interests spin the fiction that science is more divided than united, and they sow seeds of uncertainty on issues of unquestionable priority: namely, the survival of our species on this planet.

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In 2016 and beyond, those who wish to create a better world will have to make storytelling the center of their efforts, not an afterthought. It’s clear that economic and military might will always be the key levers of statecraft. But more than ever before, swift and dramatic change is being driven by powerful narratives that crisscross the world at the speed of a click or a swipe.

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We will have to see if 2016 will be a year in which stories of anger, grievance, resentment and scapegoating of the “other” are ascendant, or whether stories of the power of love, empathy and hope for a better future rule the day.

Third, a book review from the weekend’s Wall Street Journal, a paper I don’t normally read but which was free at our hotel in Hollywood this past weekend. It’s a review by Alan Hirshfeld of a book by Randy Olson, Houston, We Have a Narrative (which, despite the review credit, has a paperback edition available for less than $20).

The idea here is that science hasn’t appealed to ordinary folk because it doesn’t have the strong narrative (that religions do).

In “Houston, We Have a Narrative,” Randy Olson, a marine biologist turned Hollywood-based filmmaker and communications consultant, perceives a “narrative deficiency” in the way science presents itself. It is scientists’ feeble storytelling, he claims, that induces yawns in the bulk of society and skepticism, if not outright hostility, in the rest. Whether or not such a blanket assertion is correct, Mr. Olson’s remedy makes sense: To better communicate, researchers should try to distill their work into its story-like essence, ideally a single sentence or perhaps a paragraph, from which can be assembled an engaging, mostly non-technical narrative—a human-interest tale built on scientific facts.

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The book’s three-part structure is explicitly modeled after the classic Hegelian triad of thesis/antithesis/synthesis. The “thesis” section posits the aforementioned narrative deficiency in science reportage, while the next section shrugs off its “antithesis” label and elaborates on the narrative techniques that scientists might adopt. Under “synthesis” are anecdotal assessments of these techniques and several case studies, as well as a summary recommendation that scientists create group story-writing circles.

Despite my earlier comment about the idea of narrative as becoming almost a cultural cliche, I am inclined to think the idea of narrative is a cultural imperative, especially as it applies to science and how humanity understands, through science, its place in the universe. Is science fiction a narrative that enables humanity to understand its place in the universe? I’m thinking yes, to some extent, but not entirely. In any event, I am thinking that anyone who might ponder writing a book about how the evident truths of science apply to how humanity understands itself needs to understand how narrative, like sugar, helps the medicine go down.

Posted in Narrative, Science | Comments Off on The Narrative of Narratives

Refining My Thesis

Posted on Tuesday 22 December 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

My thesis about science fiction is that (for the most part) it reflects the framework of my Provisional Conclusions: science fiction recognizes humanity’s existence within a vast, ancient universe; it recognizes that human perception of reality is incomplete and sometimes misleading; it recognizes that human culture, including religion, is contingent; most of all it recognizes change and the scientific method as key factors in understanding how humanity interacts and engages with the greater universe; and finally it speculates on potential futures, negative and positive.

(That science fiction is concerned with issues outside the relative bubble of human culture, where mainstream literature resides, is why SF is so often considered ‘escapist’.)

Fantasy, in contrast, prioritizes elements of human nature and human culture – including the imagining of endless variations of the supernatural illusions humans are subject to – over concern or engagement with the greater universe, or concern with historical context. Horror may be either fantasy or SF, though if the latter, it responds to recognition of the greater reality of the universe with fear, as existential threat to one’s person or one’s species.

My project about science fiction (and this blog) is to explore to what extent typical and canonical SF works support, or depart from, this framework.

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Sean Carroll’s Reading List

Posted on Tuesday 22 December 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Sean Carroll is one of my favorite physicists who blogs, and whom I’ve linked several times before, most recently about his forthcoming book The Big Picture (due May 2016), and in a blog post a few days ago, he posted the bibliography he’s compiled for “further reading” for this new book, chapter by chapter:

Reading List

His themes in this forthcoming book somewhat overlap my themes, as far as I can tell, and his bibliography includes a number of books (maybe 20% of his list) that I’ve read or have on my shelves — including Steven Weinberg’s To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science, which I blogged about at length here — and many of his other titles are similar to titles I have. I will be exploring his list.

