Lessons

Lessons

by Marco M. Pardi

“Nothing has more retarded the advancement of learning than the disposition of vulgar minds to ridicule and vilify what they cannot comprehend.” Samuel Johnson 1751

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“Yeah. Capital punishment. That oughta teach ’em.” Tricia Nixon, daughter of then President Richard M. Nixon.

I remember being stunned silent by the “logic” portrayed in that utterance. But then, she was an ardent Republican, a cult not known for intellectual development. Nevertheless, as a first time parent and a relatively new college instructor it set me to thinking about other concepts of lessons. Until the age of 15, when I dropped the pretense of believing in a religion, I had been schooled by teachers who, despite their subject, found ways to inform and remind us that we all were born into Original Sin, condemned to Hell by Eve’s gustatory mistake unless we were absolved through a very specific line of baptism. Wait a minute. Wasn’t that Eve’s lesson to learn? How did I get dragged into this? So some guy commits a murder and we all have to line up for a seat on Old Sparky? It seemed that someone was conflating lesson with punishment. And when did group punishment become acceptable, beyond the actions of dictatorships on battlefields? At least the Romans practiced decimation. When a legion showed cowardice in battle the survivors were formed in ranks and every 10^th man was killed, coward or not. And no one called it anything other than punishment. After all, it’s hard to say a dead man learned his lesson. Maybe the survivors learned a lesson. Those of us experienced in combat learned early that you can’t hurt a dead guy anymore, or teach him new tricks.

Around the same time the Nixon crowd was in the White House the “New Age” movement was quickly growing. Well, why not? In VietNam General Westmoreland had us looking for the light at the end of the tunnel – which turned out to be an oncoming NVA battalion. President Nixon was telling us that ketchup was a vegetable. And something is not illegal if the President does it. Disney World was opening in Central Florida. The ultra fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell started his Moral Majority (it was neither) movement and one-stop mega churches sprouted across the land like hallucinogenic mushrooms while televangelists bilked stay-at-home old folks out of their Social Security checks. The Scopes Trial was revisited as schools were pressured to give equal time to “Intelligent Design”. It was an era of Pick Your Fantasy.

But the New Age movement brought in a revised curriculum, revised because it altered a core religious idea (life’s purpose as a physical classroom to develop a spiritual entity, your soul, through certain approved lessons) and turned it to their own purposes. Whole forests fell to the demands of publishers hawking books on life’s purpose, and buying such books was high on many a list. I, however, had different priorities.

While taking a graduate course in Criminology I spent some time with road crew chain gangs in a Southern state. Group punishment was enforced on them when one of them, out hacking weeds with the crew, attempted escape. Sometimes one or more prisoners were unshackled so they could get into the sloping weeds. Of course, a guard on a horse could ride them down or shoot them before they got far. But the thinking was that the others must have known of the escapee’s intent and, not having snitched on him, they were deserving of punishment. That seemed to work, though it must also have inspired the escapee to try harder since he didn’t want a beating once returned to the prison. Logic. Not exactly a pleasant way to employ logic, but there it is.

More peaceful opportunities to employ logic presented themselves in the form of physicians I knew in one context or another. Several of them were very highly ranked in their field. Yet, although religion seldom came up I knew a few of them were devout believers, even some in what are considered the more primitive forms of religion, such as absolutely literal belief in the Bible.

These few devout physicians bothered me. Even those who believed in mainline religions seemed puzzling. I knew they must have been exposed to science at some point in their education, yet at least a couple of them believed the universe and all that’s in it was created in six days, all current life forms descended from those forms lucky enough to score tickets for Noah’s cruise ship, a virginal woman in the Middle-East got impregnated by a god and delivered a god. Something just didn’t make sense. But then……………the clouds parted and a thought came down.

These people weren’t scientists; they were highly skilled technicians. They were excellent at applying the lessons learned for them by scientists but they were not scientists. And that was a lesson for me.

Others, specifically the mega church pastors cited above, seemed to have learned a lesson as well. Thumbing through my worn copy of Lord Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy I again came across his explanation of how the early rock stars of science, Kepler, Newton et al, pulled us from the abyss of the Dark Ages. Remember the Holy Roman Empire, the seamless blend of singular and dogmatic theology with autocratic politics? Russell explains how The Reformation fractured the hold the Roman Church had on Europe, allowing the formation of multiple dissenting churches, each too weak to control national politics in their home countries as the Roman Church had for so long. Thus, more books were published and fewer developing scientists went up in smoke at the stake.

But it seems no good lesson goes unturned into nefarious ends. Falwell proclaimed credit, largely due, for getting the Ronald Reagan cult into the White House by absorbing the then Republican party as a largely owned subsidiary. But the power brokers in the Evangelical movement realized their lasting strength could come only from the ground up. They began infiltrating local school boards, library boards, county commissions, election boards, local media and all other institutions of influence on the public mind. As national media conglomerates expanded and solidified more and more local markets found themselves narrowed into echo chamber offerings which, in the case of television, became peppered with “eye candy” faux journalists and college drop-outs.

Furthermore, long sworn denominational enemies who had engaged in some of the bloodiest internecine warfare in history, overcame their animus through discovery of common ground: abortion, contraception, and the threat logical science posed to their fantasies. The growing distrust and outright hostility to science played well for the primary funders of the Republican Party, the fossil fuel industry, and its cover up of the deadly climate change they well knew was coming.

Once again the stage was set for holy combat with science and the dangerous powers of the free and logical intellect. Today we are seeing books and videos banned, even burned in a reenactment of Fahrenheit 451. I remember the priest announcing the weekly book and movie ban at each Sunday Mass during the 1950’s. As far as I know, the Roman church stopped doing that as they might have noticed how it boosted sales. Today no conscious person can have missed the furor over “Critical Race Theory” in K-12 schools, a non-issue since almost no one knows what it really is and it isn’t taught below the college level. Several States have re-engineered their voting laws to ensure that people likely to vote Democrat, and thus support efforts to curb climate change, are less able to vote. Draconian anti-abortion and even anti-contraception laws are proliferating across those same States. But the Ring Which Binds Them All, at least for now, is the issue of common sense defenses against a very dangerous and easily transmitted virus.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against stupid people dying. I do have an issue with stupid people seriously damaging or killing those who try to act responsibly. I have an issue with stupid people filling up hospitals and thereby denying needed care to those with serious chronic or emergency conditions. I do have an issue with stupid people conflating freedom with lack of responsibility.

So what lesson do I take from this? Keep my mouth shut and my head down, or speak out? I hope you are asking yourselves the same.