They Will Never Have Enough

So, the Trump Republicans have control over virtually everything except the courts. The path is now clear before them to chop down every policy and law that might impede their conquest of nation and Earth for their private gain. They have not been able, as of this writing, to destroy the Affordable Care Act, but Trump has already singlehandedly disabled its implementation. And they have negated nearly every environmental policy that existed prior to the current administration, even rules that date back to previous Republican presidents. Sure, some kinds of pollution remain illegal, but the Executive Branch will simply not execute those laws.

You would think these would be the Halcyon Days when everything is going their way, sort of like what the Democrats had in 1993-1994 and the Republicans had in 2001-2006: single-party rule. You would think that they could just relax and enjoy their hegemony.

But instead, the Trump supporters have become even more fierce. They need not bother to attack Democrats, who have no power. Despite this, they still do so. Right-wing Republicans continue to insult Hillary Clinton on social media. What? What is the point? Hillary has no more political clout. There is no reason to attack her except to continue wallowing in hatred of her.

But the Trump Republicans also attack moderate Republicans, Bipartisanship is now considered treason. Trump even attacks His own hand-picked cabinet. Just recently, Trump has openly insulted retiring Senate Republicans Bob Corker and Jeff Flake.

The Trump Republicans do not just want to be in sole control of the nation. They want to be the only voices that are heard. Already, nobody listens to Democrats. The Trump Republicans want moderate Republicans, as well, to simply bow and obey.

One vivid recent example of this is the October 29 white supremacist rally in Shelbyville, TN. They shouted, marched, wore Confederate insignia, and some of them declared that “the Jews will not take our place.” While not all Trump supporters are Nazis, we are still waiting to see if any Trump supporters speak out against them. Why don’t the neo-Nazis just sit back and enjoy the far-right domination of all of American life? They will never have a Nazi in the White House, at least by legitimate means; they have it as good as they ever will. But they cannot enjoy the Trump victory which has created a golden space for them. The white supremacists have tasted blood and they are on a roll.

White rage is happening not just in politics but in general society. Where I live, in rural Oklahoma, most of the people are Trump Republicans, not moderate Republicans. They have the whole arena of public space under their control. But what do they do? The people of rural Oklahoma are even more militant in their hatred of non-supporters of Trump than they were before the election of 2016. They overtly demonstrate their hatred of their neighbors even more than before. If you are out in public in rural Oklahoma, it feels like a theater of war. At least for people like me who look like liberals; I wear science T-shirts rather than camo. It is now hostility that I encounter, not the quiet dislike such as I experienced before.

Already, Trump Republicans can accumulate all the automatic weapons they want, at least in Oklahoma. But they have redoubled their efforts to build up their stockpiles since the beginning of the Trump administration. I know this because one of them told me. Who are they building up their weapons against? Is it against the remaining minority of progressives such as myself, progressives who do not dare to speak out? My car has no bumper stickers on it, but the fact that it is a Prius calls attention to the fact that I am not a Trump supporter. I might, for all anyone knows when they see me in my car, be a moderate Republican who sees energy efficiency as a great investment (which it is). I feel as afraid to speak my mind in public as do the people in the Zoroastrian or Christian minorities in countries ruled by Muslim strongmen. I am less likely to get killed than a religious minority in a Muslim country, but, I wonder, for how long? How long will Trump Republicans keep accumulating weapons before they decide it is time to use them, perhaps not just against progressives but against moderates within their own party?

They will never be satisfied, so long as those of us who do not agree with them exist in even barely noticeable numbers.

Altruism: Don't We Wish

I recently heard an interview with Jonathan Haidt, a professor at New York University. He had some really interesting thoughts; and not just thoughts, but results of his own research. Oh how I wish I could agree with him.

Haidt’s research shows that our political convictions—in particular, being liberals vs. conservatives—is based on psychology rather than reason. Of course, liberals have always “known” this about conservatives: those conservatives are just mean people who want to oppress and victimize other people. And conservatives have always “known” this about liberals: those liberals are just immoral people who want to destroy the moral compass of society. But Haidt has shown that liberal vs. conservative biases may come from the deepest part of our brains. Conservatives have a need for order, while liberals relish diversity. This even shows up in the conservative preference for dots on a screen that move in lock-step with one another, and liberal preference for dots moving independently.

But what do we do with this information? It is here that, I fear, Haidt has gone off on a cloud of wishful thinking. If both liberals and conservatives can just recognize that their beliefs have a psychological basis, then they could start to talk and work things out. This is, as I understand it, Haidt’s gospel, as it were. He also says that our society needs both liberals and conservatives, to keep each other from going overboard.

