David Lynch’s Hilarious 1984 “Dune”

Trolling Netflix, my wife and I stumbled upon David Lynch’s 1984 film, “Dune.” I’d read the Frank Herbert sci-fi novel in the ’70s; hadn’t remembered this film version; nor seen the more recent one.

“1984?” My wife said. “This will be retro.” Boy was she right.

Lynch, a major film auteur, both wrote the screenplay and directed, so it seemed worth watching. And the cast was stellar, including Patrick Stewart, Jose Ferrer, Max von Sydow, and Francesca Annis. But Lynch seemed to make this a clownish parody of old sci-fi Flash Gordon type flicks. Instructing the actors to deliver their lines as woodenly as possible.

Though set millennia hence, the ambience is very mid-Twentieth Century. Lots of military uniforms evoking that era. Early on, an alien being visiting the (human) galactic emperor arrives in what resembles a locomotive — replete with steam hissing from side-pipes.

The hero, Paul Atreides, is first seen working at a desktop computer. Computers existed in 1984, but personal ones weren’t yet really a thing.

So this scene was meant to look futuristic. Yet Paul’s set-up seemed a lot clunkier than what I’ve long had. Amazing how far back 1984 was.

The villain is a cartoon one, with standard cackling, his face afflicted with nasty boils, which some creepy medic is working to relieve — or accentuate? — when first we meet the S.O.B. His name, presciently enough, is Vladimir.

And what was up with those preposterous furry eyebrows on what should have been some serious characters?

My wife and I were laughing our heads off at almost every scene. After we watched about a third of the film, I checked Wikipedia to learn whether this was in fact meant to be a comedy. It was not. Reviews were mostly ghastly. The special effects seemed amateurish given the movie’s bloated budget. The story an incoherent mess. The film deservedly bombed.

After I briefed my wife on my findings, we deliberated and reached a joint decision to forgo watching the rest.

And then we viewed the much better 2021 Dune film (actually only Part One, the second part due in 2024). Not nearly as funny; the technology far whizzier; but again a bizarre mash-up of futuristic and throwback. (This story unfolds about 8000 years hence — assuming they’re still using AD dates.)

Much here evokes Imperial Rome, and even older civilizations. Looked like some Assyrian style reliefs. Would they really still have titles like “Duke?” And I keep reading articles in The Economist on “the future of warfare,” but in this movie it’s hand-to-hand swordplay. Combatants do have some kind of flashy force field — functionless as far as I could tell, except to give these atavistic scenes a sci-fi vibe. Doesn’t keep hapless soldiers from being mowed down in droves.

My Marriage

In all my years of blogging, I’ve barely touched upon my life’s central thing: my marriage with Therese Broderick. (I’ve eschewed boastfulness, humility being one of my great virtues.) November 27 is our 35th anniversary.

A recent David Brooks column deems marriage under-appreciated. Many younger Americans, he says, feel that one’s profession is the core of life, with marriage like icing on the cake. Wrong, argues Brooks: “if you have a great career and a crappy marriage, you will be unhappy, but if you have a great marriage and a crappy career, you will be happy.” He cites a study showing that while income does enhance happiness, marriage is a much more powerful factor.

But Americans are marrying later, if ever. Brooks reports that in 1980, only 6% of 40-year-olds had never been married. It was 25% in 2021. Around 50% of children have single parents. Economic as well as socio-cultural factors shape these trends. Males are falling behind women in education, making them less marriageable. Many folks aren’t even looking to hitch up. And I think a lot of marriages fail because people are too focused on themselves — too selfish if you will. A great irony, because if you let that undermine your marriage, you aren’t really serving your self after all, but wrecking what could be the greatest contributor to overall happiness.*

A key reason why marriage can be so fulfilling is our being wired by evolution for sociability (because greater social cooperation conferred an adaptive advantage). And while earlier people typically married for other reasons (economic, familial, etc.), modern marriage often provides one’s richest human connection.

Certainly true in my own case — though it’s no normal story. I was a loner kid, had somehow missed the standard socialization. By age 23, I’d had nothing to do with girls, was clueless how that even worked. At 5’4″ I was below their radar.

And the notion of someday having a wife literally never occurred to me. My hormones were repressed. But now, newly living on my own, I was suddenly much aware of romantic couples all around — and realized I wanted that.

