Human beings are not moved by facts. This is the closest thing to a true fact that you will ever encounter in your human existence. The facts, ma'am, just the facts are just too
boring, too
inconvenient, too
depressing, too...
factual--or as Mr. Colbert may already have said (Dr. Omed doesn't have cable)--too
facty.
We, as a people, as an allegedly sentient species, don't want too much factiness. We do not want to be told the facts; we want to be told a story, a story with a happy ending; or at least a story with a good moral. I don't blame us; the facts are hard. We want some factric softener added to the wash, so our thoughts about them will come out fuzzy and warm. "God" is our favorite brand of softener when it comes to the really hard facts. God comes in many brands, and each brand claims unique and exclusive features and offers periodic enhancements to keep the devotion of its customers, but mostly what we want is to make those cold, hard facts fuzzy and warm.
Fuzziness is next to Goddiness. Is that so bad?
Idle facts do the Devil's work. Is that so good?
There is a phrase that is invoked almost inevitably by journalists and commentators when an modern army expensively equipped with the lastest in high tech mass murder weapon systems is not performing up to its "Top Gun" advertising, usually against an irregular force operating and innovating on the margins, an army of the dog. That phrase is "the fog of war" and the words are uttered, dripping with hopeful wisdom, like honey poured on a hecatomb. Battles are lost or won in the fog of war. On the battleground of Gott-Mit-Uns-Kulturkreig we must navigate the Fuzz of God. The hard facts are still there; you just can't see 'em. It's fuzzy out there.
The Fuzz are out there, too. The Fuzz are people who are Goddy, Goddier than thou, who embody Goddiness and Rightiness. Sometimes they run with the dogs, sometimes they sit on the General Staff. Here come the Fuzz--these people full of it, fuzzier than a whole bucket of thous. Fuzzy thinking collects in the belly-buttons of the world, but Fuzzimentalists collect fuzzy thoughts like the screen in a dryer full of freshly laundered towels collects lint.
On the quantum level, facts are fuzzy, a skien of probabilities rolled up into little balls like dust mice under a bed; but the mathematical equations underlying the fuzz are quite precise and even elegant. The fuzziness of our picture of the world on the quantum level is an artifact of clunky conceptual frames that don't fit it. If we all could do the math, the picture would be clearer--not completely resolved--but clearer. Doing the math, particularly the statistical math on the human overburden of the biosphere of the Earth, produces the kind of hard facts by which the vast majority of the humans are not moved. There is a clear picture in the numbers, but most of the humans can't or won't do the math
in any case. Man, Woman, Many is the primordial count many of us still keep--hormonal math. Some of us do the math by adding up the begats in the Big Book of Lies for the Literal-minded, or by calculating how many houris we'll get when we ride the suicide express to Paradise.
This warm and fuzzy innumerancy is not helping us preserve something for our children from the likely wreck of ten thousand years of human history. Gandhi, while on a visit to London, was asked what he thought of Western Civilization. His answer? He thought would be a good idea. We, as a species, can't do the math, are not moved by facts, and want to be told a story with a happy ending, or at least a story with a good moral.
What is the moral? We are not moved by facts; we are moved by pangs and contradictions; we are moved by what we lack, and we have a plentiful lack of understanding. This lack is a gift, or a given, depending on how you see it, an open invitation to participate in the marvelous--or in monstrosities. In this lack, all motive and meaning is found.
Imagine for a moment, that you are looking up at the stars on a clear moonless night, far away from any city lights, alone. What story would you tell the stars? Would the telling of it make you sad, or charm you, or terrify you? What are the words in it that would make you proud? Make you weep? Make you feel alive, say, this is the real me? Make you say, this is a true story, and believe it? Is there a happy ending?