Whittle on Moore’s ‘Magic’
Assertively-rational conservative Bill Whittle has posted an essay that is getting lots of attention lately, at least according to Daypop: Magic. It’s entertainingly written, which is good, because it’s also fairly long-winded, and takes quite a while to get to the main point, which is that Whittle doesn’t like the way Michael Moore staged fictional scenes and asserted untrue things in Bowling for Columbine.
There’s extensive discussion of people’s love of magical thinking, illustrated by gleeful debunkings of Roswell and Loch Ness. Whittle invokes Carl Sagan, citing him as an influence and hailing his writing as “refined genius of the highest degree” (though apparently Sagan wasn’t able to actually apply the principles of clear thinking that Whittle praises so highly, since Sagan’s own views on political questions, at least, were diametrically opposed to Whittle’s).
There’s also a mention of misdirection, the illusionist’s hand-waving that distracts the audience while handkerchief is replaced by rabbit. Which is fun, given that Whittle’s logical argument itself is pretty much just a grand piece of misdirection.
I am always distrustful of self-styled skeptics who seem driven more by an emotional need to prove others wrong than by the desire to get closer to the underlying reality that mocks our simplistic, abstract perceptions. Whittle provides a great example of that, decrying the magical thinking on the part of those he disagrees with, while engaging in his own version of the same thing. His denial of the essential magic and mystery of the world, his repeated assertions that he possesses firmly-grounded Truths that his political opponents myopically overlook, is itself magical thinking, just on a slightly higher plane.
The constancy of the speed of light as a natural speed limit has been so thoroughly and completely tested and vindicated that these aliens must have learned to harness the power of entire galaxies to bore wormholes through spacetime, which would be necessary to have these infinitely fast, staggeringly maneuverable, gravity-defying, super-hardened space-metal saucers in the skies over our planet.
Sweet!
Heh. No one who really grasped the essence of what Sagan wrote about human knowledge and science could make a statement like that. Not because it’s particularly likely that aliens crashed a foil-wrapped spaceship into New Mexico in 1946, but because anyone defending a scientific principle as having been “so thoroughly and completely tested and vindicated” is just begging to have his frame of reference pulled from under him by new, unanticipated data.
The Whittle who saw a leprechaun at the age of nine was, in my view, a better scientist than the Whittle of today. It saddens me to see how the emotional traumas of growing up can do that to people, closing them off from the world, isolating them within protective walls of rational certainty, loudly proclaiming the correctness of their views and attacking anything that threatens to make a chink in that armor.
There is magic in the world still, real magic, way down deep. Children know that. Too many adults have forgotten.