Alas, there are two problems here.

• Liberals are much more likely to agree with Haidt on his basic points. Conservatives will usually reject the very premise that psychology has any influence on their beliefs. They believe that they are God’s chosen and that they are as unlikely to be wrong as for God to not exist. The Holy Spirit has made them conservatives. That being the case, a true conservative will consider it unnecessary or even evil to have a meeting of minds with liberals. Haidt reached his conclusion from his liberal background; can he point to even one conservative scholar who has reached the same conclusion from his or her conservative background? Maybe he can, and if so, I’d like to hear about it.
• Conservatives have a lot more guns piled up, ready to hand, than liberals. How can any parity of discussion be reached when one side is heavily armed and the other side virtually helpless? If you have guns, who needs dialogue?

These are two deadly asymmetries that make discussion impossible between liberals and conservatives, in general. Happily, some individual conservatives and liberals can talk, but this will not happen on a large enough scale to influence the immediate future.

Haidt gave an example of how liberals and conservatives could discuss an issue and perhaps come to a better understanding of one another. The issue: global warming. The liberals could begin a discussion by citing a military general, rather than an environmentalist, who talks about the dangers of global warming. Great idea. Only we climate scientists have already tried this. Defense Secretary Maddis has already said that global warming will cause international conflicts to which the U.S. military must pay close attention. Maddis is not just a conservative, but a hand-picked Trump follower. But the conservative global-warming denialists have either taken no notice or have been hostile toward this prominent conservative. A search of the most prominent denialist website turned up no matches with “Maddis.” The reason is, of course, that the denialists are paid by fossil fuel corporations, or individuals who have gotten rich from them, or foundations started by them.

Haidt also said that, on average, religion makes people more moral. But in order to justify this statement, Haidt had to include, in the term “morality,” those activities that bind the group together, even if it means that the group is hostile toward other groups and causes a great deal of harm to the world in general. I am sure Haidt does not mean to establish a moral equivalence between, say, the United Nations and the Nazis, but I am unclear about how he avoids this equivalence.

This problem is the very same one we encounter when we consider altruism, about which I have often written. Altruistic behavior, encouraged by empathetic feelings, enhances an individual’s evolutionary success within his or her social environment. In ancient times, the social environment was very local. Today, the environment can be the whole world. Natural and cultural selection may favor warm, fuzzy feelings within the group, but may also favor extreme hostility. This hostility can take two forms: the feeling of sweet revenge against cheaters within the group, and extreme hostility toward people outside the group, whether they are cheaters or not. It might be enlightening to think that conservatives draw the line between “us” and “them” more narrowly than do liberals. Haidt may have written about this someplace.

In a related thought, Haidt also said that, according to surveys, conservatives care more about the people around them, while liberals care more about the people of the world. And here is where I have to draw a completely different conclusion from my Oklahoma experiences than Haidt may draw from his New York experiences. The conservatives who live around me in Oklahoma seem to be hostile toward everyone except, maybe, their own families. They dump garbage in their neighbors’ yards and allow their dogs to attack anyone who is out on the street. Many of them fly Confederate flags, which displays their hostility toward even many of their immediate neighbors. And, in this reddest of red states, “Oklahoma is ranked 3rd in the nation for women killed by men in single victim-single offender homicides.” (see data here). Red states are not moral, at home, or in their communities. I wonder if the surveys that Haidt has conducted indicate more about what people like to think about themselves than what they actually do. Prominent conservatives, from Bill O’Reilly on down, proclaim Christian morality while pursuing immoral personal lives.

What I come away with, from Haidt’s statements, is that individual conservatives and liberals might try to understand one another better, after finding some personal common ground. This common ground might be something as strange as a shared adoration for the music of the 1930s country singer Jimmie Rodgers—which I share with a very conservative person I’ve not yet met but if I do I will talk to her about this rather than about politics. But on a national level? I think it is hopeless.

Haidt’s views might be appropriate for a society at equilibrium—that is, one in which liberal and conservative views can mix and respond to one another, reaching some kind of stable balance. But right now, our country is experiencing extreme disequilibrium. This is not true in every country. In France, a country about which I know a little, the conservatives and liberals disagree vividly. But the conservatives do not have stockpiles of guns in France the way they do in America. Even if American conservatives choose not to use these guns, they have the psychological advantage: we all know that they have them.

