The Age of Unreason

This morning I woke angry. Kavanaugh was confirmed as our newest Supreme Court Justice. Perhaps taking the oath of office to that revered position will jar him into being a fair judge. Perhaps my hero for who I named this blog, Judge Hand, will possess him and instill him with the spirit of fairness and objectivity.

But I am not angry at the Kavanaugh appointment. I am disappointed that someone fairer and temperamentally judicial was not confirmed. My anger is aimed at those who are responsible for the Kavanaugh nomination: Trump, McConnell and Ryan. Here's why.

Steven Pinker's most recent book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress tells the story in clear english and graphics how much progress the human race has made in the last 400 years and why. The extended title of the book says it all: reason, science and humanism. Over the last 400 years, a tiny blip in the history of our species, we have risen out of poverty and disease to become a much longer lived, healthier, and happier species.

This didn't happen because we prayed it would. It happened because we paid attention to the world around us and took our lessons on the nature of the world from the world itself. We observed, took note, and used that knowledge improve our lives. Until recently.

In 2010 the midterm elections handed control of the House and Senate to the Republicans. Here is a quote from Politico in 2010:

Here’s John Boehner, the likely speaker if Republicans take the House, offering his plans for Obama’s agenda: “We're going to do everything — and I mean everything we can do — to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell summed up his plan to National Journal: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

In these statements the Speaker of the House, John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, abdicated their responsibility to the American people by stopping using reason, science and humanism to make decisions about legislation that was best for the American people, but to use ideology: the anti-Obama vow of faith. Instead of abiding by the choice of the American people they reverted to the strategy of hate.

When the Obama administration proposed legislation that would have helped the middle class member of our country such as large infrastructural projects, another economic stimulus after the 2008 recession, or increased taxes on the wealthy, the slim Republican majority rejected them all. They rejected them using reasons based on religion, untested, or sometimes tested and failed, economic slogans, and bad science. But these "reasons" weren't "reasons" at all; they were camouflage for their hatred of Obama. They had nothing to do with 'the age of reason' that had brought us all to the great standard of living we have now compared to 400 years ago.

Trump is not as bad as McConnell and Ryan. So far he is more of a joke than a president, a bad joke, but a joke nevertheless. Trump opens his mouth and out comes tweets that he has made up just that moment: without thought, without information, without humanism. And often they are wishful lies.

So, I am angry because we are clearly going backwards. The great 'miracle', as the economists call the rise of wealth during the Age of Reason, is threatened. It will, I am sure, in the end succeed because humans like their comforts, their good health, their children happy and educated, and food on the table. That didn't happen because of prayer, ideology, faith, or hate. It happened because of reason.