Eventually, a learning curve did get me a relationship. Nice for a time; less so for the ensuing decade, until the gal found an exit. The long drama with her left me a more mature, wiser man. But all this fraught past history still sticks powerfully in my psyche.

Alone again at forty, through a cold dark winter, I undertook intensive efforts to finally find the woman I craved. I’ve written about comedian Andrew Sloss touting refusal to settle for less than perfection in a mate. Yet I would have settled — rather than waste my life in pursuit of an ideal. I am a romantic but also pragmatic. And to find that 100% perfect partner is seeking the proverbial needle in a haystack.

A local singles organization held an “interactive workshop” on romantic love, posing the question of what objective one centralizes. Among several choices, I picked “commitment.” With that, I believed, a lot could be overcome.

And at that workshop I did find the needle in a haystack after all. Hit the jackpot, really. A razor-sharp mind with a humble integrity of character and the sweetest disposition. Comely too. Therese and I seem preternaturally suited to each other, in our temperaments, outlooks, beliefs, and interests; the frictionless meshing of our lives, our mutual devotion. We don’t have conflicts — each attuned to accommodating the other; we’re not my-way-or-the-highway type people. I’ve told her it’s like we’re a single organism.

A big factor in happiness is an attitude of gratitude. We both have this quite strongly, regarding everything about our lives, with our marriage the anchor. Seeing our glass as way more than half full. She is a joyful, cheerful person, and we share a lot of laughter.

One thing we’re together on is our involvement with a Somaliland school project, including hosting students in our home, with Therese taking the lead. And this intrepid gal even traveled with me to Somaliland! But of course our biggest joint adventure has been raising a daughter, which I think went rather well.

I love Therese’s wide-ranging intellectual curiosity; and especially love being married to a poet. I don’t mean someone who (like many) dabbles at writing verse. For Therese, poetry is her vocation, taking it seriously and dedicated to her craft, active in the poetry scene; all a human flourishing which I honor. For my 75th birthday she produced a wonderful book of poems, humorously celebrating our joint life, which she’d worked on intensively for a year. Our both being deeply into words and language is another source of togetherness.

The physical aspect must be mentioned, of course we’re biological beings. If anything, Therese’s attractiveness to me has actually grown as she’s aged (more so since she started wearing glasses). Looking at her now I see the very archetype of the woman I’d always fancied, and I’m all “Yes!!!” But of course, I’m seeing not just the physical, but all the things about her, and our marriage, that give me pleasure.

Some view love as essentially irrational. One does not fall in love over a balance sheet of a person’s pluses and minuses. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote that our conscious mind is like an elephant rider, thinking they’re in charge. But the elephant is one’s subconscious, going where it wants, and the rider’s main role is coming up with rationales for the direction of travel. Love is a lot like that.

Yet Therese and I are both very rationally mindful people. And even one’s elephant has its reasons, which may be rational ones after all. I did not fall crazily in love with her. I recall thinking at the time how very rational it all was.

That’s not to leave emotion out of it. As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has argued, emotion and reason are inextricable; emotions give us the reasons for deploying reason. The emotionality of my feelings vis-a-vis Therese has also grown over time. I recall seeing the phrase “surprised and delighted” describing how newlyweds feel about their marriage — feelings which typically fade. But I am more surprised and delighted than ever, besotted even. So present to my consciousness it’s almost like a neurotic obsession. Yet still of course it’s not irrational; behind it lie all the rational reasons for those feelings.

Furthermore, even 35 years later, I cannot stop seeing her in the context of all my long ago history. My marriage still does surprise me. Everyone constructs a story line, a narrative arc, fitted to one’s whole life. This is mine. And now I’m in the denouement, the “happily ever after” part.

Similarly, a religious person’s belief system forms a structure within which they see their lives as embedded. My marriage to Therese is my equivalent. My religion: I am a Theresian.

* Note that the marriage picture is worse still in China, whose longtime one-child rule resulted in a shortage of younger people, especially girls (due to a preference for boys). Yet youth unemployment is severe, while owning a home is considered a prerequisite for marriage, and housing prices soar. All presaging fewer weddings. Young people are demoralized; many couples not even having sex (let alone babies).

