Category Archives: Rationalism

You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so realistic that they can live in them.

Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)

When did America become untethered from reality?

I first noticed our national lurch toward fantasy in 2004, after President George W. Bushs political mastermind, Karl Rove, came up with the remarkable phrase reality-based community. People in the reality-based community, he told a reporter, believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality Thats not the way the world really works anymore. A year later, The Colbert Report went on the air. In the first few minutes of the first episode, Stephen Colbert, playing his right-wing-populist commentator character, performed a feature called The Word. His first selection: truthiness. Now, Im sure some of the word police, the wordinistas over at Websters, are gonna say, Hey, thats not a word! Well, anybody who knows me knows that Im no fan of dictionaries or reference books. Theyre elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isnt true. Or what did or didnt happen. Whos Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, thats my right. I dont trust bookstheyre all fact, no heart Face it, folks, we are a divided nation divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart Because thats where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlementhe gut.

Whoa, yes, I thought: exactly. America had changed since I was young, when truthiness and reality-based community wouldnt have made any sense as jokes. For all the fun, and all the many salutary effects of the 1960sthe main decade of my childhoodI saw that those years had also been the big-bang moment for truthiness. And if the 60s amounted to a national nervous breakdown, we are probably mistaken to consider ourselves over it.

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Each of us is on a spectrum somewhere between the poles of rational and irrational. We all have hunches we cant prove and superstitions that make no sense. Some of my best friends are very religious, and others believe in dubious conspiracy theories. Whats problematic is going overboardletting the subjective entirely override the objective; thinking and acting as if opinions and feelings are just as true as facts. The American experiment, the original embodiment of the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, whereby every individual is welcome to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams, sometimes epic fantasiesevery American one of Gods chosen people building a custom-made utopia, all of us free to reinvent ourselves by imagination and will. In America nowadays, those more exciting parts of the Enlightenment idea have swamped the sober, rational, empirical parts. Little by little for centuries, then more and more and faster and faster during the past half century, we Americans have given ourselves over to all kinds of magical thinking, anything-goes relativism, and belief in fanciful explanationsmall and large fantasies that console or thrill or terrify us. And most of us havent realized how far-reaching our strange new normal has become.

Much more than the other billion or so people in the developed world, we Americans believereally believein the supernatural and the miraculous, in Satan on Earth, in reports of recent trips to and from heaven, and in a story of lifes instantaneous creation several thousand years ago.

We believe that the government and its co-conspirators are hiding all sorts of monstrous and shocking truths from us, concerning assassinations, extraterrestrials, the genesis of aids, the 9/11 attacks, the dangers of vaccines, and so much more.

And this was all true before we became familiar with the terms post-factual and post-truth, before we elected a president with an astoundingly open mind about conspiracy theories, whats true and whats false, the nature of reality.

We have passed through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole. America has mutated into Fantasyland.

How widespread is this promiscuous devotion to the untrue? How many Americans now inhabit alternate realities? Any given survey of beliefs is only a sketch of what people in general really think. But reams of survey research from the past 20 years reveal a rough, useful census of American credulity and delusion. By my reckoning, the solidly reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half. Only a third of us, for instance, dont believe that the tale of creation in Genesis is the word of God. Only a third strongly disbelieve in telepathy and ghosts. Two-thirds of Americans believe that angels and demons are active in the world. More than half say theyre absolutely certain heaven exists, and just as many are sure of the existence of a personal Godnot a vague force or universal spirit or higher power, but some guy. A third of us believe not only that global warming is no big deal but that its a hoax perpetrated by scientists, the government, and journalists. A third believe that our earliest ancestors were humans just like us; that the government has, in league with the pharmaceutical industry, hidden evidence of natural cancer cures; that extraterrestrials have visited or are visiting Earth. Almost a quarter believe that vaccines cause autism, and that Donald Trump won the popular vote in 2016. A quarter believe that our previous president maybe or definitely was (or is?) the anti-Christ. According to a survey by Public Policy Polling, 15 percent believe that the media or the government adds secret mind-controlling technology to television broadcast signals, and another 15 percent think thats possible. A quarter of Americans believe in witches. Remarkably, the same fraction, or maybe less, believes that the Bible consists mainly of legends and fablesthe same proportion that believes U.S. officials were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.

When I say that a third believe X and a quarter believe Y, its important to understand that those are different thirds and quarters of the population. Of course, various fantasy constituencies overlap and feed one anotherfor instance, belief in extraterrestrial visitation and abduction can lead to belief in vast government cover-ups, which can lead to belief in still more wide-ranging plots and cabals, which can jibe with a belief in an impending Armageddon.

Why are we like this?

The short answer is because were Americansbecause being American means we can believe anything we want; that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone elses, experts be damned. Once people commit to that approach, the world turns inside out, and no cause-and-effect connection is fixed. The credible becomes incredible and the incredible credible.

The word mainstream has recently become a pejorative, shorthand for bias, lies, oppression by the elites. Yet the institutions and forces that once kept us from indulging the flagrantly untrue or absurdmedia, academia, government, corporate America, professional associations, respectable opinion in the aggregatehave enabled and encouraged every species of fantasy over the past few decades.

A senior physician at one of Americas most prestigious university hospitals promotes miracle cures on his daily TV show. Cable channels air documentaries treating mermaids, monsters, ghosts, and angels as real. When a political-science professor attacks the idea that there is some public that shares a notion of reality, a concept of reason, and a set of criteria by which claims to reason and rationality are judged, colleagues just nod and grant tenure. The old fringes have been folded into the new center. The irrational has become respectable and often unstoppable.

Our whole social environment and each of its overlapping partscultural, religious, political, intellectual, psychologicalhave become conducive to spectacular fallacy and truthiness and make-believe. There are many slippery slopes, leading in various directions to other exciting nonsense. During the past several decades, those naturally slippery slopes have been turned into a colossal and permanent complex of interconnected, crisscrossing bobsled tracks, which Donald Trump slid down right into the White House.

American moxie has always come in two types. We have our wilder, faster, looser side: Were overexcited gamblers with a weakness for stories too good to be true. But we also have the virtues embodied by the Puritans and their secular descendants: steadiness, hard work, frugality, sobriety, and common sense. A propensity to dream impossible dreams is like other powerful tendenciesokay when kept in check. For most of our history, the impulses existed in a rough balance, a dynamic equilibrium between fantasy and reality, mania and moderation, credulity and skepticism.

The great unbalancing and descent into full Fantasyland was the product of two momentous changes. The first was a profound shift in thinking that swelled up in the 60s; since then, Americans have had a new rule written into their mental operating systems: Do your own thing, find your own reality, its all relative.

The second change was the onset of the new era of information. Digital technology empowers real-seeming fictions of the ideological and religious and scientific kinds. Among the webs 1 billion sites, believers in anything and everything can find thousands of fellow fantasists, with collages of facts and facts to support them. Before the internet, crackpots were mostly isolated, and surely had a harder time remaining convinced of their alternate realities. Now their devoutly believed opinions are all over the airwaves and the web, just like actual news. Now all of the fantasies look real.

Today, each of us is freer than ever to custom-make reality, to believe whatever and pretend to be whoever we wish. Which makes all the lines between actual and fictional blur and disappear more easily. Truth in general becomes flexible, personal, subjective. And we like this new ultra-freedom, insist on it, even as we fear and loathe the ways so many of our wrongheaded fellow Americans use it.

Treating real life as fantasy and vice versa, and taking preposterous ideas seriously, is not unique to Americans. But we are the global crucible and epicenter. We invented the fantasy-industrial complex; almost nowhere outside poor or otherwise miserable countries are flamboyant supernatural beliefs so central to the identities of so many people. This is American exceptionalism in the 21st century. The country has always been a one-of-a-kind place. But our singularity is different now. Were still rich and free, still more influential and powerful than any other nation, practically a synonym for developed country. But our drift toward credulity, toward doing our own thing, toward denying facts and having an altogether uncertain grip on reality, has overwhelmed our other exceptional national traits and turned us into a less developed country.

People see our shocking Trump momentthis post-truth, alternative facts momentas some inexplicable and crazy new American phenomenon. But whats happening is just the ultimate extrapolation and expression of mind-sets that have made America exceptional for its entire history.

America was created by true believers and passionate dreamers, and by hucksters and their suckers, which made America successfulbut also by a people uniquely susceptible to fantasy, as epitomized by everything from Salems hunting witches to Joseph Smiths creating Mormonism, from P. T. Barnum to speaking in tongues, from Hollywood to Scientology to conspiracy theories, from Walt Disney to Billy Graham to Ronald Reagan to Oprah Winfrey to Trump. In other words: Mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that ferment for a few centuries; then run it through the anything-goes 60s and the internet age. The result is the America we inhabit today, with reality and fantasy weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.

The 1960s and the Beginning of the End of Reason

I dont regret or disapprove of many of the ways the 60s permanently reordered American society and culture. Its just that along with the familiar benefits, there have been unreckoned costs.

