Hate Mail - And Why I'm Not Posting Hate Mail Much These Days

WELL, NOW I KNOW you didn't go to school in the late 60s or early 70s, or, if you did, you never took a rigorous course in Freshman Rhetoric.   In mine, at my small, state university we were assigned to read Eugene Wigner's famous essay,  The Unreasonable  Effectiveness of Mathematics In The Natural Sciences which starts this way: 

There is a story about two friends, who were classmates in high school, talking about their jobs. One of them became a statistician and was working on population trends. He showed a reprint to his former classmate. The reprint started, as usual, with the Gaussian distribution and the statistician explained to his former classmate the meaning of the symbols for the actual population, for the average population, and so on. His classmate was a bit incredulous and was not quite sure whether the statistician was pulling his leg. "How can you know that?" was his query. "And what is this

symbol here?"  "Oh," said the statistician, "this is pi." "What is that?" "The ratio of the circumference of the circle to its diameter." "Well, now you are pushing your joke too far," said the classmate, "surely the population has nothing to do with the circumference of the circle."

Naturally, we are inclined to smile about the simplicity of the classmate’s approach. Nevertheless, when I heard this story, I had to admit to an eerie feeling because, surely, the reaction of the classmate betrayed only plain common sense. I was even more confused when, not many days later, someone came to me and expressed his bewilderment [The remark to be quoted was made by F. Werner when he was a student in Princeton.] with the fact that we make a rather narrow selection when choosing the data on which we test our theories. "How do we know that, if we made a theory which focuses its attention on phenomena we disregard and disregards some of the phenomena now commanding our attention, that we could not build another theory which has little in common with the present one but which, nevertheless, explains just as many phenomena as the present theory?" It has to be admitted that we have no definite evidence that there is no such theory.

The essay is still relevant to its subject matter though it's past the age of retirement for People because it's still true.  There is not only no knowable way to understand why mathematics works as it does in the physical sciences,  it is often "made to work" through manipulation of the data.   And, I'll note, that in many cases in the soft sciences and especially in the pseudo-sciences the confirmation of that effectiveness is not achieved by the success of predictions made regarding the results but are merely a question of assertion. 

I have said for years that one of the most dramatic of such confirmations in real life are the early predictions of climate change through humans dumping carbon into the atmosphere,  I think that is one of the most impressive scientific successes though perhaps the greatest of human failures and tragedies due not to the failure of the science but to the political folly of "enlightenment" political and legal theories based on the premature and pretty stupid assumption that the abstract perfection of mathematics and its solutions of some impressive but not that difficult physical phenomena in the early history of science could be applied to the governance of human life.   

That was especially true of the early "enlightenment" attempts at forming new kinds of governments not based on European feudalism,  the American one and the French one.   America's was what we are taught to never consider, a system of genocide and enslavement that makes European feudalism in the period before the Reformation, in many cases look enlightened and the French one which was a bloody catastrophe in which huge numbers of French peasants and the poor  and many other totally innocent People were killed in the name of REASON and under the cult of the "enlightenment." 

The history of the French republic, due to the tumultuous violence that affected its ruling class wasn't early locked into a written Constitution that made its basic alteration a practical impossibility,  ours developed in a way that that original power structure was locked down in ways that prevent its basic reformation even after the most terrible of wars in our history and the experience of a majority of our population under its subjugation has not been able to change it.   The effective amending or re-writing of the U.S. Constitution will probably not come until an even worse war happens.   Which will more likely result in the permanent break-up of the country.  

In each and every case of that failure, there was a moral failure often masked in reason and at times science.   It is one of the major features of science in the public sphere that you can always find someone with a PhD in science who will lie for money or one who will lie for their own profitable ideology.   And lawyers who will facilitate that lying, whether on or off of courts and, especially, Supreme Courts.   The "enlightenment" in the law is especially unimpressive when it comes to the rigorous application of the most obvious of morality.   They can always find reasons to reason their way out of that. 

I have been writing since he middle of last summer about the failure of the American enlightenment which has and continues to result in everything from Reagan to Trump II and looks like it's not about to stop any time soon.   In each and every case it is not only a failure or reason and the rationalist regime that was really a regime of the slave-holders, the plantation system, the northern importers of slaves and financing of that and genocide in the West, translated into current American English.     And if, as Wigner demonstrated, the connection between the abstract perfection of mathematical proof and the hard physical sciences is not only unexplainable and veering into the unreasonable, the assumption that they could ever be applied to human societies and laws and politics is a complete leap of faith.    The "enlightenment" desire to not have to rely on "faith" in such matters has not only been an even bigger leap of faith than that in revealed morality,  in its desire to by-pass revealed morality (especially those such as the Golden Rule and those imposing obligations of charity)  it has obliterated morality and endangered all of our lives.   And that demotion of revealed morality has happened in christianist religion as well as in the secular sector.   Our idiotic First Amendment can't even discern the difference between Hegseth style "religion" and a religion that is dedicated to helping the least among us.   It is that mentally deficient.   The secular law is an ass and its officers choose for it to be such. 

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It's kind of a tradition here for me to post the comments of one particular guy who likes to troll me (and at least one which I believe is his sock-puppet) but for the most part I don't post most of the others.  And these days he isn't sending much of it my way.  He's in his eighties now, maybe he's not feeling up to it. 

Me too.   I haven't been posting much of the hate I get in comment moderation because I'm not feeling up to it.   Though if it amuses me to answer directly, and the commentator hasn't violated my rules such as the one against lying about a third party,  I might get into a brawl again. 

I also haven't been posting much of the pre-election coverage because, frankly,  the closer it gets to possible disaster the more it takes out of me.   I don't trust polling so I don't believe any of it until the final results of the vote are in.   And I have a very strong sense of jinxing the results if I express any confidence in them before hand.    I am Irish Catholic and an heir to the thwarting of my optimism of you early adulthood, though I was always skeptical of such stuff as "The Greening Of America."   I was always more a student of Shirley Chisholm and The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. and Dorothy Day.   I am on the side of the farthest left, the one  that takes the Gospel, the Epistles, the Law and the Prophets seriously.   Far more seriously than the Constitution, especially since I've come to the realization that no one else with the ability to take it seriously does,  especially the Court.