In some years I’ve done a special July 4th post on the blog, but the past couple of days I was occupied with, well, July 4th stuff, including going out to see a neighboring town’s fireworks celebration for the first time since 2019, working in the garden, cooking out in the back yard, and the like. But I have had a few thoughts running around in my head about this time of year in America, which the constant stream of recent news keeps fresh.
I think most people consider themselves to be members in some way of several groups, social classifications, tribes of common interests. Perhaps if you truly don’t identify with any of these, you’re a member of the group that professes not to be part of any groups! (The mathematically inclined will recognize the scent of Russell’s Paradox, a stink bomb that cleared the halls in early 20th century mathematical logic). Anyway, I personally would fit into groups that include, in no particular order, “folks with chemistry degrees”, “bloggers”, “guys from Arkansas”, “telescope owners”, “people who quote Tacitus while eating pizza”, and quite a few others. There are of course a number of other groups that are taken more seriously – I’m white, I’m male, I just reached the 60-and-over demographic, I used to often vote Republican but don’t see how I can ever do that again, I don’t think that the last election was stolen. And so on. That’s where the arguing starts.
I’m actually not a “joiner” by temperament – to be honest, I haven’t even been an ACS member for many years now. I belong to no church. I tend to avoid official higher-level positions in the associations I do take part in, since I’ve realized over the years that I have a slight-but-real aversion to overseeing other people and telling them what to do. Since becoming an adult I’ve never run for any sort of office. I’m pretty free with my opinions, as the last twenty years of this blog will illustrate, but it’s more in a “Here’s what I think and why I think it, see what you think” mode rather than trying to lay down any sort of law. My reflex is to try to argue from evidence, which can be kind of annoying to people around me, because forty years or so of studying and practicing in science has made me deal with most every new thing that comes up by first saying to myself “Hmm. I wonder if that’s true?” and then deciding how much weight to give it (or how much time to invest in deciding that!)
So if I had to describe the “tribe” that I most value my membership in, that might be a good place to start. People who value learning and reasoning, who consider these things worthwhile in and of themselves. I remember years ago watching the first rovers landing on Mars, and seeing the jubilation erupt among the JPL mission scientists when they got word of a successful touchdown – I turned to my wife and said “These are my people”. I want to count myself among those who think that everyone should have the right and the opportunity to read what they want, to think what they want, to come to their own conclusions – but who also understand that this means that everyone has a responsibility on their own part to try to come to the soundest conclusions that they can. In the end, I’m not much of a relativist. I believe that there are facts in this world (I’m not a nihilist, either, by any means), that there are such things as right and wrong, and that some courses of conduct toward your fellow man really are more preferable (more “right”) than others. I give some opinions and worldviews much more weight and credit than others. If someone has reached the conclusion that opening fire on a street full of innocent people is a correct course of action, or perhaps that correct course of action involves burning down a church full of people whose views about a supreme being do not accord with their own, or insulting and attacking people merely because of the color of their skin or what they choose to wear on their heads. . .well, this is wrong, and you’d like to use the term “evil”, I’ll join right in. Anyone can, of course, find plenty of sources and arguments and passionate advocacy for all of these sorts of acts, why this group or that group has to be tortured and killed, on and on. But that stuff is poisonous garbage, and has to be recognized for what it is.
That takes us right into the paradox that Karl Popper talked about the The Open Society and Its Enemies: the necessity to be intolerant of intolerance. Which might be reminiscent of the paradox that I opened this blog post with, from some angles. All I know is that I myself want to be part of, and make common cause with, the people that turn away from the sorts of acts I just described, but do not think in turn that the main problem with them is that the wrong people are being shot and burned. That’s not the way. Be a decent person. Treat others as you’d be treated. Learn new things, from the best sources you can find. Recognize the good that we have in our society and our civilization and be aware that it can be lost. And help the rest of us hold on to it.
Comments are still on for this post, but be aware that I will be prepared to illustrate Popper’s paradox of tolerance while moderating it.
