The new year is coming up. Are you ready
for it? Neither is anybody else. The big problems continue to get worse,
particularly the strain of human consumption and pollution upon the ecosystem
of the Earth, and hardly anything is being done about it except by a minority
of humanitarians. The Paris climate talks earlier this month produced a set of
reasonable recommendations that will at least help make the impact of global
climate change a little more manageable. But the political machine of America
responded with a collective snort; Congress has declared that America will not
cooperate at all with other nations to limit global warming. Most Republicans
declare that (in words I heard one of them use) nothing will ever convince them
of global warming. Nothing. Ever. This is a statement, pure and simple, that
Republicans consider themselves to be totally incapable of error. They have
carved out for themselves a niche that properly belongs to God, if there is
One.
And a lot of the power behind the
conservative declaration of infallibility is religion. They believe that God
has made them incapable of error. God approves of everything they do. (Some of
them might admit that, once in a while, they make a few tiny mistakes.) To win
any argument, a conservative need do no more than hold his God Finger Puppet up
in the air and wiggle it.
There is practically no hope that this
will change. And that is because the human brain did not evolve to reason. It
evolved to rationalize. That is, the human brain evolved to use information
from the world to control other human beings. Sometimes they used reason to do
this. But just as often they used fantasy. We are the evolutionary descendants
of people whose brains allowed them to understand the world just enough to
manipulate it and to dominate other human beings. Therefore, the coming year,
and all years to come, will be just as unreasonable and dangerous as the
previous year, as all previous years.
However much I admire the character of
Perry Mason, as played by Raymond Burr, I must regretfully disagree with one of
his statements. In a 1961 episode, a client named Fallon (one of thousands of
wrongfully-accused defendants) thanked Perry Mason for not losing faith in him,
to which Mason responded, “Oh, I always have faith, Mr. Fallon—faith in what
Judge Learned Hand called ‘the eventual supremacy of reason.’” One of the
reasons I have always enjoyed Perry Mason reruns is that I can fantasize, for a
few moments, that truth will eventually triumph in the world, a fantasy that I
know is not true.
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