Is common sense on its deathbed in the United States?

 

Top: Poster in Mulder and Scully's
X-Files office, bottom, illustration
from Wikipedia entry for wishful thinking
showing a little boy imagining his cart
is being pulled by a real horse.

By Hal Brown

Forget about lamenting the lack of sophisticated critical thinking ability among a large part of the population. Expecting this for more than half the population is too much because it requires a combination of above average intelligence (half the people have below average IQ's) and both the desire and ability to make the effort to analyze all the elements required to differentiate fact from fiction.

To have common sense only requires that a person follows a few simple rules when reaching conclusions. An important one, perhaps the most important, is to want to know the truth. This involves having an open mind and being will to admit that there's a chance that what you believe may not be the whole truth. 

It also means that you understand that what you want to believe may not be true. Ideally the average person should be able to understand the power of wishful thinking even if they have no grasp of the concept of confirmation bias, i.e., searching for, interpreting, favoring and recalling information in a way that confirms or supports one's beliefs or values.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines wishful thinking in three ways: 

1. Thinking in which what one wishes were the case is believed to be real or likely to become real.
2. The illusion that what one would like is actually true.
3. Decision-making based on self-delusion.

Note that the first is a way of thinking, the second is having an illusion, and the third is making decisions based on delusions. The latter is indicative of or at least suggestive of someone having a psychiatric disorder. 

It is frightening that what we are observing in the country today is that a large number of people, from GOP politicians to ordinary people, are making decisions based on things that they wish were true because they support their beliefs but are outright lies. Some are comparatively benign like that Biden stole the election from Trump. Others are can lead to violence, for example that members of the LGBTQ community are dangerous pedophiles.

We have members of Congress spouting QAnon conspiracy nonsense which can lead to mentally ill people committing violent acts.

It's one thing to vote for someone because you believe an exaggeration like this:

It is entirely different to vote for someone because you believe they will save you from someone who is out to destroy your country. 

There is a sobering irony in all of this. This is that the leading Republican candidates for president are all intent on turning the country in an authoritarian direction which disenfranchises minority groups or worse. You don't need to be a critical thinker to reach this conclusion. This is common sense.

The incontrovertible fact is that the two most likely Republican candidates not only spout lies but base their campaigns on them. We can only speculate whether they believe their lies or not. If they do they are delusional. If not they are counting on the lack of common sense among people they hope will vote for them.

Addendum:

In a subscriber only newsletter Paul Krugman in The NY Times writes (in the context of an article about the economy titled Biden and the bad news bros)

...that technology billionaires are especially susceptible to the belief that they’re uniquely brilliant, able to instantly master any subject, from Covid to the war in Ukraine. They could afford to hire experts to brief them on world affairs, but that would only work if they were willing to listen when the experts told them things they didn’t want to hear. So what happens instead, all too often, is that they go down the rabbit hole: Their belief in their own genius makes them highly gullible, easy marks for grifters claiming that the experts are all wrong.

To me this demonstrates that even highly intelligent people can lack common sense.

1. 
   
4. 
   

Let's analyze whether there really are demons only a Trump or DeSantis can save you from

 By Hal Brown

Let's analyze whether there really are demons only a Trump or DeSantis can save you from....

This is a photo I took in a village we walked to on Sunday.

Click above to enlarge.

While it can't be proved to with absolute 100% certainty we can be 99999999.9% sure that at some time shoes were sold in a store in this location in the unincorporated village of Oak Grove, Oregon. It is open to interpretation as to whether this shoe store should be called an emporium since it depends on how big an establishment has to be for it to accurately call itself this. 

We can also be sure with 100% certainty that the mural was painted on the side of the building:

It would take some research to find whether the shoe store was operating when the mural was painted or whether it was painted after the store closed. 

Tomorrow is Tuesday. The only way it won't be Tuesday is if the planet ceases to exist, is literally vaporized because even in the event of a nuclear holocaust and no human woke up to check their calendar it would still be Tuesday.. maybe. In a version of the philosophical question about the tree falling in the forest making a sound if no-one was there we could say that absent humans it wouldn't be Tuesday it would just be another rotation of the earth. It wouldn't even be July 4th with humans around and nobody would care that this was once a national holiday in the United States.

