Common Book: These minds are made for rationalizing

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge:

Think of it this way: humans are equipped with some of evolution’s finest mental circuitry to protect us from changing our minds when doing so might alienate us from our group. We have hundreds of thousands of years of practice at believing whatever will keep us in good standing with our tribe, even if that requires denying, discounting, rationalizing, misperceiving, and ignoring the evidence in front of our nose.

Common Book posts are quotes from whatever I'm reading. Sometimes you'll get lots of them. Sometimes not so many. 

Book No. 19: 'Twilight of Democracy'

I have finished my 19th book of the year, "Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism" by Anne Applebaum -- a closeup survey of the rise of nationalist movements in the U.S. (Trumpism), Poland, Hungary and Spain, and the cultural and technological developments that hasten their rise. When I say "close up," I mean to say that Applebaum is former friends and colleagues with many of the people involved. No longer.

Key quote: "Because all authoritarianisms divide, polarize, and separate people into warring camps, the fight against them requires new coalitions. Together we can make old and misunderstood words like liberalism mean something again; together we can fight back against lies and liars; together we can rethink what democracy should look like in a digital age." We have to keep fighting, in other words, to make the world we want.

My new flip phone destroyed my exercise routine

 

About a week ago, after more than a decade of owning an iPhone, I downgraded to a flip phone.

The proximate cause of this was news that Apple was going to be snooping in on users phones to look for child sexual abuse material. That's a worthy cause, but it contributed to my unease with privacy in the digital age. But I'd been thinking about making the change anyway, if only to create spaces in my life where I'm not constantly staring at a screen. And it's working! I'm finding it easier to concentrate on long-form reading, or even being present with my wife.

But there are tradeoffs.

I didn't realize the extent to which my impulse to exercise was connected to my iPhone, how the widget showing the number of steps I've taken today was a nudge toward getting out and doing something, usually early in the day so I wouldn't be haunted by low numbers all day. Since getting the flip phone, my exercise just plunged off a cliff.

Living without the iPhone means that I have to think a little more, require on nudges a little bit less. So this morning, I got up and took a walk first think. I had to be intentional about it. I will have to be. And maybe that's not the worst thing.

Reverting to pandemic habits

I find that after a couple of months of getting out, seeing people, and really enjoying it, I'm reverting to old habits from the early quarantine era -- not leaving the house much, not exercising much, and not engaging the world beyond my driveway all that much. I'm vaxxed, but the pandemic is raging once again and the old habits kept me alive for more than a year. 

But I've got to be more intentional about all this. I don't want to go back to the old ways.

In Texas, masking and vaccines are a personal choice. The consequences aren't.

AP: "Gov. Greg Abbott appealed for out-of-state help to fight the third wave of COVID-19 in Texas while two more of the state’s largest school districts announced mask mandates in defiance of the governor."

And there you have the "vaccines/masks are a personal choice" argument in a nutshell. Clearly it's not -- if protecting yourself was purely a "personal choice," you'd personally bear responsibility for the outcomes. That's not the case. Your trip to the hospital affects that hospital, clearly, and if enough other people make the same choice, then that hospital in turn needs to call for help from out-of-state nurses. The ripple effects are plain to see.

That's why stuff like this is so silly.

Right now, Abbott is asking Texas hospitals to delay elective surgeries. If you're vaxxed, your choices are constrained by the decisions of the unvaxxed. It's not the worst problem posed by the surge in hospitalizations, of course, but it does mean that the vaxxed can't simply go on their way and disregard what's happening among the unvaxxed. 

Can we save ourselves from climate change?

Helen Lewis thinks so: "I no longer feel like the dog in the cartoon, insisting that “this is fine.” This isn’t fine. We have messed up quite badly, for some noble reasons, such as lifting people out of poverty, and some less noble ones, such as enriching the shareholders of fossil-fuel companies. But the same ingenuity that got humanity here, the ingenuity that created the internal-combustion engine and the airplane and the power station and the megafarm, is what can save us."

I'm skeptical. One of the lessons of adulthood -- for me, anyway -- is that sometimes you fuck things up so badly they can't be unfucked up. If you read the climate report today, it sure seems like we've hit a level of unfuckability. It's too late to smart our way out of this -- the real hope is that we stop the bleeding. We're still going to lose a limb or two though. 

Is anybody else angry all the time?

Something that happened after Donald Trump left office in January is I got a lot less tense. Four years of checking Twitter the second I woke up, of losing friends I'd cared about deeply, of never getting to slow down seemed ... to ease up a bit. Honestly, the best thing about Joe Biden's presidency is what it's done for my mental health.

But: I think I'm moving back to that place where I'm angry all the time. I can't decide if this is a me thing or a world being stupid thing.