In 1962, people started referring to hippies, the Beatles had their first hit, Ken Kesey published One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, and the Harvard psychology lecturer Timothy Leary was handing out psilocybin and LSD to grad students. And three hours south of San Francisco, on the heavenly stretch of coastal cliffs known as Big Sur, a pair of young Stanford psychology graduates founded a school and think tank they named after a small American Indian tribe that had lived on the grounds long before. In 1968, one of its founding figures recalled four decades later,

This is not overstatement. Essentially everything that became known as New Age was invented, developed, or popularized at the Esalen Institute. Esalen is a mother church of a new American religion for people who think they dont like churches or religions but who still want to believe in the supernatural. The institute wholly reinvented psychology, medicine, and philosophy, driven by a suspicion of science and reason and an embrace of magical thinking (also: massage, hot baths, sex, and sex in hot baths). It was a headquarters for a new religion of no religion, and for science containing next to no science. The idea was to be radically tolerant of therapeutic approaches and understandings of reality, especially if they came from Asian traditions or from American Indian or other shamanistic traditions. Invisible energies, past lives, astral projection, whateverthe more exotic and wondrous and unfalsifiable, the better.

Not long before Esalen was founded, one of its co-founders, Dick Price, had suffered a mental breakdown and been involuntarily committed to a private psychiatric hospital for a year. His new institute embraced the radical notion that psychosis and other mental illnesses were labels imposed by the straight world on eccentrics and visionaries, that they were primarily tools of coercion and control. This was the big idea behind One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, of course. And within the psychiatric profession itself this idea had two influential proponents, who each published unorthodox manifestos at the beginning of the decadeR. D. Laing (The Divided Self) and Thomas Szasz (The Myth of Mental Illness). Madness, Laing wrote when Esalen was new, is potentially liberation and renewal. Esalens founders were big Laing fans, and the institute became a hotbed for the idea that insanity was just an alternative way of perceiving reality.

These influential critiques helped make popular and respectable the idea that much of science is a sinister scheme concocted by a despotic conspiracy to oppress people. Mental illness, both Szasz and Laing said, is a theory not a fact. This is now the universal bottom-line argument for anyonefrom creationists to climate-change deniers to anti-vaccine hystericswho prefers to disregard science in favor of his own beliefs.

You know how young people always think the universe revolves around them, as if theyre the only ones who really get it? And how before their frontal lobes, the neural seat of reason and rationality, are fully wired, they can be especially prone to fantasy? In the 60s, the universe cooperated: It did seem to revolve around young people, affirming their adolescent self-regard, making their fantasies of importance feel real and their fantasies of instant transformation and revolution feel plausible. Practically overnight, America turned its full attention to the young and everything they believed and imagined and wished.

If 1962 was when the decade really got going, 1969 was the year the new doctrines and their gravity were definitively cataloged by the grown-ups. Reason and rationality were over. The countercultural effusions were freaking out the old guard, including religious people who couldnt quite see that yet another Great Awakening was under way in America, heaving up a new religion of believers who have no option but to follow the road until they reach the Holy City that lies beyond the technocracy the New Jerusalem. That line is from The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition, published three weeks after Woodstock, in the summer of 1969. Its author was Theodore Roszak, age 35, a Bay Area professor who thereby coined the word counterculture. Roszak spends 270 pages glorying in the younger generations brave rejection of expertise and all that our culture values as reason and reality. (Note the scare quotes.) So-called experts, after all, are on the payroll of the state and/or corporate structure. A chapter called The Myth of Objective Consciousness argues that science is really just a state religion. To create a new culture in which the non-intellective capacities become the arbiters of the good [and] the true, he writes, nothing less is required than the subversion of the scientific world view, with its entrenched commitment to an egocentric and cerebral mode of consciousness. He welcomes the radical rejection of science and technological values.

Earlier that summer, a University of Chicago sociologist (and Catholic priest) named Andrew Greeley had alerted readers of The New York Times Magazine that beyond the familiar signifiers of youthful rebellion (long hair, sex, drugs, music, protests), the truly shocking change on campuses was the rise of anti-rationalism and a return of the sacredmysticism and magic, the occult, sances, cults based on the book of Revelation. When hed chalked a statistical table on a classroom blackboard, one of his students had reacted with horror: Mr. Greeley, I think youre an empiricist.

As 1969 turned to 1970, a 41-year-old Yale Law School professor was finishing his book about the new youth counterculture. Charles Reich was a former Supreme Court clerk now tenured at one of ultra-rationalisms American headquarters. But hanging with the young people had led him to a midlife epiphany and apostasy. In 1966, he had started teaching an undergraduate seminar called The Individual in America, for which he assigned fiction by Kesey and Norman Mailer. He decided to spend the next summer, the Summer of Love, in Berkeley. On the road back to New Haven, he had his Pauline conversion to the kids values. His class at Yale became hugely popular; at its peak, 600 students were enrolled. In 1970, The Greening of America became The New York Times best-selling book (as well as a much-read 70-page New Yorker excerpt), and remained on the list for most of a year.

At 16, I bought and read one of the 2 million copies sold. Rereading it today and recalling how much I loved it was a stark reminder of the follies of youth. Reich was shamelessly, uncritically swooning for kids like me. The Greening of America may have been the mainstreams single greatest act of pandering to the vanity and self-righteousness of the new youth. Its underlying theoretical scheme was simple and perfectly pitched to flatter young readers: There are three types of American consciousness, each of which makes up an individuals perception of reality his head, his way of life. Consciousness I people were old-fashioned, self-reliant individualists rendered obsolete by the new Corporate Stateessentially, your grandparents. Consciousness IIs were the fearful and conformist organization men and women whose rationalism was a tyrannizing trap laid by the Corporate Stateyour parents.

And then there was Consciousness III, which had made its first appearance among the youth of America, spreading rapidly among wider and wider segments of youth, and by degrees to older people. If you opposed the Vietnam War and dressed down and smoked pot, you were almost certainly a III. Simply by being young and casual and undisciplined, you were ushering in a new utopia.

Reich praises the gaiety and humor of the new Consciousness III wardrobe, but his book is absolutely humorlessbecause its a response to this moment of utmost sterility, darkest night and most extreme peril. Conspiracism was flourishing, and Reich bought in. Now that the Corporate State has added depersonalization and repression to its other injustices, it has threatened to destroy all meaning and suck all joy from life. Reichs magical thinking mainly concerned how the revolution would turn out. The American Corporate State, having produced this new generation of longhaired hyperindividualists who insist on trusting their gut and finding their own truth, is now accomplishing what no revolutionaries could accomplish by themselves. The machine has begun to destroy itself. Once everyone wears Levis and gets high, the old ways will simply be swept away in the flood.

The inevitable/imminent happy-cataclysm part of the dream didnt happen, of course. The machine did not destroy itself. But Reich was half-right. An epochal change in American thinking was under way and not, as far as anybody knows, reversible There is no returning to an earlier consciousness. His wishful error was believing that once the tidal surge of new sensibility brought down the flood walls, the waters would flow in only one direction, carving out a peaceful, cooperative, groovy new continental utopia, hearts and minds changed like his, all of America Berkeleyized and Vermontified. Instead, Consciousness III was just one early iteration of the anything-goes, post-reason, post-factual America enabled by the tsunami. Reichs faith was the converse of the Enlightenment rationalists hopeful fallacy 200 years earlier. Granted complete freedom of thought, Thomas Jefferson and company assumed, most people would follow the path of reason. Wasnt it pretty to think so.

I remember when fantastical beliefs went fully mainstream, in the 1970s. My irreligious mother bought and read The Secret Life of Plants, a big best seller arguing that plants were sentient and would be the bridesmaids at a marriage of physics and metaphysics. The amazing truth about plants, the book claimed, had been suppressed by the FDA and agribusiness. My mom didnt believe in the conspiracy, but she did start talking to her ficuses as if they were pets. In a review, The New York Times registered the book as another data point in how the incredible is losing its pariah status. Indeed, mainstream publishers and media organizations were falling over themselves to promote and sell fantasies as nonfiction. In 1975 came a sensational autobiography by the young spoon bender and mind reader Uri Geller as well as Life After Life, by Raymond Moody, a philosophy Ph.D. who presented the anecdotes of several dozen people whod nearly died as evidence of an afterlife. The book sold many millions of copies; before long the International Association for Near Death Studies formed and held its first conference, at Yale.

During the 60s, large swaths of academia made a turn away from reason and rationalism as theyd been understood. Many of the pioneers were thoughtful, their work fine antidotes to postwar complacency. The problem was the nature and extent of their influence at that particular time, when all premises and paradigms seemed up for grabs. That is, they inspired half-baked and perverse followers in the academy, whose arguments filtered out into the world at large: All approximations of truth, science as much as any fable or religion, are mere stories devised to serve peoples needs or interests. Reality itself is a purely social construction, a tableau of useful or wishful myths that members of a society or tribe have been persuaded to believe. The borders between fiction and nonfiction are permeable, maybe nonexistent. The delusions of the insane, superstitions, and magical thinking? Any of those may be as legitimate as the supposed truths contrived by Western reason and science. The takeaway: Believe whatever you want, because pretty much everything is equally true and false.

These ideas percolated across multiple academic fields. In 1965, the French philosopher Michel Foucault published Madness and Civilization in America, echoing Laings skepticism of the concept of mental illness; by the 1970s, he was arguing that rationality itself is a coercive regime of truthoppression by other means. Foucaults suspicion of reason became deeply and widely embedded in American academia.

