Discovery

Slow month in June; less than 20 hits a day on my blog.  It is months like that which make me question why I continue to share my thoughts.  Am I kidding myself to think that anyone cares to read my opinions?  Am I fooling myself to think that my writing is cogent, thoughtful, relevant, or any other term one might consider a compliment?

I rationalize the time I spend in this endeavor with the possibility that someday my posts will be read by someone of influence who will find them important enough to share within their circle of followers.  Or perhaps a particular opinion or thought might inspire someone to act in such a way that the world is better for it.  Or even that in continuing to record my thoughts, small ripples of change might begin their long journey towards an unknown shore, effecting behavior or a future philosophy in a positive way.

Or, perhaps, that those in my small circle of influence might feel better for having read them.

A resurgence of interest from Russia has me wondering.  In the past I have received some very nasty comments from a few Russian readers, making me think they might be the source of activity in that country.  Is negative interest better than no interest at all?  Is our president's fascination with Putin generating interest in that country for the opinions of Americans, even someone as obscure as myself?

Just finishing the Spring edition of Lapham's Quarterly, called Discovery.  As usual, many fascinating articles, essays, thoughts on the subject from the depths of history.  A few that I took note of.

In the opening essay by Lewis Lapham, founder and continued inspiration behind the quarterly, he laments the rise of the machine, and our burgeoning dependence on technology for our information. This is not to say that being able to access Laphams digitally is a problem, but that in our growing dependence on our phones and tablets for information, we too often eschew the knowledge of the past, alluded to in Goethe's observation, that he who cannot draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth.  Lahpam's further comment that the failure to connect the past to the present, the present to the past, "breeds delusions of omniscience and omnipotence, which lead in turn to factories at Auschwitz and the emptiness of President Donald Trump."

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A snippet from Vera Rubin's Women's Work, recounts how, as an astronomy student at Vassar College in 1947, she wrote a postcard to Princeton University asking for a catalog of the graduate school.  She received a nice little note in response from the dean of the graduate school that Princeton did not accept women in its graduate physics and astronomy programs, so he would not be sending along a catalog.  It wasn't until the 1970's that such a thing would happen.

Rubin also recounts how in 1976 when the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum presented as its first planetarium show a history of American astronomy, only male astronomers, all but one white males, were included.  To Rubin, the thousands of little girls who streamed into the show, in addition to learning about space, learned the limitations of their futures as a result of being born female. Repeated efforts by Rubin to request the addition of female astronomers and their contributions were met with a shrug, presumably by white males.

Stories like this make me laugh at the recent rise in white male angst over the perceived slights that the attempts to even the playing field for women and minorities has generated.  I guess practically forever in recorded history is not long enough for them to be given all the advantages!

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From the House of Representatives' report on the Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011, a bill was voted on in the House which would prohibit the administrator of the EPA (that is Environmental Protection Agency, lest you forget, an agency created during Nixon's Administration) from "promulgating any regulation concerning, taking any action relating to, or taking into consideration the emission of greenhouse gas to address climate change".  During the vote, three amendments were offered by the Democratic minority, one which would accept the scientific evidence that climate change is unequivocal, one that would accept scientific evidence that greenhouse gases are the root cause of the observed climate changes, and the third that the public health of current generations ins endangered, and that the threat to public health will continue to increase as greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere.

Laphams recounts this episode under the heading "Tyranny of the Majority", reflecting that fact that the GOP majority defeated all amendments, and passed the bill as a way of protecting the fossil fuel industry to the detriment of public health.  Fortunately, the bill did not pass in the Senate. Unfortunately, it is not far-fetched to imagine a similar bill passing both houses, and then be certainly signed by President Trump.

It is understandable why so many voters chose to turn over control of both the executive and legislative branches to the GOP, after the stagnation of the political process the last 6 years of the Obama Administration, but there seems to be a precedent which indicates that when a split government is in place, and the voters hold both parties accountable to the concept that common ground must be found to create a government that considers both majority and minority perspectives, then the majority does not operate in a tyrannical fashion, nor does the minority embrace the role of obstructionism to detriment of all.

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In a 1953 talk General Electric physicist Irving Langmuir, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1932, identified several symptoms of what he called pathological science - that is, "the science of things that aren't so".  A few of his 6 symptoms of Fake News include:

Claims are of great accuracy.

Fantastic theories are contrary to experience

Criticisms are met by ad hoc excuses thought up on the spur of the moment

Finally, in reference again to the recollections of Vera Rubin and the open discrimination she fought as a career scientist, one can only wonder how many achievements were delayed or missed throughout history due to the premise that only white males should be given the opportunity to think, to research, to discover.  The good news is that the genie is out of the bottle.  When given the same opportunity and resources as their white male counterparts, similar levels of achievement, success, and innovation are attained by men and women, regardless of race, ethnicity, or any other means by which humans limit those who are different from themselves.  Especially in the case of women, one might say despite the obstacles placed in their path.

The bad news is that we seem to be in the midst of a cycle that finds the pendulum swinging in the wrong direction in this matter.  Let's hope that we can recover from our misdirection, and discover (again) that the nature of inspiration lands equally in the minds of all and every type of human, and that to fully take advantage of that muse we must reject the notion that She prefers one gender, one race, one country over the rest.