So let me be clear: there are several versions of what Stephens seemed to want to say that would be completely acceptable, interesting, legitimate, as far as I’m concerned. As it stands, the column says the following:

1. We’re too certain of too many things
2. We’re too certain of too many things, especially science, because we trust in the data we have and the methods we have for collecting it, like Hillary Clinton’s campaign was
3. Because you see, some things are only about probabilities, unlike other things that aren’t
4. Climate science is only about probabilities, not certainties
5. If climate science is only about probability, not certainty, maybe we shouldn’t act on it
6. After all, we have made many mistakes in the past based on probabilities and science

Folks who read this blog regularly have certainly heard me say some similar things, though often in a very different manner and in different, more specific, contexts. And, I hope in my own case, in an actually searching and open-minded way, rather than as sophistry intended to endorse a particular political orthodoxy. The problem here with Stephens is that all science is probabilistic on some level. I could just as easily say, “There is a probability that the aspirin I take in the morning will suddenly cause an unexpected allergic reaction and I will die within 30 minutes, despite having no prior allergy to it.” It’s true! It doesn’t mean I should never take aspirin again. He makes a big move towards epistemological skepticism to open his column and then applies that skepticism in a highly limited way that doesn’t match the opening.

The column is, as Will Bunch noted, a fact-free nothingburger, intended largely to troll and annoy liberals and then to complain that they’re intolerant of alternative opinions when they get annoyed. What annoys me is a newspaper that’s marketing itself as a vehicle for truth, for ambitious attempts to understand the world, for challenging thinking, playing along with the smack-the-imaginary-intolerant-liberal game. Fuck that noise.

I want to prove that there are alternative versions of Stephens’ column that would be perfectly respectable–where I would readily concede the legitimacy of the opinion and would also regard Stephens (or any other writer) as legitimately expanding the range of what we can argue, and I would submit, most of these would be read in a similarly open-minded or appreciative (if perhaps in some cases puzzled) spirit by many “liberals”.

Epistemological Rebel

1. Do we really know anything?
2. Maybe formal knowledge doesn’t tell us what’s really true about the world and the universe.
3a. Maybe we should trust our feelings and intuitions more and act impulsively on them. (Basically, this is Romanticism and its various 20th Century descendants).
3b. Or maybe we should look for forms of faith and detachment from this world. (Basically, some forms of spirituality.)
3c. Maybe all knowledge is too entangled in the reproduction of institutional and political power. (Basically, some forms of anti-foundationalist philosophy.)
4. This applies to everything, not just climate action or climate science. What does that look like?

Hey, I grant you: this would not be popular with most readers, liberal and conservative. And it would lead in a really different kind of direction for a weekly or regular column. But all of these exist in the world, they’re possible directions for commentary. The point is that this branch recognizes that a general epistemological or philosophical complaint has to be applied generally.

Risk and the Precautionary Principle

1. A vast amount of our collective and individual action involves projections, hypothetical, models, probabilities, intuitions of risk. Not just conservative AND liberal politics, but businesses, families, etc.
2. How do we know how to map our thinking about what might happen to the costs and challenges of acting because of that thinking?
3. Case Studies guided by some consistent clearly-stated principles

E.g., a column that does this every single week, where that’s the entire focus: how do we reconcile what might happen with what we should do about it? Think of the Ethicist column in the NY Times Magazine or maybe the NPR show modelled on Freakonomics as models here. It’s completely plausible–there are a zillion things to talk about under this heading. This solves the problem of Stephens just applying this entire way of thinking once to question a single political plan, and it makes him set down some kind of consistent logic that could gore his own ox. You want to say someone’s an independent thinker, that’s what he’s got to do. This takes understanding probability, of course, and engaging directly with actual projections by climate scientists rather than hand-waving about how they use probability and so it’s not completely certain. One thing that might lead out from that engagement is that the possibility that things won’t be as bad as the mainstream projections would have it is mirrored by a possibility that things will be vastly worse.

Why Don’t People Trust Science? Or Probability? Historical Explorations

1. Science or social science have often been used in the past to justify public initiatives and governmental programs
2. Sometimes they’ve been badly wrong; sometimes they’ve been wrong in smaller and less damaging ways; sometimes they’ve been right
3. Is there anything about the cases of being wrong that we can learn from, if we review them with an open mind?
4. Do scientists need to engage publics differently with an awareness that at least some of these historical errors (or perceived but misremembered errors) are remembered in various ways?
5. Is this specifically one of the issues hampering attempts to move from climate science to climate action?

