…ranger? …wolf? …some dove? …star? …ly hearts club band? The family went back to the White Wooden House yesterday after Thanksgiving. The moon is startlingly full and the color of butter. Later tonight there will be a partial lunar eclipse. One tiny planet’s shadow will soon fall on an even smaller object across a couple of hundred thousand miles of empty space for a few tens of minutes. Some members of a somewhat less-hairy two legged species of apes who inhabit the planet will look up at the skies in the middle of the night and get excited.

I enjoy being here alone. Perhaps because it is an option just like when I had a vegetarian lunch the other day, knowing there was bacon in the fridge for breakfast the next morning. Having established that I’m not a true loner, I’m going to admit that I’m not even really alone. They left Ouiser with me. Ouiser is not a loner. All day she played, ran, slept, ate, pooped, chewed, barked, rested, and most recently, farted, all never more than a few feet away from me. I took a break from my activity for the day – planting wildflower seeds – to take numerous photos and videos of Ouiser. I won’t share them all with you, but I will share some.

The kids have noticed that I more or less stopped taking pictures of them since we got the pets. What can I say? Ouiser is much better looking…

Speaking of being alone, here’s a thought. Imagine where no one interacts with anyone outside of their family for eight weeks (assume a worst case serial infection scenario of two weeks per person and a family size of four). Each family stays absolutely alone. So, no mingling at schools or hospitals or nursing homes or grocery stores or Amazon delivery or pharmacies or the police or gas stations or gyms or restaurants or bars or drivers license places or prisons or homeless shelters or hotels or cruise ships or airplanes or at football games or church or Sturgis or military bases or weddings or Kim Kardashian’s birthday party. Would the virus have disappeared from the human species by the end of those 8 weeks? I’m not saying this is practical. But I have questions. Can/could we do some version of this with more time thrown in for where people inevitably have to interact? And if my yard doesn’t look like this come spring, should I ask for a refund (native wildflower seeds are more expensive per pound that aged tenderloin steaks)?

In Walter Dean Myers’ The Treasure of Lemon Brown, Brown says “Every man has a treasure,” and I may not be a man, but I do have a treasure. It was given to me by an old man standing outside a museum.

I wince as I dig through my bag, finding only crumbs and stray dirt until my hand brushes against a folded paper. It’s dry and cool to the touch, and has a slightly glossy feel to it. As I retract my hand from my bag, the folded paper held gingerly in my palm, I can see that it’s a paper crane. I toy with its delicate wings, slipping its waxy surface between my fingers. It’s folded out of a black paper, so dark it seems to suck all the light from the space around it. It’s of an incomplex design, but holds a certain elegance in its simplicity. It’s head tilts down, bending its long neck gracefully, as if paying respects to the lost lives it symbolizes. I gaze at it as I am transported back to when I first received it.

It was chilly, but not cold, and the wind nipped playfully at me through the thin fabric of my dad’s sweatshirt, tugging on strands of my hair, inviting me out into the grey city. Everything was quiet, as if the town itself was mourning its dead in silence. My fraying tennis shoes padded softly on the brick ground. The cold stung the barely dried tears on my face. Like everything else in Japan, the city was neat and clean. The trees lined the streets, perfectly spaced and groomed, rounded on the tops, like mushroom clouds.

Fresh tears leaked from my eyes as I replayed a gruesome slide show in my head. Images burned into my mind, like kimono patterns burned into little girls’ skin. Husbands with missing arms weeping over the charred bodies of their wives and children. Faces marred beyond recognition, skin practically cooked. They don’t show you that in school, the way it moved like a tidal wave of superheated air, so fast you didn’t have time to scream. They don’t tell you how it started fiers so intense , they could suck you into their inferno. They didn’t tell me. Now I’m walking out of this museum with tears in my eyes and my head bowed in shame, and yet, an old man with a weathered face and a pair of forgiving eyes is slipping a paper crane into my hand.