Criticizing Israel is not Anti-semitism

Predictably, the Middle East horrors bring out, too widely, not humanistic responses, but their antitheses. Ideological pathologies.

The hard left (to borrow a Middle East trope) never misses an opportunity to shove its head up its butt. This we saw after the October 7 atrocity, with some “woke” Palestinian sympathizers saying, essentially, Israelis got what they deserved. Fools saying such things got the condemnation they deserved.

Yes, Israel did sow seeds for the metastasizing enmity. Blindly treating it as an irremediable given; to the exclusion of treating Palestinians as human beings who, in fact, they have no choice about living beside. A reality from which Israel — its government, that is, and the population segment supporting it — has divorced itself.

But none of that excuses, let alone justifies, October 7. In fact, if Hamas are friends of Palestinians, who needs enemies? October 7 was a terrible blow not only against the innocent Israelis butchered, but against Palestinians. Certain to bring down upon them a terrible retribution. That indeed was Hamas’s cynical inhuman calculus — if there was any rational thinking at all.

So defending, in any way, Hamas and what it did, is moral idiocy.

And so is defending what Israel is doing. I heard an otherwise smart observer on the radio (WAMC’s Roundtable) blandly dismissing accusations of genocide because only about 12,000 Palestinians (mostly women and children) have so far been killed.

This word “genocide” has become a moral tarbaby. Yes, thrown around with imprecision; it’s supposed to mean acting with intent to eradicate a people as such. Israel isn’t doing that (though many Israelis probably wish they could). But then the implication often seems to be that if it’s not “genocide” then it’s okay.

The Gaza nightmare might conceivably be rationalized as collateral damage to achieve a worthy objective of destroying Hamas to prevent more October Sevenths. But that cannot in fact be achieved. Israel cannot realistically hope to destroy Hamas, and even if it did, it’s surely aggravating the enmity and thus making recurrences of October 7 more, not less, likely. This is just madness.

Also floating around here are ideas of collective guilt. All Palestinians deserving punishment for what Hamas did. All Israelis — indeed, all Jews — for what Israel’s government does. A barbaric concept of justice (fitting only for a barbaric book like the Bible).

Meantime too, cancel culture has gone into overdrive against notional anti-semitism. Today’s paper reports actor Melissa Barrera tossed from a Hollywood production over online comments using the G-word and “ethnic cleansing,” with Gaza “being treated like a concentration camp.” The same story relates Susan Sarandon dropped by her talent agency for saying Jews “are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country, so often subjected to violence.”

Sarandon’s phraseology may have been injudicious, but I don’t read her as actually justifying anti-semitism. Likewise one can nitpick Barrera’s word choices, but she was calling out actions that are wrong.

The great irony here is that throwing around accusations of anti-semitism is just as objectionable as the supposedly anti-semitic statements being condemned. Indeed, more so — because those statements address something truly fundamentally wrong, whereas condemnations of them torture verbiage to point a finger at a supposed wrong where there really isn’t any. Criticizing Israel’s government and actions is not anti-semitic.

(Disclosure: my ancestry is Jewish. My mother was a German Holocaust refugee. Her grandmother died in a Nazi camp.)

Democracy and the Press: We’re in Trouble

Our democracy is in deep trouble. A big part of that is people unable to tell truth from lies (indeed, reality versus downright crazy) and which news sources to trust. A big part of that has been Trump, calling mainstream media “the enemy of the people.” Really because it’s the enemy of his lies.

Last week Albany had three great events spotlighting journalism’s importance in serving democracy. It “dies in darkness,” the saying goes. It’s all about government being accountable to citizens — which requires having the necessary information — simply knowing what’s going on.

First was the annual Nelly Bly investigative journalism award. Bly was the pen name of an intrepid reporter (1864-1922) who exposed a lot of bad stuff. The award is bestowed by the (so far virtual) Museum of Political Corruption, founded and run by Bruce Roter, in Albany, certainly an appropriate place for it.

This year’s honoree was Anna Wolfe, just 28, a reporter with Mississippi Today. She subsequently also won a Pulitzer. Wolfe unearthed one of her state’s biggest scandals ever. It gets millions from the Feds for anti-poverty efforts, while rejecting 99% of benefit applications.

