Wednesday Words, uncomfortable echoes edition

Ok, so if you’re a Jew, then certain words or phrases can make you a little uncomfortable.  And when these words get used, in an offhand, unconscious way, especially by or about government types, then it gets worse.  So, just from the last week:

The president* talks about a class of people “infesting” the country.

A radio reporter talks about the head of the Department of Homeland Security “making the trains run on time.”

The president* wants a new branch of the armed forces, which will be “separate but equal.”

Update, OK, I am now in shock.  The Department of Homeland Security has issued a press release headlined with Fourteen Words beginning “We Must Secure...”. They’re not even trying to hide it any more.

Seriously, SCOTUS?

I am upset, but not entirely surprised, by the decisions that came out of the Supreme Court today.  To paraphrase a saying about Jewish law, where there is a judicial will, there is a legal way.  A majority of the Supreme Court is A-OK with the Republican slide towards fascism, so they will find a legal way, however crudely and illogically and inconsistently argued, to make it happen.  And so we have an executive order that is completely inspired by religious bigotry being declared constitutionally acceptable—because the third revision had scrupulously neutral language—and using the overruling of Korematsu as justification!

When this presidency started, I was alarmed at the regulatory/executive and judicial mischief that it promised.  What I was not prepared for, and what gives me increasing agony, is the deep and blatant racism and bigotry that it has made publicly acceptable.

Play, memory

I am good at sight-reading music.  You can plop a relatively simple piece of sheet music in front of me, and I can stumble through it at the piano.  (Mind, I am not great at sight-reading; I can’t do like Saint-Saens, and sit down and play from the score of a Wagner opera that I’ve never heard before).  This ability has stood me in good stead for most of my life, allowing me to fake my way through lessons I should have practiced harder for, and letting me accompany far more worthy musicians than myself.  But, I have found that it has shaped my musical abilities in ways that I don’t entirely like.

When I was a youth, my piano teachers didn’t particularly press me to memorize music.  I made a few efforts, because it was a thing people did, but I found it to be far more work than I was willing to put in.  When I did try to memorize, it was largely kinetic; my memory was a series of motions, and it would have to be uninterrupted.  If I were derailed, I would have to go back to the beginning and start over.  Perhaps “kinetic” isn’t the word—perhaps “ballistic” is more accurate, in that I would launch and from that point on the trajectory of things was set.  At any rate, my ability to memorize was never developed.

Now, in my 50’s, I am trying to learn to memorize music.  Partly it is a desire to keep stretching out my brain, maybe spurred by watching my parents succumb to Alzheimer’s disease.  Partly, it’s that I have a harder time reading music without my glasses on.  But there I am, struggling with memory.

My approach is somewhat different from what I formerly tried.  I am trying to pay more attention to the music, and why this note follows that note.  I try to shake myself out of a kinetic memory, by playing the same notes using different fingering, and by starting at different points in the music.  I try to pay greater attention to the landmarks, and how the composer gets from one place to another.  I see myself, as if I am walking through a landscape.  At the first, I can only see the most obvious features—a pass, a huge tree, a river—and I can’t see the trails from one to the other.  Learning the music is learning the trail from one landmark to another.  At first, I stumble around, sometimes on the trail, sometimes lost in the weeds, but as I get better, I can stay on the trail; as I learn and memorize the trail, I find myself paying less attention to the trail, and more attention to the landscape as a whole and the beautiful flowers and features that fill it.  Now, while I play far less music than I used to, I feel that I am playing far more musically than I did while reading music.  

The experience is similar to a mindfulness practice.  I have become much more aware of what’s going on inside of the music; I am able to pay attention to the things that need attention, and more critically see what I need to work on.  I am seeing longer lines, rather than isolated notes.  While I am nowhere near a great musician, I think I am better—and while I don’t feel that regret is a useful emotion, I do wish that I had spent more of my time properly memorizing music back when I could move my fingers to play Chopin etudes and such.  But, I won’t complain.  I am learning the Bach Partitas.  Learning and memorizing and polishing a page of music takes me a month, and it’s good.  

What’s my pre-Cambrian rabbit? What’s YOUR pre-Cambrian rabbit?