[Vivian wrote this yesterday for a short writing assignment for her Language Arts class. I am glad to see an occasional tangible dividend of our traveling, which seems light years away. The experience Vivian recollects here happened in Hiroshima in February. I’m also blown away by what a great teacher and dedicated school can do. Four years ago Vivian couldn’t write more than a couple of sentences without getting frustrated – though her head was bursting with ideas she wanted to express. Here’s a photo of the old Japanese man who gave the kids their cranes of peace in Hiroshima. Vivian is wearing my Pilani sweatshirt.]

Kill him!

Vivian is our bringer of memes from the world on Instagram. She found this jewel the other day. Evan thought it was the cleverest thing he had heard all day. Try saying this and emphasize a different word each time:

I didn’t say we should kill him.

I didn’t say we should kill him.

I didn’t say we should kill him.

I didn’t say we should kill him.

I didn’t say we should kill him.

I didn’t say we should kill him.

I didn’t say we should kill him.

After the laughter subsided at the dinner table, the kids agreed that subtilty matters!

Evan took a good hit last weekend during a league soccer game. He collided with a bigger kid whose shoulder or elbow got into Evan’s chest. He went down like sack of flour. I stood on the sidelines wondering if the ref would blow her whistle and the coach would trot over to check him out while the other players took a knee and waited. It happens every few games to someone. For 10 year olds, soccer is a full contact sport.

But Evan got back up and in the game almost instantly, rubbing his chest and taking shallow breaths. He was winded but otherwise fine. I asked him about it when we walked back to the car after the game (which they handily won). He said that Coach Steven from three years ago had taught them the importance of getting up quickly and getting right back into the game. The coach famously crept up unexpectedly on the kids and pushed them over during practice to teach them how to fall and roll right back up. Since then, Evan, as a matter or pride, minimizes his downtime after a fall. What an amazing lesson to learn, I thought.

About 16 months ago when we were on Day 3 and 4 of a hike up Kilimanjaro, Aaron caught some sort of a stomach bug. That night he couldn’t eat dinner and crawled into the tent looking green. The next day we go up to 16,000 feet. We started the day by going up the Barranco Wall, which looked very daunting from our camp.

The morning was morose. But after a huge song and dance with lots of clapping and jumping, our support crew perked us up. As we slowly (“pole-pole” in Swahili) clambered up the Barranco Wall it didn’t seem so bad after all. Aaron sat down where he could. The rest of the day’s hike wasn’t bad either. The next morning Aaron looked better. When we started our final ascent at midnight that night Aaron was back in usual form and beat me to the summit by an hour.

Aaron and Evan did the same thing in different time scales. They got knocked down and they got back up – fast. They were on their feet when it mattered. They both showed resilience.

Countries too can be resilient. Neither the most powerful military nor the biggest treasury (well, a treasury that can borrow the most) were able to help us deal with the corona virus. American competence and advanced science and technology, our staples, could have stepped in, but they were hobbled. The leadership, with the explicit mandate of its voting base, smothered the scientific community, and created a lack of trust in the government (precipitated strangely by a president who heads the government), making it difficult for the competent to do their jobs. So we fell like a bag of dicks. Even defendable places like Hawaii look more like Nebraska than New Zealand. To get back up we must recognize that we are down. And we must agree on which way is up. Should we make American even greater again, again? Or should we chart a new course to a future that isn’t some faded sad replica of an old whitewashed patriarchal christian past? It is too bad that we can’t have Coach Steven creep among nations, pushing us down during practice to teach us how to jump back up.

The pod arrived last month – a giant white box that held our worldly belongings while we were traveling. Jo had filled it with what she hadn’t given away to Goodwill. Then a storage company carted it away to a climate controlled building. Last month, like a boomerang, it came back to our driveway. I unlocked it, raised the shutter in the back and took a look at what we had lived without for the last year. By weight, it is mostly books. We’ve moved the boxes from the pod to the garage. But the poor White Wooden House needs some tender love and care before we unpack the boxes.