Meanwhile, over in sociology, in 1966 a pair of professors published The Social Construction of Reality, one of the most influential works in their field. Not only were sanity and insanity and scientific truth somewhat dubious concoctions by elites, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann explainedso was everything else. The rulers of any tribe or society do not just dictate customs and laws; they are the masters of everyones perceptions, defining reality itself. To create the all-encompassing stage sets that everyone inhabits, rulers first use crude mythology, then more elaborate religion, and finally the extreme step of modern science. Reality? Knowledge? If we were going to be meticulous, Berger and Luckmann wrote, we would put quotation marks around the two aforementioned terms every time we used them. What is real to a Tibetan monk may not be real to an American businessman.

When I first read that, at age 18, I loved the quotation marks. If reality is simply the result of rules written by the powers that be, then isnt everyone ableno, isnt everyone obligedto construct their own reality? The book was timed perfectly to become a foundational text in academia and beyond.

A more extreme academic evangelist for the idea of all truths being equal was a UC Berkeley philosophy professor named Paul Feyerabend. His best-known book, published in 1975, was Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. Rationalism, it declared, is a secularized form of the belief in the power of the word of God, and science a particular superstition. In a later edition of the book, published when creationists were passing laws to teach Genesis in public-school biology classes, Feyerabend came out in favor of the practice, comparing creationists to Galileo. Science, he insisted, is just another form of belief. Only one principle, he wrote, can be defended under all circumstances and in all stages of human development. It is the principle: anything goes.

Over in anthropology, where the exotic magical beliefs of traditional cultures were a main subject, the new paradigm took over completelydont judge, dont disbelieve, dont point your professorial finger. This was understandable, given the times: colonialism ending, genocide of American Indians confessed, U.S. wars in the developing world. Who were we to roll our eyes or deny what these people believed? In the 60s, anthropology decided that oracles, diviners, incantations, and magical objects should be not just respected, but considered equivalent to reason and science. If all understandings of reality are socially constructed, those of Kalabari tribesmen in Nigeria are no more arbitrary or faith-based than those of college professors.

In 1968, a UC Davis psychologist named Charles Tart conducted an experiment in which, he wrote, a young woman who frequently had spontaneous out-of-body experiencesdidnt claim to have them but had themspent four nights sleeping in a lab, hooked up to an EEG machine. Her assigned task was to send her mind or soul out of her body while she was asleep and read a five-digit number Tart had written on a piece of paper placed on a shelf above the bed. He reported that she succeeded. Other scientists considered the experiments and the results bogus, but Tart proceeded to devote his academic career to proving that attempts at objectivity are a sham and magic is real. In an extraordinary paper published in 1972 in Science, he complained about the scientific establishments almost total rejection of the knowledge gained while high or tripping. He didnt just want science to take seriously experiences of ecstasy, mystical union, other dimensions, rapture, beauty, space-and-time transcendence. He was explicitly dedicated to going there. A perfectly scientific theory may be based on data that have no physical existence, he insisted. The rules of the scientific method had to be revised. To work as a psychologist in the new era, Tart argued, a researcher should be in the altered state of consciousness hes studying, high or delusional at the time of data collection or during data reduction and theorizing. Tarts new mode of research, he admitted, posed problems of consensual validation, given that only observers in the same [altered state] are able to communicate adequately with one another. Tart popularized the term consensus reality for what you or I would simply call reality, and around 1970 that became a permanent interdisciplinary term of art in academia. Later he abandoned the pretense of neutrality and started calling it the consensus trancepeople committed to reason and rationality were the deluded dupes, not he and his tribe.

Even the social critic Paul Goodman, beloved by young leftists in the 60s, was flabbergasted by his own students by 1969. There was no knowledge, he wrote, only the sociology of knowledge. They had so well learned that research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth.

Ever since, the American right has insistently decried the spread of relativism, the idea that nothing is any more correct or true than anything else. Conservatives hated how relativism undercut various venerable and comfortable ruling ideascertain notions of entitlement (according to race and gender) and aesthetic beauty and metaphysical and moral certainty. Yet once the intellectual mainstream thoroughly accepted that there are many equally valid realities and truths, once the idea of gates and gatekeeping was discredited not just on campuses but throughout the culture, all American barbarians could have their claims taken seriously. Conservatives are correct that the anything-goes relativism of college campuses wasnt sequestered there, but when it flowed out across America it helped enable extreme Christianities and lunacies on the rightgun-rights hysteria, black-helicopter conspiracism, climate-change denial, and more. The term useful idiot was originally deployed to accuse liberals of serving the interests of true believers further on the left. In this instance, however, postmodern intellectualspost-positivists, poststructuralists, social constructivists, post-empiricists, epistemic relativists, cognitive relativists, descriptive relativiststurned out to be useful idiots most consequentially for the American right. Reality has a well-known liberal bias, Stephen Colbert once said, in character, mocking the beliefs-trump-facts impulse of todays right. Neither side has noticed, but large factions of the elite left and the populist right have been on the same team.

Conspiracy and Paranoia in the 1970s

As the Vietnam War escalated and careened, antirationalism flowered. In his book about the remarkable protests in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1967, The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer describes chants (Out demons, outback to darkness, ye servants of Satan!) and a circle of hundreds of protesters intending to form a ring of exorcism sufficiently powerful to raise the Pentagon three hundred feet. They were hoping the building would turn orange and vibrate until all evil emissions had fled this levitation. At that point the war in Vietnam would end.

By the end of the 60s, plenty of zealots on the left were engaged in extreme magical thinking. They hadnt started the decade that way. In 1962, Students for a Democratic Society adopted its founding document, drafted by 22-year-old Tom Hayden. The manifesto is sweet and reasonable: decrying inequality and poverty and the pervasiveness of racism in American life, seeing the potential benefits as well as the downsides of industrial automation, declaring the group in basic opposition to the communist system.

Then, kaboom, the big bang. Anything and everything became believable. Reason was chucked. Dystopian and utopian fantasies seemed plausible. In 1969, the SDSs most apocalyptic and charismatic faction, calling itself Weatherman, split off and got all the attention. Its members believed that they and other young white Americans, aligned with black insurgents, would be the vanguard in a new civil war. They issued statements about the need for armed struggle as the only road to revolution and how dope is one of our weapons Guns and grass are united in the youth underground. And then factions of the new left went to work making and setting off thousands of bombs in the early 1970s.

Left-wingers werent the only ones who became unhinged. Officials at the FBI, the CIA, and military intelligence agencies, as well as in urban police departments, convinced themselves that peaceful antiwar protesters and campus lefties in general were dangerous militants, and expanded secret programs to spy on, infiltrate, and besmirch their organizations. Which thereby validated the preexisting paranoia on the new left and encouraged its wing nuts revolutionary delusions. In the 70s, the CIA and Army intelligence set up their infamous Project Star Gate to see whether they could conduct espionage by means of ESP.

The far right had its own glorious 60s moment, in the form of the new John Birch Society, whose founders believed that both Republican and Democratic presidential Cabinets included conscious, deliberate, dedicated agent[s] of the Soviet conspiracy determined to create a world-wide police state, absolutely and brutally governed from the Kremlin, as the societys founder, Robert Welch, put it in a letter to friends.

This furiously, elaborately suspicious way of understanding the world started spreading across the political spectrum after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. Dallas couldnt have been the work of just one nutty loser with a mail-order rifle, could it have? Surely the Communists or the CIA or the Birchers or the Mafia or some conspiratorial combination must have arranged it all, right? The shift in thinking didnt register immediately. In his influential book The Paranoid Style in American Politics, published two years after the presidents murder, Richard Hofstadter devoted only two sentences and a footnote to it, observing that conspiratorial explanations of Kennedys assassination dont have much currency in the United States.

Elaborate paranoia was an established tic of the Bircherite far right, but the left needed a little time to catch up. In 1964, a left-wing American writer published the first book about a JFK conspiracy, claiming that a Texas oilman had been the mastermind, and soon many books were arguing that the official government inquiry had ignored the hidden conspiracies. One of them, Rush to Judgment, by Mark Lane, a lawyer on the left, was a New York Times best seller for six months. Then, in 1967, New Orleanss district attorney, Jim Garrison, indicted a local businessman for being part of a conspiracy of gay right-wingers to assassinate Kennedya Nazi operation, whose sponsors include some of the oil-rich millionaires in Texas, according to Garrison, with the CIA, FBI, and Robert F. Kennedy complicit in the cover-up. After NBC News broadcast an investigation discrediting the theory, Garrison said the TV segment was a piece of thought control, obviously commissioned by NBCs parent company RCA, one of the top 10 defense contractors and thus desperate because we are in the process of uncovering their hoax.

The notion of an immense and awful JFK-assassination conspiracy became conventional wisdom in America. As a result, more Americans than ever became reflexive conspiracy theorists. Thomas Pynchons novel Gravitys Rainbow, a complicated global fantasy about the interconnections among militarists and Illuminati and stoners, and the validity of paranoid thinking, won the 1974 National Book Award. Conspiracy became the high-end Hollywood dramatic premiseChinatown, The Conversation, The Parallax View, and Three Days of the Condor came out in the same two-year period. Of course, real life made such stories plausible. The infiltration by the FBI and intelligence agencies of left-wing groups was then being revealed, and the Watergate break-in and its cover-up were an actual criminal conspiracy. Within a few decades, the belief that a web of villainous elites was covertly seeking to impose a malevolent global regime made its way from the lunatic right to the mainstream. Delusional conspiracism wouldnt spread quite as widely or as deeply on the left, but more and more people on both sides would come to believe that an extraordinarily powerful cabalinternational organizations and think tanks and big businesses and politicianssecretly ran America.