Why I Am Not a (Public) Christian

I received an email from a man whom I knew back when I was an up-and-coming leader in an organization of Christians in the sciences, the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA). Had I stayed with them, I might have been one of their most prominent members. But my participation became sporadic after 1994, and I attended no meetings after 1999, as my conventional faith gradually fell apart. This man had run across a 1987 article I had written for the ASA journal, in which I struggled with the ideas about why God would allow apparently evil things to happen in the natural world. He wanted to know what had become of me and hoped I was still a Christian.

At first, I intended no response whatever. Not because I have any ill feeling toward the ASA; they are reasonable and sincere people, unlike most self-described evangelical Christians, but because I could write a book in response. I finally decided to write a short but vivid response, parts of which I include below. I decided on a pamphlet-length response, sort of a Thomas Paine instead of an Aquinian Summa Theologica.

“Dear Ted,

I was surprised and pleased to receive your email, but I am afraid that what I have to say won’t be entirely pleasant. I have nothing bad to say about the ASA, or the many fine people I have known in its ranks, which includes you.

But I have entirely distanced myself from any public identification with Christianity. My private views are between me and God, however defined. I am one of those people whom an evangelical Christian would label as an atheist, although I do not affirm this label. Thank God American evangelicals will not be my judges. (Do I hear an amen on that?)

American evangelical Christianity has increasingly become the private playground of the Republican Party and, more recently, worshipers of Donald Trump. To me, American evangelical Christianity has become blasphemous. It’s been like this a long time. When I first worked at The King’s College, it was pretty much a Republican institution. After I left, they hired Dinesh D’Souza as president, mainly because of his political views, ignoring the warning signs that later they had to admit: that he was morally unsound. When I worked at Huntington College, it was another Republican institution, although those were back in the gentle days of George H. W. Bush and Dan Quayle (Huntington was his hometown). Under George W. Bush, American evangelical Christianity was largely supportive of war and torture. And now, the American evangelical church seems to either worship Donald Trump, or to go along with those who do. Where is there any public outcry among evangelicals against Trump committing nearly every sin that is possible for a man to do? For the love of God, I keep my distance from American Christianity and its support of, or its silent acquiescence to, Trump.

Moreover, I live and work in rural Oklahoma, where Christianity is also tied almost completely to the accumulation of automatic weapons. The local church, which sometimes posts condemnatory signs against me (I’m the local evolution professor), sometimes gives away automatic weapons as door prizes for its revivals.

When I teach my classes, I begin the first day by writing on the board, “Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.” I have yet to have any student, although most of them have been drilled in Sunday school, identify the source of this quote. They think of Jesus holding a machine gun, not as getting down on his knees to look at wildflowers. I want to get them to start looking at the natural world around them and marveling at it, regardless of its origin. I give surveys to my classes, which consistently reveal the profound ignorance that my students have about the Bible, the religious ones even more than the non-religious ones.

A recent national survey showed that only 30 percent of white evangelicals, in 2011, thought that a president could be forgiven of moral lapses; today the figure is 72 percent. Evangelicals hated Barack Obama, an astonishingly moral man, while admiring the pussy-grabbing Donald Trump. This has nothing to do with God, Jesus, or the Bible. It’s all about politics, money, power, and guns.

The scientific credo of American evangelical Christianity seems to be, regarding what they call God’s creation, “It’s okay if you pour oil on it, it’s okay if you chop it down, it’s okay if you shoot it, it’s okay if you drive your truck over it, so long as you don’t believe that it evolved.” (Did I mention that I live in Oklahoma?)

Meanwhile even the moderate Christians seem powerless to stand up to the right-wing conquest of Christian faith. Last year, I wrote to every member of the English department at Calvin College (from which my daughter graduated) to ask their views on what constitutes Christian literature. I believe I sent twelve emails. I received not a single answer. I know that the messages were received. I think the faculty must have just been confused: to them, the world consists of Calvinism and atheism, therefore their brains simply had no binding sites for the peptides of my intermediate ideas.

Meanwhile, the ASA has, I assume, remained reasonable. But after a while, I began to feel the futility of agonizing over unanswerable questions. I remember how hard David Wilcox struggled with trying to reconcile Adam and Eve with the record of human evolution. Good try; I admire him still. I think it is safe to say that the ASA has no discernible impact on American Christianity. I have devoted myself instead to writing books (I’m completing number 5 now for fall publication) about topics that might actually help to educate people, for example, how to think scientifically.

