This is a real diary.
I've been having one of those conversations that you have with old friends from high school, who have become a little stuck in a social circle that punishes people who dare to think.
We have been trading emails for a while. I send him DailyKos and CommonDreams stories and he sends me video clips of Evan Sayet and various forwarded emails proving the conservative points he tries to believe in.
But I know him too well to think he believes this stuff. He's a brilliant rhetorician, a sharp arguer, and a very funny guy with a dry wit.
But we never talk about evidence, or social science, or religion, or any kind of analysis of humans themselves and how they work in small or large societies.
So he sends me a 47 minute Evan Sayet clip from youtube.
Evan Sayet proudly poses with David Horowitz, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter on his home page, which you can skip.
I watched for eight minutes, took a deep breath and wrote this:
Friend: First, I don't categorize you as a conservative. I think you're smart, in the sense of being able to process logic and rhetoric quickly and accurately.
I hope you don't categorize me as a Liberal, as that jackass Evan Sayet would likely do.
I tried watching it, got 8:30 into and decided he was already so far off track with his basic assumptions and oversimplifications that it was a waste of time to continue, since I've already heard his speech before many, many, many times.
I watch a lot of highly selected television, and many of the programs are seminars, forums, debates and documentaries.
Since I have TiVo, I don't watch commercials much, and I can rewind and re-view interesting points with wife or a friend, some of which are "creeping logic", a term I invented during a long cross-campus walk with Ben Sargent, a former Jesuit priest, and expert rhetorician.
Ben became frustrated and annoyed when I constantly interrupted his chain of logic, whereby he intended to prove that his point came from a long string of agreements that I made to the chain of logic.
But I kept objecting to small points about his statements. He said it was unfair to break his concentration with small objections, but I responded with this reconstructed observation, which I hope you will keep in mind when you are parsing what I say:
"Ben, when you are constructing these long arguments, you presume that I will be constrained by politeness to let you make statements that are slightly incorrect, so that you can continue with the next statement, which depends on the first one being completely correct, despite my knowledge that it is, in fact, slightly incorrect.
Politeness can be a tool used against me, however, when each statement leans in a particular direction, every single time.
What happens is that, if I let you continue this leaning toward your eventual conclusion, that each of your statements leans just enough so that when you are through with thirty statements, each with, say, six degrees of lean, when you are finished with your string of leaning statements, you have turned the argument around 180 degrees, and then it becomes my job to go back and object to each carefully hidden flaw in every statement.
Your objection to this is that I don't let you get away with the first ever-so-slightly (and purposely) flawed statement, because I am not a polite person when it comes to the truth."
I haven't spoken to Ben since, and don't expect to. He had nothing to say, since I would not be his friend enough to let him relate to me the entire warped sequence by which he justified his own beliefs.
Perhaps this is why I only have a few friends even here in Berkeley, and the Bay Area: because I so value a clear statement and a clean argument, even if it means often that the conclusions reached thereby are depressing, demeaning, or unflattering.
That valuation is not common, nor perhaps, even socializing. I read enough social science to know that societies, small and large, are built on little lies designed to soften the unworkable truth that we all die, that the universe has no purpose, that God is not our friend, that humans are easily xenophobic, often mistaken, and untrue friends.
So be it. On this weekend of Memorials to the millions who have died in pointless religious wars, greed wars, and manipulative wars, I'm not inclined to succumb to the jingoistic concept of America the Exceptional. I've read the Constitution through many times, and have often praised its profound reading of human nature and the requisites for governance of a stable (note that word!) society.
Stability requires lying, stability requires truth. So which is true?
Both. It depends on who is lying, and for what reasons, and who is believing the lies, and for what reasons.
People live by lies because, as the man said "Mister, you can't handle the truth!"
Maybe you putter along in the easy belief that almost everyone can handle the truth. I don't know, because you never talk about them, perhaps due to a compact you've made with yourself about the world you live in, and the social penalties imposed on those who speak the truth, without regard for whose God is impugned, whose unfaltering patriotism is analyzed, whose SUV is maligned, whose inability to see everyone in the world as equal in rights to Americans.
I run a hard course, Friend, and that jackass Evan Sayet ain't even close to understanding it. I don't hate America, but I think she's been betrayed by those who won't understand that the basic requirement for democracy is clear knowledge of the truth.
The most significant comment on this is from Ben Franklin, atheist, inventor, author and friend of the ladies: when asked, on emerging from the hall where the Constitution had just been signed, what kind of government we now had, said "A Republic, if you can keep it!"
I took that to mean that he understood that human governance depends on humans maintaining their highest standards of understanding of the world, and he also understood that the men who hammered out the Constitution understood, as he did, that handing the responsibility for governance to representatives elected by popular vote was at best risky, because popular vote depends on being popular, and the truth has never been popular.
We see that today, with 70% of Americans being willing to say they believe in angels, more than half thinking Iraq was connected to 9/11, and when universal health care is dismissed as socialism. These are foolish, lazy things to think, and I'm sure at times you know that.
But it doesn't enter into your fortress of rhetoric, just like I'm not allowed in Ben's, because I know where the key foundation block is, and I have a crowbar.
So, if you understand what I'm getting at, and are offended, I understand. Been nice knowing ya, but I'm not about to start watching Evan Sayet or David Horowitz or Ann Coulter, or any of the sell-outs of the fright-wing talk show circuit. I know why they sit around and backslap each other into thinking they live in the greatest nation on earth, with the biggest military (right now) and the best standard of living (for them).
I'm not interested in listening to someone tell me that something called a Liberal always sides with evil, is dedicated to teenage promiscuity, hates America, has no morals, can have no morals since they don't believe in God, etc. etc.
I already have many many discussion with people who carefully follow the rules of evidence-based thinking, understand you can construct morality from three kids in a sandbox, and the distinction between what you want to believe and what unobligingly exists.
Remember the soldiers. They didn't need to die, just like the next ten thousand who will die for sloppy thinking, greed and faith.
Ormond Memorial Day 2007
Incidentally, I will be posting this as a diary. Your name will not appear, although your persona will. Nobody knows I know you, except as "a longtime friend from high school who although very smart, is too comfortable to think hard thoughts."
Ain't I diplomatic? Prove me wrong. Start by admitting there is no evidence for God (I know proof is impossible.) Then analyze Straussian politics using cognitive science and governance theory staying always with the best scientific evidence, free of patriotism and appeals to America the Beautiful.
If you can't do that, then why should we talk? About them Cubbies, the weather, the burning Everglades? Soon enough. Got your food and water supplies laid away?