Each camp, conspiracists on the right and on the left, was ostensibly the enemy of the other, but they began operating as de facto allies. Relativist professors enabled science-denying Christians, and the antipsychiatry craze in the 60s appealed simultaneously to left-wingers and libertarians (as well as to Scientologists). Conspiracy theories were more of a modern right-wing habit before people on the left signed on. However, the belief that the federal government had secret plans to open detention camps for dissidents sprouted in the 70s on the paranoid left before it became a fixture on the right.

Americans felt newly entitled to believe absolutely anything. Im pretty certain that the unprecedented surge of UFO reports in the 70s was not evidence of extraterrestrials increasing presence but a symptom of Americans credulity and magical thinking suddenly unloosed. We wanted to believe in extraterrestrials, so we did. What made the UFO mania historically significant rather than just amusing, however, was the web of elaborate stories that were now being spun: not just of sightings but of landings and abductionsand of government cover-ups and secret alliances with interplanetary beings. Those earnest beliefs planted more seeds for the extravagant American conspiracy thinking that by the turn of the century would be rampant and seriously toxic.

A single ide fixe like this often appears in both frightened and hopeful versions. That was true of the suddenly booming belief in alien visitors, which tended toward the sanguine as the 60s turned into the 70s, even in fictional depictions. Consider the extraterrestrials that Jack Nicholsons character in Easy Rider earnestly describes as hes getting high for the first time, and those at the center of Close Encounters of the Third Kind eight years later. One evening in southern Georgia in 1969, the year Easy Rider came out, a failed gubernatorial candidate named Jimmy Carter saw a moving moon-size white light in the sky that didnt have any solid substance to it and got closer and closer, stopped, turned blue, then red and back to white, and then zoomed away.

The first big nonfiction abduction tale appeared around the same time, in a best-selling book about a married couple in New Hampshire who believed that while driving their Chevy sedan late one night, they saw a bright object in the sky that the wife, a UFO buff already, figured might be a spacecraft. She began having nightmares about being abducted by aliens, and both of them underwent hypnosis. The details of the abducting aliens and their spacecraft that each described were different, and changed over time. The mans hypnotized description of the aliens bore an uncanny resemblance to the ones in an episode of The Outer Limits broadcast on ABC just before his hypnosis session. Thereafter, hypnosis became the standard way for people who believed that they had been abducted (or that they had past lives, or that they were the victims of satanic abuse) to recall the supposed experience. And the couples story established the standard abduction-tale format: Humanoid creatures take you aboard a spacecraft, communicate telepathically or in spoken English, medically examine you by inserting long needles into you, then let you go.

The husband and wife were undoubtedly sincere believers. The sincerely credulous are perfect suckers, and in the late 60s, a convicted thief and embezzler named Erich von Dniken published Chariots of the Gods?, positing that extraterrestrials helped build the Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge, and the giant stone heads on Easter Island. That book and its many sequels sold tens of millions of copies, and the documentary based on it had a huge box-office take in 1970. Americans were ready to believe von Dnikens fantasy to a degree they simply wouldnt have been a decade earlier, before the 60s sea change. Certainly a decade earlier NBC wouldnt have aired an hour-long version of the documentary in prime time. And while Im at it: Until wed passed through the 60s and half of the 70s, Im pretty sure we wouldnt have given the presidency to some dude, especially a born-again Christian, who said hed recently seen a huge, color-shifting, luminescent UFO hovering near him.

The 1980s and the Smog of Subjectivity

By the 1980s, things appeared to have returned more or less to normal. Civil rights seemed like a done deal, the war in Vietnam was over, young people were no longer telling grown-ups they were worthless because they were grown-ups. Revolution did not loom. Sex and drugs and rock and roll were regular parts of life. Starting in the 80s, loving America and making money and having a family were no longer unfashionable.

The sense of cultural and political upheaval and chaos dissipatedwhich lulled us into ignoring all the ways that everything had changed, that Fantasyland was now scaling and spreading and becoming the new normal. What had seemed strange and amazing in 1967 or 1972 became normal and ubiquitous.

Extreme religious and quasi-religious beliefs and practices, Christian and New Age and otherwise, didnt subside, but grew and thrivedand came to seem unexceptional.

Relativism became entrenched in academiatenured, you could say. Michel Foucaults rival Jean Baudrillard became a celebrity among American intellectuals by declaring that rationalism was a tool of oppressors that no longer worked as a way of understanding the world, pointless and doomed. In other words, as he wrote in 1986, the secret of theorythis whole intellectual realm now called itself simply theoryis that truth does not exist.

This kind of thinking was by no means limited to the ivory tower. The intellectuals new outlook was as much a product as a cause of the smog of subjectivity that now hung thick over the whole American mindscape. After the 60s, truth was relative, criticizing was equal to victimizing, individual liberty became absolute, and everyone was permitted to believe or disbelieve whatever they wished. The distinction between opinion and fact was crumbling on many fronts.

Belief in gigantic secret conspiracies thrived, ranging from the highly improbable to the impossible, and moved from the crackpot periphery to the mainstream.

Many Americans announced that theyd experienced fantastic horrors and adventures, abuse by Satanists, and abduction by extraterrestrials, and their claims began to be taken seriously. Parts of the establishmentpsychology and psychiatry, academia, religion, law enforcementencouraged people to believe that all sorts of imaginary traumas were real.

America didnt seem as weird and crazy as it had around 1970. But thats because Americans had stopped noticing the weirdness and craziness. We had defined every sort of deviancy down. And as the cultural critic Neil Postman put it in his 1985 jeremiad about how TV was replacing meaningful public discourse with entertainment, we were in the process of amusing ourselves to death.

How the Right Became More Unhinged Than the Left

The Reagan presidency was famously a triumph of truthiness and entertainment, and in the 1990s, as problematically batty beliefs kept going mainstream, presidential politics continued merging with the fantasy-industrial complex.

In 1998, as soon as we learned that President Bill Clinton had been fellated by an intern in the West Wing, his popularity spiked. Which was baffling only to those who still thought of politics as an autonomous realm, existing apart from entertainment. American politics happened on television; it was a TV series, a reality show just before TV became glutted with reality shows. A titillating new story line that goosed the ratings of an existing series was an established scripted-TV gimmick. The audience had started getting bored with The Clinton Administration, but the Monica Lewinsky subplot got people interested again.

Just before the Clintons arrived in Washington, the right had managed to do away with the federal Fairness Doctrine, which had been enacted to keep radio and TV shows from being ideologically one-sided. Until then, big-time conservative opinion media had consisted of two magazines, William F. Buckley Jr.s biweekly National Review and the monthly American Spectator, both with small circulations. But absent a Fairness Doctrine, Rush Limbaughs national right-wing radio show, launched in 1988, was free to thrive, and others promptly appeared.

For most of the 20th century, national news media had felt obliged to pursue and present some rough approximation of the truth rather than to promote a truth, let alone fictions. With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared. If lots more incorrect and preposterous assertions circulated in our mass media, that was a price of freedom. If splenetic commentators could now, as never before, keep believers perpetually riled up and feeling the excitement of being in a mob, so be it.

Limbaughs virtuosic three hours of daily talk started bringing a sociopolitical alternate reality to a huge national audience. Instead of relying on an occasional magazine or newsletter to confirm your gnarly view of the world, now you had talk radio drilling it into your head for hours every day. As Limbaughs show took off, in 1992 the producer Roger Ailes created a syndicated TV show around him. Four years later, when NBC hired someone else to launch a cable news channel, Ailes, who had been working at NBC, quit and created one with Rupert Murdoch.

Fox News brought the Limbaughvian talk-radio version of the world to national TV, offering viewers an unending and immersive propaganda experience of a kind that had never existed before.

For Americans, this was a new condition. Over the course of the century, electronic mass media had come to serve an important democratic function: presenting Americans with a single shared set of facts. Now TV and radio were enabling a reversion to the narrower, factional, partisan discourse that had been normal in Americas earlier centuries.

And there was also the internet, which eventually would have mooted the Fairness Doctrine anyhow. In 1994, the first modern spam message was sent, visible to everyone on Usenet: global alert for all: jesus is coming soon. Over the next year or two, the masses learned of the World Wide Web. The tinder had been gathered and stacked since the 60s, and now the match was lit and thrown. After the 60s and 70s happened as they happened, the internet may have broken Americas dynamic balance between rational thinking and magical thinking for good.

Before the web, cockamamy ideas and outright falsehoods could not spread nearly as fast or as widely, so it was much easier for reason and reasonableness to prevail. Before the web, institutionalizing any one alternate reality required the long, hard work of hundreds of full-time militants. In the digital age, however, every tribe and fiefdom and principality and region of Fantasylandevery screwball with a computer and an internet connectionsuddenly had an unprecedented way to instruct and rile up and mobilize believers, and to recruit more. False beliefs were rendered both more real-seeming and more contagious, creating a kind of fantasy cascade in which millions of bedoozled Americans surfed and swam.

Why did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan begin remarking frequently during the 80s and 90s that people were entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts? Because until then, that had not been necessary to say. Our marketplace of ideas became exponentially bigger and freer than ever, its true. Thomas Jefferson said that hed rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of itbecause in the new United States, reason is left free to combat every sort of error of opinion. However, I think if he and our other Enlightenment forefathers returned, they would see the present state of affairs as too much of a good thing. Reason remains free to combat unreason, but the internet entitles and equips all the proponents of unreason and error to a previously unimaginable degree. Particularly for a people with our history and propensities, the downside of the internet seems at least as profound as the upside.

