Two tales from my dad

some old psychologies face new challenges

Sometime while I’m still able I should forget all this argumentative shit and just write collections of stories of my family, especially my dad. But for now a couple of the stories seem pertinent to current arguments.

South Chicago

My dad (Sam) grew up in South Chicago, surrounded by a variety of colorful superstitions. One guy claimed that illnesses themselves can never kill you. The only thing that can kill you is a poison pill that the Angel of Death pops into your mouth when it falls open at seeing Him. Exactly why a poison pill from another source would fail to have the same effect wasn’t quite clear.

Maybe that one guy was the only one who believed that creative story, but the central theme is widespread. Some societies hold that most (maybe all?) sickness and death come from the Evil Eye or something like it. Nothing is just the natural shit that happens to all living things.

You can see that psychology at work among a vocal subset of people who think (like me) that Covid came from a lab. They also think everything was intentional- the introduction into the general population, the timing that was awkward for Trump, the opportunity to wreck economies by various amounts of lockdown, the chance to kill everybody or maybe implant microchips with the dreaded vaccinations….. No harms came from a mere virus, they all came from the public health authorities popping those terrible vaccines into us. None of it quite forms a coherent story but the image of powerful plotting evildoers holds it all together.

So some of the old psychological patterns are alive and well, thriving in a world tied together by high-speed modern electronics.

After Los Alamos

Sam escaped dreary Chicago and was born again in beautiful Berkeley, working in the glorious lab of G. N. Lewis. The idyllic time came to an end when he and some friends were called to Los Alamos. (I have the official paperwork, a mimeographed half sheet of paper saying that he was excused to work on “MDP”.) I’ll save the many Berkeley and Los Alamos stories for later.

After the war, Sam’s grandfather Benjamin told him “Sam, the world isn’t ready for this thing you guys made.” Despite the miraculous 70 years without further atomic attacks, it’s hard to argue that Benjamin was wrong.

Times change, people make new things, big new things. Civilization-destroying nuclear war didn’t used to be conceivable, now it’s more than conceivable. Big man-made climate change would have been a fantasy 10,000 years ago, but in the last few decades it’s started to be a big deal, maybe heading for becoming a catastrophic deal. Lab-built pathogens were impossible before labs and unlikely until labs recently started playing with enhancing natural pathogens. Now the argument that this danger can’t exist because it didn’t used to exist makes about as much sense as arguing that “people don’t change the climate” because for most of our history we didn’t.

Times change. The Einstein quote is over-used, but apt: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” The same could be said of the new pathogen modification methods. People claim that it’s also true of AI, but I don’t have a sense of whether or not that’s right.

What to do

We’re the same species who can easily believe in the Angel of Death and can make actual fusion bombs. Those of us who plug away at trying to encourage scientific thought without too much distortion from self-interest or superstition are not succeeding very well. But we might as well keep trying.
(My next post will be pure story-telling, no moral.)