A Reply to Don Geddis

Don Geddis left a comment on my last post.  My reply grew far longer than would reasonably fit into a comment reply so I decided to post it as an article.  Don wrote:

I wonder if you've considered that perhaps you have more in common with the people who frustrate you, than your current self-image suggests.

My reply:

I've not just considered it, I will happily concede that I am not as rational as I fancy myself to be.  In my case, I would prefer to put a slightly different spin on it and say that I am not as rational as I would like to be, or as I try to be, but whatever.  I'm a fallible human, just like everyone else.  (Duh!)  I make mistakes, and one of the mistakes I've made on more than one occasion is to be overly confident in my own abilities.  The best I can say about myself (or at least could until recently) is that I try.  I try to recognize when I make mistakes.  I try to learn from them.  I try to improve.

The failure I'm referring to in this post is not that I've failed to be sufficiently rational, or even that I've failed to persuade others to become more rational.  I only mentioned that to put my gloomy assessment of the situation into context.  My failure is that I reached the limits of my willingness to try.  I've had arguments with Protestants and Catholics and Muslims and Witnesses and Mormons and YECs and lunar landing denialists and even Republicans.  (I've never had the pleasure of interacting directly with a flat-earther, but if there are any among my audience who would be willing to engage I'd welcome the opportunity.)  The vast majority of these discussions have been civil and constructive.  I've learned a lot, and found a surprising amount of common ground.  I can steel-man just about any position (even yours, I'll bet).  In a not-insignificant number of cases I've ended up becoming friends with my interlocutor (at least for a while).  I even managed to make peace with Erik Naggum once (at least for a while).  That is one of my proudest achievements.  I figured if I could have a civil discussion with him and find common ground, I could do it with anyone.

I was wrong.  I tried really hard with Publius for a very long time, but the claim that Kamala Harris was never a prosecutor was such a brazen falsehood that it took me by surprise, and left me to face two of the most difficult choices of my life.  The first was whether to publish the claim and its accompanying screed.  Do I contribute to the promulgation of falsehoods, or do I sign on to cancel culture and become a censor?  Neither of these options is appealing.  Both run deeply counter to my moral intuitions.  It's not even clear to me which is the lesser of the two evils.  I ultimately chose the former, not because I had a good argument for it, but just because I didn't want to face the second choice: if I published Publius's comments, should I respond to them, and if so, how?

The reason this second choice was so difficult is that responding to Publius takes a lot of effort.  It can be mentally exhausting.  He's not stupid.  If I make a mistake, I can be pretty sure he'll call me out on it.  (See for example our recent exchange about the Chinese Room.)  So I can't phone it in.  I have to think and do research and keep track of a zillion different points (because Publius is a master of the Gish Gallop).  It takes time and mental energy, both of which I have in increasingly short supply these days.  So responding to Publius has a cost.  On the other hand, not responding has a cost too.  If I publish his comments and don't reply, someone might come away with the impression that I think his claim might have some merit, and that's not a good outcome for me either.

I agonized over this for nearly two months hoping that some other alternative would present itself, but none did.  So I decided to do what I did.  I don't regret it, but I'm not proud of it either.  I find it a little harder to look at myself in the mirror now than I did before.  Before I could say that, yeah, I'm far from being perfectly rational, but I'm willing to listen to anyone and try my best to understand their position.  I can't say that any more.

But I can still say it about you, Don.  I've never censored you, and you have never said anything that would make me even consider it.  Your silence here is self-imposed.  Any time you feel like breaking that silence, either in public or privately, I'm ready and willing to listen to you, and that has always been the case.

I have failed. Now what?

Nearly two months ago now I wrote:

It's getting harder and harder to find a reason to keep doing this.  My opportunity costs are high, and writing a blog entry takes a non-trivial amount of time.  I wrote this because I needed to blow off some steam, and I wanted to get my position on the election results on the record while they were still fresh in my mind.  Whether I keep doing this in the future is now very much an open question.

I got a handful of replies to that.  Thanks to everyone who responded.

The reason it has taken me so long to post any follow-up is that I also got an extended eight-part (I think that's a new record) rant from Publius, which began:

In my replies below, I will show with facts why Kamala Harris is the true threat to the rule of law, free speech, and free elections. As a bonus, you'll also find out that Kamala Harris was never a prosecutor.