The way internet search was designed to operate in the 90sthat is, the way information and beliefs now flow, rise, and fallis democratic in the extreme. Internet search algorithms are an example of Greshams law, whereby the bad drives outor at least overrunsthe good. On the internet, the prominence granted to any factual assertion or belief or theory depends on the preferences of billions of individual searchers. Each click on a link is effectively a vote pushing that version of the truth toward the top of the pile of results.

Exciting falsehoods tend to do well in the perpetual referenda, and become self-validating. A search for almost any alternative theory or belief seems to generate more links to true believers pages and sites than to legitimate or skeptical ones, and those tend to dominate the first few pages of results. For instance, beginning in the 90s, conspiracists decided that contrails, the skinny clouds of water vapor that form around jet-engine exhaust, were composed of exotic chemicals, part of a secret government scheme to test weapons or poison citizens or mitigate climate changeand renamed them chemtrails. When I Googled chemtrails proof, the first seven results offered so-called evidence of the nonexistent conspiracy. When I searched for government extraterrestrial cover-up, only one result in the first three pages didnt link to an article endorsing a conspiracy theory.

Before the web, it really wasnt easy to stumble across false or crazy information convincingly passing itself off as true. Today, however, as the Syracuse University professor Michael Barkun saw back in 2003 in A Culture of Conspiracy, such subject-specific areas as crank science, conspiracist politics, and occultism are not isolated from one another, but rather

The consequence of such mingling is that an individual who enters the communications system pursuing one interest soon becomes aware of stigmatized material on a broad range of subjects. As a result, those who come across one form of stigmatized knowledge will learn of others, in connections that imply that stigmatized knowledge is a unified domain, an alternative worldview, rather than a collection of unrelated ideas.

Academic research shows that religious and supernatural thinking leads people to believe that almost no big life events are accidental or random. As the authors of some recent cognitive-science studies at Yale put it, Individuals explicit religious and paranormal beliefs are the best predictors of their perception of purpose in life eventstheir tendency to view the world in terms of agency, purpose, and design. Americans have believed for centuries that the country was inspired and guided by an omniscient, omnipotent planner and interventionist manager. Since the 60s, that exceptional religiosity has fed the tendency to believe in conspiracies. In a recent paper called Conspiracy Theories and the Paranoid Style(s) of Mass Opinion, based on years of survey research, two University of Chicago political scientists, J. Eric Oliver and Thomas J. Wood, confirmed this special American connection. The likelihood of supporting conspiracy theories is strongly predicted, they found, by a propensity to attribute the source of unexplained or extraordinary events to unseen, intentional forces and a weakness for melodramatic narratives as explanations for prominent events, particularly those that interpret history relative to universal struggles between good and evil. Oliver and Wood found the single strongest driver of conspiracy belief to be belief in end-times prophecies.

The Triumph of the Fantasy-Industrial Complex

As a 13-year-old, I watched William F. Buckley Jr.s Firing Line with my conservative dad, attended Teen Age Republicans summer camp, and, at the behest of a Nixon-campaign advance man in Omaha, ripped down Rockefeller and Reagan signs during the 1968 Nebraska primary campaign. A few years later, I was a McGovern-campaign volunteer, but I still watched and admired Buckley on PBS. Over the years, Ive voted for a few Republicans for state and local office. Today I disagree about political issues with friends and relatives to my right, but we agree on the essential contours of reality.

People on the left are by no means all scrupulously reasonable. Many give themselves over to the appealingly dubious and the untrue. But fantastical politics have become highly asymmetrical. Starting in the 1990s, Americas unhinged right became much larger and more influential than its unhinged left. There is no real left-wing equivalent of Sean Hannity, let alone Alex Jones. Moreover, the far right now has unprecedented political power; it controls much of the U.S. government.

Why did the grown-ups and designated drivers on the political left manage to remain basically in charge of their followers, while the reality-based right lost out to fantasy-prone true believers?

One reason, I think, is religion. The GOP is now quite explicitly Christian. The party is the American coalition of white Christians, papering over doctrinal and class differencesand now led, weirdly, by one of the least religious presidents ever. If more and more of a political partys members hold more and more extreme and extravagantly supernatural beliefs, doesnt it make sense that the party will be more and more open to make-believe in its politics?

I doubt the GOP elite deliberately engineered the synergies between the economic and religious sides of their contemporary coalition. But as the incomes of middle- and working-class people flatlined, Republicans pooh-poohed rising economic inequality and insecurity. Economic insecurity correlates with greater religiosity, and among white Americans, greater religiosity correlates with voting Republican. For Republican politicians and their rich-getting-richer donors, thats a virtuous circle, not a vicious one.

Religion aside, America simply has many more fervid conspiracists on the right, as research about belief in particular conspiracies confirms again and again. Only the American right has had a large and organized faction based on paranoid conspiracism for the past six decades. As the pioneer vehicle, the John Birch Society zoomed along and then sputtered out, but its fantastical paradigm and belligerent temperament has endured in other forms and under other brand names. When Barry Goldwater was the right-wing Republican presidential nominee in 1964, he had to play down any streaks of Bircher madness, but by 1979, in his memoir With No Apologies, he felt free to rave on about the globalist conspiracy and its pursuit of a new world order and impending period of slavery; the Council on Foreign Relations secret agenda for one-world rule; and the Trilateral Commissions plan for seizing control of the political government of the United States. The right has had three generations to steep in this, its taboo vapors wafting more and more into the main chambers of conservatism, becoming familiar, seeming less outlandish. Do you believe that a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government? Yes, say 34 percent of Republican voters, according to Public Policy Polling.

In the late 1960s and 70s, the reality-based left more or less won: retreat from Vietnam, civil-rights and environmental-protection laws, increasing legal and cultural equality for women, legal abortion, Keynesian economics triumphant.

But then the right wanted its turn to win. It pretty much accepted racial and gender equality and had to live with social welfare and regulation and bigger government, but it insisted on slowing things down. The political center moved rightbut in the 70s and 80s not yet unreasonably. Most of America decided that we were all free marketeers now, that business wasnt necessarily bad, and that government couldnt solve all problems. We still seemed to be in the midst of the normal cyclical seesawing of American politics. In the 90s, the right achieved two of its wildest dreams: The Soviet Union and international communism collapsed; and, as violent crime radically declined, law and order was restored.

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How America Lost Its Mind - The Atlantic

Since everyones favorite game these days is guessing what is behind every move companies like Uber and Tesla are up to, it was likely only a matter of time before someone came up with the idea that Tesla could be building its own freight network. The key word being could.

Trent Eady, who advises buying Tesla stock and holding it long term, suggested in a Seeking Alpha commentary that a Tesla freight network is worth at least $10 billion in annual revenue based on a 1% market share but could eventually generate tens of billions or even hundreds of billions in revenue for Tesla.

Perhaps Eadys a bit optimistic, but he lays out his path to these billions, and it starts with a news flash Tesla semi truck. By now, most everyone knows that Tesla is building a big rig, expecting to debut it in September. Eady surmises that this truck will be the gateway to an on-demand freight network, much like Tesla has planned for passenger cars.

The freight network would launch in the early 2020s, Eady predicts.

In October [2016], Tesla announced the Tesla Network for passengers, an autonomous ride-hailing service that will compete with Uber, Eady writes. With Tesla now working on self-driving freight trucks, the logical next step is to develop a competing service to Uber Freight.

Eady also notes that this concept is tied directly to Teslas value, as the company is currently priced at a point only achievable by autonomous driving.

Contrary to popular belief, Tesla is not already priced for perfect execution of its strategy, he writes. That could only possibly be true if Teslas strategy did not include self-driving, which CEO Elon Musk has stated is the companys No. 2 priority, behind only the Model 3 launch. Self driving for passengers would likely grow Teslas market cap several times over. Self driving for freight represents another opportunity for growth that ranges from around a 20% increase in market cap at 1% market share and a several-fold increase at higher market shares.

Back to the freight model, Eady believes that Tesla is well positioned to dominate the market of self-driving, electric trucks. He bases this simply on the lack of competitors.

The economic rationalism of the freight trucking industry and the anticipated dramatically lower cost per mile of self-driving electric freight trucks means these vehicles will dominate the freight trucking industry, he says. No other company is known to be developing this kind of vehicle.

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The Tesla Freight Network? It's a guessing game - FreightWaves (blog)

Though he was one of Italys most influential mid-20th-century architects and interior designers , very little is known about the inner world of Turinese legend Carlo Mollino. Born in 1905 in the northern Italian city of Turin, Mollino became a figure of fascination for design enthusiasts worldwide, many of whom were transfixed by his hidden private life and ability to create dreamy, sensuous spaces inspired by his various obsessionswhich ranged from the voluptuousness of the female form to symbols and talismans of witchcraft and the occult. At a time when the style of the day was, for the most part, defined by a movement known as Rationalism (led by fellow design giants like Gio Ponti and the Castiglioni brothers, who looked to architecture primarily as a self-effacing entity, created more for streamlined functionality than for decoration), Mollinos work was particularly unique, overtly romantic, and a far cry from the goings-on in Milan.