I try to be honest with myself in how I think about things.  It is hard to be aware of one’s blind spots, and it is tiring to be suspicious of ideas that make one feel better.  I may have picked up the habit of self-skepticism from an early exposure to Karl Popper, or a lot of training by curmudgeonly old-school molecular geneticists, but however I got it, I’m stuck with it.  Popper taught us all about falsifiability, and my post-doc advisor taught me to have an adversarial relationship with my own ideas, but my favorite formulation is from the evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane.  

Evolution is a big, big concept, with ramifications that permeate the entire world of biology, geology, and astronomy, and more.  But, to be honest about how one thinks, one must be aware that it’s still only an idea, a view of the world that may be wrong.  Haldane was (according to the story) asked what would cause him to change his mind about evolution as an explanation for life on earth.  “A fossil rabbit in the pre-Cambrian” was his reply.  Pre-Cambrian rocks are over 500 million years old.  There are pre-Cambrian fossils, but only of simple invertebrates and mysterious life forms long extinct.  But, significantly, there are fossils; if there were rabbits 500 million years ago, they could have been fossilized, so it is in principle possible that Haldane’s reliance upon evolution could have been shaken.  

Any responsible thinker should have a pre-Cambrian rabbit for their beliefs.  The people who study climate change, if they were honest, would reconsider everything if it were found that carbon dioxide did not in fact help to trap heat, and that hundreds of years of data were in fact due to an easily overlooked artifact.  Cancer researchers, if they were honest, would re-evaluate a lot of their beliefs if the apparent connection between smoking and lung cancer were shown to be the result of some chemical in the packaging of cigarette boxes.  Furthermore, for an honest thinker, it’s not a matter of simply recognizing falsifying evidence when it appears.  Rather, like Haldane, the honest thinker must be aware enough of their thinking that they can imagine and define things that would falsify their beliefs before encountering them.  

The news recently has really been getting me down.  I have become convinced of a theory that our president is a racist, and that his presidency will be severely detrimental to this country.  This theory is based on observation of facts and informed by historical parallels.  But, while it is consistent with all facts, it is a theory.  It is, and must be, falsifiable.  The president could decide to fire his Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller and General Kelly and all the other people who have pushed him in the direction of racism, and renounce many of the claims he’s made; despite rigorous fact-checking, many of the claims he’s made about immigrants could be shown to be true (somehow); he could actually do things to promote racial harmony—these would all be possible but unlikely.  They would falsify my theory, and elevate my mood.  

But, I have noticed something more disturbing in the mirror world inhabited by those whose sympathies lie with the president.  For them (and those who insist that anthropogenic climate change, vaccines, and evolution are bunk), there simply is no pre-Cambrian rabbit.  There is no possible fact or observation that will change their position, and whether this is bad faith or just simple-mindedness, it makes rational argument impossible.  When a Trump supporter at one of his tinpot “Triumph of the Will” rallies was asked about some of the images and recordings of children torn from their parents, they admitted that they were disturbing, but ultimately opined that they were probably faked.  I’ve also heard dodges about how Trump is accomplishing great (but unspecified) things and how everybody is out to get him; and, finally, fake news, fake news, fake news.  Even the most reliable, scrupulously reported pre-Cambrian rabbit is fake.  

I don’t know a way beyond this impasse to civil discourse, although I’m pretty sure it doesn’t involve Facebook memes or using InfoWars as a reliable source.  Perhaps any real attempt at discussion must be made one-on-one.  Before attempting conversation, we have to tell each other about our pre-Cambrian rabbits.  Acknowledging that our beliefs are falsifiable is the opposite of a sign of weakness; rather, it is a sign of honesty, like duelists of old showing each other that they are only using the prescribed weapons.  Also, if you showed me a rabbit skull and told me it came from, say, the Laurentian Shield, I’d want to see some acceptable proof—and, like the rabbit itself, proof that I would be willing name as acceptable before it is produced.  

I really doubt that a fossilized rabbit will ever be discovered in pre-Cambrian rocks.  But, to be absolutely sure, I would be thrilled and excited to hear that a truly, completely verified rabbit fossil had been found in the basement sediments of the Grand Canyon.  It would show me that I was working under an erroneous view of the world, and it would be fascinating to try to understand this newly illuminated world.  And, while I would love to be wrong, I think that rabbit is more likely than finding that our president is not a racist.