Today I was noticing bumper stickers as I was driving home from work. One guy had the Darwin Fish being swallowed by the Truth Fish. (Actually they’re not completely swallowed; it looks more like the Darwin Fish is caught in the Truth Fish’s throat. Which makes sense, really; the Jesus Fish crowd does kind of choke on Darwin. But I digress.) Darwin Fish/Truth Fish indicates a creationist. Other stickers of note: “Before you were formed in the womb, I knew you. -God.” So that one’s an antiabortionist. I saw this one stuck on a sign: “9/11 Was An Inside Job.” Conspiracy theorist. “Never drive faster than your angels can fly.” Just plain stupid, that one. You see this kind of thing all around you in America, every day, and you sort of get inured to it. But for some reason today they stood out, and I found myself asking a simple question:
How does America continue to function when so many Americans are just plain crazy?
Not just crazy, either, but proudly crazy. Boldly and vocally crazy. Besides the obvious foolishness of christianity as Americans practice it, we have “birthers” who believe the president isn’t a citizen, scientologists, homeopaths, New Age bullshit, orbs and chakra and bible codes and holocaust deniers and moon landing deniers and all sorts of other nutball stuff. Astrology, for pete’s sake. I can’t believe that’s still with us. Somewhere out there I’m sure there are people who think the little slips of paper inside fortune cookies are real messages from some genuine cosmic oracle, or the Magic 8 Ball really does tell the future, and I’ll bet there’s a Church of Elvis, too. In any rational or reasonably civilized society, people holding these opinions and others like them would be objects of general hilarity; you’d be ashamed to show your face in public if people knew you believed in angels and demons. But in the USA, if you have an irrational belief, there’s a bumper sticker for it, so people who’ve never even met you can know you’re proudly nuts just by driving behind you.
How do we function? Seriously, how? We have a culture that not only tolerates irrational stupidity, it actually encourages it. We make a business out of it. Here we are, a decade into the 21st century now. Everyone has a cell phone and a computer and a car, and some of us have access to amazing lifesaving medical care, and we have a thousand other benefits of science and technology that simply didn’t exist a hundred years ago. Quite a lot of them didn’t exist even a generation ago. We live in this high-complexity world, surrounded by products of science and reason; and our culture is shaped around it, or by it; and yet huge chunks of our population are walking around with very little understanding of how it all works, because they don’t have the mental tools to grasp it. The spot in their brains where reason and logic should live is occupied instead by the same superstitions that have been holed up there for generations upon generations. You’d reasonably expect a high-tech society to be run by intelligent, thoughtful people; instead we have people who think god has a perfect plan for the universe but will put it aside for your benefit if you murmur a few words to the empty air.
People who can’t think (or won’t, which is nearly functionally equivalent in this context) would seem clearly unsuitable for the task of operating our society. And yet we muddle on, although I can’t see how we will manage to do so indefinitely. Our muddling latitude is almost over. I don’t know how much longer the rest of the world will put up with it, especially if the muddle-heads get in charge of the government again, which is looking increasingly likely. The “tea party” movement is basically a group of know-nothing reactionaries who wear their crass anti-intellectualism on the outside as if it were a medal or some sort of ghetto bling for Republicans. They don’t want to think; they want to be told what to think, by a book with onionskin pages, or a preacher reading it to them and telling them what they should believe it means, or some loutish loudmouth on television whose idea of winning a debate is to shout the other guy down for two and a half minutes. If this crowd gets back in the driver’s seat, well, it’s like letting the dog drive the car. Just because he can put his paws on the wheel doesn’t mean he can steer.
We often sneer at the muslim world because they are stuck in the 9th century ideawise. Well, so are we. Maybe not all of us, but a lot of us. We think we’re superior because we have a higher standard of living and are surrounded by tech toys and the benefits of affluence, but that won’t last long. If we’re going to live our lives by 9th-century philosophies and refuse to take on the responsibility of living in the modern world, then we won’t have the modern world much longer; we’ll join Afghanistan in the 9th century soon enough. Autopilot will only take us so far; eventually someone’s got to be at the controls.
And overtly crazy people are just not qualified.
Since you’ve mentioned it, there’s something I keep wondering about. Why is the 911 Inside Job theory the preserve of the Right? Over here it’s more of a radical-left notion. And that makes a lot more sense. If 911 really was an inside job, what sort of people do they imagine did that job, and for what purpose? How can a person believe that (for example) Cheney commissioned the hit, and then go to the tea parties to rail against godless socialist terrorist-loving commie liberals who opposed the GWOT and the Patriot Act and so forth, as they seem to be doing. Correct me if I’m wrong about their affiliation. I mean, do they really think the junior senator for Illinois dunnit?
I guess that only goes to reinforce your point, huh? It’s probably the junk-food additives……
The Cui Bono principle would certainly point towards any 911 inside job being a right wing conspiracy. It certainly did give them the “Pearl Harbor”, as Cheney had famously said before the attacks, that the right needed to implement their police state/world hegemony agenda. In addition to motive, the right also had opportunity that the left simply did not. And there are “inside job” theorists on the left. A few. But I think a lot more people on the right believe Obama was indoctrinated as a child in Indonesia to go into deep cover where he would play some future role in these attacks.
It gets so cartoony that it’s tempting to think that these people don’t really exist in large numbers, that the media is using a few nuts to pump up ratings, except that I keep meeting them. Just last night I got into a discussion with a climate change denier. One can always cast doubt on causal relationships, even on the concept of causality itself. But it’s a lot harder to deny that climate change is happening, even as the extent of human causality remains in debate. This guy was different. He went straight from his desires–I want to drive a big car. I want to go fast. I want to crank my AC in the summer and my heat in the winter. I want. I want. He went straight from me, me, me, to a purported fact that science supports that his desires are rational and correct, that anyone who wants to conserve energy or develop alternate energy sources, is being duped by a massive left wing conspiracy. Weird!
“This guy was different. He went straight from his desires….”
So, if we (we non-musicians, I mean) should take it into our heads to desire to be surrounded by beautiful and adoring women, where can we find the science to support this? X-)
Argh, I have definitely had my fill of fundamentalism since moving from a reasonably sane Fayettevile to rural Arkansas, and I am most definitely not as tolerant toward it as I used to be. I had a run-in with a complete whackjob at Wal Mart a few weeks ago. The lady had SHARPIED her truck with the nuttiest religious sayings imaginable. She accosted me in the parking lot and went on a 10-minute rant on how we need to stand up for our Christian nation and fight against the Muslims that are trying to take it over. I got a picture of the truck, and the only reason I haven’t blogged about it yet is because the internet sucks here and I can’t get it uploaded. But she was 10 kinds of crazy. Then I go to my parents’ house and see all kinds of kooky Creationist bullshit lying around. While I made dinner, my dad was watching a sermon on DVD where the preacher talked about how Jesus was the rebar of the human body and he LITERALLY held every MOLECULE of our bodies together.
If I don’t get out of here soon, I am going to have a nervous breakdown.
Laura, if you can email me the picture, I’ll host it here and you can just link to it in your blog.
Taken to its logical conclusion, this means Jesus’ direct intervention is responsible for serial killers and vicious pedophiles not spontaneously decomposing into their component atoms. If it weren’t for Jesus holding them together, they’d disintegrate and we wouldn’t have to worry about them any more.
Way to go, Jesus.
For all who haven’t seen this: http://www.theonion.com/articles/god-hinting-at-retirement,17747/