So where was the money going? Turned out the system was being hugely scammed by insiders and their cronies — who, of course, were not exactly poor. Without dogged journalism like Wolfe’s, nobody would have been wise to this outrage.

Next day featured a panel discussion hosted by the Albany Times-Union, focused on the widespread recession of local journalism, with 30,000 reporters — half the total — lost over the past decade or so.

Mainly it’s because the newspaper business model is under extreme pressure. Papers used to be sustained by print ads, but now advertisers have a lot of other options, especially online. While furthermore, newspaper circulation declines as readers too migrate to online options. Meaning fewer eyeballs for print ads. Newspapers try to compensate by exploiting the internet themselves, but that’s not producing enough revenue.

Another problem is that economic vulture outfits have been buying up local newspapers and then stripping their assets, decimating news teams.

While big city newspapers are hanging in there, the effects of all this are greater for small local papers, resulting in about a fifth of Americans living in “news deserts,” with no source for nitty-gritty civic information. Corruption thrives where “nobody’s minding the store.”

The third event was a pair of panel discussions hosted by the New York State Writers Institute, with the heading “Telling the Truth — The Struggle for America’s Future,” the fifth in an annual series. When the emcee, Institute director Paul Grondahl, quipped about a need for its continuation, the audience laughed. Because they get it.

Unfortunately, too many others don’t. Lacking a foundational baseline understanding of our civic/governmental landscape, making their political notions clueless. (This was what I asked about, both here and at the prior event. Can’t say I got good answers. It’s a wicked problem.)

The first panel featured Franklin Foer, author of The Last Politician, about the Biden presidency, and Miles Taylor, former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff and author of the famous 2018 New York Times “Anonymous” essay — a Trump administration insider’s account of how people like him struggled to stop nightmare stuff.

Taylor quoted his boss, Trump’s Chief of Staff John Kelly, that the picture was “not as bad as it looks” but “so much worse.” Also calling Trump a “very very evil man.” Who terrified most staffers into silence. (But Taylor played some hair-raising voicemail messages he got from Trump loyalists, after his authorship was revealed.)

Foer assessed President Biden candidly, but with overall admiration. Addressing the age issue, and Biden’s occasional verbal lapses, he said, “Forgetting someone’s name is different from being a lunatic.”

Taylor said Trump was not “played” by Putin — rather, he wanted to align with Russia, admiring and even identifying with Putin and other autocrats. Loving the idea of total power. Striving to push the envelope in that regard, even seeking to invoke “magical powers” (Trump’s actual words). January 6 was the culmination.

Horrible as all that was, a key takeaway from the discussion was that a second Trump term would be “vastly more dangerous.” He’s said “retribution” will be its watchword. Claiming to be the victim of unjustified political prosecutions, Trump promises exactly that for his own political opponents.

In public discourse it’s generally advisable to avoid invoking Nazis or Hitler. Yet here the parallels are stark. As with the sinister “enemy of the people” language, etc. — and now Trump’s recent “vermin” speech, a truly unnerving echo of you-know-who. But Trump cultists, oblivious to the sheer insanity afoot, are marching over the cliff.

This segues to the evening’s second panel, titled “The American Backlash,” with Jeff Sharlet and Juliet Hooker, both authors of books about grievance politics.

Obama’s presidency was important not for anything actually done but more for its symbolism, with a segment of white Americans fearing loss of what they consider their rightful place. With “take our country back” rhetoric and a sense of victimhood.

Now it has enfolded not just racial but sexual politics. “White male fragility;” the whole “incel” thing (“involuntary celibacy”). Venting against sexual nonconformism, especially trans people.

They seem to feel democracy is no longer working for them, and they’re done with it. Aiming to prevail by other means — violence if necessary. Sharlet’s book subtitle references “A Slow Civil War” — some people having already psychologically seceded. And it all amounts to an “aesthetic of fascism,” that Trump has brought forth and legitimized. Idealizing the strongman.

Apocalyptic rhetoric drives this. But Sharlet sees some of that on the other side too, using words like “crisis.” Well, my own 2022 book was titled The American Crisis. We’ve indeed been in the throes of one since 2016 — as these discussions made clear.

Finally, Hooker was asked if anything gives her hope. Young people, she answered, citing the Parkland students who organized against gun madness.

If only young people would vote at rates comparable to old fools. Can sensible Americans take our country back?