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Alan Lightman on Cosmology and Human Meaning

Posted on Tuesday 22 December 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Yesterday I mentioned the Harper’s essay by Alan Lightman, What Came Before the Big Bang?, which concerns a couple different theories for that question: one by Sean Carroll and Alan Guth, a so-called “Two-Headed Time” theory, and another by Ukrainian/US physicist Alexander Vilenkin, expanding on the Hawking’s idea that asking anything about ‘before the beginning of time’ is nonsensical.

In either case, this issue is central to my theme that human intuitions are primed for our position midway between atom and cosmos, and the discoveries in physics about the very large and the very small, about a state of the universe so tiny and dense we cannot conceive it terms we understand, reveal the limitations of our comprehension, while that incomprehensible universe nevertheless exists.

One long para near the end of this piece captures this brilliantly:

In our short century or less, we generally aim to create a comfortable existence within the tiny rooms of our lives. We eat, we sleep, we get jobs, we pay the bills, we have lovers and children. Some of us build cities or make art. But if we have the luxury of true mental freedom, there are larger concerns to be found. Look at the sky. Does space go on forever, to infinity? Or is it finite but without boundary or edge, like the surface of a sphere? Either answer is disturbing, and unfathomable. Where did we come from? We can follow the lives of our parents and grandparents and their parents backward in time, back and back through the generations, until we come to some ancestor ten thousand years in the past whose DNA remains in our body. We can follow the chain of being even further back in time to the first humans, and the first primates, and the one-celled amoebas swimming about in the primordial seas, and the formation of the atmosphere, and the slow condensation of gases to create Earth. It all happened, whether we think about it or not. We quickly realize how limited we are in our experience of the world. What we see and feel with our bodies, caught midway between atoms and galaxies, is but a small swath of the spectrum, a sliver of reality.

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Immediately following this essay by Alan Lightman is a “from the archive” essay by none other than Fred Hoyle, from 1951, called Our Truly Dreadful Situation, in which that acclaimed astronomer (and science fiction writer) reacted to the then current discoveries of cosmology, the idea that those discoveries shed no light on “whether our existence has any real significance”, and how people got “very angry” by astronomers pointing this out.

But I do not like the situation any better than they do. The difference is that I cannot see how the smallest advantage is to be gained from deceiving myself. We are in rather the situation of a man in a desperate, difficult position on a steep mountain. A materialist is like a man who becomes crag-fast and keeps on shouting ‘’I’m safe, I’m safe!” because he doesn’t fall off. The religious person is like a man who goes to the other extreme and rushes up the first route that shows the faintest hope of escape, and who is entirely reckless of the yawning precipices that lie below him.

So these questions about the meaning of human existence, vs the increasingly apparent incomprehensible greater universe, have been around for more than half a century.

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Links and Comments: Science and Math and Religion

Posted on Monday 21 December 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Radio interview with Lee Goldman, MD, about his new book Too Much of a Good Thing, subtitled “How Four Key Survival Traits Are Now Killing Us”. This is about the familiar idea that our species is optimized for survival in an environment quite unlike the modern environment. Thus we evolved to gorge ourselves on sweets whenever available, when sweets were rare — but now that they’re readily available, we’re still prone to gorging, thus obesity. The other four are about our taste for salt, our tendency toward violence, and (one I hadn’t heard before) how blood clotting kept people from dying from trauma and childbirth in our ancient past, but now more often has the deleterious effect of leading to heart attacks and strokes. (So much for ‘intelligent design’.)

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NPR: No Warp Drives, No Transporters: Science Fiction Authors Get Real

About The Martian, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora (my review) and Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves (which I haven’t yet read).

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Harper’s essay by Alan Lightman: What Came Before the Big Bang?.

Short answer: nothing. Any more than there’s something farther north than the north pole.

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Website for a delightful short book, illustrated, about “bad arguments”, i.e. logical fallacies and cognitive defects. You can buy the book, An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments from Amazon, which I’ve done, but the entire content is on this site.

