The Death Of Reason

I'm enjoying time with my new baby and, consequently, a short break from blogging. The break is particularly refreshing because of the increasingly self-evident fact that no amount of arguments, logic, proof or reason will sway those who are determined to follow Bush's neo-conservative line.

How do you argue with people who will not acknowledge facts, evidence or objective reality? What's the point in seeking to illuminate harsh truths, when people prefer the Hollywood story-line of Bush's idiot fantasy?

This piece from the Nashua Advocate gives a voice to that growing sense of frustration:

Only where science fails, and the dynamic, almost cellular movement of God in the hearts of men flags, can the Golden Age of Men encroach...

Time was when we knew the earth's atmosphere was damaged. We knew global temperatures were rising at an alarming pace, several degrees warmer on average, this year, than seventy years ago. We knew not because someone simply told us it was so, but because someone had proven it was so... Dilemma, query, thesis, diagnosis, resolution, prognosis, logic, rationality, conclusion.

The Bush Administration, in practiced and professional form, took this bright splay of human ingenuity, this interplay between the scientific community and the lay community--man's supposition, made in faith, coupled with man's integrity, in seeking proof--and snuffed it out right quick.

Suddenly we were told that science was at odds with itself, it did not know what it had purported to know, it could no longer tell what it had purportedly already told in lectures, in studies, in publications, in presentations, in charts, in data, in volumes and volumes of accumulated wisdom.

The horse was put back in the barn.

The waters reversed course and flowed back under the bridge.

The ship retreated to its dock.

Team Bush had found a scientist or two, the renegades and rogues and used car salesmen of their profession, to say those things neo-conservative Team Bush wanted or needed so desperately to hear: we (said the renegades and rogues) the gathered purveyors of formerly indisputable, as-you-say scientific fact, don't really don't know anything at all.

Science presents no threat to your beliefs (or policies) such that you must amend them or vacate them entirely.

And what a racecourse of anti-intellectualism that set this country upon.

Like dominoes on a prepared track, the things we thought we knew were suddenly once more just unevolved masses in the Great Unknown: abstinence education might still work; a strategic missile-defense system might still work; Social Darwinists might yet be deserving of our thanks (were any of them still alive to receive it) in postulating that the poor are poor because the poor are lazy; global warming might be no more than the myth we secretly had hoped it to be; the roulette-wheel of the stock market might yet be the most sound frame upon which to weave our nation's civic safety net; the saturation of legally-sold guns into suburbia might yet make these bedroom communities safer, rather than more treacherous through random acts of passion, confusion, accident, unchecked impulse; holy wars between the great religions might yet be more holy than all other wars combined, less fraught with evil deeds and evil consequences; juveniles might yet defy a generation of psychiatrists and prove themselves as morally developed as men and women thirty years their senior; corporations might yet be such superlative stewards of the public trust that they, and not the humans who populate them, will ever remain most deserving of generous tax treatment; journalism might be merely an art, not a profession, and nothing one could quantify, anyway, with standards, or credentials, or bona fides, or curricula vitae, or degrees, or experience, or concentric circles of objectivity mapped upon a foundational, bedrock belief in integrity.

All in all, life in America became Something It Had Not Been.

A Death to Excellence.

A Death to Experience.

But more than that, too:

The Death of Knowledge.

The Death of Wisdom.

The Death of Fact.

The Death of Proof.

The Death of Distinctions.

The Death of Science.

The Death of Reason...

What matters, Today, is not so much being right--is not, in fact, getting it right--but getting it into the public consciousness with the most volume, the earliest, the most-often, with the most vitriol, a biting wit, an acerbic tongue, a knowing glance, a honeyed voice, a terrorizing bit of "oppo," a smear, a grimace, a smirk, an act...

Neo-conservatism does not intend, nor hope for, nor work toward God moving in the hearts of men.

It intends, rather, to appropriate, for its own ends, the profound electricity of millions of hearts moving toward God.