Now that we're in the era of fake news, I'm going to retell a story in which I get every single detail wrong. In the Native American Philosophy class I took in college, we read a story about a small band of Hopi Indians who organized a protest against the Apollo 11 mission in mid-1969. The group objected on religious grounds to NASA's plan to put humans on the moon. According to their cosmology, the moon was a living deity. If humans set foot on the moon and demonstrated it to be a rock and not a living, sentient thing (at least in the traditional definition of life and sentience) their entire religion would be upended. For that reason, Armstrong & Co's fateful mission was a threat to their reality.
I remember reading this and musing that the Hopi were being comically naive. Not for their belief that the moon was a god, but for their belief that religion couldn't withstand the onslaught of physical reality. Religion exists independently of evidence; it's not like Christianity suffered a setback when humans realized death was permanent. Reality, at least as defined as the realm of observable phenomena, doesn't really overlap much with the intelligent application of religion. They occupy different spheres of experience and demand different heuristics.
Physical reality is unavoidable. You could decree it illegal to eat food by the word of god, but you'd be founding history's shortest-lived cult. In this life, in these bodies, you need to honor physical truths. That necessity extends from your bodily needs all the way up to what we know about physics, and neuroscience, and biology. That knowledge demands to be heeded. And doing so really doesn't doom anything about your religion as long as your religion is worth a damn.
A worthy religion expresses philosophies of happiness and ethics and ontology as opposed to your run-of-the-mill primitive attempts at science. Humankind grew out of those first imaginings of science 3,000 years ago at latest, with the empiricism of the Greeks, and probably in many other cultures before that. People should be embarrassed to still subscribe to literal interpretations of any deific text, especially when they're contradicted by better methods of discovery.
So why the fuck am I talking about all of this. Well, because I'm celebrating no longer feeling guilty.
The night of the election, I was awake well past the point where victory was called for Trump, writing different things to myself. At first I was trying to beat the rush of people posting to Facebook. Soon realizing I was too jumbled mentally to offer intelligent analysis, I settled for stabbing out little philippics against everything that had led to that point. I hated Clinton. The media. Urban elites. Everybody. But every time I set in on one of these groups, I felt something pulling me back. I didn't really feel that angry at Clinton. I felt pity for her, for the fact that she gambled her campaign on the trust that American voters would prefer an emotionally mediocre candidate who was responsible, over a basally evocative maniac with no grip on reality. (There's that word again.) Honestly, I was just pissed at Americans.
But not all Americans. Even then it was clear that a majority of votes were coming in for Clinton. No, I was pissed at the Trump people. The know-nothings who had not so much conceded to Trump's cynical war against facts, but demanded it. People who blood-lusted for the destruction of knowable reality. People so culturally primitive that they resented the mere specter of education, and its confidence and its natural broadening of the mind, and perceived it as a threat. Those people saw Trump confounding the class of people who do know things, at every turn, and they loved it. Fucking idiots.
But after I wrote my millennial-required post-election missive, which was the most brutal takedown of these rubes I could dash off between Wednesday meetings, I started to feel bad again. I felt sorry for the decades of political neglect that left those people so violently bitter against elites that they jumped at the first, worst option conceivable, simply because he talked to them.
Then I read this article. It's called, "On Rural America: Understanding Isn't the Problem," and it made me pissed off at those people once again.
The idea in the article is that redneck rubes don't hate liberals and modernity because they're economically depressed. They hate it because it's a threat to the world they want to live in, which is a world of closed intellectual borders and supernatural order. And as long as there exists a class of people who want to interfere with this constructed reality, they will resent those people. Modernity is the enemy.
This explanation rings a bell. It justifies why a "post-truth" era is good for these people: because it razes everyone's knowledge down to zero. And why "liberals" have become such a comical boogeyman to them. It's not just the increased partisanship. Or rather, this era's hyperpartisanship maybe didn't come out of nowhere. It's a defense mechanism deployed by rubes.
Truthfully, this isn't even a foreign feeling to me, a college-educated twentysomething living in Libtard HQ, Brooklyn. The scope of what is knowable in the world has increased in immensity over the course of my life, and it is extremely daunting to be part of. I mean I remember when "the information superhighway" became a vaguely ominous term. The best explanation of this phenomenon came to me via one of the most influential articles I've ever read, this piece in TechCrunch from last year. It posits knowledge as a fraction: the numerator is what you know, and the denominator is what you know exists about the world. It's the old knowledge vs. metaknowledge vs. ignorance idea; I know I don't know Russian, but I have no conception of an idea of what life is like for some Aboriginal tribe I've never heard of. The information age hasn't so much expanded our numerators as made it easier for them to expand. But in doing so, it's absolutely exploded our denominators. The individual has never been more aware of how little he knows than right now. It animates Socrates' definition of wisdom with palpable existential angst.