Maybe the ASA needs to refocus. When it started, Christianity did not dominate politics. Today a twisted version of Christianity is threatening the world. Maybe the need now is not to get more people to believe in God but to get believers to rediscover peace and love.

Maybe when we move to France, which we plan to do some year soon, I might start going to church again. In France, nobody becomes a Christian for money, power, or sex. The only Christians in France are those who want to be.”

Altruism as Evil: The Work of Donald Trump

Altruism occurs when (usually) animals cooperate with one another, to the benefit of all of them. One kind of altruism, recognized by evolutionary scientists, is indirect reciprocity, in which an individual gains recognition and admiration for doing generous acts—and along with that admiration comes profit. We all want to do business with people who have a public reputation for generosity.

Nearly everyone recognizes altruism as good. Everyone, that is, except Donald Trump. He seems to believe that it is evil to do good things for other people.

One way that more fortunate countries have of helping the less fortunate ones is through the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Educational and scientific exchanges promote world peace, one of the express purposes of the United Nations in general and UNESCO in particular. UNESCO facilitates altruism, especially indirect reciprocity.

But Trump has removed the United States from UNESCO. Not only does he not believe that the United States should promote world peace in this way, but he also appears to hate the reputation for goodness that the United States used to enjoy as a member of UNESCO. It used to be that when the world looked at America, it thought, “they want to help us,” and we got a lot of admiration for that. But today the world looks at us and thinks, “they hate us.” Trump, who is always sneering and insulting everyone else, already promoted this image, and has now backed it up by action. We hereby send the message to the world that, even if you are our friends, we do not need you. We do not even like you.

Trump’s consistent message has been “America first.” But this is not what he meant. Probably every nation puts itself first. What Trump meant, apparently, was “America only.”

America, Trump thinks, does not need the admiration or goodwill of the world. All we need to do is to intimidate them.

The End is Near?

The end is near! The end is near! The Republicans are going to get out their guns and start shooting the rest of us! Oh, and the sky is falling, too.

I know what I would have said to this even a couple of days ago: Yeah, right. The Republicans talk tough, about how there should be absolutely no restrictions at all of any kind for any reason on building up huge stockpiles of any kind of weapon. (Except, oddly enough, nuclear weapons. I haven’t quite figured out why they find a nuclear weapon ban acceptable.) They say that people like the Las Vegas shooter should have been utterly free to build up his stash of weapons in his hotel room, weapons that he had altered from semi-automatic to automatic. They even say that kits that allow semi-automatic weapons to be so altered should be freely available for purchase by everyone, even people with a known history of psychiatric problems. Only after the man starts shooting should law enforcement be allowed to take any action.

But the Republicans aren’t really going to do this. They never plan to actually use all those weapons they are hoarding.

Well, that’s what I thought, until I was in Wal-Mart yesterday. The line consisted of people with huge numbers of things to purchase. The late-middle-aged woman ahead of me saw that I had only a few items, and asked me to go ahead of her. I accepted the offer, since it would help me a great deal and make no difference to her. They were, after all, still waiting for a prescription refill. I realized this was an Oklahoma redneck actually living by the Golden Rule rather than just talking about it. For about a minute, I felt good and thought maybe I have misjudged this rural Oklahoma hotbed of fundamentalist gun nuts.

Then, for no reason that I could tell, she started telling me that her husband had just purchased an AK-47 at a pawn shop for over $400, and she said that lots of people were purchasing them because they knew the price was going up, probably to $700, very soon. I wondered what had prompted her to tell me this. I looked at my T-shirt. Was it a flaming liberal T-shirt? No, it was from the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in California. My shirt did not say, “Dump Trump, shoot me right here,” with a target painted on it. And the woman’s voice sounded utterly friendly and sincere.

I knew that here was my opportunity to learn something about the people among whom I am embedded, one of the few people in town who does not worship the NRA. I asked her why her husband purchased the AK-47. She talked about how, in her neighborhood down by the lake, there were drug deals going on all over the place. They have up No Trespassing signs but the drug dealers tear them down. I realize that an argument can be made for them to have a gun, but an AK-47? I did not ask this question, however. I just let her talk. I did not ask her in what way gun restrictions might harm them—surely, they have a good reason to get permission for a gun, to protect themselves. Surely her husband could pass a background check.

Finally, I did ask if he planned to actually shoot people with the AK-47. She said absolutely not—she is the kind of person who wouldn’t hurt an animal, much less a human. She even uses glue to repair turtle shells. She said she didn’t want to go to hell for shooting someone. She said her husband would just shoot the AK-47 into the treetops to scare criminals away.