I share this only because facts have become irrelevant in American politics to the extent unprecedented in our history. The twisting of facts to promote a political agenda reminds me when as a child I learned about how the leaders of the Soviet Union claimed that Russians invented just about everything from the bicycle (really invented by a Frenchman) to baseball (a claim they gave up in 1988 when Valentin V. Lozinskiy, the Soviet ambassador, formally relinquished Moscow's claim to have invented the game

Not content to brag about their own made-up accomplishments the champion shameless purveyors of lies (who stand a chance of becoming president, a proviso I add because of George Santos) Trump and DeSantis aren't constrained merely by lying to pump up their wonderfulness. Not only do they want to portray themselves as hyper-masculine warriors (case in point Trump's electronic trading cards) but they want to concoct terrifying demons best left to horror movies and nightmares. 

There's a war going on, don't 'ya know? We're being invaded.   

Don't just be uneasy, be terrified! I suppose by now all I have to say is that it is everything - bless his contribution to today's dictionary - what Ron DeSantis defines as a new nasty meaning of woke.

Wokers (I had to look this up to see if this was a word being used, it is) are coming to get you.

What led me to writing this blog was the DeSantis video ad in the news today. 

Here's the ad on Twitter, if you can't see it there scroll down and you can view it on CNN:

You can watch the ad and a CNN discussion of it here.

The ad has been criticized by an LGBTQ conservative group and by Pete Buttigieg who says it is an attempt by DeSantis to prove his manhood.

There are death and destruction dealing demons determined to demolish your world and only I can save you with my superhuman powers. Trust me. I'd never lie to you...

What would Thomas Aquinas say?

Thomas Aquinas, Altarpiece in
 Ascoli Piceno, Italy,
by Carlo Crivelli
 (15th century) Public domain

By Hal Brown

We recently binge watched Madam Secretary. If you're familiar with the show you know that the star Téa Leoni plays Secretary of State Elizabeth McCord and that her husband Harry (played by Tim Daly) is a theology professor who often quotes Thomas Aquinas who has been described as "the most influential thinker of the medieval period and he greatest of the medieval philopsher-theologians. 

In a few episodes he related a "Thomas Aquinas walks into a bar" joke. Here's one of them:

Thomas Aquinas walks into a bar, and the bartender pours him a big goblet of mead.

Bartender says, "How ya doin?"

Aquinas says, "Oh, not so great. I've been working on this treatise for seminarians. Uh, basically explains all the major points of Catholicism. It could be the most important theological document of our time, and I even thought of the perfect title: Summa Theologica."

Aquinas continues, "So, I finish it, and I misplaced it. I can't find it anywhere, and I can't understand why God would inspire me to do this and then allow it to be taken away. What is God trying to tell me?"

Bartender says, "Eh. You win summa, you lose summa."

I am about as far removed from being a religious scholar as I am from being Kafka's cockroach, well, probably further removed. Still, I decided to see whether Aquinas had anything to say applicable to the politics of today and to my life in general. Not about to read his collected works I turned to the website AZ Quotes for his best known quotations. Below are a selection of quotes with my annotations.

• Grant me, O Lord my God, a mind to know you, a heart to seek you, wisdom to find you, conduct pleasing to you, faithful perseverance in waiting for you, and a hope of finally embracing you. Amen.

This is totally irrelevant to me personally since I don't believe in God. However it should be a quote to live by for all those who do believe in God. You can ask yourself whether members of the far-right could say the above if there was a real lightning hurling god who would strike liars and hypocrites and burn them to a heap of cinders would be around to vote in the next election.

•  The things that we love tell us what we are.

 Whether you love money, power, your family, or humanity or various combinations to different degrees, I believe this.

• The greatest kindness one can render to any man consists in leading him from error to truth. 

I agree, but this quite obviously far easier said than done. As someone who was a psychotherapist for 40 years the saying "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink" comes to mind. Of course the horse first has to be thirsty and then is willing to ask you for directions to the watering hole.

• He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why? Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust. 

This is a tricky one because it is possible to be consumed by anger over injustice to the point where you can be immobilized. I agree it is immoral not to feel angry at immorality and injustice but anger enacted upon in a moral and productive way should be the highest goal.

• For those with faith, no evidence is necessary; for those without it, no evidence will suffice.
  
  

When Aquinas refers to faith he means faith with no evidence he means believing in God without questioning. His going on to say that those without faith will ignore evidence of God's existence seems to be highfalutin dismissiveness.

• We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject, for both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in finding it. 

There's love and there's love and there's hate. I love people who are in my life, and I can and do have love for people who I admire, and can have a kind of empathy which isn't really love but isn't hate either for people who I understand even though they are to varying degrees intolerant and hateful. While it is risky to be consumed by hate for someone like Trump or DeSantis or their ilk I can feel it and haven't an iota of guilt over this.

• Nothing created has ever been able to fill the heart of man. God alone can fill it infinitely. 