This is pretty much a kind of column theme close to my own thinking at times on this blog. I think it’s a useful approach. Maybe this isn’t quite a week-after-week theme, but it surely could support a series of 5-10 columns. The point here is to think deeply about what kinds of mistakes have been made, and what the causality of those mistakes might have been. I think there’s a range of examples and underlying causes–and probably to the discomfort of Stephens’ ideology, at least some of them have to do with the intersection of business interests, the economics of higher education, and science. E.g., they’re not “liberal hubris”, but something grubbier and more tied to the ideology of market conservatism and to governmental authority of all types and ideologies. It wasn’t “liberals” who thought it was a great idea to introduce cane toads to control agricultural pests. But this isn’t exclusively so–I’m just as willing to pile scorn on Paul Ehrlich as any Austrian economist might be.

Again, the saving grace is for Stephens or someone like him would involve not chopping off feet and hands to fit a body onto the bed of Procrustes. If a hypothetical columnist wants to argue that climate action plans and policies closely resemble past mistakes in fitting science to policy, some rich and well-chosen examples have to come into play first. Protip hint: polling during the Clinton campaign is not a rich or well-chosen example.

What’s the Debate About Probability and Projection Within Climate Science?

1. Here’s what climate scientists actually say and disagree about when it comes to making projections
2. Here’s what climate scientists actually say and disagree about when it comes to suggesting strategies for mitigation
3. How are we who are not climate scientists to decide which ideas or research to favor? How literate do we have to be to make those judgments?

If Stephens wants to really think about this just with climate science, he could learn a bit about the rather vigorous debate between climate scientists about what kinds of projections and estimations are responsible and which aren’t. And about the caution that many of them demonstrate when they try to match up their most certain projection ranges with possible strategies for mitigation. There’s a fine column or series of columns in that somewhere. But it takes actually knowing something, which doesn’t seem to be a big thing with most of the New York Times‘ regular columnists.

Is It Actually Possible To Care About the Far Future in a Real Way?
OR
Screw It: I’m Alive Right Now and I Want What I Want

1. Nobody has really ever given up what matters to them right now for the benefit of people who aren’t even born yet
2. Seeming examples of that are deceptive (e.g., people who seem to be sacrificing for their kids and grandkids are just hoping that there will be a reciprocal benefit to them and they’ll be cared for in turn; or they are just making a big deal out of a ‘sacrifice’ they had to make no matter what anyway; or it’s about the real actual emotional relationship they have with a real actual person rather than a hypothetical future person). Etc.
3. What would it take to actually have an ethics that was more about the lives of people (and environments) that are two or three centuries ahead? What would we be like if we lived that way?

OR

1. Who cares about a century from now? Let those people solve their own problems.
2. Look at what Americans a century ago left in our laps to solve: a ruinous war that fueled an even worse one, an unregulated and amateurish financial system that caused a global economic disaster that afflicted people for decades, resurgent racism and lynching that still haunts us today, an incoherent distinction between alcohol and other controlled substances that fueled mass imprisonment on one hand and the ravages of alcoholism on the other, etc. Were they thinking about us? No.
3. People can cope with anything, we’ll figure out a way to live with big changes and nobody will really know the difference.
4. Or we won’t, and so what? The dinosaurs didn’t figure out how to stop volcanoes erupting or how to keep comets away. This is just where our evolution led us. That’s the way it goes.

I am completely ok with either of these approaches as something to read if they’re argued in an interesting, stylistically alive fashion. The first is basically what Roy Scranton does in Learning to Die in the Anthropocene; there are other ways to work this terrain than Scranton’s. I have some sympathy for the approach that says: this is actually a really hard problem that most climate scientists and climate activists underestimate because most of them don’t really think a lot about how other people think or feel. I’m not at all sympathetic to the second approach, but I recognize its hard coherence. It’s a legitimate point of view–though its bleakness applies to way, way more than climate action. It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t lend itself to having a political opinion about specific policies–it’s a kind of nihilism that works better as a literary sensibility. But I dunno, a hard nihilist who was brutal and vicious in his/her assessment of EVERYONE would be a breath of fresh air on an opinion page, a kind of 21st Century Mencken.

=====================

The major thrust here is to say: do NOT give me this guff about how sensitive snowflakes don’t want to hear unconventional thoughts or diversity of opinion. It is the laziness and conventionality of Stephens’ column that indicts it. If James Bennet is on a mission to broaden the range and form of opinions on his page, Stephens is very nearly the worst possible vehicle to accomplish that. It is as if someone said they were tired of vanilla ice cream and decided to go wild by ordering FRENCH vanilla ice cream.

————————

Dear Mr. Dean Baquet, Ms. Liz Spayd, Mr. James Bennet:

We have been reading the New York Times for most of our lives. Both of us read you when we were children, teenagers, college students together. We subscribed as one of our first acts as a married couple in the late 1980s and we have carried that subscription ever since, with a few minor interruptions on various moves. It is a 40-year plus fixture in our lives.

