Mental Models, Old and New
The most important thing a conceptual model of our present situation should do is explain the extraordinary phase transition regarding Donald Trump that occurred on November 6, 2016, and has not budged at all, not even a blip, in terms of the view of him cherished by the people who call themselves liberals, Democrats, Progressives, and hard line traditional conservatives.
A valid model will not involve reliance on opinion polls, pop culture fads, election horserace tactics or even overarching political strategies. The model will involve understanding the particular reality our culture as a whole is living in, which is not synonymous with anything that can be compiled from statistics of various sorts or the meticulously quoted words of those who have opined about the nature of 21st century reality. Why?
Because reality has become a very dicey business. Broadly and accurately speaking, reality is easy to define as the way things are, the superset of all things of all kinds everywhere, seen and unseen, from the particle and string level to the cosmological/multiverse level. Every kind of reality definition you encounter in contemporary America, however, is only a subset of that greater reality, because the one human drive even more powerful than sex and survival is the imperative to chop reality down to manageable size, in accordance with our own agreed upon criteria.
Here is the metaphor for that subsetted reality I propose:
Yes. A tabletop. A hard glossy, formerly living surface with no legs. Of course, every man, jack, and jill has his own tabletop, and those tabletops have legs you can see and depend upon.
There are others among us, of course, who have their own legless tabletops, but they are not on THIS particular tabletop.
The Main Tabletop is an extrapolation from the rise of science during and after the European Enlightenment that gave us chemistry, biology, geology, cosmology, physics, medicine, information technology, and other disciplines relying on the hard rules of the Scientific Method given us by Sir Isaac Newton. Breakthroughs in these areas also gave us somewhat less nuts-and-bolts-type disciplines like economics, psychology, anthropology, capitalism, earth sciences, and most marvelous of all, advanced mathematics.
The tabletop has no legs because they were finally chopped off in the 19th century when Newton’s mission statement was thrown overboard because it declared science a tool for better understanding and honoring Divine Creation. The toolset he devised was retained, however, and his religious delusions are now chalked up to his Asperger’s.
Hence the Tabletop of our model. It has a hard surface, representing definite tangible reality. Nothing is permitted on its surface but that which can be measured, counted, catalogued, seen, touched, stored, dissected, and plugged into various kinds of probability models and recordkeeping and modeling algorithms. Everything which does not meet these criteria is thrown over the side into the infinite nothingness which is the only larger universe the scientists dare to accept. The meaninglessness of the nothingness is the indispensable tool for declaring that it is not the responsibility of authoritative science to explain life, the universe, or the meaning of absolutely anything. What they have in place of literary mythology is a scientific narrative that tells them all they need to know about the weak-minded human race, where it’s going, and who should be in charge of it. Here’s what that narrative looks like on top of our table.
Don’t worry about the TV show. We’ll get around to it. Runs on PBS between pledge drives.
This isn’t that hard a model component to parse. Just remember that nothing is permitted on this table that hasn’t been subjected to the myopic reality criteria of the current interpretation of the Scientific Method. We weren’t there to collect samples and conduct experiments on the fossils of the cosmologists’ Big Bang. We also can’t draw any sort of line from the beginning of Darwinian Evolution back to the origin of life, which can’t be nailed to the table and must therefore be thrown off it. What we have are fossils of dinosaurs, Darwin’s Theory postulated (by consensus of the cognoscenti) as Fact, and the measurable, countable physical evidence of about 5,000 years of human civilization. Which is quite enough, thank you, to produce repeatable results on the subject of human empires, the inevitability of man’s obsession with building more powerful weapons, and only one what you’d call ‘scientific’ route out of the omnipresent pattern of doom: technology; i.e., building computers and systems and robots that are smarter than we are and uncompromised by dangerous variables like individuality. And please don’t forget there’s no earthly reason for looking beyond this particular tabletop, because the physicists have discovered proofs that we simply cannot ever know enough about the big mess called the universe to look out there for help or even answers. If we had any questions left.
Which leaves only the one residual and not that important question anyone has to deal with. Who should be running things as the human experience winds down. Scientists are too bored to do it. Much much better to make high six figure salaries spending government money on detail-oriented projects like whether birds or feathers came first in the evolutionary Jitterbug.
Did somebody mention government? That’s obviously who should be running things. It should look like democracy and say fine words about liberty, opportunity, equality, elections, and progress, while doing what is necessary, which is a hard detail-intensive job for experts in dozens of academically approved disciplines. The technocracy they create is immune to everything merely human that opposes it, and the control of the tabletop by technocrats is absolute. Why they have all those meetings and hearings and managed planning projects. Theirs is the tabletop the scientists’ model of reality brought into being.
All is for the best in the least dangerous of all conceivable realities.
Great progress has been made by the time of the 21st century. The ruins of the horror called Christianity, which began the Enlightenment and only by accident failed to end it, have been pushed so far over the edge of the table that they’ll careen into the void any day now. Thankfully, there’s a substitute for religion produced by ever helpful science, which retains the fear of apocalypse in the form of a long term mankiller called climate change that can be used to give the technocrats a kind of papal authority. The advantage of this kind of artificial religion is that you really can measure and count and quantify things of earth to a fare-thee-well, and no big amorphous phantasm called the Flying Spaghetti Monster or some such pejorative nickname has any power over a human government that owns the reins of political power, the applications of information technology, and the will to ride roughshod over the rebellious in the name of those who prefer to live under the wing of a bureaucrat who tells the same lies enough times. Take that, Spaghetti Monster:
Look at that sad cloud formation. Pitiful.
Whoops. That graphic made our tabletop look just a little smaller in the scheme of things. But the sheer size and extent and variety of things not included or permitted on the tabletop doesn’t give them any power. All of the stuff that doesn’t belong, can’t be nailed, or ridiculed off the cold surface of REAL reality just doesn’t matter. Look at it all:
Esoteric crap. Who ever measured a sunspot or looked at it under a microscope or in an ice core? Nobody.
These are insubstantial fables. Everyone knows — and our experts have repeatedly proven — that there is no mystery about UFOs or Flight 19 or the Thunderbird of the Native Americans or legends of ghosts or worlds beyond our ken. You do the math.
Maybe not the right instruction. Math is a tricky subject. You can’t see it, measure it, or even count it or put it under a microscope or at the end of a telescope. It is far bigger, in fact infinitely bigger, than the science which uses it as a utilitarian tool. It is at least as large as the entire universe, and it contains so many nested infinities even these can’t be counted. And unfortunately the very sad fact for our tabletop is that math preexists mankind and, given the rules of operation of the universe as we claim to know it, math is older than the universe as well.
But there is no meaning. Math can have no real meaning either because it can’t be nailed to our tabletop. In that sense it doesn’t even exist. Something men made up by accident that looks sort of infinite from certain points of view.
Oh well.
What does any of this have to do with Trump and the curious case of the Overton Window? (Part 1 of this post)
This the end of Part 2. The concluding section is here: