“A Preference for Blindness” Lent 4 March 26, 2017
Community
Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Mark Twain “Education: the path from cock ignorance to
miserable uncertainty.”
Isaac Asimov “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant
thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the
false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your
knowledge.’”
Miguel de Unamuno “That which the fascists hate, above
all else, is intelligence.”
In 2010 the University of
Michigan did a research project in the psychology of prejudice. They were
interested in trying to understand why that so many of us, when presented with
facts that are contrary to our beliefs, do not seem to be very inclined to
change our beliefs. One of the researchers involved mentioned a very specific
case in politics from that year when the governor of Arizona at that time, Jan
Brewer, had said in a speech that border patrol officers had found bodies in
the Arizona desert along the border that had been decapitated.
She was, as you recall,
famous for ginning up fear among her voters of illegal immigrants coming across
the border of Mexico into Arizona. Border agents assured news sources that they
had never found any decapitated bodies. Governor Brewer had obviously heard
news stories about drug wars in Mexico where there had been instances of
beheading and she let her imagination run a bit wild…. One could say that she
figuratively lost her head over this one. But she never backed down on the
topic, even with the total absence of evidence.
She was not the only
Arizona politician with this kind of sketchy connection to facts. Senator
McCain has, for years, said that Phoenix ranked number two in the nation for
abductions. He has very publicly been corrected on this fact and yet, for
years, he has continued to repeat the claim. There are a lot of non-facts used
both then and in our recent campaign year about immigrants. Though immigrants
are blamed for high crime rates, for smuggling drugs, for rape and murder, but
the facts clearly indicate that illegal immigrants commit many fewer violent
crimes or thefts, or even traffic violations, than the average citizen
specifically because they don’t want to have any run ins with law enforcement.
In recent years, as the
economy in the United States has failed to produce many new jobs, the actual
immigration flow has been from the United States back into Mexico. Regardless
of who actually pays for it, it is beyond ironic that President Trump
campaigned on the promise to build a 30 ft tall wall between our two nations.
The facts are so obvious that those naughty boys at South Park actually did a
tongue in cheek episode on the wall being built to keep our cheap Mexican labor
from escaping the United States.
What the University of
Michigan study was documenting was how often people will choose, not to give up
a mistaken prejudice in the presence of contradictory facts, but they will
actually double down. Three weeks ago, when President #45 tweeted that
President Obama was a sick, bad man because he had ordered Trump Tower’s phones
tapped, every spy agency in the country quickly insisted that it simply wasn’t
so.
And rather than admit
that he was taken in by a raving nut-case on Fox News the night before, he
actually doubled down and said that Obama had gotten the British secret service
to do it for him.
This was such an
insulting and preposterous claim that the former Prime Minister of Great
Britain, David Cameron, quipped that the best part of no longer being Prime
Minister is that he doesn’t have to listen to Donald Trump’s wire tapped
conversations anymore.
Sadly, this Clementine
Caligula who now occupies the White House keeps giving us so many examples of
belief without facts that it is hard to keep up. His famous mistakes began when
he insisted on the guilt of the Central Park 5, the black and Latino teenagers
who were falsely accused of raping a Central Park jogger in 1989. Even after
they were cleared with DNA evidence, the Donald still insisted that they were
guilty, one can only assume, because they were black and brown.
He entered presidential
politics with his attempt at discrediting America’s first black president by insisting
that he was born in Kenya. Even after Obama’s birth certificate was made
public, Donald insisted that it was fake and he wasn’t born in Hawaii. Which,
since Obama’s mother was an American citizen, it would not have disqualified
Obama from being president if she had given birth while abroad but that is a
constitutional issue that is far beyond the grasp of the most powerful elected
official in the world.
The misinformation,
mistaken beliefs, prejudices, and outright lies are so numerous that it would
be too depressing for me to go on listing them but I want to make one further
objection and that goes to the administration’s proposed budget.
Our military budget is
larger than the next ten largest military’s in the world and eight of those are
our allies. Still, Trump has proposed a $54 billion increase in military
spending, even though we are not at war and our military spending is already
crowding out healthcare, infrastructure, education, and other civil
expenditures.
