(3089/898) Getting it straight

412) Although there is a great deal to be learned from the plague of AIDS, the lessons it teaches lie in the realms of science and society, and certainly not within the purview of religious elucidation. We are dealing not with a punishment but with a crime - one of those random crimes that nature now and then perpetrates on its own creatures. And nature, as Anatole France reminds us, is indifferent; it makes no distinction between good and evil.

[...] How can one begin to make sense of this affliction? No wisdom has been discovered, no lesson revealed. AIDS as a metaphor, AIDS as an allegory, AIDS as symbolism, AIDS as jeremiad, AIDS as a test of mankind's humanity, AIDS as an epitome of human suffering - it is these kinds of lucubrations that consume the intellectual energy of moralists and litterateurs nowadays, as though something good must at any cost be salvaged from this foul scourge. But even history fails us; analogies with past plagues are always found wanting.

Sherwin B. Nuland
How We Die (1993)

413) Dogma, certainly without evidence, is the great menace, the great nemesis, of art, of religion, of politics, of economics, of philosophy, of how to write articles for magazines, of just about everything that we do and think. Dogma is a great ossifier of mind and of imagination, of all creativity. It is an integral part of human nature, being our laziness's answer to the strain that goes with thinking. The only qualification in science's favor - not that it doesn't have dogmas, because certainly it does, loads of them - is that its dogmas tend to collapse in a heap a bit more readily than those you find in art, religion, politics, and the rest. If you have a scientific dogma and it's discovered that according to it 1+1 ≠ 2, this often means you're in trouble. (Not always, as quantum theory shows us.) Whereas in politics you can hold on to your dogmas on that basis for decades, in religion for centuries. In psychoanalysis, 1+1 ≠ 2 is a genuine advantage.

Ralph Estling
"The Scalp-Tinglin', Mind-Blowin', Eye-Poppin',
Heart-Wrenchin', Stomach-Churnin', Foot-Stumpin',
Great Big Doodley Science Show!!"
Skeptical Inquirer (Summer 1994)

414) The majority of grade-school textbooks in whatever discipline use the reductionist style [...] When I read these texts, no matter how hard I try to concentrate, the idea generally escapes me. Why? Because the style is overly simplistic. Attempting to make sure that no single statement is unclear, the textbook utilizes sentences that are simple in structure, that is, they contain only one main cause. Of necessity, sentence after sentence begins with the same subject. Ideas, in effect, are placed next to each other without their relationships being signaled by normal sentence connectives. What is absurd about such writing is that the attempt to make writing simple actually makes it much harder to comprehend. Grade school texts are, for the most part, unreadable [...] The more we condescend to students and stoop below their levels to make sure they don't miss anything, the more we bore them and destroy their motivation to learn. It is time we stopped writing textbooks as if every student were a moron who could not take in more than one piece of information per sentence. Why? Because the method does not work. The condescension to students' abilities and the lowering of expectations leads to high scored and confirms "success," but few graduates are competent, as employers readily know.

Frank Reuter
"The Synthetic Mind Clashes with the Reductionist Text"
Skeptical Inquirer (Summer 1994)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 746 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.