Modus Vivendi in a World Going Nuts

A recent major poll showed Trump leading Biden in five of six key swing states. Many people won’t vote for Biden because he’s old. But will vote instead for a depraved comic-book villain?

Another poll showed just 33% for Biden in a 3-way race, with 24% for absurdist RFK Jr, and Trump leading with 35%.

Are only a third of American voters sane?

How to stay sane oneself in these “brutalizing times” is the subject of a recent David Brooks column. Saying “scenes of mass savagery pervade the media,” and people everywhere “are coping with an avalanche of negative emotions: shock, pain, contempt, anger, anxiety, fear.”

It does feel like the world is unraveling, compared against a relatively benign-seeming picture a decade or two ago. The Trump phenomenon threw American civic culture into the toilet. Russia’s Ukraine atrocity shockingly showed us such things were not consigned to a barbarous past. Then came Hamas’s bloodbath, and Israel’s even bloodier response. (Many Republicans perversely support backing Israel but not Ukraine.) Myanmar’s army wars against the whole population. While China becomes a creepy Orwellian dystopia, threatening the rape of Taiwan, which would really blow up the world order.

As to the mentioned polls, Brooks elsewhere theorizes they really just reflect people venting sourness toward the whole public landscape, rather than actual voting intentions. The electorate has indeed broadly rejected Trumpism ever since 2017. Yet so mucked up and fraught is our politics that another 2016-like shocker remains quite possible. Trump won then despite a majority against him. A significant third party vote could make that likely, given his irreducible hard-core cult support.

And I increasingly see many voters simply bedazzled by his aura of “strength” — even if epitomized by his attempt to seize power unlawfully. Which Democrats can’t match. Those pathetic pussies.

We survived one Trump term — sort of, barely — but all signs presage a second being “No More Mister Nice Guy.” The end of the world. Almost literally, not only shredding what America has represented, but with vast dire global repercussions. If you’re not scared shitless, you’re clueless. (Most MAGA voters are clueless about what they’re really voting for.)

“Modus vivendi” means a way of living; usually applied to conflict situations. I’m conflicted about how, psychologically, I could live in a Trumpian future. What then will be my modus vivendi?

Shall I continue, no matter how futile-seeming, to stand up for reason, battling its enemies? So much a part of who I am. Or give up, hunker down, shut out the world? Could I live that way?

So let’s return to Brooks, who starts off saying we Americans are still the lucky ones, and should count with gratitude our blessings. Which I fully do — understanding what an oasis of goodness this country is. And may to a considerable extent remain, even under Trump. Yet still I’d feel my love for America profoundly betrayed.

But Brooks does go on to the problem of how to avoid “becoming embittered, hate-filled, calloused over, suspicious and desensitized.” Now, those attributes are all basically at odds with my own personality. Yet with one I have trouble: hate-filled. Hatred for evil is an appropriate human emotion. Surely applicable toward today’s Republican party. How can I not feel that intensely? Yet I hate my own hatred, it roils peace of mind, warps one’s soul.

Relevant there, the ancient Greeks wisely urged moderation in all things. And as Brooks discusses, they were beset with violent upheavals, instilling “a tragic sensibility,” central to their wisdom. With “awareness that the crust of civilization is thin.” Which you can naively wish away, or realistically confront.

My own tragic sensibility confronts the reality that all lives end in the tragedy of death, meaning loss of everything. So we must make the most of the time we have. A tragic sensibility has also been a hallmark of traditional conservatism, inspiring caution toward radical notions of remaking society. Something lost in the perversion of “conservatism” today. And I’ve long warned that America’s wonderfulness can’t be taken for granted as somehow god-ordained forever. Fools are testing its vulnerability.

Consistent with all that, Brooks urges humility about one’s own particular agenda. Being “convinced of your own rightness” ultimately “blinds you and turns you into a hate-filled monster.” This he casts against both the “hard left,” with their cancel culture, and the “burn-it-all-down” House Republicans. A syndrome that “hardens into the sort of cold, amoral, nihilistic attitude” seen in Trump and his ilk.

But this whole tragic take on the human condition, he says, finally should lead us toward finding “our common humanity,” a compassion that “recognizes the infinite dignity of each human soul.” These passages evoke my own deepest feelings of kinship and, really, love for my fellow humans, admirably struggling to make good lives against so much adversity. Whose manifold imperfections, foibles, and even frequent horribleness I see as outweighed by the better angels of our nature.

