Good Cops, Bad Cops

Image credits. Left, Louise Macabitas. Right, Steve Hillebrand, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

If you look around the internet, you can find plenty of examples of American police acting in ways that are a disgrace to America. You can also find examples of cops acting professionally, and sometimes even heroically. What's the difference? How can you get some police officers acting civilized and some acting like savages?

One difference that stands out is attitude. Some cops have a professional attitude and so they exhibit professional demeanor. But we've all seen the other kind of attitude, the "punk with a badge" who seems to think that he's a special class of human. We've seen the cops who display courage on the job, and we've seen the cops who empty their weapons at anything that can remotely be viewed as a threat.

But bad attitude isn't the fundamental problem.

The Obama Problem

I was a Republican from 1993 until 2012. The biggest reason I left was because the party adopted science denialism as part of its agenda. Since that same approach failed for the defunct Soviet Union, I won't caucus with anyone who thinks that repeating one of Stalinism's big mistakes would be good for America.

There's another thing about today's GOP that really annoys me, and that's the way they've demonized Obama. At this point, any Republican reading this will probably instantly decide that I'm a big Obama fan, maybe even an Obama "worshiper". They would be wrong, because they've fallen for the stupid notion that there are only two ways to view Obama, as a destroyer or Messiah.

Here's why I call that notion stupid.

Who's Killing American Conservatism?

Conservatism is a simple philosophy that seeks to preserve the good ideas of the past. It's based on the observation that not all new ideas turn out well. Conservatism is therefore cautious about the unintended consequences of changes.

When you understand the basic principles that guide conservative philosophy, it becomes clear that what passes for conservatism in America these days is a gross distortion. So who's to blame for distorting it? Here's my list of suspects.

1600 Years of Progressive Failure: the Scope

You probably have some idea, through television and movies if nothing else, what medical technology was like a hundred years ago. You can probably imagine what it would be like to visit a hospital a hundred years from now, with technology that would look almost like magic to us, although the food might be just as bad.

You can imagine humanity having a hundred-year head start on medicine. How about two hundred years? Four hundred?

How about 1600 years? That's how much more advanced our scientific and medical knowledge might be, if yesterday's progressives hadn't screwed up. And it's going to happen again if today's self-styled conservatives don't stop attacking science.

Here's what happened.

Humanity has been using glass or crystal lenses for at least 2000 years. Those primitive boneheads of the ancient world used them for the same reasons we use magnifying glasses today, to read fine print and to burn ants.

Good for the progressives. One of them probably found a piece of clear river gravel, noticed the magnifying effect, and worked out how to make a lens artificially. It's a noteworthy achievement.

But a single lens has limitations. To really get the most out of lenses, you need to put one behind the other. That's how we make microscopes and telescopes. We put one lens behind another.



View through a 4x rifle scope. Image credit: Captaindan and Jellocube27 at en.wikipedia

For 1600 years, humanity's progressive element either didn't think of putting one lens behind another, or they thought of it but didn't write it down. And that's what put us hundreds of years behind in medical technology, because it put us hundreds of years behind in science.

The modern scientific revolution didn't really get going until the 1600s with the invention of the telescope and the microscope. These new tools gave science what it needed to begin to flourish, new data. New data gave us new knowledge, and new knowledge lets us invent things like cruise missiles and blenders.

Obviously, the invention of the scope 1600 years earlier, even though it was technologically feasible, would not necessarily have put our scientific advancement exactly 1600 years ahead. The scientific revolution depended on improved reasoning as well as improved tools and more data.

Still, we could certainly have been much farther along than we are now, if only humanity's progressive element had done its job and put one lens behind another instead of goofing off for 1600 years.

Here's the point of all this. One thing that helped modern science thrive is the idea of persistent scientific inquiry. In the old days, when a scientist died, his research died too, or at least the part about putting one lens behind another did.

Today we have institutions that keep the research going beyond the lifetime of any single scientist. We need that, because some lines of scientific research take a long time. There's no way around this. The better we understand our universe, the better the chances of long-term survival for humanity in general and America in particular. Understanding the universe takes time, and it takes some continuity in our research and development endeavors.

Imagine starting and stopping your military in the middle of a war. Messes up your war effort, right? Same thing happens if we take a start and stop approach to research.

If those primitive boneheads of the ancient world had understood the value of persistent scientific inquiry, they'd have established a lens institute to develop the magnifying glass, and we might be hundreds of years more advanced, and your next trip to the doctor would be amazing. If we don't want to fall hundreds of years behind again, we need to keep enabling long-term research, because the cost/benefit ratio has been very, very good.

If you don't believe that, get a magnifying glass and take a good look at it. Now take a good look at the computer or tablet or phone you're using to read this. See what a difference science makes? The newer tools do way more than the old tool did.

Last thought on this little talk about progressive failure. If you actually got a magnifying glass when I told you to, you'll see the value of preserving the good ideas of the past, which is the foundation of genuine conservatism. That magnifying glass design is at least 2,000 years old, yet it's still useful, and it's still a component in many modern tools.

That's how civilization progresses. Progressives come up with new ideas. Conservatives preserve the good ones. Let's not wait another 1600 years for the next good idea.