Carlo Mollinos RAI Auditorium, built in 1952. Photo: Courtesy of Oscar Humphries

After graduating from college, where he studied engineering, architecture, and art history, Mollino began working for his fathers architecture firm. There, he entered several design competitions and won for projects like the Agricultural Federation in Cuneo, Italy, and the Turin Equestrian Association headquarters, both of which, for buildings intended for public use, were unusually artsy and illustrated his predilection for sloping forms and circular spaces. After Mollino left his fathers firm, he spent the rest of his life picking and choosing his own projects, many of them commissions for private homes that were hidden from public view. His most famous work, the grand Teatro Regio in Turin, an opera house, is one of his only buildings still standing today.

As Mollinos oeuvre has grown in appreciation over the years, the scarcity of what is available to view and acquire has only added fuel to the fire. In 2005, a Mollino table earned a record-high sale for 20th-century furniture at Christies, going for $3.8 million. Its great appeal is the immediately seductive look, a former director at Christies, Philippe Garner, told The New York Times in a 2009 interview. The fact that virtually every piece can be traced to a specific commission and that production was very limited add the appeal of rarity.

The chairs in Carlo Mollinos RAI Auditorium. Photo: Courtesy of Oscar Humphries

It was only until Mollino expert and curator Fulvio Ferrari and his son Napoleone discovered and restored an apartment Mollino had been secretly working on did the doors to the architects world open. A social recluse for most of his life, Mollino spent years creating and decorating a home for himself on the River Po in which to live out his later days. Inside, both his dark strangeness and genius were revealed: Rooms immaculately decorated, strange voodoo imagery hung on walls and ceilings, and hundreds of erotic Polaroids taken of women who modeled for him were found. Obsessed by the Ancient Egyptian mummification process and beliefs, Mollino also created a wooden boat-like bed that served as a symbolic vessel of passage into the afterlife, placed in a room prepared meticulously for his death. Though he never actually lived in this apartment, it spoke most aptly to his deep love of all things beautiful, revealing how carefully he tried to construct the world around him. It is within this spacenow known as the Museo Casa Mollino, a highlight for visitors to Turinthat Mollino has been brought back to life.

In a beautiful new short filmdirected by Felipe Sanguinetti, produced by Oscar Humphries, narrated by Fulvio Ferrari, and given exclusively to Vogue we are offered visits to Mollinos Teatro Regio and Casa Mollino. It provides private insights into Mollinos mind and how he saw the world. Shot from around corners and through half-opened doors, the visual narrative is atmospheric in its secrecy, just as one would imagine for spaces of Mollinos. His presence is palpable and, in many ways, evidently vulnerable in the navigation of the cameras lens: As viewers, we get the distinct impression that we are walking side by side with Mollino himself, reseeing the spaces so close to his heart.

The completed Teatro Regio, 1973. Photo: Courtesy of Oscar Humphries

Mollino is so famous for the Polaroids he took and his iconic pieces of design, that as an architect hes often overlooked, said Humphries, who shot the film with friend Sanguinetti in June. But he was an architect first, and we wanted to show that.

Of the films humanized perspective, Sanguinetti noted: I wanted to share what I felt in these two spaces. Its unlike anything Ive ever experienced before, and what Mollino brings out in people is such a unique and emotional response to his work. I hope the spectator, when watching the film, can feel that.

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A New Short Film Offers a Private Look Into the Life of an Italian Architect and Design Enigma - Vogue.com

NAME the American Founding Fathers, or at least the ones everyone knows, and then describe their religion. George Washington: reticent, probably lukewarm; Jefferson: accused of atheism, disliked organised religion, basically a deist; Franklin: another deist; Hamilton: youthfully religious, lost his enthusiasm, not keen on churchgoing. Madison: largely indifferent. Only really John Adams and John Jay can lay claim to piety.

Add to this the Fathers undeniable enthusiasm for Enlightenment rationalism, the new nations desire to keep Church and State separate, and the First Amendment to the Constitution (Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion), and you seem to have built up a pretty godless, or at least God-uninterested, picture.

One of the many merits of Daniel Dreisbachs book is to show how misleading this picture is. Against this popular image, the Bible was referenced more often than any other text, or even writer, during the Revolutionary period. The most prominent Founding Fathers were not typical of American revolutionaries, and even they were steeped in, and often fascinated by, biblical ideas and figures.

Dreisbach shows how prevalent the Bible was in early American culture and politics: think England or Scotland c.1650, and you wouldnt be far wrong. He also demonstrates, in the books best chapter, that the Revolutionaries political theorising, in particular their justification for rebellion, would have been impossible (or at least unrecognisable) without two preceding centuries of Protestant resistance theology: Vindiciae contra tyrannos was an extremely useful text when you found yourself defending liberty against those you considered to be tyrants.

Dreisbach recognises that the Fathers biblical rhetoric was sometimes only skin deep, borrowing figures and phrases to lend political speechifying a weight, dignity, and significance that it would not otherwise have had. Nevertheless, to dismiss it all as theological window-dressing is mistaken. Even when the Bible was not embedded in the Fathers lives (and chapter three shows that it often was), it underpinned and defined the sense of justice, rights, duty, liberty, providence, and destiny that created the new nation.

Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers is a scholarly book, drawing on an abundance of source material and demonstrating an admirable familiarity with the period and the Bible. It is also somewhat repetitive: having established that the Fathers were deeply informed by biblical language, narrative and ideas, Dreisbach effectively goes on repeating the conclusion with different examples and from different angles. By the end, you have well and truly got the point.

Still, it is a point that needs to be got. In the United States polarised climate, this book will remind culture warriors that the nations robust constitutional secularism was grounded, paradoxically, in its equally robust Christianity.

Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos.

Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers

Daniel Dreisbach

OUP 19.99

(978-0-19-998793-1)

Church Times Bookshop 18

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Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers by Daniel Dreisbach - Church Times

The Democratic Peoples Republic of North Korea is ramping up its nuclear deterrence, and this is causing consternation and wild proclamations from western officials and corporate media. What is particularly galling for the United States side is that North Korea appears to have achieved the capability of hitting the US mainland with ICBMs.

However, is the US not capable of hitting North Korea from wherever? So why does a rival created by the US [1] cause panicked rhetoric upon achievement of an ICBM capacity?

If your castle is capable of being targeted by a bellicose castle with inter-castle projectiles, would you leave yourself undefended? Especially when the bellicose castle has already destroyed the disarmed Iraqi castle as well as the disarmed Libyan castle.

US Senator Lindsey Graham said,

The only way they [the North Korean government] are going to change is if they believe there is a credible threat of military force on the table.

Graham believes any war will be confined to the East Asian region.

Why would Graham speak such provocative words? Follow the money. Grahams campaign fundraising appears aimed at the arms industry: Security through Strength.

US secretary-of-state Rex Tillerson is advocating peaceful pressure against North Korea and a willingness to hold talks. However, there is a condition, which certainly will not entice the North Koreans to talks. That condition is that the North Koreans disarm themselves of nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. What is unstated is thatthe US will not disarm in any way whatsoever. The lessons of the disarmed and subsequently destroyed Iraqi and Libyan castles would seem to urge a cautionary approach.

Jack Rice, a former CIA agent, referred to North Korea as a threat. Why? Who is threatening who? North Korea haspledged no-first-use of nukes. The US has not. So who is the actual threat?

The US is modernizing its nuclear stockpile which is a stark abrogation of its undertaking as a signatory of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The NPTs Article VI states:

Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating tocessation of the nuclear arms raceat an early date and tonuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general andcomplete disarmament under strict and effective international control. [emphasis added]

North Korea has never attacked the US. It was the US that attacked North Korea during the so-called Korean War. The US used chemical and biological weapons, resulting in an estimated 4-10 million Koreans being killed. [2]

A Rationale Analysis of What a Nuclear-armed North Korea Portends

1. It is clear from the cases of Iraq and Libya that a disarmed US-designated enemy is not spared from a violent opportunistic attack. That North Korea was included on George W Bushs axis of evil along with Iraq triggered alarm bells in North Korea.

2. The US refuses a peace treaty with North Korea. [3] And the sanctions against North Korea constitute anact-of-war. Trump tweeted, China could easily solve this problem. But it is not China maintaining a state-of-war with North Korea.

3. The US is nuclear-armed, has used nuclear weapons, and does not adhere to a no-first-use policy.

Given the above three points would it be rationale to be without an effective deterrence against a military attack?

Furthermore, when North Korea did enter into anAgreed Frameworkwith the US in 1994, among the obligations was an end to hostilities; normalization of relations, no nuclearization of the peninsula; freezing operation and construction of North Korean nuclear reactors in exchange for two proliferation-resistant nuclear power reactors; and, while awaiting completion of the nuclear reactors, the US was to provide oil for North Korean energy needs. The US did not fulfill its obligations. In other words, the US cannot be trusted to uphold its end of any agreement.

If North Korea were ever to launch a nuclear weapon or even launch a non-nuclear attack against another country, then the North Korean government would be committing an act of suicide. Kim Jong-uns grandfather and father were not suicidal, so there is no reason to suspect familial psychosis.

If North Korea has achieved and maintains an effective nuclear deterrence, then a US attack is only imaginable in a nightmare Bizarro World. An attack on a nuclear-armed North Korea would be mad. The US would not be unscathed in such an attack. Major population centers such as Seoul, Busan, and Tokyo (all where US troops are stationed) and perhaps the US mainland would be hit. Of course, North Korea would be obliterated. Even if continental US were not hit by nukes, the radiation from nuclear fallout and a potential nuclear winter will affect the entire planet.