Something broke in the kid’s bathroom flush and flooded Evan’s bedroom. The floor had to be ripped out and new one installed and then the rest of floors refinished. The paint needed touching up. A new bathroom flush finally got here after a transatlantic voyage but the delivery guy dropped it on our driveway and another one is on order. The flush sits inside the bathroom wall, so the wall has been torn out. We need a new kitchen oven. Two of the air-conditioning systems broke over the same weekend. One was easily fixed but the other will be replaced along with ducts in the attic. The internet works intermittently. The refrigerator is on the blink. But bit by bit the house is being put back together, mostly by Gunaraj. Having things is complicated. It was certainly easier to live out of backpacks in hotels and other peoples’ homes. But ready or not, here we are, back in Austin.

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The kids have settled back to school pretty seamlessly. Evan’s school alternates between a week of online and a week of in-person classes. He has rejoined his soccer league and is enjoying playing. So far they haven’t lost a game – which has caused a serious case of swollen-headedness. Speaking of heads Vivian has colored hers flaming red. The procedure was performed by another 13 year old – what could go wrong? She is back in school, and is ecstatic to be back with her friends. She and a friend joined a kids’ running group at Town Lake.

Jo and my return to Austin has been more uneasy. We had excuses. We couldn’t let Ouiser trample through the white wooden house till the newly-refinished floors had a chance to properly cure. Then the cats needed to be micro-chipped before letting them loose in Austin. Now is seems like we are using the Canyon Lake house as a mid-week refuge by turn. With the rains from tropical storm Delta, everything is green and blooming. Ouiser likes to frolic through the tall grass stems when they sway in the breeze. In the middle of last week I sat outside and enjoyed the day and smoked two pork shoulders and a rib for eight hours while Ouiser licked the dripping grease off the smoker. I found this giant moth with eye-like markings on its wings and intricate feathery antennae.

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Outside our little privileged town and country bubble, the dumpster-fire-train-wreck that is 2020 rages on. While I would rather rub my eyeballs with a dull cheese grater than see Trump debate, friends from around the world had plenty of funny things to say about it. And a handmaid has joined the alleged rapist (make that two) who will together write majority opinions at the supreme court for the remainder of my life. People agonized with why Mitch McConnell would ram through a lifetime supreme court nomination days before a presidential election after adamantly opposing a previous similar nomination because it was only six months away from the 2016 presidential election. Shankar Vedantam has an answer. In a recent podcasts of The Hidden Brain, his guest, psychologist and professor Linda Skitka, explained it this way.

If you like cheese on your pizza and I like pepperoni, we can both live with that. We can be friends. We are even okay with being each other’s children’s teachers and coaches. Because differences in preferences are okay. If you don’t eat beef and I don’t eat pork, we can still be friends. Differences in normative conventions like driving on different sides of the street in different countries and conflicting religious dietary rules are also okay. But if you support systemic racism and I don’t, we have a difference in moral convictions. Everyone is sure of their moral convictions. They are therefore also sure that those who oppose these views are immoral and wrong. We achieve a 2+2=4 type clarity and certainty about things that are often not objective and therefore subject to multiple opinions.

Jo summed up her feelings about racism this using a popular meme about pizza toppings (credit to funny.co for this version). A few years ago, someone I know who is against abortions invited his friends on facebook to de-friend him if they felt otherwise – and many did. There is almost nothing that can change a moral conviction I hold because I feel it in my bones. And as it requires no evidence, no evidence can shift it. Two years ago on Valentine’s Day, a shooter armed with a semi-automatic rifle shot and killed 17 people at the Majory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. If you are a staunch 2nd Amendment supporter and worry that “the government is coming for your guns”, that’s one thing. But if you morally believe that anyone should be allowed to own guns and ammunition without restrictions, your choices are limited when you learn that a troubled underage youth is able to legally buy a semi-automatic weapon that he then uses in his rampage to kill 14 year old students at a school. One option you do have is to dive into a wild conspiracy theory conveniently provided to you. Instead of admitting that some gun purchases may be dangerous you are willing to accept a theory that the whole school shooting is an elaborate hoax put on by parents, school administrators, hospitals, doctors, nurses, funeral homes, students, the police, and journalists who are doing all this just to make your god-given right to bear arms look bad. This suddenly gives you the license to become the enraged victim and to rail against the devastated parents who are grieving the sudden violent death of a child. People who feel this way are extreme but not rare. The force of a moral conviction is strong among us all, even if we all don’t go as far as these people do.

