What Would Jesus Do? True Believers, The Desperation of Belief

In today's New York Times Paul Krugman reacts to an interview in GQ with Marco Rubio, one of the most earnest voices of the Republican Party and Krugman is struck by Mr. Rubio's answer to the question: "How old is the earth?"  Mr. Rubio replied, "I'm not a scientist, man,"  which is manifestly true, but then he goes on to say "it's one of the great mysteries," putting it in a category along with eternal questions like, "why do bad things happen to good people" and "where do we come from and where are we going?"   

In fact, the question of the age of the earth is a question about measurement and we can, in fact, get at least an approximate measurement.

Of course, the reason Mr. Rubio is afraid to answer this question is he is afraid of offending the creationists who deny/doubt evolutionary theory. The vast eons of time required for evolution to explain the almost incomprehensible variety of life forms on earth require vast time. Creationists, for reasons Mad Dog is unfamiliar with, need the earth to be only a few thousand years old to fit with whatever they have found in parts of the King James version of the Bible.

As Mr. Krugman observes:  "What was Mr. Rubio's complaint about science teaching? That it might undermine children's faith in what their parent told them to believe."

Mr. Krugman is a numbers man. This is not to say he is a scientist--he is an economist, which may be the  "dismal science" but it is no science, because you cannot do hypothesis-test-measure thing, i.e., you cannot do experiments with sufficiently few variables.  And he is a professor, so he is familiar to with the problem of teaching students, younger people things which may conflict with what their parents taught them.

My own son told me a story about being in a class at Vanderbilt when the professor posed a knotty ethical dilemma for the class and then called on a student for his analysis. How would you solve this problem? How would you weight the competing claims and values here?  The chirpy, bright faced, well scrubbed student replied, without a moment's hesitation:  "I'd just ask myself, 'What would Jesus do?'"

At which point, half the class groaned, slid under their desks, tossed wads of paper at the Jesus disciple, laughed, cried and generally grumbled about transferring to another college.  

Vanderbilt is a very interesting institution, founded by a Vanderbilt (a one percenter) in 1873 to create an atmosphere expressly designed to bring together young people from North and South int he aftermath of the Civil War to reason together, to learn from each other.  The student body, to this day, is about 50% from the South, and Southwest (Texas mostly) and the other half from the Midwest (Chicago mostly) and the Northeast (the Washington to New York corridor.)  The faculty is now predominantly from the North.

The professor smiled and asked, "Well, but how would you know what Jesus would say about this particular question--as far as I know, and I've read the Bible since I was a child, Jesus was never presented with this question,or anything remotely like it.  This woman, who was impregnated by rape, and whose pregnancy threatens her life owing to eclampsia asks for an abortion.  Should she be allowed an abortion? Find the text in the Gospel which addresses these circumstances."

Now, Krugman reports a Chris Mooney, author of The Republican Brain has reported "the now extensive research linking political views to personality types. As Mr. Mooney showed, modern American conservatism is highly correlated with authoritarian inclinations."

Ya think?

You need "extensive research" to appreciate this?  

When Mad Dog  was growing up, he found himself attracted primarily to Catholic girls  because Catholic girls had the most to rebel against. It made them more interesting.

Look at the Supreme Court--the four horsemen of the eighteenth century Alito, Scalia, Roberts and Thomas are either Catholic or fundamentalist--grew up hearing "all the answers are in the Good Book." And now they are "originalists" who look to all the answers in that Good Book called Constitution, as if its authors, those  18th century gentlemen, some of whom were slave owners, some of whom were brilliant, but who among them could have anticipated the microphone, television, the internet, public education, the land grant college, automatic weapons, nuclear power plants and all those forces which make the 21st century such a different world from the 18th?

We all want to clutch on to something in the swiftly moving current of life. We want to believe we know things, immutable truths. And we find it hard to give up old beliefs. Mad Dog has occasionally complained that 90% of what he was taught in medical school turned out to be wrong or at least subject to heavy revision. That the heart pumps blood to the brain, that the pituitary gland controls the thyroid gland's release of thyroid hormone (except when it doesn't)  are still verifiably true, but those are the few boulders in the stream, still firmly planted as the roiling currents of change sweep past.

So Republicans refuse to hear new evidence, refuse to believe new things, refuse to give up cherished beliefs.  Don't we all, in some ways? The problem is, the Democrats know we have to be willing to go forth boldly into worlds where man has never gone before. The Republicans would rather curse the darkness than light a candle.