Consequently, all the talk in the media of a war is irrational conjecture or bluffing.

Rationality demands that all sides avoid any brinkmanship.

Kim Petersenis a former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be reached at:[emailprotected]. Twitter:@kimpetersen.

Notes

1. At the end of World War II, the Korean Peoples Republic arose and the first cabinet was formed on 14 September 1945. US scuttled the Korean Peoples Republic. See Nhial Esso,What You Dont Know about North Korea Could Fill a Book, (Intransitive Publishers, 2013): 15%. See Bruce Cumings,Koreas Place in the Sun: A Modern History(New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005): 238.

2. SeeKorean Truth Commission, Report on U.S. Crimes in Korea: 1945-2001(New York: 2001).

3. Said former US secretary-of-state Colin Powell: We wont do nonaggression pacts or treaties, things of that nature. Quoted in Steven R. Weisman, U.S. Weighs Reward if North Korea Scraps Nuclear Arms,New York Times, 13 August 2003.

Featured image is from Infowars.

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Rationalism and Nuclear Lunacy - Center for Research on Globalization

Written by Anuradha Mascarenhas | Pune | Published:August 3, 2017 6:34 am Taher Poonawala

The family of Taher Poonawala, a rationalist who died on Monday night, donated his body for educational and research purposes at the Sane Guruji Hospital, Hadapsar. This is not an isolated case as, according to anatomy experts across the city, the practice of body donations is increasingly being seen in the city. Taher Poonawala had already pledged to donate his body for medical research several years ago, said Dr Girish Kulkarni, associate professor of the Department of Anatomy at the Sane Guruji Hospital.

The hospital has the capacity to preserve as many as 30 bodies and every month, they receive at least four forms pledging body donations. This is a trend that has picked up over the years. Noted socialist leader G P Pradhan had donated his body and several prominent people had pledged to donate their bodies, said Kulkarni.

At the B J Medical College and Sassoon General Hospital, Professor B H Baheti, head of the Department of Anatomy, said that nearly 40-45 bodies are donated every year. The trend has picked up. In fact, the hospital has a capacity to preserve 30-35 bodies and we receive a lot of applications pledging body donations, said Baheti.

The Armed Forces Medical College has also seen an increase in body donations, said official spokesperson Colonel Abhijit Rudra. This year, till July, we have had 10 body donations and many have also filled forms pledging body donations. Overall, the awareness levels have increased and people are encouraged after they see a sympathetic interaction between the staff and relatives of those who donate their bodies, said Colonel Rudra.

Other activists remember Taherbhai: A grateful salaam for him

For several activists in the city, the death of eminent rationalist and progressive thinker Taher Poonawala was a huge loss. Taherbhai was a friend, philosopher and guide for my father Dr Narendra Dabholkar. A strong supporter of the Maharashtra Andhashradda Nirmulan Samiti, he was the one who actively supported the need for progressive thinking, said Hamid Dabholkar, son of the slain activist. Poonawala, who was 95, died on Sunday night. He is survived by his wife and a daughter.

Anwar Rajan, who was a member of the Peoples Union for Civil Liberties along with Poonawala, recalled how he had been ex-communicated due to his revolutionary views.

Phir bhi kisike saath dushmani nahi thi. (Still, he did not have any enemies) We thought his shop would shut down due to immense pressure but Taherbhai is an example of how the ex-communication turned out to be a good opportunity to spread his progressive thinking, said Rajan.

Social activist Razia Patel said Poonawala had strongly opposed orthodoxy in the Bohra community. It is difficult to stand up against religious authorities, but he did it. In his personal life, he staunchly followed principles of secularism and rationalism. How can we ever forget him? A grateful salaam for our Taherbhai, said Patel.

Ajit Abhyankar, a member of the CPI-Ms state secretariat, remembered Taherbhais kind heart and great sense of humour. He was a committed rationalist and was associated with several social organisations like the Mahatma Phule Samata Pratishthan, Rashtriya Ekatmata Samiti, Samaji Krutdnyata Nidhi and Peoples Union for Civil Liberties.

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More and more Puneites come forward to donate body for research ... - The Indian Express

The Readers Respond comments regarding crime and punishment in Baltimore (Yet another reminder of why I left Baltimore, Aug. 1) prompt reconsideration by Baltimore civic leaders on how best to address our horrific homicide rate and increasing criminal activity. Their perspective on the causality of crime, and the corresponding more lenient sentencing trends, seem rooted primarily in a belief that the best approach to mitigating crime is through a rehabilitative approach. While rehabilitation and resolution of some of our systemic poverty issues are certainly needed, our city leaders need to not forget that there are other mitigation models that must continue to be used in order to prevent further rampant crime and homicide in the city.

In 2010, David Mulhausen, Research Fellow in Empirical Policy Analysis for The Heritage foundation, testified before Congress on the foundations analysis regarding theories of punishment and mandatory minimum sentences. In his testimony, Mr. Mulhausen cited the generally accepted methods of reducing criminal activity: deterrence, incapacitation and rehabilitation.

Deterrence postulates that increasing the risk of apprehension and punishment in society deters members of society as a whole from committing crime. In layman terms, deterrence ensures that the administration of punishment is certain, swift, and imposes a severity commensurate with the crime, sending a message that crime will not be tolerated. According to the deterrence model, criminals are no different from law-abiding people. Criminals rationally maximize their own self-interest subject to constraints that they face in the marketplace and elsewhere. Increasing the certainty, swiftness, and severity of punishment will result in the utilitarian goal of reduced crime.

Incapacitation does not require any assumptions about the criminals rationalism, or root causes of the criminals behavior. Incarceration is beneficial because the physical restraint of incarceration prevents the commission of further crimes against society during the duration of the sentence.

Rehabilitation assumes that society is the root cause of criminality. Under this model, crime is predominately a product of social factors. Consequently, criminal behavior is determined by societal forces, such as poverty, racial discrimination and lack of employment opportunities, so the object of criminal justice is to mitigate or eliminate those harmful forces. Assuming that structural defects in society cause crime, then criminals deserve rehabilitation, not punishment. Supporters of the rehabilitation model hold the perspective that correctional treatment programs can successfully reduce crime.

The study found that while rehabilitation is an important societal goal, it cannot come at the expense of deterrence and incapacitation. The root causes (poverty, racial discrimination and lack of employment opportunities) are systemic issues, and discussions about the best approaches to mitigate those issues are under continuing debate. In the meanwhile, criminals will continue to commit crimes, which is detrimental to society, including those living within the root causes environment cited above. Rehabilitation is a much needed and important component of mitigating our crime problem, but it cannot be used in isolation. The immediacy of criminal activity and the safety of our citizens require a recognized use of deterrence (swift and sure punishment) and, when warranted, incarceration as well. Society cannot rely solely on altruistic thinking while criminals continue to threaten our safety and well being. This type of broad, holistic approach will better serve the needs of our city.

Jerry Cothran, Baltimore

Send letters to the editor to talkback@baltimoresun.com. Please include your name and contact information.

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We can't rehabilitate our way out of Baltimore's crime problems - Baltimore Sun

Bengaluru: Challenge accepted -- AS Nataraj has been waiting to hear these words for the past 16 years after framing a seemingly simple challenge of 10 questions. To make it easier, he insists on only eight correct answers for the challenger to be eligible for the Rs 1 crore reward. The catch? The answers would involve the challenger accurately predicting an individual's future using janam kundali or astrological chart. Now you didn't see that coming, did you?

"The reward was Rs 10 lakh when I first issued the challenge in 2001. I increased it to Rs 1 crore because no one came forward despite initial promises. I am now sure that even if I raise the prize to Rs 100 crore, nobody will volunteer," says Nataraj, the 77-year-old founder of Akhila Karnataka Vicharavadi Sangha. His aim is to debunk astrology's main claim to fame - the power to pinpoint the future. "I know it is not true because I was also an astrologer," laughs Nataraj, author of Jyothishyakke Savaalu (Challenge to Astrology) and a veteran TV talking head on the matter.

The other challenge doing the rounds is aimed at busting a scientifically untested brain training programme. Narendra Nayak, the rationalist crusader from Mangaluru, has been holding demonstrations and challenging proponents of mid-brain activation for the last two years. The groups behind this fad take money from parents to enhance brainpower of their children through the 'activation'. Those trained can apparently see after being blindfolded. "People fall for new tricks all the time. Mid-brain activation involves teaching children to lie (about peeking from behind the blindfold). The organisers use pseudo-science jargons and it becomes difficult for lay persons to understand," says Nayak, president of the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations (FIRA).

LOGIC WINS

For every new trickster in town, there are a few rationalists like Nayak who demand that fantastic claims should be backed by evidence, scientific reasoning and stone-cold rationale. If not, people like him resort to dramatic one-upmanship and myth busting on public platforms to uphold what they see as truth and rationality.

"Earlier, we used to go after petty godmen who produced ash from thin air or put their hands in boiling water. Now, the picture has changed," says Nayak, a 67-year-old trained bio-chemist. The new age miracles involve coming up with sales pitches to sell anything from yoga, millets, salt room therapy and apple cider vinegar as cures for various ills, including cancer, he says. The marketers rely on scientific terms or the ancient Indian label to bamboozle people.