Enter a culture where issues are moved into the moral realm to manipulate us. Guns, belief in systemic racism, abortions, climate change, immigration, and even mask-wearing have become morally right or wrong. These issues – some of which are scientific truths or untruths, and hence not subjective in the first place – become battle grounds for good versus bad in our souls. Once we take a stance we are stuck. The only way out is to face massive internal cognitive dissonance and who wants that. This means that politicians and preachers are free to harvest the benefits of having voters ignore policy by keeping us permanently locked into our silos of moral rights and wrongs. While it may be too late for us to extract ourselves from this moral tarpit, we must teach the next generation to be critical thinkers. To stop and put issues in their place before issues put them in their place. To be immune to psychological manipulation.

I went to a secular school growing up. We took that definition to mean all religions and beliefs are okay. Our principal read a prayer or a thought every morning at assembly from an assortment of religions and philosophies. But this is the one (by Rabindranath Thakur) that I and most boys from the Hyderabad Public School remember the best and can recite from memory forty years later:

“Where the mind is without fear
and the head is held high,
where knowledge is free.
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls.
Where words come out from the depth of truth,
where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection.
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost it’s way
into the dreary desert sand of dead habit.
Where the mind is led forward by thee
into ever widening thought and action.
into that heaven of freedom, my father,
let my country awake!”

Yesterday a certain 10-year old in an online zoom class was asked by his teacher to find an example of a fact and another example of fiction. He picked the general theory of relativity and god. Dare I hope : – )

It has been said that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. It has also been said that Trump lies like other people breathe. This habit unfortunately makes it difficult for him to be effective against Covid. The little strand of RNA doesn’t care about “alternate truths”. Years from now, Vivian and Evan, you will wonder why we faired so poorly against this bug. Why other countries did so much better. This New Yorker cover from March sums it up.

When you are faced with a tidal wave of shit heading towards the fan, it is hard to find the individual turds for proverbial forest. But here’s a story of a very small turd on its journey towards the air circulation device dangling from the ceiling: a damned lie about statistics! Stick with me for a few minutes while we skim through basic immunology and some arithmetic.

If you survive an infection, it is because your body’s immune system produced a type of protein called an antibody that helped you fight the infection. In the case of Covid, the antibodies stick to the coronavirus at the very same spikes that the virus uses to enter your cells, thus preventing the virus from entering your cells. Your immune system retains a memory of how to produce these antibodies. If you have a future infection, the production of antibodies ramps up quickly, helping fend off the infection. It takes time to recognize a foreign body and make an effective antibody. Someone who has a fresh infection of Covid may not yet have her own antibodies. If she could get some of your antibodies, she may be temporarily protected against the virus. If you donate your blood for helping others, the antibodies and the liquid part, called Covid-19 convalescent plasma (CCP), is separated from the rest of your blood and injected into a Covid patient in need.

Here’s a quote from Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, the commissioner of the FDA from Sunday. Not from a guy whose cousin knows a janitor at the FDA. The Head of the FDA.

“Many of you know I was a cancer doctor before I became FDA commissioner. And a 35 percent improvement in survival is a pretty substantial clinical benefit. What that means is — and if the data continue to pan out — 100 people who are sick with covid-19, 35 would have been saved because of the admission of plasma.”

This 35% number was repeated by the President. Yes – it would be criminal to not use CCP with these numbers. You would understand why the FDA issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for Covid convalescent plasma. EUAs are precisely designed for something as miraculous as this. The FDA is effectively saying: go ahead and start saving lives while the scientists keep checking on the safety and benefits. It’s too important to wait!

