If we want better political debates we need better political hygiene, with everyone refusing to tolerate behaviour on “their side” they rightly deplore in partisan foes. But I increasingly believe better intellectual hygiene is even more urgent. For instance we should grab for the mental floss when we read in Britain’s normally reputable Daily Telegraph that “Salvador Freixedo, who has died aged 96, was a defrocked Spanish priest who became an authority on UFOs and the paranormal.” We’ve got to get that little green stuff out from between our ears.
Oddly, I consider myself an authority on UFOs, too. It all began decades ago when I wasn’t driving down a lonely road late one night and my car engine mysteriously didn’t conk out just as an eerie blue lack of light failed to shine through thick fog not enveloping me, casting no long spindly shadows from three invisible beings that weren’t even there.
Perhaps you dismiss this weird tale as mere anecdote or the result of the drugs I didn’t take that evening. The human brain is fallible, after all, and our senses can cheat. Which could explain why I failed to detect what Freixedo did and wrote some 30 books on: non-corporeal entities lurking in giant spaceships or caverns a kilometre deep, or wandering invisibly in our midst, masquerading as the one true God for centuries to drink our blood and feast on brainwaves caused by pain and suffering. But (gasp) I am not alone.
Oddly, I consider myself an authority on UFOs, too
An amazing number of other people have not detected aliens. Indeed, nearly 70 years ago physicist Enrico Fermi did a back-of-the-napkin calculation of how many habitable planets there should be, some surely with intelligent life, then noted the absolute lack of radio waves bringing I Love Xhtl from distant stars and asked “Where is everybody?”
That all our sensors missed them because they’re hiding in caves, which to be fair Freixedo said might be just 100 metres deep, is such rubbish you might ask whether I’m drivelling on about it because aliens probed my brain, found nothing, and left. No. It’s because this Obituary 9 from Outer Space appeared in real newspapers including Monday’s National Post. And as long as the press runs horoscopes and eulogizes ex-Jesuit crackpots, we look a bit silly complaining about Donald Trump.
Yes, it’s odd to have an American president who looks like the reassembly job after an alien probe went badly wrong, leading to a Neptunian ruckus about who forgot to take pictures beforehand of how the hair originally went. And surely Trump calling his conversation with the Ukrainian president “perfecto” emits a weird orange glow.
What of it? His partisans will jeer “told you so,” while Democrats express outrage that such a thing is possible depending on your definition of the word “is,” then nod gravely at Elizabeth Warren’s $20.5-trillion plan for free health care on the Brezhnev plan. And as Ottawa temperatures plunge to -10 by Thursday we’re told little plant food molecules are creating runaway heating that hides in the deep oceans and we can all fly to Tofino using wind power.
Oh dear. Was that snide? Well, I am a columnist. And even if we let Elvis RIP we’re going to have some frustrating arguments. Which is precisely why if you think there’s too much nonsense out there (if not, you clearly inhaled something), the place you have to start is in here. You must patrol your own brain for random bits of rubbish as well as tangled loops of pseudo-logic.
It’s not easy because of the cliché that I am principled, you are stubborn and she is ideological. Our own ideas seem clear and factual to us while our adversaries plainly have some form of mental disorder. And as the human brain is fallible we are never going to get rid of all its failings by using it; in life as in philosophy we are both doctor and patient. What’s worse, conspiracy theories have a lurid appeal because they make us feel important enough to be worth plotting against.
Conspiracy theories have a lurid appeal because they make us feel important enough to be worth plotting against
Still, there’s wrong and then there’s just plain stupid. Respectful tributes to a theological-freak, sociological-fool UFO “expert” are in the latter category. Along with anti-vaxxing, micronutrients, 63 genders, vegan diets, smoke enemas and pyramid power.
Much idiocy has to do with health, followed surprisingly closely by monetary policy. But it’s also found dangerously close to the public-affairs mainstream. Like glowing obituaries to former Communist Party USA head Gus Hall, an unrepentant Stalinist, when he died in 2000, including Peter Jennings intoning on ABC that “Even after his friends … abandoned the cause, Hall never wavered.” Neither did Himmler. Would you applaud him?
If not, why applaud someone whose faith in little green men outlived his faith in God? Is your brain lurking invisibly deep underground?
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