And so with my own nature’s conflicting aspects I continue to grapple. Struggling to apply my love for humanity as a whole even unto MAGA cultists, those poor misguided souls. “Forgive them, for they know not what they do?”

Sarah Vowell: Historian-Adjacent Narrative Non-fiction Wise Guy

Sarah Vowell is a living contradiction to the notion that history is dull. She writes history books almost as comedy routines. Yet still they’re full of real history.

Her book, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, sometimes digresses to lament — as the title hints — how messed up this country is. And she wrote back in 2015!

The book is really a chronicle of the Revolutionary War. For the benefit of those who “learned” history in modern American schools: that war, 1775-83, won our independence from Great Britain, having previously been a bunch of her colonies. That was before the Civil War. Something, Vowell observes, 40% of Americans get wrong.

Though I was pretty familiar with this material, the book was fun to read. On page 147 she talks about debate over attacking the British army occupying Philadelphia. Such a move would probably have been foolhardy; but Vowell quotes Samuel Adams predicting that future historians would call the Americans weenies for their caution. Then she adds: “If historian-adjacent, narrative non-fiction wise guys are allowed to weigh in, I will go on record as being cool with it.” (Me too.)

And I did learn some interesting things. Vowell notes that in 1778, the British Prime Minister, Lord North, proposed to end the war by giving the Americans all their demands, bar only independence. America said no. Good for us. But Vowell goes on to note that what was really the greatest obstacle to all people being equal was slavery — which the British parliament abolished in 1833. So had we remained British, slavery would have ended here thirty years sooner. Though I’d say it’s dicey to assume other events would have proceeded as they did, despite such a big alteration of the historical landscape.

Lafayette is the book’s focus. He was an orphaned teenaged minor French noble, who traveled to America with a jejune fantasy of military glory. This inauspicious launch did inspire some Vowell snark. But more broadly she recapitulates how Lafayette pretty soon outgrew his youthful folly and actually became a real asset in the war. The book highlights his return visit to America as an old man in 1824, to a rapturous reception.

Also coming off well is Washington. Not free of blemishes and blunders; yet Vowell portrays him with a genuine admiration (which I fulsomely share). George Washington was indeed a remarkably good, even truly noble, person. Of course he’s remembered, but as a cardboard figure, with little understanding of how much we really owe to him. When I compare Washington against . . . .

His treatment of slaves does incur opprobrium. But nobody’s perfect, and I’m not being sardonic. In his day slavery was taken for granted, few giving much thought to its ethics. Moral progress is a slow climb. At some future time, meat eating may be deemed morally unacceptable. Shall we then pull down all the statues of non-vegetarian past luminaries? The Washington plaque on my wall will stay.

We don’t realize just how hard his war was. Vowell quotes John Adams that the revolution had already occurred, in American hearts and minds, even before Lexington and Concord. Well, maybe. But the actual fighting still had to be done, and after six years it seemed at best a stalemate. We’d avoided losing, but winning appeared to be a bridge too far.

Then came Yorktown. It still makes my heart soar. Vowell argues that the really decisive battle was “The Capes,” at sea, where our allies, the French, under Admiral de Grasse, saw off the British Navy’s attempt to come to Cornwallis’s rescue. That de Grasse was one gutsy commander, taking risks to do what needed doing. His ships blocking the British army’s escape through the Chesapeake sealed its fate.

There were so many opportunities for things to go differently. If they had, today’s world would probably be unrecognizable. True of my own personal story as well. By such slender threads of probability our lives do hang.

What Are Humanity’s Top Problems? And Their Solutions?

This is a “philosophy contest” advertised by the “World Roundtable Association of Amateur and Professional Philosophers.”*

It solicits a list of humanity’s top 20 problems, and their solutions. While our top few problems might seem pretty obvious — cue the “four horsemen” — solutions are not. Especially real feasible solutions that could overcome many people’s self-interest and a host of other pragmatic obstacles. As opposed to pipe dreams.

My take on our biggest problem may be surprising. We’ll get to that in due course.