To help pay for this
massive increase in spending, the Donald has asked to cut out all funding for
the arts, for Public television, and for National Public Radio. He actually
wants to fire Big Bird! He also wants to increase Homeland Security by
$44 billion to build that wall and hire more immigration agents.
All of which gives him
the excuse to do what people of his ilk want to do anyway, taking deep cuts in
education funding, the EPA, and even agricultural science research. But the
most hypocritical of all is the suggestion that we cut all funding to Public
Broadcasting which is only a tiny sliver of the federal budget, less than 5% of
the proposed increases to military and homeland security spending.
We get an unnecessary
wall between the USA and Mexico and we lose funding for the arts, education,
public TV and radio, meals on wheels for seniors, and after school meals for
hungry children. All of this is like a caricature of what liberals have been
saying that Republicans are only now he is giving solid mathematical evidence
to the caricature.
Clearly, cutting Public
Radio is not about saving money… it is about killing off a reliable news
source.
One administration
official even said, “Why should we pay for another liberal news outlet when we
already have MSNBC?” Which goes to the point of my objection this morning…. You
can have conservative and liberal opinions but you can’t have conservative and
liberal facts.
When you are presented
with facts that you do not like, that does not make it fake news. Things are
not true just because you want them to be true and things are not false because
you don’t like them. The Buddha said that there are three things that cannot
remain hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.
If we were the kind of
people who paid close attention to the liturgical year, I would have read the
gospel lesson for the 4th Sunday in Lent which is the John chapter 9
account of the man who was born blind. I don’t think it will come as a shock to
any of you to hear me say that there are not historical accounts in the Gospel
of John. John is a work of narrative theology…. John is trying to instruct our
faith, not give us a peek into Jesus’ day-planner.
It is not that he healed
a man who had been blind. Blindness in this account is a metaphor for refusing
to see. In the John 9 account, the man who was born blind has his sight
restored but then he runs into treacherous opposition from his parents, his
neighbors, and his church. John is not telling us about a single healing
incident, he is writing a commentary on a culture that prefers blindness to
seeing.
That is really what this
Michigan State study was about, they were trying to answer the difficult
question, why do we prefer to remain blind to facts? Why do we cling to our
worn out beliefs?
I was just 24 years old
when I heard Ronald Regan say that he was going to cut taxes, increase military
spending, and balance the budget all at the same time and even then I knew that
couldn’t be done. It sounded nice but it didn’t participate in reality. He
might as well say that he was going to replace gas burning cars with flying
unicorns because the kind of people who would believe that you can cut taxes,
increase military spending, and balance the budget all at the same time are the
kind of people who would believe in flying unicorns.
This past year, when
Donald Trump said that he was going to cut taxes, increase military spending,
and reduce the deficit, I don’t think that even the flying unicorn voters
believed it and yet when he polished the lie a bit and said that he was going
to get rid of Obamacare and give health insurance to everyone that would cost
only a fraction of what Obamacare costs and would give us better health care….
Millions of people fell for it.
I love that quote from
Mark Twain that says that, “Education: the path from cock ignorance to
miserable uncertainty.” It would be nice to believe that you can cut healthcare
spending and get more healthcare but then there is this thing called “math.”
Like every other tyrant,
our current president wants you to be uninformed. An uninformed public is
easier to control with propaganda. The proposal to do away with Public
Broadcasting is an attempt to take away a source of education and information
and I don’t think that we should allow that to happen.
So I guess you can say
that this is my “save NPR” sermon but more than that, it is a plea for you to
strive to remain informed. Don’t be seduced by promises of pie in the sky. Be
willing to change your views in light of new information.
Emily
Dickinson said, “We both believe, and disbelieve a
hundred times
an hour, which
keeps Believing nimble.”
If you believe all of the
same things you believed five years ago then you
are already brain
dead. Keep your minds nimble. Listen to NPR and
make it a part of your
daily diet and don’t let anyone take it away from
you. Expose yourself to
new things. Change your mind. Grow. Challenge
authority and if doing
that scares you keep doing it until you learn to like
it, and then keep doing
it until you are addicted to it.
Don’t let propaganda
intellectually kill you by starving you for facts. Be
curious, be disobedient,
be defiant, think while it is still legal to do so.