We’re kicking you out. And it’s not us, it’s you. Yes, we’ll probably still read you here and there, likely at our place of work. But we’re tired of the relationship. We’re tired of your bad decisions, which have accumulated steadily over the years. We’re tired of you making bad decisions right now when so much is at stake, not just politically, but for the survival of journalism in the face of digitization.

The New York Times has always been more enamored of its relationship to power than it ought to be. Yes, you published the Pentagon Papers (and then floated on those reluctantly-decided laurels for decades). But you also let your editors variously become handmaidens to various ideological fads. One pursued anti-Communism to the point of removing a reporter who dared report honestly from El Salvador (his reportage later upheld by other investigators). Later your editor-in-chief Bill Keller became so desperate to prove the paper’s patriotism that he became a servant to the cause of an unnecessary war founded on lies. Occasionally you’ve apologized, as Keller did. Mostly you haven’t.

We forgave. To err is human. There is no simple objectivity. We would rather have a strong sense of committed vision, even one we don’t entirely agree with, than bland faux-objectivity. But still, that kind of dishonesty—altering coverage, suppressing reportage—is hard to forgive. We want honesty, aggression in the pursuit of truth, the willingness to say something dangerous or unpopular. If it’s true. If it’s compelling. If it’s complex and thoughtfully observed.

We want something interesting. In some ways the Times has been adroit in its adaptation to an era of ubiquitous free content. You’re thinking hard about how to provide in-depth coverage that no one else has. We appreciate that. We’ll miss it. You’re thinking hard about how to explain how your coverage works, how stories were made, to provide perspective. We’ll miss it.

In other ways, you have been poor at adapting. Your cultural coverage is still mostly slow, dull and timid. You still have laughably weird attention to the real estate dilemmas of 28-year old recent college graduates who have $50 million trust funds.

These are minor issues.

What is not minor is the continuing catastrophic misjudgments in your news coverage of American politics. You were not alone in underestimating and misreporting the rise of Donald Trump, nor were you alone in paying bizarrely intense attention to Hillary Clinton’s emails. We say that as people who didn’t even particularly care for Clinton. You just missed the story, badly, because someone in your chain of command had some white whales to catch and you missed what was really going on. You’re still missing a lot, almost every other day, with news coverage and analysis that seems almost desperate to find a reason to compliment the President.

What is not minor is your continuing timidity of your coverage of foreign affairs, your compliant reproduction of conventional wisdom and diplomatic gossip—we hear and read coverage a thousand times more interesting and detailed and daring and observant and on-the-ground real than yours from the BBC, from various European newspapers, from freelance columnists, from bloggers, from many sources. Trying to follow the world just from reading the New York Times is difficult at best.

Even that is minor compared to your opinion columnists. That’s where the New York Times’ historical weaknesses meet up with the failures of our present-day public sphere and create an inexcusable disaster. There are a thousand writers online of all ideologies that we would rather read than any of your columnists. Your columnists are largely boring, predictable, incurious, and stylistically inert at best. Almost none of them bother to talk to anyone outside their own circles, research beyond what they already know (or think they know), think in unexpected ways, or engage the public culture as it stands. They are not even clickbait in the ordinary sense: they mostly get linked in social media by readers exasperated with the timidity, inaccuracy and dullness of what they say. You have vastly better opinion and analysis writers associated with the digital version of the paper, like Natalie Angier, so it is not as if your editors are unaware of what’s out there in the wider public sphere.

Now you’ve hired a columnist who thinks the height of thinking outside the box is to question whether climate change is real and whose idea of argument is to shadowbox every strawman caricature that he can hastily erect. (His interview with Vox is jaw-dropping in that respect, so much so that his interviewer actually calls him on it mid-way through.) That’s the best you can do in adding a new voice: hollow sophistry of an utterly familiar kind from yet another white male.

That’s what “defending free speech” in the sense of finding an unorthodox opinion means to you, in an era where the culture overflows with unorthodox thinkers who have honed their craft through online writing. Both in terms of how you use the influence that your long history and reputation still retain and about how we are entertained and engaged as readers, we demand something better. We demand something that is at least equal to what we presently read online through a variety of blogs, microblogs, Twitter streams, Facebook feeds and the like. Something more imaginative, more surprising, more diverse, more honest. More introspective and self-doubting. More factual. More thoughtful. We don’t want to read any more columns where we could write the rest of the column ourselves after reading the first two sentences. Where an algorithm could write the column with a few simple lines of code. Where the argument consists of lazy exaggerations and strawmen. We want you to demand more of the writers you hire and to hire writers who are more demanding of us.

We don’t even know who exactly you’re trying to kiss up to by hiring Mr. Stephens. Whomever it is, it’s not us, your formerly patient and forgiving readers.

We believe in journalism. We believe in insightful public opinion. We believe in free speech, and in diversity of viewpoints. We wish you did more than you do. Good-bye. We wish you the best.