Politics, Cooking, and PVP

I read the following paragraph in a G+ comment from a fellow writer who's also an experienced chef and restaurant manager. The subject was an article at ScienceDaily about how people avoid bumping into each other. Here's what the writer/chef said.

"One of the most rewarding feelings one gets from working in a restaurant kitchen is the sense of accomplishment one feels when when the crew works together with a sort of 'unspoken' grace: as if we were each parts of a well oiled machine: running perfectly smoothly."

Do you know that feeling? I know that feeling. I've had that feeling of coordinated team grace a few times. Working in a kitchen, working on a school bus assembly line, working on a roof.

I've also seen it in gaming, especially in player-vs-player (PVP) matches. What used to amaze me is that you can achieve a high-level of coordination with little or no communication. A couple of examples before my explanation, and why I think this is a subject of national importance.

The Enemy Within

American can't be defeated from outside. We have too much military and economic power, as well as too many armed citizens, for that to happen. But we can be weakened from within, and there's a group working hard to do that.

I don't speculate about people's inner motivations. That's a game for idiots. I judge people based on their actions, and my judgment of the Republican/Tea Party is that they represent the greatest threat America faces today, because they're attacking one of the pillars of American strength.

America is strong for a lot of reasons, such as our military and agricultural capabilities. We're also strong because America is good at science. Science is vital to America's well being because it feeds our technology, and our technology promotes our security and prosperity. Science is the tool that makes all our other tools work better.

If you want to destroy America, destroying our scientific capability is the most effective method, because the rest of the civilized world isn't giving up their science.

The Hierarchy of Tribes

Humans have developed a lot of complicated ways to organize into groups, but the basic hierarchy is simple.

• Individual
• Family
• Tribes

An individual is easy to understand. It's one person. A family is easy to understand, although the definition can get a little fuzzier. It's a group of people bound by biological relationships, like parent/child or uncle/nephew, and by marital relationships. A tribe is a group of families and individuals who work together to survive and thrive.

That's the basic setup. Obviously, things are more complex in the modern world. Family doesn't necessarily mean a blood relationship today, and tribes have evolved into larger social structures.

But we still define ourselves by our tribes. Even though I'm generally anti-social, I have a long list of tribes myself. Some of them are geological.

The Arkansas tribe. It's my native state, so this is a tribe I can avoid but never leave.
The Southern California tribe. If you go by length of residence, SoCal is my second home.
The Texas tribe. My current state. I don't like this tribe so much, but I'll still defend it and try to be a good tribe member.
The American tribe. I'll talk a bit more about this later.

Some of our tribes are formed around common interests.

I'm a gamer. I'm not a great gamer, but I'm a proud one. (Nelf hunters rule!)
I'm a beekeeper. It's only one hive, but it has bees in it, so I qualify for tribal membership.
I'm an agnostic. This is a fun tribe, because atheists and theists alike hate us, and it makes for some good arguments online.
I'm a writer.

That last tribe is really a collection of tribes. Anyone who's interested in writing is part of the writer tribe. There's also a sub-tribe of professional writers, people who make a living by arranging words. There's a sub-sub-tribe of technical writers, people who write instructions and descriptions.

That's one of the big differences between humanity's primitive past and humanity's slightly less primitive present. In the primitive world, you only had one tribe. Today, we have a whole network of tribes. And that brings up the question of tribal loyalty. Which tribe should you be more loyal to?

An example of this is my American tribe. My loyalty to that tribe outweighs my loyalty to a single city or state, because the American tribe is higher up the hierarchy. This is where geological tribalism meets political tribalism.

I was a Republican from 1993 until 2012. I'm no longer part of that tribe, because it went bad, but I'm still a member of the conservative tribe and part of the secular American conservative sub-tribe. By the rule I established in the preceding paragraph, I should be more loyal to conservatism in general than to secular America conservatism.

But I have a problem with that. Today's conservatism has been hijacked. Part of that hijacking was done by the sub-tribe of Christian fundamentalists. These people have declared that the conservative tribal identity must include certain elements that I can't accept. Science denialism is one of those elements. Another is a belief that Christians in America are a persecuted majority. Another is the belief that America has a Christian government rather than a secular one.

While I remain loyal to genuine conservatism, I'm not loyal to what passes for conservatism in America these days. I can't be, because this new conservative tribe puts its own interests above the interests of America, and I'm more loyal to the nation as a whole than I am to any single part of it.

We need to redefine American conservatism. For a starter, we need to recognize that American conservatism is built on a progressive foundation. Remember that Constitution we conservatives claim to revere? That was, and still is in many respects, a progressive document, because it overthrew the old ways of doing things.

We need to recognize that while a conservative might be Christian, conservatism is not defined by Christianity. The conservative role in society is to judge new ideas to see which ones are worth trying, not to promote a specific set of religious opinions.

Finally, we need to recognize that science denialism is not compatible with American conservatism. The place that would become America began taking shape about the same time that modern science began. Science helped turn American into a superpower. It's one of the pillars of American strength.

And no genuine American conservative attacks American strength.