I regret to say that that defeated me.  I've spent over forty years actively seeking to understand points of view that I don't agree with in the hope of finding a way to more effectively advocate for science and rationality.  During that time, I can't recall even a single instance of successfully bringing someone into the rational fold who wasn't already there.  Worse, I've discovered to my dismay that many people profess to hew to rationality aren't nearly as rational as they fancy themselves to be, and when I've tried to point this out to them they get defensive and tribal, in other words, they react like any other human would when their core beliefs are challenged.  I don't like that, and so I've tried very very hard not to get defensive and tribal when my core beliefs are challenged.  Instead, I've tried very hard to get to the roots of disagreements, partly because it has always been important for me to make sure that my beliefs rest on firm philosophical foundations, but also because I've observed over the years that a lot of disagreements turn out to be trivial differences over the definitions of words, and that people actually agree on a lot more than they appear to.  This is not to say that there aren't real disagreements -- there certainly are.  But I've found these to be a lot more rare than most people think.  In my personal and professional life I've gotten a huge amount of leverage out of this insight, and I was hoping that I could share it with others and maybe make the world a better place.

To say that I have failed would be quite the understatement.  I have failed spectacularly.  At the risk of stating the obvious, Kamala Harris was the Attorney General of California between 2011 and 2017.  That makes her a prosecutor in my book.  But even as I write this the thought that is foremost in my mind is not that I am advancing a sound argument supported by facts, but the not-so-sudden realization that what I am doing is futile.  No matter what I say, Publius will maintain that Kamala Harris was never a prosecutor, and there is no doubt in my mind that he will be able to compose lengthy screeds to defend his position.  Maybe they will even have merit.  I don't know because I'm not going to read them.  I'm done.  I'm defeated.  Life is too short to keep dealing with this kind of bullshit.  Congratulations, Publius, you won.

In a rational world, all of this would be trivial.  Instead of a loyal following my blog has ended up with a lone heckler.  Boo-hoo, let's all feel sorry for me.  But that is not really the point.  I've had many, many failures in my life.  (Hm, maybe I should write a blog post about that.)  None of them have sent me into the kind of existential despair I'm currently feeling, and that's because Publius is not an outlier, but merely a representative sample of a much, much larger population, who just elected a convicted felon and rapist to be the President of the United States of America.  But of course, to these people, Donald Trump is not a convicted felon nor a rapist, just like Kamala Harris was never a prosecutor, and nothing you nor I nor anyone else can say will ever convince them otherwise.  Truth doesn't matter.  Reality doesn't matter.  All that matters is Donald Trump and Making America Great Again (whatever the fuck that might actually turn out to mean).

Trick is, reality is even more persistent than Publius.  You can only turn your back on reality for so long before it will reassert itself. Running a country actually requires work and expertise, and if you don't put in the work, things will fall apart.  Silencing the news media might make you feel better, but it won't produce prosperity or freedom.  Neither will tariffs.  Neither will restricting immigration.

I feel like I'm watching a train wreck approaching and nothing I say or do can stop it.  The rational thing to do is to work to prepare for the disaster, to try to anticipate the worst-case scenario and put plans in place now for how to recover afterwards.  But that is not something I can do on my own, and I've found very few people interested in even discussing it.  The message I'm getting from Democrats is: we need to write bigger checks to Democrats so we can take back the House in the mid-terms and keep Donald Trump in check.  This seems hopelessly naive to me.  The Democrats had six years to get Donald Trump under control.  They impeached him twice, indicted him I don't know how many times, convicted him on 34 felony counts, and none of that made the tiniest dent in his power or influence.  And now he's heading back to the White House with complete legal immunity for anything he does as an "official act" (again, whatever the fuck that might actually turn out to mean).  The only thing that will stop Donald Trump now is if his supporters turn on him.  Good luck with that.

In a situation like that I'm finding it incredibly hard to resist the temptation to curl up into a fetal position, or maybe move to Canada.  It's not what I want.  That is not the person I want to be.  But I'm honestly out of ideas.  I've given it my best shot for somewhere between 20 and 40 years depending on how you count.  I have failed.  I don't know where to go from here.

Merry Christmas.