I was working with the editorial writers, so I didn’t interact that often with the interns who were out working on stories. The Times brought us together for events now and again, though. So I remember talking to two guys about mid-summer who were also rethinking whether they wanted to continue in journalism, but for a different reason than me. They had been sent to help with the coverage of a mass murder in a San Diego McDonald’s. 21 people were dead, some children, and others wounded. They’d been asked to go out and try to speak with the relatives of some of the victims and to take pictures. Both of them questioned the necessity for doing so: the people who did agree to speak generally just repeated the same kinds of “coping cliches” as they grasped for something to say, some way to process it all. But the interns also recognized that this was part of journalism as it was practiced, that the Times couldn’t choose to not do it without pointedly dissenting from broadly-held professional norms at the time (and for that matter, audience expectations).

Revealing accounts of “how the sausage gets made” are available about the inner life and processes that connect to a wide variety of professions. When they come from outsiders who have infiltrated or examined the profession, these looks tend to either be sharply accusatory (think Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death) or affectionate and explanatory (think Mary Roach’s books). Or occasionally they’re participatory, in the style of George Plimpton. When it’s an insider’s account, it usually takes the form of a memoir, entangled in a specific career and its details.

There are certainly many memoirs by journalists. And a few notable outsider’s exposes or explorations of journalism or of specific forms of journalism like war reporting. A few series or films that follow a specific newsroom or set of reporters, most of which ultimately are complimentary to either the integrity of at least one character or to the overall work.

But reading Ryan Schuessler’s short explanation of why he wasn’t going to continue reporting on Ferguson for al-Jazeera America made me realize that we’ve only rarely had something that we very much need, that could quite easily be done: a brutally honest visual documentary of what media professionals in a media spectacle do. A camera trained on the cameras, a crew following the crews. Something that shows us what Schuessler describes: the cajoling, the orchestration, the pushing aside of the experiential reality of the story itself, the crassness, the management of “talent”. But also the political economy of spectacle: where professionals stay, what they consume, how they pay off sources or buy access.

The obvious reason not to do it, of course, is that anyone with ambitions as a journalist knows that this is a “you’ll never work in this town again” kind of move, that much of what a documentary of this kind would show would be seriously embarrassing or damaging to many professional reputations, whether or not it was intended to or consciously slanted in that direction.

I don’t often give money to a Kickstarter, but if Schuessler or someone like him wanted to tackle this subject–spend a year going around to scenes of media spectacle and frenzy and filming what that looks like, talking to crews and reporters about what they’re doing, staying to look at the aftermath when the journalists start to leave–I’d donate enthusiastically.

If you have a wide enough range of social groups and people represented in your feeds, you will sooner or later hear one group of people saying some of the things in an untroubled or unselfconscious manner that fuel anger over in another group. Very rarely will the two groups actually be talking to each other, however, unless you choose to identify yourself as the Venn overlap and expose them to one another. Most of us know that little good can come of that: more typically, if you’re in basic agreement with the angry people, the simultaneity of conversations may spark you to unfriend or unsubscribe.

You have to have a really wide-ranging network of social media contacts or a really expansive taste for political and social variety to encounter certain overlaps. Almost everyone in my Facebook network is careful about any comments on race or expresses strongly within one major discourse that is critical of racial supremacy and racial injustice, for example, which I’m sure says something about my own professional and personal identity. Generally, I only see some of that overlap when one of my few friends who has a sizeable following to the right says something that seems too liberal in racial terms for the rest of his or her followers.

One place where I do see circles like this in my feeds are two rivalrous groups that are deliberately working to avoid any kind of intimate or insider understanding (and thus possible sympathy) for one another. The obvious case is Palestinians (and their sympathizers) and Israelis (and their sympathizers), but in a more quotidian vein I see it between faculty and administrators (though the latter group tend to be much more circumspect about expressing anything in social media, which I think is a pity).

Where I’m more likely to see this kind of overlap is in comments about body size/body image, mental health, parenting and family, age and youth, and in certain discourses about gender but not others. If I had to sum it up, in conversations about other people that concern attributes and experiences that are historically associated with the private, domestic and personal.

One example. What I see in this instance is one cluster of people for whom the existence of judgmental comments about body size and shape are powerfully explained by their views about social justice and discrimination. And then another group of people who unselfconsciously talk about weight and body size and exercise in terms of public health and private happiness. The second group is barely aware that the first group exists, and if they were aware, would regard them as risible or extreme. The second group is also often politically progressive and regard their views on body size and health as an outgrowth of other commitments they have to avoiding mass-produced food, to self-care and autonomy, to environmental justice and much else.

As an overweight person, I’m sympathetic to the first group. I’m often a bit stunned at how colleagues and acquaintances I know who would absolutely flip out if anyone “microaggressed” in their presence about race, gender or sexuality have zero problem asking me about my diet, commenting on my weight, wondering whether I’m healthy, or in one case, poking my in my belly several times during a conversation and saying, “How about that, eh?”

