- In the context of the Tom Cruise film Digger, thoughts about the difficulties of thinking about climate change;
- Neil deGrasse Tyson wonders if humans are intelligent enough to understand everything;
- Fareed Zakaria on why Marco Rubio thinks the West is great because of pre-Enlightenment values;
- A similar piece by Ishaan Tharoor;
- And how a Kansas GOP candidate seems to literally believe in witches;
- The running theme: the limitations of human cognition, perhaps one spectrum among several others.
Site is back up after a couple weeks repairs from hacker attacks. Here are some items from today and yesterday. Over the next few days I’ll post items I’ve collected over the past two weeks.
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From a review of Digger, the Tom Cruise climate change movie that I haven’t seen, some perspective on how difficult it is for many people to grasp the scope of the problem. This goes to themes I’ve been calling scale-blindness, and the difficulty of long-term thinking.
NY Times, opinion by Jayson Greene, 14 Oct 2026 (but in today’s print paper): Tom Cruise’s Big Flop Is a Secret Masterpiece
The pertinent point:
Climate crisis movies have always been notoriously hard to make, for the same reason the climate crisis is hard to combat: It’s too big. Everyone’s affected, but not in the same ways, on the same timelines or at the same scale. We can see and comprehend elements of the problem, but no one sees the whole picture or how its disparate causes and effects connect.
Those two themes speak to a newer theme here: the limitations of human cognition. Even if a few people can think beyond human short-sightedness, if not enough people can, or if those people who can are hobbled by reactionaries, we might have the explanation for Fermi’s Paradox right at hand.
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An item from yesterday reflects a similar theme.
https://www.facebook.com/reel/2634940043623571
Neil deGrasse Tyson asking his guest, Are we intelligent enough to understand everything?
I listened to this partially, but need to listen to it more closely and fully. A crucial theme here is the limitations of human cognitive intelligence. Surely we are limited to some extent, or else everyone would intuitively understand relatively and quantum mechanics and so on. Most of us, perhaps none of us in the latter case, don’t. Evolutionarily, we don’t need to. That some of us can is a feature. My thought here is to step out… and consider the intelligence of dogs. The animals nearest to us. Dogs have a certain intelligence, which we are often surprised by. But they don’t understand the human realm; they only learn how to respond to it. Will listen to this further.
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And this is related. I’ve wondered before, what is it conservatives want to conserve? (Actually Carl Sagan asked this question long before I did, in a book I reviewed here.) More and more it seems they want to preserve basic protocols of tribal human nature — what predate the ideals of democracy and equality that the people behind the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and the American Constitution tried to impose over those tribal instincts. (I have an item by Allen Clifton about this too.)
Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria, today 16 Oct: Marco Rubio misunderstands what makes the West great, subtitled “His speech in Greece celebrated power and strength, overlooking the revolutionary idea of universal rights.”
In a well-written speech last week delivered against the magnificent backdrop of the Acropolis in Athens, Secretary of State Marco Rubio urged the West to rediscover what makes it exceptional. He described the qualities that define Western civilization as “the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride,” and he celebrated its ambition, nationalism and relentless pursuit of excellence. He warned that the West has become ashamed of the very things that make it great.
Rubio is right that the West has sometimes lost confidence in its own traditions and ideals — and that it shouldn’t. But Rubio himself seems deeply confused about what makes the West exceptional.
But his role models for these virtues would be…
Consider the qualities he celebrates: courage, strength, ambition and pride. Genghis Khan had all of these in abundance. So did Persian emperors, Russian czars and rulers of imperial China. Every great civilization has celebrated its warriors, glorified its conquests and believed in its own superiority.
Whereas the qualities Zakaria sees as distinctive are, these days, increasingly dismissed as “woke” by the MAGA crowd.
What truly distinguishes Western civilization is not its military power or national pride, but its intellectual and political traditions. From Greek philosophy and Roman law through Christianity to the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, the West developed a set of ideas that challenged the arbitrary exercise of power. Reason, scientific inquiry, individual liberty, democracy, the rule of law and universal human rights became central to Western civilization and set it apart.
Zakaria goes into details… and concludes:
What makes the West exceptional is its ability to transcend the narrow claims of tribe, nation and empire, and to develop ideas about freedom, equality and human dignity that can speak to all people, everywhere. The West conquered much of the world through force. But it changed the world through ideas. I wish that the secretary of state of the United States would celebrate these ideas — and that this administration would live up to them.
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Another piece on Rubio, from two days ago.
The New Yorker, Ishaan Tharoor, 14 Oct 2026: Marco Rubio’s Wild, Wild West, subtitled “In Greece, the Secretary of State cast the West as a civilization defined by its warriors and conquerors, not by its democracies.”
Longish. I skimmed. It ends:
“Civilization” is one of the favorite words of these sorts of politicians, more committed to supremacy than to democracy. But, as a rallying cry of the American right, it’s language that rings more hollow by the day, given the excesses of the past two years, the brutalization of migrants and protesters, the bullying of weaker countries, the repeated turns to unprovoked war and displays of force, and the garishness of an Administration that plans to live-stream a public execution later this year. Sebastian Gorka, a White House official focussed on counterterrorism, told the audience in Jerusalem that right-wing forces find themselves “in a war between civilization and barbarity.” He may not be on the side he thinks he is.
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Speaking of the limitations of human cognition:
The New Republic, 14 Oct 2026 (via JMG): “Demonic Stuff”: Kansas GOP Accuses Democrat of Being a Witch, subtitled “Ty Masterson had a lot to say about witchcraft while speaking at a Wichita church this weekend.”
Ty Masterson, the Republican candidate in the Kansas gubernatorial race, accused his Democratic opponent, Cindy Holscher, of being an actual witch capable of “demonic” magic, while speaking at the Praise Chapel in Wichita on Sunday.
Masterson introduced the dubious portion of his pseudo-sermon by suggesting that God wanted him to run for Kansas’s top political office.
“God’s armies are out there in this,” Masterson said. “What we’re fighting right now is a spiritual battle that I’ve never seen before, in [this] state, in this politics.
“Evil is maturing with the brotherhood, and it is rising to a level that is just in your face,” Masterson continued as a pianist played a contemplative melody beside him. “Really, my race and the U.S. Senate race with Roger Marshall versus [Adam] Hamilton. Those are spiritual battles.
Sigh. No. This is an illustration of the limitations of human cognition. To believe in demons and angels and witches and gods. Seriously. I realize that rational people are supposed to be deferential toward those with religious beliefs. But at some point, you have to call them out. These are not people with a grip on reality. These are not people who can understand long-term threats. These are not people who will solve problems. These are people who deny that problems exist.
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Now, there is the oft-cited spectrum of autism. (I’m about a 4 on a scale of 10.) Surely there’s a spectrum of intelligence (I’m maybe a 7 on a scale of 10). And a spectrum of musical talent (I’m about a 3). And so on. We are all a mix of various qualities. There is no best way to be. There is no just one thing. This is about diversity. We need these various talents, to solve different kinds of problems.