Since this is my own blog and I am allowed to draw the most digressive connections possible, I'd like to point out that in Don DeLillo's Underworld, I saw a glimpse of a life lived in total mastery of information. One of that novel's central themes is the command over nature and knowledge enjoyed by middle-class Americans of the mid-20th century. Maybe the defining theme of the American character over the last few decades is precisely this democratization of metaphysical mastery; that while kings and emperors have always enjoyed certainty about how the world works and where its movers lie, in America of the 1950s, that certainty belonged to even middle-class people. The context is that ours was an economically powerful, culturally nimble society that had just won an epic war with the use of science, and that science kept on serving our every needs. There's a great scene of a suburban household in the 50s or 60s in that book, in which the wife remarks that Jell-O is a push-button food, the way so much of the world is push-button these days. Just total confidence in one's grasp of the world: we're on top, the Others are godless, what Walter Cronkite says is true, and once I know that truth, I'm as educated as I need to be. It must have been incredible.
That luxury was annihilated when the internet congregated all humanity into one consciousness. It's a process that is still underway; even today, societies online still follow the old geopolitical boundaries. That won't be the case forever. It might not remain the case throughout my natural lifetime. If people flock to other people like them, and if politics runs on emotion, then states are already obsolete and they have no idea for countering it. The global gathering of Christians and the global gathering of artists and so on. It'll take a generation for each successive evisceration of traditional society to be processed fully. And I'll tell you what, fighting it only makes the transition harder.
To those of us who have put our faith in human knowledge, we've dealt with our submersion into infinite knowledge in a way I consider to be reasonable. For one thing, we consume more. With the ability to learn more, you do exactly that. But also, you start to put more stock in the testimony of people who really know what they're talking about. We live in an age of experts and specialization; they have never been more valuable to those of us looking to stretch our intellects as wide as they can go. What it means practically to put stock in experts is to start speaking quantitatively a lot more consistently. Numbers have always been humanity's bedrock connection to cosmic truth, to paraphrase Ursula LeGuin, and with data, you can apply the same test of rigor across disciplines. Disraeli's warning about the veracity of statistics being granted, numbers allow anecdotal knowledge to scale. I remember in a learning book I once read, seeing someone reference the idea that in the information-swamped future, "we may leverage the cognitive benefits of autism." If we do, it'll be because that future will demand a fluency with numbers in every area of life.
But that's our adaptation as educated self-imagined intellecutals. To the people who still believe that Jesus is heading back right quick, there's really no defense to this explosion in socially acceptable knowledge. In fact, it's offensive. What has science and multi-cultural awareness ever offered a Bible-thumper except dismissal from every angle? Not only is your creation story bullshit, it says, but I can show you a thousand other examples of folk myths exactly like yours. You worship ideas created when man was on his ascent out of the slime. And here's proof.
What more could someone so accosted want than to counter-dismiss this intrusion? And so that's what they do. They dismiss what is knowable in their textbooks and ignore what is inconvenient in their jingoism. So when Trump comes along preaching exactly the cynicism towards our modern conception of information, which has become the exclusive realm of the relative intelligentsia, he's chiming right with them.
If this rendering of the situation here is accurate, that points to one solution: we elites need to more aggressively dismiss superstition.
My assumption is that of all the cultural conventions worth protecting, only one threatens you on a level even deeper than your identity. And that's religion.
Religion, of course, exists in the first place because it answers the fundamental question for any sentient thing: what happens after I die? (In fact, I'm down to make that question the single definiens of a human's level of consciousness.) I don't think it's possible for our species to obtain a satisfying answer, so for that reason, religion or religion-like conjecture will always exist. And given that we have equally uncertain answers about why we exist, what constitutes happiness, and what "the good" is, and given how un-intrepid most people are in imagining answers to these questions, I think it's fine that satisfying philosophies popularize into religions. But there needs to be a conscious, deliberate, culture-wide tightening of the permissible role of this philosophy. We no longer need it to tell us how the earth was physically formed, for example. We need to shut the Overton window on religion to its proper place.
There's precedent for this. In our culture, it's already seen as savage to do what Christian Scientists do, and deprive your child of life-saving medicine in the name of God. The average religious person doesn't follow the Bible's dietary or cultural norms. Hell, the fastest-growing form of Evangelical Christianity in America is about God's ability to build your wealth, which contravenes pretty much everything in the New Testament. God is already a designer product. We just need to shave some authority off the whole enterprise.
This work has been largely done by the New Atheists, which in light of this argument of mine, were truly prophets ahead of their time. Though Dawkins et al originally stepped out to counter the political rise of Evangelicism in the Bush years, the cultural isolation it creates remains a definitive force in American life. It makes people jealous — insanely jealous — of their cosmologies. And until they feel comfortable letting that go, they will oppose any incursion of the modern world into their lives. The United States will have an increasingly outdated, out-of-touch population of restives who have no idea how to contend with a world that's only going to get more complicated. That's no good.
Once religion ceases to be an acceptable source for answering how old the earth is, as it was for Marco Rubio in an interview in 2012, there won't be any harm in accepting the rest of what cutting-edge human insight has to offer. Is this optimistic? Condescending? I don't care. The God they worship isn't real and He's getting in the way of progress.
We live in a world of admittedly terrifying epistemology. Our denominators are huge. But the so-called "elites" or "coastal libs" or whatever the fuck else those red-state populations we're supposed to be listening to, call us, we're doing a much better job of handling our generation's defining shift into onslaught-ignorance. If the superstitious can stop guarding their delicate falsehoods and strengthen their minds, they'll be able to hack living in the modern world, threat-free.
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