In 2009, I authored The Case for Rational Optimism, seeing a lot of positive trends. It would be far harder to write today, much having gone sour. For example, democracy was proliferating globally then; now it’s receding, with authoritarianism ascendant. Indeed, worldwide surveys show declining belief in democracy, with increasing allure of “strong man” rule. And whereas we’d seemed to put wars among major powers behind us, Russia’s Ukraine aggression has smashed that pretty picture, while China seems hell-bent on attacking Taiwan. In America, a non-white president appeared to herald improving race relations. But that provoked a fierce backlash. And who could imagine a presidential election might be won by a man who’d tried to overthrow the previous one?

Then there’s inequality. World poverty has, in the big picture, plummeted over recent decades — though lately that gain has stalled if not reversed, while the rich are getting much richer.

And, back in 2009, climate change looked more manageable than it does today. This of course tops many lists of our biggest challenges.

But perhaps there’s a perspective that can tie together all our disparate problems — and even show a path toward remediation.

A key theme in my Rational Optimism book was our deployment of rationality and knowledge to attack problems and improve quality of life. But there’s never a free lunch; always a price to pay; yet on the whole, again through use of reason, we’ve generally managed to still come out ahead. Some scolds fault humankind for “raping the planet,” but without making use of its resources we’d still be living in caves and wearing animal skins.

Climate change and its harms constitute a huge price that we’re now paying for our progress. Yet it remains possible to cope, as we always have, by doubling down on use of reason, knowledge, science, and technology.

Indeed, that’s the way to tackle all our problems. Using our brains, thinking better. That prescription is not just pablum. The Ukraine invasion was a product of messed-up thinking. In fact, Russia’s having the regime it does, in the first place, was down to poor thinking. As is the trap of authoritarianism everywhere. And America’s Trump cult. And so forth.

We have the capability to do better. A key element is simply knowing truth from falsehood. You can’t deal effectively with any challenge without having the facts straight. So many of our problems are worsened, and made harder to address, by that very basic issue. Certainly, for example, America’s Covid tragedy was heightened by so many people unable to distinguish reality from lies.

Confirmation bias is a major factor here. It’s the proclivity to embrace information bolstering a pre-existing belief or preference, while shunning anything contrary. A powerful aspect of human psychology, hard to avoid. In fact, smarter people are better at confabulating rationales to support their confirmation bias.

A huge confirmation bias machine in human life is religion. We are psychologically wired for that too, it pushes a lot of our buttons. And it really makes us want to believe certain things. Mark Twain said “faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”

Some see religion and science as just alternative belief systems, equally valid. However, in religion one believes basically because one wants to. Whereas science is not a “belief system” at all, but rather a systematic method for ascertaining verifiable facts about reality.

Religion is, indeed, a “gateway drug” for wrong belief and eschewing reason. It scrambles the brain’s ability to think rationally and objectively. If you can believe the world is controlled by a man in the sky, who you’ll meet after death, it’s but a small step to believing Trump election lies — or a Putin saying he’s fighting Ukrainian Nazis — or that the answer for gun violence is more guns, or that climate change is a hoax, or other conspiracy theories.

It’s no coincidence that America’s strongest religious believers, and those who swallow those Trump lies, and reject climate change and Covid vaccination, etc., are largely the same people.

Some nevertheless imagine religion is, on balance, a good thing, the indispensable foundation for morality. Surely that notion has been exploded by rampant Catholic clergy sex crimes, the atrocities of Iran’s theocracy, and so much more. In fact, we don’t get morality from religion, religion gets it from us — being coded into our genes, and originating in our use of reason. Religion actually confuses moral thinking; especially when instilling feelings of righteousness and demonizing people not on the same page. Hence religion has always played an outsized role in our whole blood-drenched history of conflict, and man’s inhumanity to man. While, in stark contrast, advanced nations, especially in Europe, notably the Scandinavians and Nordics — where religious belief has mostly disappeared — are the nicest, most orderly, peaceable, humane, and ethically advanced places on Earth.

How so? Because their brains are not scrambled by religion and superstition. Freeing them to think better, more rationally, more able to tell reality from fantasy. Better equipping them to tackle every sort of problem.

And it was better thinking in the first place that enabled them to overcome the religion that was holding them back. Better thinking begets better thinking.