Last week the heads on two other government organizations, the National Institute of Health, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Doctors Collins and Fauci respectively) told the FDA not to issue the EUA. They said that the data to support plasma was too weak. How on earth could they say that about convalescent plasma when it is saving 35 people out of every 100 sick people?

Unfortunately there hasn’t been enough time or plasma to run a nice randomized clinical trial to test the safety and benefit of CCP anywhere in the world. If we had, we would be able say something like this: take 200 people who have Covid. Split them randomly into two groups of 100 each. The first group receives CCP treatment and second doesn’t. X people die in the first group by the time the study ends, and Y people in the second group. If X is heaps less than Y, and X doesn’t have other dangerous side effects, X gets FDA approval to become a drug (my brother, Alu, will tell you it’s a bit more complicated and requires three phases of trials with tens of thousands of test subjects, a small army of scientists and statisticians, and several thousand pages of documentation).

So where did Hahn and Trump’s 35% come from? From this study that hasn’t yet been peer reviewed https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.12.20169359v1.full.pdf. I’ve highlighted the relevant part:

Because there are no randomized clinical tests to fall back on, we must rely on various weaker results. Mayo and other medical organizations around the world have been collecting data on CCP for a while. This data from the Mayo study says that people that received more concentrated plasma (plasma with more antibodies) did better than those who got plasma with lower amounts of antibodies. One week after receiving the high dose plasma, 8.9% had died, while one week after receiving the weaker plasma, 13.7% had died. So if I had two experiments with a 100 sick Covid cases in each, about 9 people die in the first group in 7 days and about 14 people die in the second group in the same time. Now let’s do some simple arithmetic: The first group did 13.7% – 8.9% = 4.8% better than the second. That is an improvement of (4.8/13.7)x100 = 35.04% between the first and second types of plasma treatment. Not, as Hahn stated: What that means is — and if the data continue to pan out — 100 people who are sick with covid-19, 35 would have been saved because of the admission of plasma.

Trump needs a miracle cure for Covid. It’s at least a bit ironic because he has spent the last seven months convincing his people that the disease doesn’t exist or isn’t very harmful. He needs a cure to this non-existent harmless disease before election day. He wishes he could be like Putin and start injecting people with a half baked vaccine that Jared made in the basement. So he has been pressuring the FDA for anything. Issue an EUA for plasma so I can hail it as “a major therapeutic breakthrough on the China Virus” and declare the pandemic over (again). When Collins and Fauci told the FDA that the data supporting plasma was too weak, Trump forced the FDA to act alone. Here’s a link to FDA’s website and a screen grab of the press release. Does this read like a scientific press release headline? How often do they normally mention anything about an “administration” :-)? https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-issues-emergency-use-authorization-convalescent-plasma-potential-promising-covid-19-treatment

The scientific discussion about convalescent plasma will continue among researchers till enough data is available. CCP has been used on more than 70,000 patients in the US in the last few months. My friend was instrumental in building the first free plasma bank in Hyderabad to help Covid patients there. Scientists from Wuhan to the middle east are trying to figure out how and when to use plasma to fight Covid. At least one potential vaccine is taking this route. But this isn’t about how good plasma is. This isn’t even about Trump lying about how good plasma is (we’ve become somewhat immune to Trump lying). Our scientists and doctors from the best government scientific institutions are having to lie. Hahn tweeted today to half apologize.

Those that want to re-elect Trump heard him and a top doctor say that 35% fewer people will die now with convalescent plasma treatment. They also saw Trump’s tweet that the deep state is keeping therapeutics from the people. They don’t care about the details. Trump is more important than a few morals or what’s good for the country or scientific honesty.

And that is the story of a tiny turd caught in a shit storm that is heading for the fan, my dear children.