I don't know whether this is meant to mean an individual man or mankind. Either way, the assumption that there's a supernatural entity that is capable of such a feat seems preposterous to me. As a cynic I ask why if God is real what is he (or He) waiting for to do this?

• To love is to will the good of the other. 

Here Aquinas makes an observation tIhat seems to be his being a goody two-shoes engaging in wishful thinking. Getting back to the politics of the day, why should I will the good of Trump or Putin? I wish they were good people but I only wish bad things for them.

• To pretend angels do not exist because they are invisible is to believe we never sleep because we don't see ourselves sleeping. 

Before Anton van Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope there were invisible creatures nobody knew existed. Today we know we sleep because there are scientific ways as simple as being video recorded, to prove we do. If somebody invents a way to prove angels exist I won't believe in them.

• Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do. 

By this I assume he means mankind. By ought to believe this seems to mean God. While belief in and acting on all the best of religion would indeed lead to the salvation of mankind, this isn't about to happen. The second and third ideas make sense to me. If you know that you ought to desire and act, for want of a better way to phrase it, that you live by The Golden Rule I agree.

• Fear is such a powerful emotion for humans that when we allow it to take us over, it drives compassion right out of our hearts. 

He sure nails it here. One of the emotions that drives the hard right, that drives white nationalism, and also motivates individuals to lash out at other, is fear. 

• Better to illuminate than merely to shine. 

This seems to be an indictment of self-aggrandizing narcissism. If this is what he meant I certainly agree.

• Man cannot live without joy; therefore when he is deprived of true spiritual joys it is necessary that he become addicted to carnal pleasures. 

Wow! Sure a person leads a happier more fulfilling life the more joy they experience. But again he has to interject spirituality when this is irrelevant to leading an ethical, moral, and happy life. You can be an abject atheist and still lead a laudatory life. He's goes even further here. What's this carnal pleasure addiction? He probably means sex although the term also means anything of the body so this could be a condemnation not only of sexual gratification but also of enjoying any other kind of sexual pleasure from sensual touching to eating tasty food to enjoying the sun shining on your skin.

• It is only God who creates. Man merely rearranges. 

Somehow the universe of which Earth is but a minuscule part of came into being. Nobody knows what was here before the Big Bang. I suppose we could call this unknown God, nothingness, Rootie Kazootie, or hell, why not El Squeako Mouse, the great Mexican matador.

• Rarely affirm, seldom deny, always distinguish. 

This appears to be an appeal phrased as an admonition to reason and critical thinking. I'd put it as saying that it's best in decision making to consider all factors without prejudging and bias.

• Give us, O Lord, a steadfast heart, which no unworthy affection may drag downwards; give us an unconquered heart, which no tribulation can wear out; give us an upright heart, which no unworthy purpose may tempt aside. Bestow upon us also, O Lord our God, understanding to know you, diligence to seek you, wisdom to find you, and a faithfulness that may finally embrace you; through Jesus Christ our Lord. 

This is basically a prayer which I find nothing to object to about for believers who find it helpful assuming they don't distort the means of the words to justify evil behavior.

• If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever. 

I assume this is a metaphor for an individual never taking risks. It makes sense to me.

• A man's heart is right when he wills what God wills. 

You don't have to believe in God to do what's right. The heart is an ancient metaphor for emotions, the saying "follow your heart" usually means taking actions that feel right to you. Unfortunately for some people doing what feels right is morally and ethically wrong.

• Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution; justice without mercy is cruelty. 

One the face of this, without going too deeply, this sounds like a valid statement. Unfortunately it could be used to exact what one group considers justice against someone who does deserve mercy. The second part describes how punishment is all too often exacted against groups of people today.

• There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship. 

I would add true love to true friendship but I certainly agree with this. 

• No man truly has joy unless he lives in love. 

100% agree.

• Of all the pursuits open to men, the search for wisdom is most perfect, more sublime, more profitable, and more full of joy. 

Add love and I agree.

• If you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust. 

100% agree.

• One cannot use an evil action with reference to a good intention. 

This is a version of "the ends justified the means" which is often addressed in the study of ethics. Was dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki justified is a frequently used example. It would be interesting to bring Aquinas back and ask him what he thought.

• There is within every soul a thirst for happiness and meaning. 

In the language of his time soul meant something deeper than just saying person, but assuming this is what he meant, I can find an argument to support this. Everyone wants to achieve some kind of happiness even in people with some psychiatric disorders, it is by making themselves experience pain. Everyone, even those struggling to survive to the next day, wants to have some kind of meaning in their life even if it is just keeping themselves and their loved ones alive.