On the other hand, for all sorts of reasons, I don’t really feel like signing on with the conventional set of moves made within identity politics on this issue. Much of that is that I’m not really the kind of person who suffers serious consequences of body-image, body-shape discrimination: as always, white men get away with stuff that other people can’t. But it’s also that I just am not prepared to identify with or claim anything that’s based on the fact that other people feel it’s ok to be stunningly rude and actually touch my body, even though I find that always annoying and sometimes emotionally distressing.

I am more interested in figuring out what’s going on in this and many other cases, and the assumption that this is part of a coherent structure for the maintenance of discriminatory power seems premature, to interfere with that investigation.

It’s relevant today with the undercurrent here and there of a few people expressing anger with Robin Williams for committing suicide rather than sadness. We hear that kind of expression about public figures, more or less depending on how what they did relates to conventional wisdom. Why didn’t this person do that? Why is that person doing that thing? What’s wrong with them? Sometimes the discourse is fairly unanimous that it’s ok to pass judgment (say, on Justin Bieber); sometimes the discourse is fairly unanimous that only an asshole would say something like that (say, on Robin Williams). The most interesting cases for me are when it’s not only evenly divided, but the two groups are not really talking to one another.

There are days where I feel a sort of generic libertarianism is the right answer to all of this discourse, to all those circles in my feeds where someone is concerning themselves with another person’s body, behavior, looks. Just tend to your own knitting, judge not lest ye be judged, beam in your eye, all that.

But not only is that an impossible prescription to live up to, it’s too incurious. Why do circles form where it’s not only permitted but almost mandatory to pass judgment on some group or behavior? The conventional answer in most identity politics is that the judgments are produced by an infrastructure of stereotypes that is a functional part of structures of discrimination. E.g., that dominant groups use such judgments (and communicate them through microaggressions) in order to buttress their own power and status.

I think that’s part of the story, but when you wander away from the histories and structures whose connections to power and injustice blaze in neon, when you wander into that more personal, domestic, private space, I think some other dimensions crop up as well.

When the streams do cross and someone in a group or a discussion suddenly says, “Actually, I feel pretty hurt or offended by the way you folks are talking about this issue, because I’m actually the thing you’re talking about”, what happens? Sometimes people make non-apology apologies (“sorry that you’re offended”), sometimes people double-down and say, “You’re crazy, there’s nothing offensive about talking about X or Y”. A turn or two in the conversation, though, and what you’ll often hear is this: “Look, I just care about you and people like you. So I want to help.” (Or its close sibling: “Look, not to insult you personally, but people like you/behavior like that costs our society a lot of money and/or inflicts a lot of pain on other people. Don’t you think it would be better if…”)

I’d actually like to concede the sincerity of that response: that we get drawn into these discussions and the judgments they create out of concern for other people, out of concern for moral and social progress. That we feel passionately about people who let their children go to the park by themselves, about people who train their children to go hunting, about people who are overweight, about people who drive big SUVs, about people play their radios too loudly in their cars, about people who buy overly expensive salsa, about people who play video games, about people who raise backyard chickens, about people who demand accommodations for complex learning disabilities, about people who follow the fashion industry, about people who post to Instagram, about people who feed their kids fast food twice a week to save time, and so on.

I’d like to concede the sincerity but the problem is that most of these little waves of moral condemnation or judgmental concern don’t seem to be particularly compassionate or particularly committed. The folks who say, “I just want to help, because I care about you” show no signs of that compassion otherwise. They usually aren’t close friends to the person they’re commenting on, they usually have little empathy or curiosity overall. The folks who say, “Because I care about progress, about solving the bigger problem” don’t show much interest in that alleged bigger problem. The person who hates the big SUVs because they’re damaging the environment is often environmentally profligate in other ways. If the SUV-judger is consistently environmentally sensitive, some other aspect of their concern for the world, their vision of a better society, may be woefully out of synch or weakly developed.

The people I know who really care about others generally aren’t the people going on Facebook to say, “Man, I’m sick of people hiding behind claims of depression” or “If I meet another mother who thinks it’s ok to bring cupcakes to my child’s class, I’m going to go berserk”. The people I know who are really think about incremental moves to improve the world don’t get hung up on passing judgments on someone they’ve witnessed fleetingly in public.

I’m in strong agreement with the idea that there is no such thing as “reverse racism”, if by that we mean the capacity for a white person to suffer systematic consequences for being white. Even if a white person works in a specific context where the professional consequences of felt animus towards whites might have an impact on them, that’s still a very limited and constrained kind of consequence.