I am assuming her husband (who was standing behind her, his mind a thousand miles away) was not crazy. But if he started shooting his AK-47, what would stop him from shooting just a little bit lower and maybe killing someone who was actually not a criminal? Can we be one hundred percent sure that her husband would never slip, for just a moment, into fury? He doesn’t have to be crazy; he just has to be imperfect, make a single mistake, which is something that all humans do—especially according to religious people like her who believe the mankind is sinful.

Unless, of course, she believes her husband is as perfect as God, which is blasphemy.

Moreover, whoever the person was whom her husband planned to shoot at, but not shoot, might be crazy, and have his own AK-47, and come after them. If I say you should have a background check before getting an AK-47, I do not mean that you are crazy, but that this should be a standard procedure to make sure that only people like you can make such an acquisition. The crazy intruder might shoot them, their children, and the grandchildren the woman was so profusely praising.

The chip reader beeped, so I removed my card and left, without drawing any conclusions from the conversation. The woman said she was stockpiling food since the Big Battle was about to begin. Strangely enough, it was all frozen food, which would decay if electricity was lost during the Big Battle. I let her continue hauling frozen dinners onto the conveyor belt.

You can see why I am now wondering if the Republicans are about ready to start shooting. Here is one couple who would not start The War themselves but who are waiting eagerly for the first sign that they believe will tell them it is time to start shooting.

This is also why I am an agnostic. In America, being a Christian means that you worship the NRA and the Republican Party, and probably Donald Trump also. In America, being a Christian has nothing whatsoever to do with Jesus. This is why I want utterly nothing to do with American Christianity. Maybe, if I move to France, I will start going to church again. In France, Jesus does not carry an AK-47 around.

Republican Psychology

Lots of things have been written about the Republican Brain. I’ve probably written a fair percentage of them myself. Do we need another overview of Republican psychology? Yes, because it has suddenly become the dominant, powerful psychology of the United States. It is now the face we show to the world. Not everyone who identifies as a Republican shares these features, but the powerful ones do. To the powerful Republicans who are now in control, the moderate Republicans are as irrelevant as Democrats.

Here are some of the characteristics that you find in almost all conservative Republicans:

• First, they must believe themselves to be uniquely right in the eyes of God. They cannot believe that there might be more than one right approach. Not only are they right; they are the only ones who are right.
• Second, they must find people to accuse of doing the things they declare to be sinful. Nowadays they are finding lots of people like that: Democrats, Muslims, immigrants, Native Americans.
• Third, they must make their accusations loud and public. The recent Las Vegas shooting was carried out by a 64-year-old man, whose motives remain unclear at the time I post this essay, but right-wing news outlets quickly said that a Muslim extremist had done it. The right-wing fake news was the story that caught the attention of French online media. For good reason, the French think Americans are by and large crazy, though they are willing to make individual exceptions to this rule of thumb. At least my French relatives make an exception for my family.
• Fourth, they have a psychological requirement to be hypocrites, to then do the things they accuse others of doing. One example, nearly trivial but illustrative: In his campaign tweets, Trump accused Obama 38 times of taking time off to go golfing. He promised to not do this, “I’ll be too busy working for you.” But he took golfing vacations (and other vacations at immense taxpayer expense) six times in his first thirty days. Of course, Trump like Gingrich was famous for serial marriages, each starting with an affair while still married to a previous wife. Conservatives condemn this but then must either do it or utterly approve and worship leaders who do. This is an essential step in closing the circle.
• Fifth, they accuse Democrats of being “bleeding hearts,” and they just assume that Democrats will not stand by and let people starve or die of disease. Therefore, the Republicans who run the federal and many state governments will stand by and let Democrats pay for food and health care for the poor out of private donations. This starts a downward spiral in which altruistic Democrats get weaker and poorer as Republicans get richer and stronger.
• Finally, there is no problem in the world, certainly in the country, that cannot be solved by just letting people have as many guns as possible, without any background checks. While it is just as legal for a Democrat to buy an assault weapon as for a Republican, the Republicans buy more. Republicans claim they will never use these guns, but this means that we are supposed to think they are stupidly wasting their money. Notice I never accused them, above, of being stupid. Maybe they won’t have to use their guns, because they know that we all know that they have huge stockpiles of weapons and we do not want to piss them off.

While Republicans are not as evil as Nazis, their psychology is just as dangerous to the future peace of the world as was the Nazi psychology.