So we see it’s religion that tops the list of the world’s problems. It’s the greatest obstacle to human progress, in so many spheres. And freeing ourselves from religion is the potential solution to all problems — or, at least, our best hope to find and deploy real solutions.

It won’t be easy. Religion is of course a very tenacious fixture of human culture. And it fights (especially in Muslim realms, where dissent can get you killed). But whereas in past epochs, when alternatives to religious belief seemed practically nonexistent, now its mystique is broken, and a better, more persuasive path has become more visible to ever more people. Proponents of humanism must continue making the case for it, proactive and forcefully.

Those mentioned Europeans who have largely ditched religious superstition point the way, proving this is a realistic hope. Not a pipe dream.

* Closing December 1 — send entries to info@wraapp.org

The Hard Problem of AI

What does the Artificial Intelligence (AI) explosion mean for our future? That’s the Great Topic of the day.

Back in 2013, my seminal Humanist magazine article, The Human Future: Upgrade or Replacement?* foresaw a convergence of biological humankind with the artificial — we’d incorporate ever more technological improvements into ourselves, until the distinction between human and robot ultimately vanishes and Humanity 2.0 arises.

The latest Humanist magazine’s cover story is headed “The Dangers of Artificial Intelligence.” Seeing that, I mused, wouldn’t it be fun to ask an AI to address this? Well, guess what. The editors did exactly that. The article was authored by an AI.**

Typical for AI, it’s quite well written, glib, articulate, with plenty of relevant metaphors, seemingly thoughtful. But as I read it the feeling grew that it wasn’t really saying anything. Certainly nothing interesting. Just recapping the kinds of problems and issues people have been buzzing about; doing it repetitively in fact, without really providing any insight or wisdom.

My own most recent look at AI had said that all ChatGPT and the like are actually doing is just predicting what word comes next in a sequence, having been trained on billions of words of pre-existing text. Without even understanding the words. So what it’s doing is not remotely thinking.

Subsequently a David Brooks column cited Douglas Hofstadter (of Gödel, Escher, Bach fame) saying pretty much the same thing. This gratified Brooks (and me). But then he goes on to report he checked with Hofstadter for an update in light of the most recent AI advancements — and Hofstadter now says we can no longer be sure AI is not thinking!

Then my wife gave me a book, AI Ethics, by Mark Coeckelbergh. As I started reading, the flavor of this human-written work and the AI-authored Humanist article seemed quite different. But soon, not so much. I began noticing how many sentences ended with question marks. Coeckelbergh does catalog issues raised by AI, as well as answers other commenters have suggested, but never endorses any. The book is devoid of a point of view, which I found maddening. It calls for wisdom, but offers none.

Here’s a quote near the end: “it is one thing to name a number of ethical principles and quite another to figure out how to implement them in practice.” Well, yeah. And then (his emphasis), “it remains unclear what exactly we should do.”

A key problem is moral agency. The author seems to dance around this without ever sinking his teeth into the real issue — the concept of agency requires sentience. A stone can’t have moral agency even if it squashes you. However, I noted the book was published in 2020 — paleolithic times in terms of AI development. AI sentience didn’t seem an issue then. Now (as Hofstadter suggests) it may well be.

If an AI can be conscious we’re in a whole different world. Now the question becomes: how can we know? An AI today often acts as though it’s conscious. May even claim to be. But is it just an act? This is philosophy’s old “zombie” problem. Suppose a creature looks and behaves exactly as a human, but without consciousness inside. How can we tell?

Pioneering computer theorist Alan Turing’s test was whether an entity could convince a human interlocutor that it too is human. But today’s AI can do that easily. Yet we don’t have a way to determine if it truly has a consciousness, a self.

Some refuse to consider that possibility. I argued this in 2016 with computer thinker David Gelernter who believed there could be no sentience without neurons. Whereas I couldn’t see ruling it out if an artificial system replicates the functioning of neurons.

It isn’t magic, even if we don’t yet really understand how consciousness and selfhood arise and work in humans. Neuroscientists call this “the hard problem.” How they might work in an artificial system could be quite different. An even harder problem?

* https://rationaloptimist.wordpress.com/2013/07/07/the-human-future-upgrade-or-replacement/

** https://thehumanist.com/magazine/fall-2023/features/the-dangers-of-artificial-intelligence