But any single individual can deliver emotional suffering to any other individual, sometimes consciously and directly, other times without any awareness of doing so. My feeds are lighting up right now with very well-meaning people reminding everyone that middle-aged men, including white and wealthy men, are both prone to depression and prone to keeping their feelings private. The categorical part of that point is sociological. It’s the same way that we rightfully identify the problems that our society suffers from and ought to confront. But the compassionate part of that point might be to think about specific individuals with whom we’re in specific social connection. To be aware that we can always hurt someone else, that we have hurt someone else. Sometimes that’s not our fault, and sometimes what we said was needful or important or defined own freedom to express and imagine and explore. In a world full of familiar strangers and strange friends, there’s no way to anticipate all the minds and hearts that might be touched by what we say and do. There are ways, though, to be mindful of the possibilities.

This is something that many of us found out in the first wave of going online. The classic sequence was that first we all self-disclosed and felt a sense of intimacy, but not because we knew the other people in the conversation as people. We did it because a sense of anonymity: talking with a million other strangers was like shouting across a cliff in a wilderness. Who was there to remember? And then we discovered that the familiar strangers could actually reply and engage in dialogue. Some of them said things that we hated or disagreed with, so we unloaded on them with greater and greater intensity. Many of us still do that in various online hang-outs. Sooner or later, most of us discovered the hard way that a person on the other end was real. Sometimes we found, painfully, that their reality was radically other than their online persona. That the person who engaged everyone with their tales of being victimized by a family member or otherwise was the victimizer, the person dying of cancer wasn’t, the person who spoke with authority knew nothing. Sometimes we found, equally painfully, that the person we’d attacked or disparaged or belittled was writhing in emotional pain about it. Or that someone we’d never thought we were attacking had felt that way.

Social problems, oppression, injustice: we shouldn’t apologize ever for trying to engage them and change our world. When we justify what we say because we claim to have a sense of compassion: I just want people to be well, I just want children to be raised in a way that makes them happy and strong, I just want people to be more considerate of others, I just want people to know that actions have consequences? Then I think we have to be sure that it’s compassion we’re speaking from, rather than an insecure attempt to assure ourselves of our own superiority to others. Compassion, it seems to me, grows not from judgment but curiosity. Not from certainty, but humility. I’d love to see social media feeds where the Venn overlap on “curiosity” and “humility” in my various circles was one hundred percent.

I think there’s a less-told but equally important trope in the American imaginary: the loophole. The finding of the trick, the turning of the fine print back on the lawyer who wrote the contract. The victimless crime of cheating the government or the big company out of something it mindlessly and wastefully demanded of the little man. The free money, the thing that your friend fixed up for you. Topsy-turvy, the quick score that makes the smart and the sly rich without distress to anything. The beads-for-Manhattan.

It’s that last I’m thinking about when I think about King Jeremiah Heaton, who became Internet-famous for a few days when he travelled to southern Egypt to plant a homemade flag on a small area of land that he believed was unclaimed by any existing sovereign state and therefore his for the taking. All for the sake of his 7-year old daughter, who wanted to be a princess.

There’s a lot to say about the story, most of it properly accompanied by much rolling of the eyes. But I do think Heaton is a canary in the coal mine of sorts, a window into a psychic cauldron seething inside the consciousness of a fading empire. Heaton himself invoked history in the coverage: what he did, others had done, he acknowledged, but they did it out of greed or hatred. He did it for love, he says, love of his daughter. But if ever first time tragedy, second time farce applied, this is it.

The basis of Heaton’s claim is the rarely-invoked principle of terra nullius, which as several analyses point out, was one (though not the only) justification invoked by Western colonizers in their land claims after the 17th Century. The hard thing about Heaton is that I can’t tell if he thinks this is a joke or not. He’s aware, in part because the press has queried him, that a flag and terra nullius mean precisely nothing if the claim is unrecognized by other states. I’m not sure he’s aware that Bir Tawil is terra nullius because Egypt and Sudan are still fencing with each other about their postcolonial border, that to claim Bir Tawil cedes a claim to another far more valuable unresolved territory to the east.

But even as a joke, it’s a very telling one, and pursued at a level of earnestness in terms of cost and effort that it seems a rather elaborate joke for an age where a silly YouTube video generally is as far as one need go. There are so many other things available in the treasure chest of American popular culture for a princess and her patriarch: the home-as-castle (another legal doctrine, even!), the imaginary kingdom in the backyard or the woods, constructing an elaborate heritage fantasy complete with family crest and lost inheritances in the auld country. Americans make utopian communities and religious movements all the time. They go out into the wilderness that their own internal empire secured and made for them and make retreats and hermitages, towns and communes, pilgrimmages and wanderings. What’s wrong with all that?

