Sophisticated Unreality

An early scene in the movie Tombstone (if you haven't seen it, go sit in the corner) offers us a reunion between the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday (seriously, if you haven't seen Val Kilmer's tour-de-force turn as Doc Holliday - and I wrote this just so I could type tourde-force, your life is incomplete).

That reunion is encroached by the unctuous Ike Behan, who had earlier introduced himself to Wyatt Earp as "Besides Sheriff I'm also tax collector, captain of the fire brigade, and chairman of the nonpartisan anti-Chinese league." Sounds about right for a local politician.

Behan waxes eloquent about his town, bragging that it will just as sophisticated as San Francisco in a few years, when he is interrupted by a gun fight. Doc's post hoc observation?

Very cosmopolitan.

Turns out, our gang of Western heroes know the gunslingers. Doc introduces them to Behan as:

a pair of fellow sophisticates, Turkey Creek Jack Johnson and Texas Jack Vermillion.

In addition to having really cool nicknames, Creek and Jack are dressed in high western-gunslinger fashion, and turn out to be stand-up guys who ride with the Earps later on.

That movie moment bubbled up in my brainpan as I read the morning's news. The triggering items? Congressman Dan Goldman (D-NY10) continuing to assert that Hunter Biden's laptop is a Russian conspiracy and/or has not been demonstrated to be real, and a passel of Oaklanders (Oaklandites? Oaklandistas?) asserting, in a city council meeting, that Hamas's 10/7 atrocities didn't happen - that any rapes and baby beheadings were a false flag operation committed by Israel itself. Nellie Bowles over at The Free Press dubbed them Blue Anon and pointed out that:

These are not crazy people staggering around (though it’s Oakland, so you can be sure that was happening close by). These are sophisticated, smart liberals who truly believe this. The one who said it’s all a fabricated narrative? That’s Brooke Lober, a gender and women’s studies lecturer at UC Berkeley.

See that five syllable "s" word that Nellie offered? One word elicited memories of that scene in Tombstone, and thus a blog post was born. That's all it takes, sometimes.

Not that long ago, I penned a bit I titled "Ignorance Chic," which dipped into the mindset of flat-earthers, young-earthers, moon landing hoaxers, and other secret-knowledge, conspiracist, or smarter-than-thee types.

Many of these reality deniers are simply sideshows, and exemplars of Jonathan Swift's observation.

The combination of harmless sideshow and inability to reason with the unreasoning prompts us to laugh them off and to ignore rather than rebut their farcical claims.

As Rodney Dangerfield's Thornton Melon schooled Professor Barbay in the introductory business class where he sought to model a startup company (you've seen, Back to School, right? Right??), our sideshows are living in fantasy land.

The problem in letting them wallow in their sophisticated unreality is that this "alternate facts" bit is infectious and corrosive. Our conspiracists and know-betters may not have been schooled in postmodernism, but they nevertheless live the nonsense that it is. Just so we're on the same page:

Postmodernism in general has taught us that knowledge is contingent.

[P]ostmodernism rejects concepts of rationality, objectivity, and universal truth. Instead, it emphasizes the diversity of human experience and multiplicity of perspectives.

As in, I have my set of 'facts' and you have your set of 'facts' and I can ignore yours because personal perspective and life experience and blather blather blather.

I've been engaged in a slow-rolling one-on-one exchange with a reader (on a range of topics revolving around libertarianism but branching into other topics), who recently offered me this:

This research leads me to question what “Truth” is, what “Facts” are, what “Proof” is. I began to see that basically NOTHING is a rock-solid “Proof” of anything.

As I replied, facts and proof are separate matters, and the inability to 100%-beyond-doubt prove a fact doesn't mean the fact isn't. Yes, we can speculate that our existence is a Matrix-like simulation, or we can be solipsists and believe that all our senses tell us is physical reality is just our brain fabricating a fantasy, but this is over-sophisticated navel-gazing. Entertaining, and perhaps a path to some other insight, but indulging it as anything more than that sets us up for the inevitable outcome of postmodern philosophy, which is a collapse of sense and sensibility (I confess, I haven't read that book, though I did see the movie).

The encroachment of sophisticated unreality is how we get college professors denying the horrific reality of Hamas's terrorism and butchery. It's how we end up with our elected representatives rejecting the realty of Hunter Biden's laptop content in favor of their preferred narratives. It's how some smart people continue to embrace the Trump-Russia collusion story even after it was unmasked as a fabrication. It's how we find ourselves being mandated into a green energy future that is technologically unfeasible, economically ruinous, and geopolitically moronic.

The sophisticates' unreality is also how cynics and charlatans rise to power. In Tombstone, Behan entered the film as a self-serving sleaze ball, and went downhill from there. Present-day, we get Q-Anon, Blue Anon, Alex Jones, truthers of various flavors, birthers, hoaxers, and Congressmen leveraging the 'cool factor' of preferring one's own alternate reality to plain truth for notoriety, for power, and for financial gain. We get Nikole Hannah-Jones' 1619 project and Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States rewriting history. We get people claiming that Jews have no historical connection to the lands of Israel. We get holocaust denial. And we get college kids supporting Hamas and either denying rape and child murder or excusing it as “resistance.”

There was a time when such ignorance was exclusively assigned to the uneducated and the backwater. Today, that has been exposed as naive and wishful. The biggest detachments from reality and plain truth are found in our most prestigious institutes of higher learning, our most eminent news rooms, and in the halls of power. None of those sophisticates have an excuse for being ignorant, not when they, like just about everyone else in the First World, have unprecedented access to information literally in the palms of their hands.

None of these Best-and-Brightest can claim an insufficient ability to comprehend reality, not when they stand as recipients of the best educations in the land.

OK, that last phrase was too much even for me. I apologize.

There are things that occur which we may not fully know or have 100% proof of. That doesn't mean they didn't occur. The Earth orbits the Sun, and I just took a sip of coffee. You know that the former is true, but you have no proof other than my say-so of the latter. You can concoct some wild celestial sphere construct to try and deny the former, but that doesn't make your construct true. You may never know whether I actually took that sip of coffee, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.

I offer, again, the wise words of William of Ockham:

If you have two competing ideas to explain the same phenomenon, you should prefer the simpler one.

Occam's Razor doesn't completely discount the more complex explanation, but that doesn't mean that both explanations are equally likely. If something is 99.999% probable to be the case, if you insist without extraordinary evidence on advancing the 0.001% explanation, you're being a pompous jackass. Or, if you prefer, engaging in sophisticated unreality. Stop it. You're abetting the destruction of society, and giving cover to 10/7 deniers.