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Finally, I’m reading a book by Mathew Hutson, The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking, subtitled, “How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healty, and Sane”. Most of his content is familiar to me from other sources, how superstitions and motivated reasoning pervade our thinking, even those of us who think ourselves rationalists. His spin on this is that these tendencies are part of the human condition, and that by recognizing them and taking advantage of them, you can improve your own psychological life. More on this once I’ve finished reading the book.

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But here’s an essay, at website This View of Life, on the same issue: God Is Watching You: How the Fear of God Makes Us Human, by Dominic Johnson. About how these irrational beliefs nevertheless function to promote human culture and society.

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Links and Comments: Politics and Religion

Posted on Monday 21 December 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Three items by Jeffrey Tayler at Salon recently. First, in what I might call the pot-kettle-black category, Religion is the real problem: Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and GOP demonize Muslims, but too afraid to take on the real truth, where the real problem isn’t only Muslims:

More broadly, once one accepts, on the basis of no objective evidence whatsoever, religious propositions about the nature of reality, a supreme being, and mankind’s relation to alleged commandments issuing from that being, one confronts an inherent wild card: believers may decide to act on the texts they deem sacred, just as the texts tell them to do. Religion, in short, is the problem – and especially Abrahamic religion, with its monotheistic dogma dividing humanity into the saved and the damned.

Also by Tayler, Meet the Fox News atheist — the man Bill O’Reilly calls a fascist and Sean Hannity thinks is evil. About David Silverman, the president of American Atheists, who’s just published a book, Fighting God, and who’s had some number of vitriolic exchanges with the Fox folk. Tayler chats with Silverman about those two hosts:

“O’Reilly’s a very nice guy, a very intelligent man, he’s very knowledgeable. He falls for the ‘God of the gaps’ idea. That’s exactly what the cosmological idea is, and the idea from design is and the argument from morality. It’s all ‘God of the gaps.’ My personal opinion is that he’s too smart to believe what he’s saying.”
…
“Unfortunately, and unlike Mr. O’Reilly, Sean Hannity’s off-camera persona is exactly the same as his on-camera persona . . . . I have some fun with him off-camera, but it’s clear he doesn’t like me and I think he actually thinks I’m evil. I don’t think he has the ability to like me and disagree with me at the same time . . . . Because religion poisons people. Religion makes good people hate . . . . Religions creates divisions that shouldn’t be there. It gives us nothing but hate while saying it’s giving us love. This is a very good example of why religion deserves to die.”

(I bought Silverman’s book and have read some of it, and am not sure I can recommend it: it’s very blunt and rather crude, e.g. citing religious belief as “brainwashing” way too many times, without any nuance about the way religions serve cultural functions aside from the religious beliefs themselves, which are, admittedly, silly. I do like the way he observes that *all* religious beliefs are “cafeteria” religions — i.e., every believer selects which tenants of their holy book are important, and which to ignore. The examples are obvious.)

And then from Dec 13th, Follow Bill Maher’s lead, not Donald Trump: There’s a way to critique ideology behind religion without resorting to hate.

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An illustration of the Republican science denial that I discussed a couple posts ago: Tom Tomorrow on the Warped Physics of the GOP Universe.

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And one more, at Salon: Age of the Fabricating Faker: All the Republican candidates embody this condition — but none so much as Donald Trump.

We live in a time of dramatic make-believe. Almost half the voting population in the United States is at best skeptical about well-established scientific evidence, at worst in utter denial, when the evidence runs counter to their ideological beliefs. Corporations brand products more or less divorced from the outcomes they credibly are able to effect. Individuals increasingly advance their own interests by fabricating résumés and memoirs partially if not completely at odds with their actual biographical achievements. And politicians and political interests increasingly make up claims about the world, other candidates and themselves so at odds with any semblance of reality it should take a nanosecond of fact-checking to refute. And yet significant swaths of the electorate and of publics more generally are not merely convinced by the claims but seemingly have their base beliefs reinforced by such representations.