As a trained scientist, the pseudo science gets Nayak going. Recently, he wrote a detailed complaint to the Advertising Standards Council of India about tall claims made by a coconut oil manufacturer in an ad. The regulatory body found that many of the claims such as the oil being a 'natural antiseptic' , 'restores thyroid function and reduces obesity' were not substantiated and hence, misleading. They asked the adverstiser to withdraw the ad or modify it.

ATHEISTIC START

For most such activists, rationalism starts with a healthy dose of atheism. Nayak says he became an atheist at the age of 11 after coming to a conclusion ("maybe hasty") about there being no god despite his prayers. A national science talent scholarship cemented his rationalist leanings and later, after a meeting with the legendary rationalist Abraham Kovoor, he joined the movement.

It isn't easy to break down strong beliefs. Nataraj, who became a rationalist after practicing astrology for several years, says he can hold his own in heated TV debates because he has studied several works about astrology. "There are times when TV astrologers have asked me in private why I oppose astrology as I know so much about it. I tell them we have to have proof," says Nataraj.

UPHILL BATTLE

Public confrontations have a tendency to deteriorate quickly. Sanal Edamaruku, a Delhi-based rationalist, had to relocate to Finland to avoid arrest in a blasphemy case filed by a Mumbai church. Edamaruku, who exposed 'Pilot' Baba and other assorted godmen across India, says in the Mumbai case, he was held up at a TV studio for hours after a violent mob thronged outside, opposing him for saying that miracle tears of a statue came from a leaky drainpipe. "I am not a hatemonger but I gave my opinion after observation (he was invited to see the statue). Listeners can choose to disbelieve. But the situation turned violent and I escaped through the studio's back gate after three-four hours," says Edamaruku, who is bringing out his memoir detailing 25 of the most memorable investigations he has done so far.

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Thinking their way through new superstitions - Times of India

Prior to the 1970s, a persons faith had little impact on the way they voted. Make no mistake, however, there have always been those who believed religion should play a larger role in American politics. Colonies were often ruled by strict religious observance prior to the Declaration of Independence. In fact, it could be said, the reason our country implemented the separation of church and state was because of the conflict and dissention caused by the rigorous and divisive theology within the colonies.

In New England for example, the civil government dealt harshly with religious dissenterswhipping Baptists or cropping the ears of Quakers for their determined efforts to proselytize. A religious revival came through the colonies between the 1730s and 1740s, called the Great Awakening. This movement challenged the clerical elite and colonial establishment by appealing to the poor and uneducated. It focused more on an emotional relationship with God than one based in reasoning. The Great Awakening was the basis for what would become the current fundamentalist, evangelical Christian faith.

Historian Patricia Bonomi noted that rationalism, nevertheless, remained the predominant religious underpinning and was often present in the religion of gentlemen leaders by the late colonial period. As American civilization progressed in scientific discoveries, modernists seamlessly wove their understanding of God and their holy texts together. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, found their beliefs contentiously out of step with rationalism and modernization.

Until the 1970s, religious fundamentalists primarily stayed away from politics, believing politics distracted them from their calling to bring people to Christ and deliver the message of salvation. But through the charismatic leadership of people like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson, and savvy political strategists like Paul Weyrich, Christian fundamentalist extremism found a new platform in American politics, unlike any time in history.

Most of the popular Republican candidates in the 2016 presidential election claimed God told them to run for president. What they share in common is a brand of Christianity, which is historically racist, homophobic, xenophobic, dangerously nationalistic, and exclusive. It is a form of Christian Sharia law, which forces those who believe differently into strict adherence to their version of religious freedom.

Fundamentalist Christian religious freedom laws allow for sweeping discrimination and removal of federal protections for people who believe differently. For example, Mississippi passed the Protecting Freedom of Conscience From Government Discrimination Act in 2016, which said public businesses, social workers, and even public employees cannot be punished for denying services to people who believe that sex should only be reserved between married people in opposite sex relationships. Additionally, if someones religious belief is different than those of an adoption agency, the agency can refuse the adoption of a child to that person. In many ways, it is stepping hundreds of years backwards in Americas history. The government isnt doing the punishing, per se, but laws prohibit it from equally protecting citizens.

At the beginning of Trumps presidency, he initiated an executive ordered called Establishing a Government-Wide Initiative to Respect Religious Freedom. Most agree the order was little more than a nod to the fundamentalist Christians that helped elect Trump into office, and it has no teeth. However, the order essentially allows discrimination from the highest offices in the country, letting individuals deny health care, education, employment, government grants and even government contracts to people who believe or behave differently. If someone simply claims a strongly held religious belief, they can discriminate for virtually any reason without retribution.

The question is, why are Americans allowing this to happen? Surveys show that much of what Christian fundamentalists represent is out of step with what Americans want. Most Americans oppose Trumps immigration ban. Most Americans support gay marriage. Most Americans support abortion rights. Americans are religiously diverse, with more and more people disassociating with their evangelical roots. Trumps election to the White House has splintered evangelicals even further, with many recognizing the blatant hypocrisy of Trumps Christian supporters.

The fundamentalist chokehold on American politics seeks to destroy the religious and cultural plurality on which the country, and the Declaration of Independence, was based. These theological divisions which pit believers against non-believers, and those who believe correctly against those who dont are a major contributor to Americas sharply divided politics. When someone believes he or she holds absolute truth, there can be no compromise, no middle ground, and no discussion.

Fundamentalism - Christian, Islam, or any other religious ideology - is the antithesis of progression. Fundamentalisms dangerous anti-science stance threatens the worlds environment, reduces the efficacy of American education, and leaves citizens unprepared for life in a global economy. Fundamentalism is shrouded in ignorance, backed by authoritarianism, and places an enormous amount of trust in individual leaders. To free us of the religious chokehold, citizens must recognize, and actively vote against the powerful political machine of the Fundamentalist Christian right.

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The Fundamentalist Christian Chokehold On America - HuffPost

The comedy industry should certainly be giving thanks to Anthony (The Mooch) Scaramucci, and so, too, should the Republican Party. So, too, should Donald Trump. The Mooch might turn out to be the best thing that never happened to him.

A great day at the White House, Mr. Trump tweeted following the latest upheavals, including the Moochs rapid execution. He could be right. It could turn out, in terms of management style, to be a turning point for the White House.

At the House of Trump, chaos had reached critical mass, Mr. Scaramuccis plutonium-enriched persona being the prime cause. His smut-laden rampage in a New Yorker interview, besting even the Presidents normal ribaldry, was wrenching enough to finally and critically make real change happen, it being the appointment of retired Marine Corps general John Kelly as chief of staff.

In the scattershot, morally bankrupt Trump world, there will now be, for the first time, a chain of command. Things should get better not only because the bar is so low they cant get much worse, but because adolescence has been derailed.

As a military man, Mr. Kelly will bring discipline. Frogmarching the Mooch out the door was the perfect opening gambit, establishing his authority. Reince Priebus, the former White House chief of staff, was a welterweight. Competing power centres blossomed all around him, chewed him up, spit him out. The grenade-hurling Mr. Scaramuccis first act was to blow up Mr. Priebus before thankfully detonating charges under himself.

Not insignificantly, he also humiliated Stephen Bannon, the alt-right impresario whose clout has been shrinking steadily. Mr. Kelly is no fan of Mr. Bannon and his crew of white nationalist America-firsters, which is another reason why things should get better. Conventional thinkers now hold more sway. Rationalism has a chance.

Theres another reason why this past week should be seen as a critical juncture. It was the week that Congress Republicans finally got the message through to Mr. Trump that they are not going to take it any more. They forced him to back down on his intention to fire Attorney-General Jeff Sessions for the senseless reason of his doing the right thing in recusing himself from the Russian-meddling investigation. They put him on notice that any intent to torpedo the inquiry of FBI director Robert Mueller on Russian collusion would be suicidal. As well, three Republicans came forward to defeat his bid to repeal and/or replace Obamacare.

Mr. Trump cant go on the way he has been. He is the oddest of leaders in that while others seek to avoid controversy, he seeks to create it. He revels in the havoc and the storm. Mr. Scaramucci was viewed, given his brashness, his vulgarity, his ego on stilts, as a mini-Trump. Had his appointment as director of communications taken hold, it would have buttressed and augmented all of the Presidents seething quixotic tendencies.

Its no sure bet that Mr. Kelly may be able to rein them in. In his work as head of Homeland Security, some were dismayed at how readily he sided with Mr. Trumps attitudes on immigration. He curried too much favour, they say. No small wonder the President likes him so much.

But Mr. Kelly, widely experienced in Washington, has a mandate to bring order, which is what military men do best. Two other generals, national security adviser H.R. McMaster and Defence Secretary James Mattis, both no-nonsense individuals, will likely see their clout enhanced.

For all his madcap proclivities, Mr. Trump is sometimes capable of listening to reason. He didnt rip up the Iran nuclear deal or the North American free-trade agreement, lift sanctions against Russia, or move the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem. As for the Mexican wall, Mr. Kelly has been pushing him to back off. He may get his wish.

On all these issues, rationalists have made headway. They were able to do so in getting Mr. Trump to fire the Mooch as well. That decision, which required seeing the scars in someone with a similar persona and modus operandi as himself, may be a sign that his presidency is not a hopeless cause.

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With the Mooch gone, rationalism finally has a chance - The Globe and Mail