The reality that is

"God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent," Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted on Friday. "Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens."

Practitioners of religion everywhere nod in solemn agreement, which is a good reason to steer clear of religion. Earthquakes and eclipses have been recurrent natural features of the earth for its four billion year existence. For the vast majority of that time there were no humans to receive God's geological and astronomical signs.

I've asked this before: Does religion makes people stupid, or are stupid people drawn to religion? I suspect cause and effect goes in both directions.

There are many ways to be stupid. One noteworthy way is believing the 2020 election was stolen—a belief held for years by solid majorities of Republicans.

The reason belief in a rigged election is such a strong indicator of stupidity is that the lines of evidence that it was not rigged are so numerous, unambiguous, and irrefutable. You really do have to live in your own special reality, seeped in both ignorance and irrationality, to hold such a belief.

And that's the point. It was Kellyanne Conway who, in defending Sean Spicer's utterly false statement about the attendance numbers of Donald Trump's inauguration in 2017, coined the term "alternative facts." Alternative facts, an oxymoron, readily shade into alternative realities, and the strong belief in a stolen election is just one example among many.

My thesis, repeated frequently, is that there is only one reality, and our job is to discern it. Much depends on how well we do so.

Was God sending a sign with Friday's smallish earthquake in New York? How about the previous, larger one, in 2011? Or the magnitude 5.0 quake in 1884?

Consider a mind at a fork in the road, where one way involves signs from God, and another involves acknowledging geology, faults, tectonic plates, and such.

Likewise, is there a sign to be inferred from the soon to happen solar eclipse? Depends on what you mean by "sign." Scientists, as is their wont, eagerly look forward to using the eclipse to learn more about the sun's corona, which can only be directly observed during total eclipses.

In the case of eclipses, God's signs occur on a precise schedule that can be computed as far into the future as you'd like. A total solar eclipse will cross Alaska on March 30, 2033. The next total eclipse in the lower 48 will be on August 12, 2044. But that's just the U.S. Worldwide, the number of such signs over the next half century are too numerous to itemize here, but Time has mapped all of them for you to ponder.

Tragically, inhabiting alternative realities severely impedes our ability to deal with the actual one. All manner of bad things happen when we don't know what's real. Election denialism is a serious threat to the democratic process and the constitutionally mandated transfer of power. Climate denialism ensures we'll suffer far more from the consequences of global warming than if we'd taken timely action informed by reality—a reality that scientists, at least, have known about for at least a century, with ever increasing certainty and understanding over that time.

As a general matter, inhabiting alternative realities entrains a pernicious, self-reinforcing cycle of irrationality that becomes an ingrained pathology of the intellect. I'm increasingly convinced that it evinces a way of thinking that consumes not just one part of reality but, indeed, most or all of them. Dip your toe into this fetid pool and you might soon enough find yourself believing that jet airplane "contrails" (condensation trails) are evidence that the government is chemically seeding the atmosphere with nefarious intent, or constructing concentration camps pursuant to rounding up the populace. Some brains become too broken to grasp the trivially simple and correct fact that airplane contrails are just condensing, and thus visible, water vapor—a normal component of engine exhaust akin to what you can see coming from a car's tailpipe on a cold day. If enough brains operate this way, the entire societal project can break down.

Which is all to say that alternative realities can't be isolated. Your willingness to entertain one affects your willingness to entertain many. Mental discipline can help hold off this tendency, but I've come to believe that many peoples' brains are wired to be irrational. There might be an evolutionary basis for this, but in the modern world the harm vastly exceeds the vestigial evolutionary benefit.

I used to think that maybe religion could be fenced off, as a special case, from all the rest. Now I have serious doubts. The willingness to credit the possibility of divine intervention as an explanation for physical reality is both noxious and insidious, if for no other reason than it metastasizes and then destroys the ability of the thinking brain to function properly in other domains. After all, if you think an eclipse that you've known about decades in advance is somehow a sign from God, then clearly your brain isn't firing on all cylinders.

As an example of how this works, one believer told me emphatically that God determines when we die. But later that very day, upon hearing about a fatal car accident nearby, that person told me "you can't be too careful" when driving. So which is it? Some minds contradict themselves obliviously, and thus effortlessly, without a moment's reflection or any sense of irony.

The shocks of being hit by alternative realities keep coming, sometimes with jaw dropping, inexplicable suddenness. Aileen Cannon, the judge in Donald Trump's Mar a Lago documents case, seems to be entertaining the notion that the Presidential Records Act might constitute a legitimate defense for Trump taking classified national security documents with him when he left the White House. This is bonkers backwards. As experts have been explaining for years, the Act severely circumscribes what an ex-president may take by deeming it to be "personal."

In point of fact, very little of a president's documents qualify as personal. The point of the Act, which was a post-Watergate reform, was to make this explicit. Almost every document under the purview of a presidential administration is assumed to belong to the American people, and is required to be turned over to the National Archives when a president leaves office. It isn't left to presidential whims or discretion to exempt whatever documents he wants.

According to the National Archives, "The Presidential Records Act (PRA) changed the legal status of Presidential and Vice Presidential materials. Under the PRA, the official records of the President and his staff are owned by the United States, not by the President. The Archivist is required to take custody of these records when the President leaves office, and to maintain them in a Federal depository." [bold in the original]

Any citizen can easily read about what the Act is and why it was passed. There's a Wikipedia page on it, if you prefer. Now it appears that a federal district court judge, who is required to make rulings of law, doesn't have a rudimentary understanding, available to anybody, of what the law is. The Presidential Records Act is absolutely not relevant to Trump's documents case, except that prosecutors could have (they didn't) charged Trump with violating it. Wrongly introducing it to a jury could easily torpedo the prosecution's case. And once a jury is empaneled, the prosecution cannot appeal any ruling by the trial judge to a higher court, or commence a new trial to correct the judge's mistake.

It can seem that the intellectual touchstones by which we manage our affairs and understand the world are being upended continually. The few of us who insist on living in the reality that is can sometimes have a sense of drowning under waves of irrationality and ignorance. Nothing makes sense. Your best factual arguments fall on deaf, careless ears. Everybody reserves the right to define their own reality, seemingly unable to recognize why that cannot be as an organizing principle for society. Irrationality has always been a feature of humanity, but I wonder if we're at some kind of inflection point where its expression at massive scale is causing immense harm.

Copyright (C) 2024 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

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