Motivated reasoning at its finest. The current version of “You can fool some of the people all the time…”

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A Salon discussion between Sam Harris and Sean Illing. Harris is notorious for calling out Islam for its tenants and for criticizing Islam apologists, like Reza Aslan and Nicholas Kristof. What appeals to me instead are his clear-headed takes on religion and faith in general:

But we shouldn’t lie about the zero-sum contest between reason and faith—and, therefore, between science and religion. Religious people do make claims about the nature of reality on the basis of their faith, and these claims conflict with both the methods and conclusions of science. If you believe that the historical Jesus was born of a virgin, resurrected, and will be coming back to Earth, you are a Christian. Indeed, it would controversial is to call oneself a Christian without believing these things. But each of these claims rests on terrible evidence and stands in contradiction to most of what we now know about the world. The odds are overwhelming that Jesus was neither born of a virgin, nor resurrected. And he didn’t ascend to some place in the sky where he could abide for thousands of years, in a form that leaves him free to use his powers of telepathy to eavesdrop upon the private thoughts of billions of people. Nor will he return from on high like a superhero, flying without the aid of technology, or magically raise his followers to meet him in the stratosphere for the Rapture. All of these expectations—which most Christians harbor in one form or another—entail claims about biology, history, physics, and the nature of the human mind, that defy the centuries of intellectual progress we’ve made on these topics. To believe any of these things is to ignore one’s commonsense and a dozen specific sciences at the same moment.

Of course, we can pretend that none of this is happening and that science and religion represent “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould infamously said. But this is a lie. And it’s a lie that has many unhappy consequences. Ironically, one of the consequences, which I have focused on more than my atheist colleagues have, is that it bars the door to truly rational and modern approaches to getting what religious people claim to want out of life. We can’t develop truly rational and nonsectarian approaches to spirituality, for instance, if every generation is taught that faith in the divine origin of scripture must be preserved at any cost.

I’ve written and spoken a fair amount on these topics, because I share the sense that there really is something that religious people are right to want out of life and fear to lose under the glare of scientific rationality. It’s understandable that they’re afraid to lose an objective foundation for morality, because many overeducated people will tell them that morality is fiction—we just make it up to summarize apish preferences that were etched into our brains through evolution. Notions of good and evil have no grounding in truth, because they are just culturally derived ways of talking about emotions like shame and disgust. Thus, to say that something is “good” is not to say anything about reality. As I argued in The Moral Landscape and elsewhere, I think this is utterly false. There are perfectly rational ways to think about moral truth.

Religious people are also right to worry that many scientists and secularists believe that spiritual experience is synonymous with psychopathology or conscious fraud. Again, this is untrue. But if one hopes to save the baby in the bathwater of religion, one mustn’t ignore the fact that our world has been dangerously riven by divisive nonsense, simply because most people were told, since the moment they could speak, that one of their books was written by the Creator of the universe.

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Fortunately, says Sally Kohn at The Daily Beast, The Religious Fundamentalists Are Losing. One of many such essays over recent years, especially notable for how quickly this trend is progressing.

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Vox: A telling — and disturbing — anecdote about conservative media from a House Republican. About how conservative news media is feeding voting constituents with so much false information, which they forward to their congressmen, that it’s dramatically changing the way those congressmen work. Says Devin Nunes, (R-CA):

“I used to spend ninety per cent of my constituent response time on people who call, e-mail, or send a letter, such as, ‘I really like this bill, H.R. 123,’ and they really believe in it because they heard about it through one of the groups that they belong to, but their view was based on actual legislation,” Nunes said. “Ten per cent were about ‘Chemtrails from airplanes are poisoning me’ to every other conspiracy theory that’s out there. And that has essentially flipped on its head.” The overwhelming majority of his constituent mail is now about the far-out ideas, and only a small portion is “based on something that is mostly true.” He added, “It’s dramatically changed politics and politicians, and what they’re doing.”

Vox: Why conspiracy theories flourish on the right, which plays off the previous story.

In the popular imagination, conspiracy theories are the result of ignorance and psychological instability. But it turns out that’s not really true at all. Conspiracy theories are extremely common, even among well-educated, productive members of society. Some new research in political science helps home in on the circumstances and character traits that allow conspiracy theories to flourish — and casts a fairly grim light on the direction of American politics.

Again, motivated reasoning; with details about a new study about what sorts of people are most susceptible.

For liberals, more knowledge reduces endorsement of CTs, no matter the level of trust, and more trust reduces endorsement of CTs, no matter the level of knowledge — “knowledge and trust are both independently negatively related to liberals’ endorsement of liberal conspiracies.”

