The controversy of how Covid 19 entered the greater world has bubbled up with Dr. Fauci’s halo sporting a tarnish. He has been able to twist and turn for quite some time and may even end up landing on his feet after this one. He does seem to have prevaricated a bit.
Let me admit, I was never a fan and thought the man had the mien of a used car salesman. I am not proud of saying that as I’ve known some decent chaps of that trade.
How people attain there beliefs may not have all that much to do with logical inquiry. Few people I have met do not consider there worldview as anything less than sweet reason and will cling to it like a barnacle. I account myself susceptible to that as well.
Below is a column on the subject that appeared in the October 2009 Sturbridge Times Magazine. The reader can judge if it has stood the test of time.
WHAT DO I KNOW?
I tried to get my wife to take all the family’s money and put it into Mega-bucks tickets. My rationale was that I had always said it would be a cold day in July before I ever won any money. Well we had a lot of cold rainy July days this year. August, however turned out sultry hot.
Still it is a summer like none that I remember. We have had rainy spells, but little as soggy as this year. The weather occasioned a debate on talk radio. The hosts generally take the position that the low temps prove global warming a hoax. Some callers will argue the other side, a few even positing the cold spell as evidence that warming is true.
Which side is right? Beats me. My cousin in usually waterlogged Seattle tells me they are experiencing the warmest Spring and Summer ever. Well, that settles, exactly nothing. The only thing that is certain is that true believers on either side of the argument will not be swayed by anything said by the opposition.
Why not? Well why should they? What can one know? Unfortunately, not much in the modern world. The problem was best expressed by George Orwell over 60 year ago,
“Somewhere or other—I think it is in the preface to Saint Joan—Bernard Shaw remarks that we are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the MiddleAges,and as an example of modern credulity he cites the widespread belief that the earth is round.The average man, says Shaw, can advance not a single reason for thinking that the earth is round. He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth-century mentality.”
Orwell then went on to prove the point that he himself had no reason to believe the world was round even though he accepted that it was. Of course we who are living now can point to pictures from space and all that, but we have to admit that few of us have made a study of it and are taking it more or less on faith. His closing paragraph sums it up:
“It will be seen that my reasons for thinking that the earth is round are rather precarious ones. Yet this is an exceptionally elementary piece of information. On most other questions I should have to fall back on the expert much earlier, and would be less able to test his pronouncements.And much the greater part of our knowledge is at this level.It does not rest on reasoning or on experiment, but on authority.And how can it be otherwise, when the range of knowledge is so vast that the expert himself is an ignoramous as soon as he strays away from his own speciality? Most people, if asked to prove that the earth is round, would not even bother to produce the rather weak arguments I have outlined above. They would start off by saying that ’everyone knows’ the earth to be round, and if pressed further,would become angry.In a way Shaw is right. This is a credulous age, and the burden of knowledge which we now have to carry is partly responsible.”
In truth, with my own unaided reason, I could not have figured out the Earth is round. As a child in elementary school, I did have my primitive sense of wonder piqued when Columbus was explained. Unfortunately, they explained it wrong. Columbus did not come up with something shocking in the world is round idea. Most scholars already believed it. Chris thought the circumference of the globe smaller than it was. He had made a mistake that gave us the New World.
So how does this connect to Global Warming. At a family gathering the various members were talking about the question. I won’t say discussing. Neither side answered the others’ questions other than to state a fact. My techie son asked a relative how they would explain that Mars is heating up at the same rate as the Earth. A statement was made in reply, but no answer. How do people become so doctrinaire over something even experts disagree about?
It is time to quote true experts on human nature. No, not Nietsche or Freud, but Gilbert and Sullivan:
That every boy and every gal
That's born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative!
Fal, lal, la!
Yup, we’re born that way. I accept it and am waiting for my application to the Flat Earth Society to be approved. They have my solemn undertaking to agree with their official Global Warming Policy no matter what it is.
As the referenced son in the article, I want to get out ahead of this and say that I was much more gullible at the time than I am right now (I hope). My argument at the time was based on myths about solar activity which were debunked even when I said them. There has been no accelerated warming of any other planet in our solar system (at the same rate as Earth's).