To say instead, “I shall go to Africa, plant a flag, claim a country, and as long as I’m at it, it will be a very nice kingdom that has some good agricultural development policies”? Well, that is not exactly a random idea, though I don’t get the sense that Heaton knows exactly who and what the other members of the club he’s trying to join actually are. But once upon a time this was the kind of fantasy that got people killed and maimed, and not just by aspiring Kings and their Princesses. For every Leopold of Belgium, there was a Leon Rom whose principality was small and short-lived. Some of the nineteenth-century and twentieth-century men (and a smaller handful of women) who flocked to Africa looking for land they could imagine to be empty then demanded that new colonial states do just that: empty the land of human beings and return them as obedient laborers. Most of the new settlers were delusional in some way or another, but they wandered through a world where their dreams could spur nightmares.

That’s not going to be Heaton, but that’s not by any great understanding on his part. It’s just that in dreaming his little dream of a kingdom for his princess, he’s managed in a little, inexpensive way to show what it has otherwise taken the United States billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives to demonstrate: that we are slipping into the fever-dream stage of superpowerdom, in a Norma Desmond haze so deep and foggy that we don’t even know any more what we don’t know. All we think is that somehow out there, there must be a trick that gets it all back. A law, a loophole, some fine print. Some Manhattan that we can have for a few beads and a couple of pamphlets on using irrigation in agriculture.

I do think it helps with the skills that pay the bills. I do think it can make you a better citizen. I do think it can help you lay the foundation for the examined life. It doesn’t always do that, and there are many other ways to get skills, learn to be a better participant in your social and political worlds, be a critical thinker.

A modest example of the possibilities occurred to me today. The concept of social epistemology is becoming more important in philosophy as it is applied both analytically and technically to various kinds of digitally-mediated crowdsourcing. One strain of thought about social epistemology might suggest that philosophy could be as much an ethnographic discipline as an interpretative one, that it could look for how social groups generate epistemological or philosophical frameworks out of experience. There are plenty of other ways to take an interest in how people think in their social practices and everyday lives about ethics, knowledge, and so on, in any event. The question in part is, “What could a liberal arts education–or formal scholarship–add to such everyday, lived thinking that it doesn’t already have?”

I’m going to do something a bit unusual. Rather than the usual “don’t read the comments!” I’m going to suggest that at least sometimes comments on Internet sites offer some insights into how people in general think.

Take a look at this Gawker thread about a tailgater and the “karmic justice” meted out to him for following the driver ahead of him too closely and aggressively. (He eventually passes to the right at high speed, gives the driver the finger multiple times, merges back left on a lightly wet road and loses control of his truck, crashing into the median.)

The main story accepts the “karmic justice” narrative. But in the comments, three different interpretations eventually emerge.

The first validates the main story: the tailgater was unambiguously in the wrong and it is right to feel some vindication at his misfortune.

The second holds that the tailgater was acting poorly but also the driver making the videotape was also acting poorly, for several reasons. First, that the driver being tailgated was videotaping (and was therefore indulging in dangerous behavior as well) and second, that the driver being tailgated (the tailgatee?) should just have pulled to the right and let the faster driver go ahead.

The third is unabashedly on the side of the tailgater. These commenters hold that tailgating is a practical, even necessary, response to drivers who insist on blocking the left lane of any roadway at a speed slower than the speed that the tailgater wishes to go. They support both the tailgating and the obscene gesture and regret that the tailgater had an accident.

There’s a minor fourth faction that is primarily irritated at yet another person videotaping with a smartphone held in portrait mode. Protip hint: they at least are completely right.

What’s interesting in the comments is that each group has strategies for replying to the other two. The anti-tailgaters point out that the roadway in question is not a major highway, that the driver being tailgated was going the maximum speed limit, that the driver says she did not look at the camera while holding it, that she says she was going to be turning left very soon and that traffic to the right was fairly heavy. The blame-on-all-sides find that the videotaping driver has a history of being aggrieved about a lot of things, that there seemed to be plenty of space to the right, and that it’s unwise (especially in Florida) to tangle with a person demonstrating road rage. The pro-tailgaters…well, they don’t seem to have much other than a view that tailgating is necessary and justified.

It’s easy to just say, “A pox on all their houses” or to simply join in the debate on one side or another. I guess what I’m struck by is that when you pull back a little, each of these approaches is informed, whether the people are consciously aware of it or not, by some potentially consistent or coherent views of what’s right and wrong, wise and unwise, fair and unfair.

What I wonder sometimes is whether we could construct a coherent underlying credo or statement about our views, if we were all asked to step back from the views we can express so hotly in comments threads in social media or other contexts. So much of our discourse, online and offline, is reactive or dialectical. That’s actually good in the sense that real cases or experiences are a better place to start, perhaps, than arid thought-experiment scenarios about pulling trolley levers to save or not save lives. But maybe where some sort of liberal-arts experience could help. It could help us to go from a reactive reading to a more contemplative description of why each of us thinks what we think.