For conservatives, on the other hand, more knowledge increases endorsement of CTs among those with low trust; for high-trust conservatives, knowledge seems to have no effect — it neither increases nor decreases tendency to endorse CTs.

Conclusion:

The research suggests that there is only one way to mitigate or reverse this process: restore some level of trust in the US political system. But conservative elites — who have the ear of their base — have no incentive to do so, and it’s not clear that anyone else has ability to do so. Declining trust in institutions is broad and deep in America; it may very well be unstoppable. As long as it continues, conspiracy theories will play a larger and larger role in public life.

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Finally, Politifact’s Lie of the Year: everything said by Donald Trump.

Posted in Politics, Religion | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Politics and Religion

On Seeing The Nutcracker ballet

Posted on Sunday 20 December 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

As I mentioned on Facebook yesterday, we saw a production of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet at the San Francisco Ballet (click link for a 1-minute video sample), on Saturday 12/19, and had the good luck to snag first row seats, with the stage at an inch or so above eye-level and the orchestra pit directly below us. I confess I spent almost as much time watching the orchestra as watching the dancers (as I’ve done a couple other times in years past when I happened to be close enough to the orchestra at the philharmonic or opera performance); performing music, no matter how clever or passionate, is a job for these people, and so it’s not surprising to see them go through the motions professionally but without much visible enthusiasm. Unlike, say, popular soloists, like extreme case Lang Lang. (Curious note: the conductor was to our left, so we were above the 2nd violinists and the brass. At least three of the 2nd violinists used earplugs, against the brass players just behind them. How do they hear themselves play?)

As an aside, the orchestra appeared to be about 80% white and 20% asian, with a lone elderly black man performing on a bassoon. The ballet company, quite large for this particular production, with new sets of dancers for its many scenes, was somewhat more diverse: numerous asians (especially the stand-in for the regular dancer of the Snow King), several blacks, and dancers who seemed to represent the ethnic presumptions of the various 2nd-act dances, perhaps only through costume and make-up: russians, arabs, latins.

There were also a remarkable number (again, considering the many scenes in the 2nd act especially) of child dancers, meaning anywhere from age 8 to 15, I’d guess, and it looked to me as if they were having a terrific time. In response to my Facebook post, Gary Westfahl’s wife pointed me to his rather curmudgeonly essay on the subject of this ballet, titled Unknown Menaces to Civilization #3: The Nutcracker Suite, which strikes me as the reaction of someone who’s been obliged, more than a few times over the years, to attend performances of this ballet, which Gary claims no one really likes, especially the ballet companies, who dutifully put it on each year only to make money to sustain the remainder of the season.

He may be right. In my case, never having been obliged to attend this ballet at any time in my entire life, I don’t suffer from any kind of overexposure. Two points: I believe this is only the third ballet I’ve ever attended in my entire life, the first being some unremembered event on a field trip in grade school, the second being the Matthew Bourne production of Swan Lake, back in the ’90s, because, well because you know why. On the other hand, an LP of the Swan Lake and Nutcracker suites (not the entire ballets, just highlights knitted together into suites) was one of the few classic music LPs my parents owned, and which I grew up listening to. (Others were a similar pair of Gershwin suites, and the Grand Canyon Suite by Ferde Grofe.) Eventually I heard the entire Nutcracker ballet, and have a CD set somewhere, so I was very familiar with the music before having ever seen the ballet, or even having much idea of the ballet’s ‘story’. (Thus, one lumbering melody I’d always thought had a vaguely nautical feel, turns out to be music for a lumbering circus bear!)

Back to the orchestra: I noticed two or three players, especially one of the first violins on the other side of the conductor from us, who seemed to be having a really good time, responding to the music, smiling or almost swooning in the case of that first violinist. But most of the players, as I said, were relatively stoic.

The production itself was clever, especially in the way the sets ‘expanded’ in the first act, as the little girl fell asleep, the wooden Nutcracker grew into a life-size dancer, and the mice came out of the woodwork to battle the soldiers.

There were a fair number of children in the audience, all well-behaved as far as I could tell, and I couldn’t help but think that one reason this ballet might have persisted for so long is that, with its many children dancers up there on the stage seemingly having such a good time, it might be the greatest recruitment tool for new young dancers in the ballet repertoire.

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