Skittles likes to sleep on Vivian’s 7th grade math textbook. While we were traveling, Vivian and Evan skipped school for the 2019-20 school year and did a sort of abridged homeschool instead. Jo says the kids have become quite feral especially the lad. Back before we left for our year of wandering, we had planned that during the 2020-21 year the kids would try and catch up on some formal schooling – teachers, classrooms, curriculum and stuff like that.

Remember back in May when it looked like we were figuring out how to slow the spread of Covid? And then we managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Having messed up how we reopened our economy, now we are getting ready to do the same thing to our schools. Same people. Same leadership. Same shit.

Jo and I know we are lucky. We don’t have a desperate need for our kids to be at in-person school. We are mostly at home so we can keep track of the kids if needed. Families where all the adults are working don’t have that option. Our kids, while not prone to listening, can self manage themselves most of the time. And while physical human contact is undeniably important, they can learn almost everything that is in their curriculum through online classes. Kids with severe special needs or students in higher grades with lab components can’t do that. And kids a few years younger than ours who learn by doing and imitating and meeting and touching and playing and licking will also miss out.

There is a possibility that schools and teachers will innovate in the face of this unprecedented stimulus called Covid. But they will need our support to experiment and the funds to do so. Either way, it will be an interesting school year up ahead.

Imagine a VR based zoom call. Slip on your headset and turn your head to look around the classroom. By using the camera on your computer, and technologies like Artificial Intelligence and image recognition/analysis/generation, the software builds a 3D image of each participant in real time. If Johnny says “Teacher!”, the teacher can tell where the sound is coming from and zeroes in on Johnny almost like in real life. “Raise your hand if you have a question, Johnny. And please stop picking your nose in class”.

Evan started fifth grade earlier this week. Unlike his fellow students, online live class and google meet and google classroom are all new to him. After a couple of hours he settled in and by the end of the first day he said he liked it better than in-person school “because it goes a lot faster”. Which I am translating to “because I’m more engaged”. Kudos to his teachers. But the rest of the school year may not go so smoothly. And for many others, for many reasons, it may not be going smoothly at all. Evan’s in-person school is supposed to start on September 8th. Unless it get’s pushed back further.

A couple of days ago, a friend who is a school principal dropped by for a socially distanced chat. Some of her parents want school to only be online. Others want their kids in school yesterday. There are teachers who hate the idea of being online and physically separated from their students. And others who balk at the idea of coming back to school. The administration is flip-flopping on major issues on a regular basis. The students are anxious. The principal has to navigate this minefield, and she said that everyone was unhappy with her. I told her that in a perfect negotiation, no party leaves happy because everyone thinks someone else got a better deal. So she was doing her job as well could be done! Jokes aside, her job is one that I don’t envy. But being able to look under the hood of a couple of schools where I am on the board is fascinating. Expectations are running high, anxiety is through the roof, and the demand to be flexible is daunting. No one can tell how this experiment will turn out. Meanwhile, I’ve taken the advice of an educator friend to heart. “Be prepared to lose this school year”. In the big scheme of things, that is okay. Skittles, you can keep napping on the math textbook. They have put up an old fashioned blackboard at the beach at Sand Island in Kenya on the Indian ocean where we spent a few blissful days a little more than a year ago. Not much internet there, so education will have to be delivered in person. Even then Jo would pick up and move in a heartbeat.

This picture shows two Shepard Tables, named after Roger Shepard, the Stanford psychologist who conjured up this illusion. The geometric parallelograms that make up the tops of the two tables are identical. Yes one looks skinny and long, the other short and stubby. My brain fills in information that doesn’t exist (three-dimensionality) and in this particular case it arrives at an incorrect conclusion that the two table tops are different. The reason my brain is tricked by this illusion is evolutionary – the shortcut my brain takes is what allows me to navigate my three dimensional world every moment of ever day without stumbling and crashing into things. When I first came across this illusion, I didn’t believe my eyes. So I created a google slide and manually shifted one parallelogram on to the other. They fit perfectly. But knowing this didn’t change a thing. The table tops still look different. Shepard said “any knowledge or understanding of the illusion we may gain at the intellectual level remains virtually powerless to diminish the magnitude of the illusion.” Wow. Makes me feel stupid.