Suppose I’m against the tailgater: why? Because I object morally to tailgating period–its aggression, its danger? Is it ok to be aggressive in return? (The driver in the video apparently has specified that she did not break-check the tailgater.) How confident am I that tailgating is the result of road rage? How much do I actually know about another driver, and why should I be confident about my strong moral readings of someone whom I only know in a single dimension of their behavior? If was going really slowly, would tailgating me be justified?

Suppose I’m against both of them: why? Can I trust that someone can in fact be a good driver while holding up a smartphone and not looking at it? Why do I trust or not trust in that proposition? Why not, as this approach suggests, just yield to someone determined to be antisocial and get out of their way? Is being righteous in opposing a tailgater just a kind of self-indulgent or egotistical response? Or an aggression of another kind? What does that imply about other cases?

Suppose I’m certain that if I want to go a particular speed, it’s right to allow me to do so until or unless I am charged with the crime of speeding or unless I have an accident as a result? What else does that imply? Do I mean it in all cases or is driving a special case? Am I right that I’m a better driver than most others? What does that entitle me to if so?

I suspect that in a lot of cases, driving (or other everyday practices) are held to be “special cases”–that to try and work back to some bigger or more comprehensive view of the world isn’t going to work for many people in the Gawker thread. But that too is interesting: if much of how we read the “manners” of everyday life is ad hoc, that’s not necessarily bad, just significant.

I was especially keen to show my family Tuolumne Meadows and the high country around it along the Tioga Pass. I knew, however, that the snow might be so heavy that it might not be worth the drive. So two days ago I set out to find out whether the Meadows, Tenaya Lake and some of the easier trails might be free enough of snow to justify going.

When I was young, we came up here a lot. It seemed to me then that there were a fairly large number of Park Service staff who could give informationally rich answers to very specific questions about conditions from hikers, backpackers, climbers, fishers and so on. We once did a five-day backcountry trip up the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne River and the rangers were able to tell us a lot about the specific conditions at each camp site.

Today? The privatization of a lot of Park services is much more markedly visible. When you talk to the staff at the Visitor Center, the Mountain Store, or elsewhere, they don’t seem to know much of anything. The one thing the Information staffers in front of the Visitor Center did say, however, was that it was absolutely not worth going up the Tioga Road. I didn’t particularly trust this opinion because the person offering it didn’t seem to know much about anything else and didn’t seem curious about what my purposes in going might be.

In the 1970s, if the staff didn’t know, then you’d probably be able to find people at the backpacker’s camps or Camp 4 who would know. Today I can search the web, if I’m sitting over at the wifi-enabled lounge at Camp Curry. So I check. Hiker boards say no, maybe, yes–if you know what you want, the question is answered very well. Do you want to hike the PCT north of the Meadows? Could be very bad. Do you want to hike to Soda Springs from the road? Boots and be ready to get wet, but ok. Do you want a simple scramble up Pothole Rock plus seeing the Meadows themselves, clear of snow but not blooming yet? (This is what I want.) Well, there’s a photo dated June 22 2011 from a hiker showing the Meadows clear. That’s all I need to know. And yet I can’t help but feel that I should have been able to know it from the staff as well as the web.

Am I remembering the past too rosily? Very possibly. I was a kid, a teenager, a young adult, and maybe too inclined to credit the ranger as a trusted authority figure. I intellectually know too well how little the management of national parks was influenced by anything resembling ecological expertise until the 1970s. I probably misremember rangers the way other people misremember professors, as Olympian figures who combined book knowledge of their responsibilities in the National Parks with a lifetime of experience with animals, environments and people.

But this trip to California, both here in the Sierras and the other places we’ve been, is giving me a glimpse of what will happen when we lose a sense of public mission in institutions like parks. And that too has parallels with higher educations, about what we lose when education is offered as a profit-seeking commodity. You can still get the bare bones of what you need but neither the people offering service nor consuming the product have any sense of enduring obligation or commitment to something beyond that transactional moment. Maybe our new technologies of communication and community will make a different public that will more than make up for that loss, and maybe there are forms of private or profit-seeking management that properly value experience, commitment and mission.

But something that’s occurred to me in recent weeks, thinking about the Rapture and the Left Behind books (which I teach in my History of the Future course) and so on.

What if the Rapture already happened, and only about three or four people disappeared, so few having met the standard? And thus this is the Tribulation already. I get that preterist Christians have thought this way for a while. In fact, given the complexity of Christian eschatology, I’m sure this is an old-hat proposition in some schools and not particularly funny. (I also have a sinking feeling that it’s probably a standard schtick in somebody’s comedy act already.) But it certainly is an amusing proposition up against the particular constituency of American religious conservatives who are certain that the Rapture is imminent in the near-term future and that they will be among those called in it.