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Peter D. Kramer and Andrew Solomon

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from: Andrew Solomon

There Is Logic Not in Keeping With Reality

Posted Tuesday, July 10, 2001, at 4:18 PM ET

Dear Peter,

Darwin in the Bible Belt. Is the problem there repression and denial? I try not to hold too many beliefs that are contrary to logic and always have trouble understanding people whose beliefs are contrary to logic. Transubstantiation? A permanent bull market? Do you remember how the Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass said she practices believing three impossible things before breakfast every day?

Here I revert to our mutual expertise: depression. Depression corrupts logic, and when you're in it, you believe things that are contrary to the logic of non-depressed people. Whereas now I think life is full of wonders, when depressed, I thought there wasn't much point staying alive. When Andrea Yates was depressed, she thought it reasonable for a mother to kill her children. Much of what one believes in depression is more accurate than what one believes otherwise. I'm sure you know these studies. My favorite is the one with the quarters. Sit down with a depressed person and start flipping coins and ask him what the chance is of the coin coming up heads, and each time he'll say it's 50/50. Sit down with a non-depressed person, and after a while he'll start saying, "Well, it's been heads a bunch of times now so I feel like it's just gotta be tails next time. I'm saying it's 70 percent likely it'll be tails." People who aren't depressed begin thinking they can predict random events in nature over which they in fact have no control at all. We make it through the world on the basis of such positivism.

So there is such a thing as a logic not in keeping with reality that is, nonetheless, logic. What do those anti-Darwinian people think? Some simply want to impose a system that is their chosen system on others whether those others like it or not. Like many anti-abortion activists, what they are interested in is control rather than the subject about which they profess so much feeling. They want to dictate what other people think and do. For them I have no whiff of sympathy. But others actually believe that creationism is correct, and I find it hard to reject the beliefs of such people out of hand. Creationism seems like evident garbage to me. I'm a science man and not a religion man. I think that science has logic behind it, and I hate the kind of relativism that says that everything is just conjecture and that all conjecture is equal. I think creationists are ignorant and regressive. But is it denial of free speech or, worse yet, free thought to invalidate their views? For school boards to refuse to teach the science is shocking and unacceptable, and that business in Kansas was just appalling, but for school boards to request equal time for creationism--well, I find it difficult to say no to that, EXCEPT on grounds that church (religious beliefs) and state (the public schools) should be separate. On that point, I don't budge. But it's almost a technicality, I know. ...

Best always,
Andrew

the breakfast table
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from: Andrew Solomon

There Is Logic Not in Keeping With Reality

Posted Tuesday, July 10, 2001, at 4:18 PM ET
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Peter D. Kramer is a professor of psychiatry at Brown University and author of Listening to Prozac and the new novel Spectacular Happiness. Andrew Solomon is the author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (read a "Book Club" discussion of it here) and also of the recently reissued novel A Stone Boat.
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Reader Comments From The Fray

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[Notes from the Fray Editor... or perhaps we should call them footnotes. There was a recommendation for David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest here, and a splendid line from Tim Button here: "Footnotes are justifiable in philosophy, but philosophy as a whole is very hard to justify." KC is expecting footnotes to these exchanges. The Fray team would like to recommend Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as having the best footnotes ever. We were glad to see that the poster Shark agreed with us: he is looking like the new star of the "Breakfast Table" (eat your hearts out Neill Hamilton and Amber) with his cutting-edge offer of a Kaus-like Star Poster skipping service. Find it here, on the WillV post below, and here.]


You wrote about anarchists who capture the popular imagination? Obviously, you didn't know about the merry band here in the Fray, a group that perfected popular anarchy long ago. Come join us as those from the left, center, and right are terrorized for intellectual pretensions, grammar and punctuation, and bourgeois status symbols. Your sequel could write itself.

--WillV

(To reply, click here.)


It has been suggested that liberals backing down on their opposition to nuclear power is equivalent to conservatives backing down on the rights of children who cannot yet defend themselves against abortions. I'm not going to bother with the actual debates, but I would like to say that liberals and conservatives alike view the nuclear power question as a balance of risk vs savings. Nuclear power is cheap, plentiful, and the electricity is the same either way. The only questions are these: can the plants be run safely, can the waste be disposed of safely. These are practical concerns, and as the need for power increases, the risks seem less ominous. If we were to suddenly find unlimited sources of sulfer free oil, or a way to cheaply produce reliable solar energy, conservatives would find the risk of nuclear power unpalatable. Nobody opposes nuclear power on moral grounds, everybody has practical concerns.

Abortion, infanticide, pornography, etc: These are moral issues, not practical issues. No conservative would say that he opposes abortion because there are too few babies being produced. Moral issues are fundamentally different from practical concerns.

In any case, conservatives and liberals frequently change their positions on practical issues, as things become palatable or circumstances change. When they start giving up moral positions, there had better have been a revelation, because abandonment of a moral position out of expediency is ... immoral

--Ben Kirkup

(To reply, click here.)

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