It is easy to trick our brains. This is why marketers and Russian trolls have jobs. They make us buy crap we’ll never use or manipulate us to vote for The Rump. Psychologists create traps for our biases that, like the Shepard Tables, prove that we often act irrationally but predictably. If you are interested, explore the works of Ariely, Tversky (whose grandson played soccer with Evan last season), and Kahneman.

Don’t wear masks. Don’t reopen schools. Black Lives Matter. Defund the police. Vote by mail. We are constantly grappling with what’s the right thing to do. There is an overpowering tendency to collapse complex issues into blinding moral certainties. And whole groups of people into idiots or flakes. The other day someone asked me, “so, has it been shown that Trump supporters are dumb?”. Only anecdotally, I wanted to think.

It turns out that social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has answered a similar question: do conservatives and liberals have different morals? How can you and I each hold that face masks are a constitutional infringement and that face masks are useful in slowing the spread of Covid?

Haidt has suggested that each of us come equipped with five moral foundations: care/harm (for instance, almost universally people care about children and cute young animals and morally oppose harm to them), fairness/cheating (we like to be treated fairly and bristle at cheaters and free loaders), loyalty/betrayal (also referred to as “ingroup” – our tribal instinct to like our own people and our instinctive fear, dislike, or apathy for outsiders), authority/subversion (the moral power of hierarchical structures that permeate our families and societies like the patriarchy, teachers, priests), and lastly sanctity/degradation (the emotion of disgust for things like rotting meat or unusual sexual practices).

A moral foundation can be interpreted in different ways. The care/harm foundation gets me to send money to displaced Covid workers in a distant country and makes you like videos of kittens on Facebook. The fairness/cheating foundation means I like public education and you want lower property taxes. The loyalty/betrayal foundation triggers my support of Black Lives Matter and your support for Behind the Blue. Authority/subversion nudges me to listen to Fauci and you to Kushner. The sancity/degradation foundation explains why you are worked up about rioters defacing statues of confederate “heroes”. Haidt’s studies have shown that if you are conservative and I am a liberal, we value or prioritize the five moral foundations in different ways.

So now, in addition to interpreting the same moral foundations in different ways, it turns out that if you are conservative, you have more moral triggers than me. It explains why I don’t get worked up about kneeling during the national anthem while you do. It explains why Fox News and the OAN network and your preacher have a big effect on what you decide is right while I teach Vivian to question everyone including myself.

How do we examine morals of people separated from us in space and time? Should morals be relative? Is slavery wrong? Was it always wrong? Did the founding fathers (not mothers?) of America know that? Should they get a hall pass today because of the social mores of their times? How do you judge another culture? One view is that morality is local and relative. Another is that relativism is a slippery slope and that things are right or wrong, everywhere, every time. What will our descendants hold us morally responsible for? Incarceration of the largest number of people in the world in the land of the free? Fucking up the planet? Living in a world which includes Jeff Bezos and millions of wretchedly poor people?

So you aren’t stupid because you are conservative (though, I suspect that liberals mainly worry that the causality of that relationship works the other way around). And I’m not immoral because I am not patriotic. Additionally, we both think we are right and morally superior to the other. In the face of such clear moral differences, the only option left is to think of the other as stupid. You can dig deeper into all this in THE RIGHTEOUS MIND: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt.

Opinions are like assholes. Everyone’s got one. In today’s world, our opinions are rarely ours. Our moral certainties emerge from our tribal social-media fueled group-think resulting from the same types of evolutionary shortcuts that make us fall for illusions. We are predictably irrational.

This exercise is an attempt to bridge the gap between conservatives and liberals. It does not shed any light on the vacant idealess cult of The Rump. If you believe that face masks are an instrument of evil created by Bill Gates to topple Trump, you are sadly beyond help. Moral foundations aside, Trump is still an huge asshole and if you vote for him in November you are still a bag of shit, and that’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it 🙂